The Buried Treasure That Neither Man in Nineveh Would Keep

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One Brick in a Standing Wall

The man took his own house apart with his own hands. Neighbors gathered in the street to watch him lower the roof beams, then lift out the upper courses, then break into the wall itself, working toward a single brick set near the middle. He had carried that brick off from another man's yard years earlier. He could have sent silver. He could have sent a hundred bricks. He dug this one out of the mortar, carried it across Nineveh, and put it in the hands of the man it belonged to.

Others walked into the courts on their own legs that season and confessed crimes nobody had witnessed. Thefts no one had reported. Killings no one had solved. They named the punishments their own law required and asked the judges to carry them out, and some of what they confessed carried death, and they confessed it anyway.

The forty days Jonah had shouted through the streets were long over. The city was still standing. The sackcloth had been folded away. And the bricks kept coming back.

What the Diggers Struck

A man bought a building lot from his neighbor, paid for it, and put workers on it to cut a foundation trench. Partway down, a mattock rang on something that was not stone. The workers cleared the dirt away with their hands and found metal: silver and gold, packed in the ground by somebody who had wanted it out of sight, buried long enough ago that the soil above it had settled hard.

The buyer did not set a guard over the trench. He did not send the workers home and come back at night. He sent for the man who had sold him the field.

Two Men Pushing the Same Gold Away

"This was under your ground," the buyer said. "It was there while the field was yours. Take it."

"I sold you the field," the seller said. "The soil and everything the soil holds. I took your money for all of it. What comes out of it is yours."

"I bought dirt and a place to raise walls. I did not buy this."

"Then you bought badly, and it is still yours."

They stood on either side of the open trench with the gold lying in it, and neither of them reached down. Each had an argument any court in the city would have honored. Each kept pushing the argument at the other. Whoever had put the jar in that ground had not been either of them, and both of them knew it, and that was the thing neither could get past.

Neither man would let it rest there. They went together to the judge, not to be told which of them owned it, but to be rid of it.

The Judge Went Looking for a Dead Man

The judge did not split the gold in half. He asked who had held the lot before the seller, and who before that. He sent for old men who could remember the far end of the street. He worked backward through the owners of one small piece of ground until he had a name, and the name belonged to a man who had gone into the earth himself years before.

That could have ended it. A dead owner leaves a windfall to whoever is standing over it. The judge kept going. He asked where the dead man's people had settled, and he found them.

What Strangers Carried Out of the Courtyard

The heirs came and stood in the courtyard, and no one accused them of anything. They were told what had been found and where, and they were told to take it.

The buyer and the seller watched strangers load their fortune and carry it off down the street, and both of them were glad, and neither of them hid it. They had spent weeks trying to hand a fortune to each other and had finally handed it to people neither of them had met.

The buyer went back to the lot and laid his foundation over the empty trench. That was all the building he had wanted from the beginning.