The Two Days When Every Living Thing Tastes Death

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The Sun Drowns Every Evening

Every evening the sun does not simply set. It falls. When it reaches the western rim of the sky it plunges into the waters of the great Ocean, and the fire goes out of it with a hiss and a wall of steam. Then darkness, and the sun rides the whole night beneath the sea without light and without flame, a cold coal carried east under the world.

Before dawn it comes to a river of fire and immerses itself there like a man who kindles his lamp inside a furnace. It puts its flames back on. It climbs the eastern edge and pours light over the earth, and the work of the first Creation is done again, one more time, exactly as it has been done every single day. The moon and the stars keep their own ritual. Each night they wash themselves in a river of hail before they rise to burn over the dark.

Nobody looking up notices, because the fixtures hold. They drown and are reforged, and no mortal ever sees the seam.

When the Hosts of Heaven Are Hauled Before the Throne

But a day is set when the seam will show.

God will call the sun and the moon and the stars and the constellations up out of their courses and stand them before Him, and He will not merely relight them. He will remake them. He will take the moon, that pale borrowed thing, and give it the full strength of noon. He will take the sun and multiply it sevenfold, until a single day carries the light of seven days laid one on top of another. On that day, the prophet Isaiah said, the Holy One binds up the wound of His people and heals the bruise of their blow.

The vine already knows how this works. So does the fig tree. In autumn their leaves yellow and drop and the branches stand bare and dead-looking, stripped, finished for good. Then spring arrives and the same dead wood buds and greens and hangs heavy with fruit. The whole host of heaven will fade like that, like a vine, like a fig tree, and then blossom again before Him. What passes away does not really pass away. That is the thing hidden inside the dying.

Two Days of Silence

First, though, everything has to stop.

For two full days the earth will taste death. Not one creature spared. "And they that dwell therein shall die in like manner," the words go, and they mean all of them, the entire census of the living. No soul of man draws breath. No soul of beast. The birds do not drop from the air, because there is no dropping left, they simply are not there. The seas hold no fish that stir. The fields hold no worm that turns. For two days there is no heartbeat anywhere under the renewed and blinding sky, and the world lies as quiet as it was before the first word was ever spoken over the deep.

Two days, a silence with a floor and a ceiling and an end.

The Third Day

On the third day He renews them all.

He revives the dead. The ground gives them back. "After two days he will revive us, on the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live before him," the prophet Hosea had promised, and now the promise walks. The dead climb out of the earth and stand before Him and live. And the world they climb into is not the cracked one they left. In it there is no more evil. No more plague. None of the old catastrophes that used to find a person and break him. Behold, says God, I create new heavens, and the former troubles are not remembered and do not rise into any mind.

Waters That Heal the Salt Sea

Then the water starts to move.

It runs out from the holy place and goes straight for the ground where nothing ever grew. Every field that never yielded, every vineyard that gave back nothing, a man leads these waters across them and they bud and bear. The waters do not stop. They run down toward the Yam ha-Melach (ים המלח), the Salt Sea, that flat bright dead pan of brine where nothing has lived since the beginning, and they pour in, and they heal it. The prophet Ezekiel watched it happen. Every swarming living thing, he said, wherever the river comes, shall live, for these waters come there so that all things may be healed.

Fish fill the healed sea. Every kind of them. And the strangest word of all is spoken over these fish, that they will be as sweet as the manna that fed the wilderness generation, food from heaven now swimming in water that used to be poison. The fish climb the current. They swim upstream, against the whole weight of the pull, all the way up to Jerusalem, and there the fishermen stand along the banks with their nets and haul them in gleaming, and the taste of heaven is caught in an ordinary net in the middle of the city.

The sun overhead burns seven days bright. The sea behind them runs fresh. The dead are walking the healed ground. And not one of them remembers the two days when nothing breathed, because what passed away did not, in the end, pass away.