The heat in the high places was a dry, patient thing. It didn’t press; it settled, seeping into the cracked limestone and the gnarled roots of the olive trees until the very air seemed to hum with a silent, baked exhaustion. Eliah ben Josiah felt it in his bones, a weight distinct from the weariness in his limbs. He had driven the small flock—the few sorry ewes and the one stubborn, black-faced goat—up to the sparse grazing grounds west of the ridge, away from the busier valleys. Away from the voices.

He found a sliver of shade beneath an overhang of rock, its face pocked and scarred by wind. He sat, his back against the ancient stone, and let the stillness of the wilderness wash over him. It wasn’t a peaceful stillness, not at first. It was the stillness of a held breath, of a world waiting. Below, in the hazy distance, the walls of the city were just visible, a smudge of baked earth. His city. Where his name was now muttered with a tone that was neither respect nor pity, but something colder: calculation. A debt, called due by a man whose heart was a ledger. A property line, disputed by a cousin with eyes like flint. Whispers that twisted his words, that made his honest silence look like guilt.

He had argued at first. Defended. His words, earnest and hot, had bounced off their polished, reasonable malice like pebbles off a shield. Now, he was just tired. A deep soul-tiredness that made his limbs feel like water.

He looked at the rock against which he leaned. It was not a beautiful rock. It was jagged in places, dusty, streaked with the grey and rust-colour of iron. It had been here a thousand years before him. It would be here a thousand years after. The sun could not melt it. The winter rains, when they came with their sudden, violent fury, only sluiced down its face, finding old grooves, making them deeper, but not breaking it. The rock simply was.

A verse, learned at his mother’s knee in a time that felt like a story about someone else, surfaced in his mind, not with a shout, but with the slow inevitability of a welling spring. *My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him.*

Rest. Not victory. Not vindication. Not even understanding. Rest. The word felt foreign on his tongue, a taste of cool water in the dry air. He whispered it. “Rest.”

The black-faced goat bleated, a raspy, discontented sound. A mere noise. It meant nothing. It was not a lie, not a scheme. It was just a creature expressing its creatureliness. Eliah saw the world then, for a moment, stripped of its human intrigue. The rock. The goat. The hawk circling on a thermal, riding the wind with effortless grace. The scrub grass clinging to life in a crack. All of it simply *being*, under the same sun, held by a hand so vast his troubles were less than a mote of dust in its palm.

*He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I shall never be shaken.* The words knitted themselves into the fabric of his breathing. His salvation. Not from the debt, or the lawsuit, but from the shaking. From the inner tremor that made him question his own worth, that made him want to become sly and hard like his opponents. God was a fortress not of stone, but of stillness. A place where the pounding of his own anxious heart could finally slow to match a slower, steadier rhythm.

He thought of the men in the city. Their lives were a frantic leaning. They leaned on their wealth, which could be stolen. They leaned on their influence, which was as fickle as the desert wind. They leaned on their cunning, which would one day trip over its own complexity. They were all leaning on a wall that was itself crumbling, a wall they spent their days painting to look sturdy. A great, collective leaning into emptiness.

*Lowborn men are but a breath, the highborn are but a lie; if weighed on a balance, they are together lighter than a breath.* It was not a curse. It was, he realized with a shock that felt like clarity, a liberation. His enemies had no real weight. Their power was an illusion they believed in, and in believing, made potent in the world of men. But in the world of rock and hawk and eternal silence, it was nothing. A breath. To fear a breath was madness.

The sun began its decline, painting the sky in washes of ochre and violet. The heat relented, replaced by a cooler breath that carried the scent of thyme and distant rain. Eliah did not move. The fortress of stillness was around him now. He was inside it.

He spoke aloud, his voice rough from disuse, blending with the whisper of the evening breeze. “One thing God has spoken, two things have I heard: that you, O God, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving.” Strength, and love. Not strength *or* love. Not love as weakness, or strength as cruelty. Both, woven together in the very nature of the Rock. The unmovable strength was for his protection. The unwavering love was his home. His refuge was not a hiding place from life, but the very ground of his being.

He stood finally, his joints stiff. He gathered the flock with a low whistle. As he walked down the path, the city coming again into view, its lights beginning to sparkle like distant, cold stars, he carried the silence with him. The shaking had stopped. The tremors in his soul had been quieted by a weightier truth. He was not just Eliah the debtor, Eliah the disputed. He was a man leaning, yes, but leaning on a Rock that would outlast every ledger, every lie, every setting sun.

And that, he knew as he felt the solid earth beneath his sandals, made all the difference.