The Mountains Drink Again
The rain had finally come. It wasn’t the gentle, life-giving rain of my youth, the kind that soaked into the terraces with a sigh. This was a violent, drenching torrent, sluicing down the rocky slopes of the mountains around Jerusalem,…
Ezekiel Bears Jerusalem’s Siege
The heat of the Babylonian sun was a physical weight. It pressed down on the flat rooftop of my house in Tel-abib, a weight I felt in my bones, a dry, baking pressure that made the very air seem to…
Clay and Promise in Exile
The heat in Babylon was a different kind of heat. It wasn’t the dry, familiar warmth of the Judean hills, but a thick, heavy thing that lay over the mud-brick houses and the strange, towering temples like a wool blanket….
The Crimson Treader’s Mercy
The memory of the winepress haunted Malachi’s old age. Not the neat stone troughs of his uncle’s vineyard outside Anathoth, where the grapes yielded their sweetness with a sigh. No, this was a different kind of pressing. He saw it…
Dust of Egypt, Fire of Zion
The heat in Jerusalem was a physical thing that summer. It lay upon the city like a woolen blanket soaked in brine, heavy and suffocating. The dust from the southern road, however, was a different kind of affliction. It arrived…
Song of Solomon’s Sunset Praise
The heat of the day was finally softening, the kind of late afternoon light that turns everything to honey and gold. We were walking, the dust of the path fine and pale on our sandals, leaving the formal gardens behind…
The Stone and the Share
The heat in the forge was a living thing. It pressed against Eliazar’s skin, a heavy, shimmering blanket that smelled of coal and scorched iron. He worked the bellows, the leather groaning, until the heart of the fire glowed a…
The Scribe and the Enduring Refrain
The lamp oil was nearly spent. Its faint, guttering light threw long shadows across the small cell, catching the dust motes that drifted in the still, warm air. Asaph, his fingers stiff and corded with age, traced the edge of…
Evening Psalm on a Hillside
The heat of the day had begun to soften, that long, amber hour when the world seems to hold its breath. I sat on a flat stone at the edge of my small, terraced field, the smell of turned earth…
The King’s Seed
The scent of cedar was fading. Solomon could still smell it, a ghost of resin and sawdust clinging to the stones of the nearly-complete palace, but it was being overtaken by the damp, earthy breath of a Jerusalem spring. He…