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| Eyes off the prize |
The Elbib Yloh
This is my philosophy in a nutshell: I have none, because I do have
the sense that we can make sense of anything, but that doesn’t mean that
anything makes sense. Here is the Old Testament read backwards, a verse from
each book, from Malachi to Genesis. The drow of the drol.
The
day comes, burning like an oven. An arm withers; a right eye goes blind. The
pomegranate yields nothing, nor the olive. (Blood is poured out like dust,
flesh like dung; neither gold nor silver saves.) Swifter than horses, fiercer
than evening wolves, the plunderers have stripped them and ruined their
branches. Counselors perish. And he said, “I do well to be angry, angry enough
to die.”
God
says: “Though you soar like an eagle, your nest in the stars, I will bring you
down. I will shake you like a sieve till the wine press is full and the vats
overflow. Then the fountain will dry up, and the spring will be parched; babies
will explode, and the wombs of their mothers will be ripped open.”
This
will be when he comes back, comes into the south. (The court will be a hundred
cubits long, and a hundred cubits broad, foursquare. Measure it, before your
eyes have grown dim, and the jackals begin to prowl. Before Rachel weeps for
her children, refusing to be comforted, for there are no children.)
Lift
up your voice like a trumpet. Awake, north wind; come, south wind – for everything
there is a season: one eats, and she wipes her mouth; a song is raised, the
timbrel sounded; the ostrich leaves her eggs to the earth. All this is written
in the Book of the Chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia.
Now
the leaders of the people lived in Jerusalem; and the rest cast lots to live
there as Ezra prayed, confessed, wept, and threw himself on the ground. They
killed a lamb on the fourteenth day of the first month.
In the
spring of the year, the kings go out to battle. The servants of Nebuchadnezzar
king of Babylon came to Jerusalem to besiege the city. The battle grew hot that
day and the blood of the wound flowed into the bottom of the chariot. And the
waves of death surrounded the king, the cords of death bound him. They burned
the bodies of the king and his sons. Then they took the bones and buried them
under a tamarisk tree. And they fasted seven days.
The
people went up to Bethel to inquire of God. Joshua said to them, “You cannot
serve Him, for he is holy and jealous; he will not forgive your sins. You were
unmindful of the Rock that gave you life; you forgot the God that gave you
birth.”
The
Lord opened his eyes, and he saw an angel in the road with a sword in his hand.
And he put on him a coat; he clothed him with a robe; he wrapped his waist with
a woven band. “You shall make the court of the tabernacle,” he said. Also he
said: “You shall serve your brother; but when you break loose . . . .”
Hales. ל
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