Shealtiel had just lived through the vision of the dry bones. The stillness after it was thick as morning fog over a river. He still stood by the black water, and in it were reflected the shards of the shattered tablets of his heart. The weight pressed on him unbearably. He did not understand what message he was to carry to those bones. What word could bring to life the dust that everything had become: covenant, promise, law?
And then, from the very depths of that dust, a memory rose. Not his — Adam’s. Not of an event — of an essence.
The air around Shealtiel was no longer steeped in Babylonian damp — in an instant it turned thin, dry, white-hot. In his ears was not the lapping of a foreign river but a deep, animal rumble rising out of the earth, out of the bones, out of time itself. The rumble of waiting for the verdict.
He was not standing at Sinai. He was Sinai.
The mountain was not outside him. It turned out to be that very crack in creation which ran through his own ribcage. It smoked not with fire but with the pain of absolute Purity touching an absolute wound.
And there was the Voice. Not a sound, but knowledge pressed into the flesh of history like a seal into hot wax.
I AM1.
Not a name — the fact of being. A hammer blow on the anvil of reality. At that word his own fear, the rage of Cain, the pride of Babylon, the lust of David, the cry of Job shuddered and fused into one. Everything that was unreal, that was not-I, flared up and vanished in that flame.
THE LORD YOUR GOD… WHO BROUGHT YOU OUT…2
“Brought out” carried in itself all the weight of an exodus from the primal, childish state in which one can pretend the wound is not there.
The chapter goes on in the book.