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| When the Fire Was Lit |
I have stood in glory and in grief.
I saw the cloud descend upon the House of the Lord.
I watched another fire rise from the hills.
My name is Shemaiah, son of Azariah, of the tribe of Levi.
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I was young when the Temple was completed — young enough that my hands trembled when I carried incense for the first time, afraid I would spill what was holy. My father said the trembling was good. “Better to fear than to grow familiar,” he told me.
The day the Ark was brought in, the city felt swollen with sound. Pilgrims pressed against the outer courts. The scent of blood and cedar hung thick in the air. Trumpets cried until my ears rang.
I stood beside my father in the inner court, close enough to see the priests’ shoulders strain beneath the weight of the Ark’s poles.
“Stand straight,” he murmured without looking at me. “This is not a day for slouching.”
“I’m not slouching,” I whispered.
He almost smiled.
When the Ark disappeared behind the veil, something changed.
The noise thinned.
Not because anyone commanded silence — it simply fell.
The air shifted first. It grew heavy, as though the sky had lowered itself into the room. My breath caught. The hairs on my arms lifted.
Then the cloud came.
It did not rush in like storm wind.
It descended.
Slowly. Deliberately.
Thick as wool, radiant and fearsome.
Someone near the altar dropped to his knees. Another priest stumbled backward, shielding his face.
The cloud pressed forward until it filled the House.
And we could not stand.
My knees struck the stone before I knew I had fallen.
I could not see my own hands. I could barely breathe.
“Abba—” My voice sounded small.
His hand found my shoulder in the haze and gripped hard — not steady, but shaking.
“Do you feel it?” he whispered.
I nodded, though I did not know if he could see me.
His fingers tightened.
“This,” he said, and his voice broke in a way I had never heard, “this is what it means for Him to dwell with us.”
When the cloud lifted enough for us to rise, I saw tears running unchecked down my father’s face.
He did not wipe them away.
And I loved him for that.
That night, as we walked home beneath the oil lamps, I asked him, “Will it always be like this?”
He was quiet a long while.
“It will,” he said at last, “if we remain the kind of people He can dwell among.”
I did not understand then why he did not say yes.
___
In those days, Solomon seemed wisdom made flesh. Kings crossed deserts to hear him speak. We believed the kingdom would shine forever.
Drift did not come with trumpet blasts. It came quietly.
Foreign wives arrived as treaties. They brought silk, language — and their gods.
At first they kept to the palace quarters, their garments bright as festival banners, their wrists heavy with gold. Their laughter carried differently across the courtyards — freer, sharper. I passed them once near the colonnade. One paused to look toward the Temple mount, her head tilted as though studying something ornamental, not sacred.
Solomon walked beside them.
He did not look ashamed.
He looked pleased.
___
The first time I saw the shape rising on the distant slope, it was nothing more than pale stone against the blue haze of morning. I assumed it a watchtower or some new folly of the court. But each day, as I climbed the southern steps and looked east, it grew. Scaffolding clung to its sides. Laborers moved like ants along its face. At night, fires ringed the summit, and the tap of hammer on chisel echoed faintly through the dark, long after the Temple lamps had been trimmed.
I asked another Levite what it was to be.
He lowered his voice.
“A high place,” he said.
“For whom?”
He hesitated.
“For Chemosh.”
The name felt foreign in my mouth. Bitter.
“Have you seen the hill?” I asked my father one evening as we scrubbed the basins.
“I have seen many hills,” he said.
“For Chemosh.”
His jaw tightened.
“The king seeks peace.”
“With idols?”
Water splashed harder than necessary against the bronze.
“You are young,” he said. “The Lord chose Solomon. I will not be found speaking against His anointed.”
“But what if the Lord is?”
He did not answer at once. The last light clung to the Temple stones.
“Then may the Lord correct him,” he said quietly. “And have mercy on us.”
That night he lingered in the court long after the other priests had gone. I watched from the steps as he stood beneath the lampstand, lips moving, shoulders bowed.
I had never seen him pray for mercy before.
---
The day the fire was lit on that altar, I stood at my post.
Smoke rose thin against the evening sky.
It did not thunder.
It simply burned.
The scent was wrong — thicker, sweet in a way that turned the stomach. A shift in the wind carried it toward the Temple courts. Some stepped back. Some pretended not to notice.
I did not move.
There was no voice from heaven.
No trembling earth.
Only a quiet fracture within my chest.
Some said, “The king is wise.”
But we had been warned.
Gold filled the treasuries.
Alliances filled the palace.
Altars filled the hills.
Outwardly, nothing changed.
Inwardly, everything shifted.
At dawn I sometimes stood where I could see both the Temple mount and the high places.
Two fires.
Two devotions.
One king.
And I remembered how my father trembled when the glory came — how he had asked whether we would remain the kind of people the Lord could dwell among.
I was no longer certain.
---
When Solomon died, the kingdom did not fall at once.
The gold remained. The walls stood.
But the fracture was already there.
Rehoboam ascended the throne with ceremony and confidence. I watched him from the outer court — young, broad-shouldered, certain.
Whispers moved through the corridors like wind through dry reeds.
“My father chastised you with whips,” he declared, “but I will chastise you with scorpions.”
The words fell like stones.
I thought of my father then. Of the way he had trembled beneath the cloud. I wondered what he would have called this — strength, or the beginning of loss.
I felt something tear in the air that day.
Not stone.
Not gold.
Not cedar beams.
But unity.
Ten tribes turned north.
And I stood again between two fires.
What begins in private compromise ends in public fracture.
I was there when the cloud filled the House of the Lord.
And I was there when another fire was lit.
One descended from heaven.
One rose from earth.
One felt like glory.
One felt like distance.
And I wait still for the weight of the cloud to fall again.
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