Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, a number. I have been leaving it lying in the lamplight for four nights now, since the first night in the round church when the copyist read you the book that argued with the sky, and I told you the year it gave, three hundred and sixty four days, and said that some people believed it very much, and that I would come back for it. This is the night. It is a night about a calendar, and I know how that sounds, and I want to tell you at the door that it is not a night of sums. There is one paragraph of sums and I will warn you before it comes. It is a night about what happens to people who count the year differently from their neighbours. About a feast that falls on a Sunday for you and a Tuesday for the man in the next valley, so that you cannot eat it together. About a priest who went out on the holiest day of the year to hunt an enemy, in an episode often read as evidence that they kept different calendars. And about thirteen songs, written to be sung on thirteen Sabbaths, one after another, through one quarter of that year, in a heavenly temple, by angels, and found in pieces in the cliff, and found again, one copy, in the ruins of a fortress on a rock where a great many people died, which means that the songs were kept there too. It does not tell us who last sang them, or when. And it is a night that ends, as every night does, on the hill, in Ethiopia, in the rain, where the copyist keeps a calendar of his own that has thirteen months in it, and has never once thought that strange. We begin in the museum. The room with the roof like a lid. The hum, the low light, the cases. It is the third night we have opened here, and the last, because after tonight the books that are left in this room are not ours to tell, and the ones that are ours are on the hill. There is a place for you here, on the bench against the wall, in the cool, where you have sat before. The hum. Nothing has moved. Nothing will. You do not have to do anything now. Let the hum be the rain. Let the cool be on one side and the dark on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close. This story does not need to be watched. It only needs to be near you, the way the year is near you, going round, without asking anything of you. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the year will go on being counted without you, which is what it is for. And one thing, whispered. Nothing in this story will ever startle you. There is a priest in it who does a cruel thing, and the roll tells it in one sentence, and I will tell it low, in one chapter, and he is not named, and then he is set down. There is a fortress in it where people died, and I will say so plainly and once and not describe it. There is nothing louder than the hum, and most of the night is singing, and singing of a kind that has no tune, only order. You can trust this room. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next night will be waiting for you when you need it. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, in the cool, and let us begin. We begin.
Here is the paragraph of sums. It is one paragraph, and then it is over, and you will never need it again. Several books from the caves prescribe a year of three hundred and sixty four days. Not three hundred and sixty five. Sixty four. And the reason is that three hundred and sixty four divides by seven, exactly, with nothing left over. Fifty two weeks. So the year is a whole number of weeks, and every year begins on the same day of the week as the last one, and every feast falls on the same day of the week, forever, and nothing ever moves. The first day of the year is always a Wednesday, because that is the day the sun and the moon were made, on the fourth day, in the first chapter of Genesis, and a year that begins with the lights has to begin on the day the lights began, and the people of the caves thought that through, and meant it. The Passover is always on the same weekday. The Day of Atonement is always on a Friday. And the four days at the corners of the year, one at each turning of the seasons, the ones the sky book called leaders and said that people forget to count, are the four that make it come out even, twelve months of thirty and four extra, one at the end of each quarter, so that each quarter is exactly thirteen weeks. That is the whole of it. That is the sum. And it is wrong. The real year, the one the sun keeps, is three hundred and sixty five days and a little under a quarter of one more, and a year of three hundred and sixty four loses a day and a quarter against the sun every time round, so that in a generation the feast of first fruits would be falling in the wrong season, and nobody knows how the people who kept it dealt with that, or whether they did, or whether they simply did not mind, because a number that never drifts is a beautiful thing to believe in, and I said that on the first night and it is still the truest thing I know about them. That is the paragraph. Let it go. From here on there are no sums, only what the sums did to people. And I want to say one thing for the people who kept it, before we go on, because it is easy to hear a wrong year as a foolish one and it was not that. Every calendar is a decision about what to keep and what to let drift. The moon's year keeps the moon and lets the weekday drift. The sun's year, yours, keeps the seasons and lets the moon drift, so that the full moon falls on any date it likes and nobody minds. As written, this year protects the week. How its users dealt with the sun is a question the surviving texts do not settle, and it was made by people for whom the seventh day was the one thing in the world that had been given to them directly, at the close of the creation story in the first book, after humankind had been made. They built their year around the one day they were sure of. I would not have done it. I understand why they did. Because here is what the sum means when you take it out of the book and into a village. The temple in Jerusalem, a day's walk to the west of the terrace, did not count that way. It counted by the moon, the way most of the world did, and still does in a great many places, a new month at each new moon, twelve of them, which comes to three hundred and fifty four days, and then every few years an extra month put in to catch up with the sun, so that the feasts stayed in their seasons. It is a year that needs tending. It drifts and is corrected and drifts again. And it means that a feast can fall on different weekdays, the way your own birthday does. So in the year described by these books, the feast of weeks was always on a Sunday. And in Jerusalem, the same feast, with the same name, from the same page of the same law, might be on a Tuesday. Or it might be a week off. Or, when the extra month had been put in over in the city and not on the terrace, a whole month off. Two peoples, one law, one feast, on two different days, and I will tell you what that does before the night is over, because it is not a small thing, and it is the whole of why this night exists. The rule, I told you two nights ago, said that where ten men are gathered they must eat in order, and the priest reaches out his hand first over the bread. Picture that table now, and picture the feast day on it, and picture the same table in the city, with the same bread, on a different day. You cannot eat together. That is all a calendar is, in the end. It is the list of days on which you may sit down at a table with someone. And the people of the caves had a different list. There is one more thing the sum protects, and it is the thing they cared about most, and it is the Sabbath. In a year of fifty two weeks exactly, the Sabbath never lands on one of the great days. The great days of the year, the Passover and the Day of Atonement and the rest, fall on their fixed weekdays and none of those weekdays is the seventh, so that a man is never asked to do on a Sabbath what a feast requires of him, the slaughtering and the carrying and the lighting of fires, and never has to choose between two commandments. That was the beauty of it, to the people who kept it. Not that it was tidy. That it kept the seventh day clean. The moon's year cannot promise that. On the moon's year a feast can fall on a Sabbath, and then the priests have to decide what gives, and there were long arguments in the city about exactly that, for centuries, and this written year offers one way of keeping those duties apart. Whether that was why particular people left the city is harder to establish.
The book that says it most fiercely is on the copyist's shelf. The heavy one, with the years counted, the one I have been promising you since the first night, and I am going to open it tonight only at one page, because the whole of it is another night's, and soon. It is Jubilees. Mashafa Kufale, on the hill, the Book of Division. The angel reading to Moses from the tablets, and everything measured in sevens, and forty nine years to a jubilee. And in its sixth chapter, after the flood, after Noah has come out and offered and been given the bow in the cloud, the angel stops telling the story and turns to Moses and gives him a command, and the command is about the year, and I can give it to you in the old translation, because it is old enough to belong to everyone. And command thou the children of Israel, the angel says, that they observe the years according to this reckoning. Three hundred and sixty four days. And these will constitute a complete year, and they will not disturb its time from its days and from its feasts. For everything will fall out in them according to their testimony, and they will not leave out any day, nor disturb any feasts. And then the warning. If they do neglect it, the angel says, and do not observe them according to his commandment, then they will disturb all their seasons, and the years will be dislodged from this order. And all the children of Israel will forget, and will not find the path of the years, and will forget the new moons, and seasons, and sabbaths, and they will go wrong as to all the order of the years. And then the line that tells you who the book is angry with. For there will be those, the angel says, who will assuredly make observations of the moon. Now it disturbs the seasons, and comes in from year to year ten days too soon. Ten days too soon. That is the moon, in this book. A thing that runs ahead. A clock that is fast, and that people insist on setting their lives by, so that they arrive at every feast before the feast has come, and, the angel says, make an abominable day the day of testimony, and an unclean day a feast day, and confound all the days, the holy with the unclean, and eat blood with their meat, because they let the moon tell them the date. I want you to hear how the book says it, because it is the voice of somebody who has lost this argument and knows it. It is not a proposal. It is a prophecy of being ignored. The angel does not say, here is a better calendar. He says, they will forget. They will not find the path. They will go wrong. And the book was right. They did. The moon won, in the city, and in the later rabbinic calendar, and the year of three hundred and sixty four days went into the caves with the people who kept it, and came out again two thousand years later in pieces, still saying that the moon comes ten days too soon. And here is the part of the page I brought you for, because it is the part that is not angry at all. The angel gives the four days. The four at the corners of the year, the ones that make the sum come out. And he does not give them as arithmetic. He gives them as Noah's. On the first day of the first month, the angel says, Noah was told to make himself an ark, and on that same day of the year, when it came round again, the earth became dry, and he opened the ark and saw the earth. On the first day of the fourth month the mouths of the depths beneath were closed. On the first day of the seventh month all the mouths of the abysses of the earth were opened, and the waters began to go down into them. And on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains were seen, and Noah was glad. Those are the four days. The corners of the year. The day the ark was commanded and the day the earth was dry. The day the deep was shut. The day the deep was opened to drain. The day the mountains showed. And on this account, the angel says, Noah ordained them for himself as feasts for a memorial forever, and they were placed on the heavenly tables, each with thirteen weeks between it and the next, from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, and from the third to the fourth. And all the days of the commandment will be two and fifty weeks of days, and these will make the entire year complete. And the angel says one more thing about the year that I want you to hear, because it is the book's whole idea of itself in a sentence. He says, for I know, and from henceforth shall I declare it unto thee, and it is not of my own devising, for the book lieth written before me, and on the heavenly tables the division of days is ordained. Not of my own devising. The angel is reading. That is the frame of the whole heavy book, an angel reading aloud from tablets to a man who writes it down, and here, at the year, the angel stops to say so, as if he expected to be doubted about this one thing above all others, and wanted Moses to know that the three hundred and sixty four was not his idea. It was written. He was only reading it out. And that, you will notice, is the kind of authority this book claims for its year. Not ours. Written. We are only reading it out. The year, in this book, is the flood. Its four corners are the four days a man in a box remembered, because they were the days something changed. The water went down. The mountains showed. That is where the four extra days come from, that the sky book only counted. Jubilees gives them a reason, and the reason is an old man's memory of the worst year of his life, kept as feasts, forever, thirteen weeks apart. I do not think that is arithmetic. I think it is grief, made into a clock. And I think that is why the book is so angry about the moon. The moon does not remember the flood. It just comes round, ten days too soon, and does not care.
Stay on that page a moment longer, because there is one more feast on it, and it is the one the whole quarrel was really about, and the copyist, on his hill, keeps its child on the weekday this book says, though he does not know that he is taking a side. Before the four days, the angel gives Noah one feast, and he gives it to him as the feast of the covenant. The feast of weeks. The angel says that it was kept in heaven from the day of creation until Noah's day, and that Noah kept it, and his sons did away with it and ate blood, and Abraham kept it, and Isaac and Jacob, and that Israel forgot it until they came to the mountain, and that Moses is to command them to keep it, one day in the year, in the third month, forever, as a memorial of the covenant, and that it is a feast of two natures, the feast of weeks and the feast of first fruits together. Elsewhere in the book, the feast is placed at the middle of the third month, the fifteenth. The fifteenth. And in a year of fifty two weeks exactly, that is always the same weekday, and the weekday is the first of the week. A Sunday, you would say. Always. Forever. And the city, counting by the moon and counting the fifty days from a different starting point, kept the same feast, from the same page, on a day that moved, and that was, as often as not, not a Sunday, and was, more often than not, not the fifteenth. The same feast, on two days. The feast of the covenant itself, the one that said, we are the people who keep the agreement, kept on two calendars by two peoples each of whom believed the other had broken the agreement by keeping it on the wrong day. And it is a feast of bread, which is the thing that makes the quarrel hurt. The law gives two loaves of the new wheat, baked with leaven, brought before the altar. Both sides could read those words. But their calendars placed the offering on different days. We should not picture a second temple altar operating on the terrace merely because a book found nearby gives a different date. Picture the written command instead. The same bread in the same law, and two answers to the question of when it belongs before God. One group looks at the page and sees a Sunday. Another counts from a different morning. They could know the same words and still be unable to keep that feast together. That is what I mean by a table divided. Not two loaves that we have watched being baked on two hills, but a common command whose day has become a boundary. I said the copyist takes a side without knowing it. He does. The church on the hill keeps Pentecost, the feast that grew out of the feast of weeks, fifty days after its Easter, on a Sunday, always, because Easter is a Sunday, and it counts the fifty days the way the terrace counted them, from a Sunday, and lands on a Sunday, in the practice of the living church, and the reason has nothing to do with the terrace and everything to do with a different argument in a different century, and the result is the same. Fifty days from a Sunday, on the first day of the week, near enough the season the heavy book names, the people on the hill stand on their staffs and keep the feast that came out of the feast of the covenant, on the weekday the heavy book on their shelf says, through a church reckoning that includes calculated lunar cycles rather than a sighting from this hill. The counting is the quarrel, in the end. The law says to count fifty days from the day after the Sabbath of the Passover week to the feast of weeks, and everything turns on which Sabbath that means. The city read it as the first day of the feast itself, a day that moved with the moon, and counted fifty from there, and landed wherever it landed. The terrace read it as the ordinary Sabbath after the feast, the seventh day of the week, and counted fifty from the day after, from the Sunday, and landed, always, on a Sunday, on the fifteenth of the third month, and would not hear otherwise. Fifty days, from two different mornings. That is the whole of the feast of weeks quarrel, and it is a quarrel about which day the word Sabbath means, and men have left cities over less. And there were other feasts on the terrace that the city did not keep at all. I gave you them two nights ago, in the temple that was never built, and I will give them again in one breath, because they belong here. Fifty days after the feast of weeks, a feast of new wine. Fifty days after that, a feast of new oil. And then, over six days, the offering of wood, tribe by tribe, for the altar. The first two continue the sequence of seven week counts; the wood offering follows, spread over its appointed days. These are prescriptions in the scroll. We cannot say that nobody in the city had heard of them. In the longest roll, in God's own voice, in cubits. So picture the summer, on the terrace and in the city. In the scroll, the counted feasts of new wine and new oil, followed by the days of wood offerings. In the city, another pattern of observance, and then the autumn feasts on days that moved. Two summers, side by side, a day's walk apart, and the people in each of them sure that the other was keeping time wrong. That is what the calendar did. It did not only put the feasts on different days. It put whole feasts in one year that were not in the other. Two peoples with the same God and the same law and different years, and the year is where you live. You cannot live in two of them.
Now the one hard thing in the night, and I will give it to you the way this room gives hard things, once, plainly, in a low voice, and then set it down. The people of the caves read the prophets in a particular way. I told you two nights ago. They read them as a code, and the key was themselves. They would take a book of the Bible, a short one, one of the prophets, and go through it line by line, and after each line write, this means. And it repeatedly concerns their community, its enemies and its expected future. This means the Teacher. This means the Liar. This means the ones who went out. They called that kind of writing a pesher, which means an interpretation, an unfolding, and there were several of them in the caves, and the best kept of them is in this room, from the first cave, in a jar, and it is on the prophet Habakkuk. Habakkuk is a very short book, and a strange one, a man arguing with God about why the wicked do well, and the people of the caves went through it line by line and found themselves in every line. And in one place, near the end of what survives, the prophet says something about a man who makes his neighbour drink, and pours out his wrath, and the roll says, this means. And what it means is this. It means the Wicked Priest, who pursued the Teacher of Righteousness to the house of his exile, to swallow him up in the heat of his anger, and at the time appointed for rest, on the Day of Atonement, appeared to them, to swallow them up and to make them stumble on the day of fasting, their Sabbath of rest. I want to give you the shape of the roll, so that you can hear how odd it is. It goes like this. A line of the prophet, in the old words. Then, its interpretation concerns. Then the meaning. A line. Its interpretation concerns. The meaning. Column after column, the prophet and the terrace taking turns, the way two men take turns on a bench, one reading and one explaining, which is exactly what the philosopher in Alexandria said they did on the seventh day. Habakkuk says the Chaldeans are coming, and the roll says, its interpretation concerns the Kittim, which is the roll's name for the army that was, in fact, coming. Habakkuk says the righteous will live by his faith, and the roll says, its interpretation concerns all those who do the law, whom God will deliver because of their toil and their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness. The commentary brings the prophet into its own world. An ancient prophet, read as if he had been writing that morning, about the terrace. That is the whole of it. One sentence, in a commentary on a prophet, about an event nobody else recorded. A priest, the one the scrolls will not name and I will not name, is said to have pursued the Teacher to the place of his exile on the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting and rest, and he came upon them, on that day, to do them harm. And here is why it is in tonight and not in some other night. One influential reading is that he came because it was not his Day of Atonement. Other scholars question whether the line proves different calendars. Think about that reading. A day of rest depends on a date, and two dates can give the same morning different meanings. On this interpretation, one group is fasting while the other does not recognize that day as its fast. The priest's arrival becomes an intrusion into sacred rest. The roll does not give us the two calendars side by side, and it does not say that the Teacher's people were forbidden every act of defence. We have a hostile encounter, a named fast and the words their Sabbath of rest. From those words, scholars have built different accounts of the quarrel. The calendar may have been part of it. I want you to hear that possibility, without turning it into something the leather states outright. I am not going to tell you what he did when he got there. The roll does not, quite. It says he came to swallow them up and to make them stumble, and it goes on to say what will happen to him for it, and then it moves to the next line of the prophet, without giving us a full account of the encounter. I am not going to tell you who he was, because the roll would not, and the scholars have a list of candidates and no agreement, and the roll gives us a priest, and a Teacher, and a day of fasting on which an enemy came. Whether they counted that day differently remains a question. That is the calendar quarrel with the sums taken out. It is not about arithmetic. It may show how an enemy could intrude on a day another group held sacred. And it happened, or the people of the caves believed it happened, and wrote it down as the meaning of a prophet, and put it in a jar. Set it down. The hum. It is the last hard thing in the night, and it was one sentence of the roll, as promised, and the priest is gone.
I owe you a recap, and I will keep it to a breath, because you have had the sky book, and this room does not tell a thing twice. On the first night the copyist opened the third of the five books of Enoch, and it was about the sun. Six gates in the east and six in the west, and the sun moving through their changing order and back, and the moon in fourteen parts, and the four days at the corners that the book called leaders, and the year that came to three hundred and sixty four, and I said it was beautiful and very old and completely wrong and that none of that mattered that night. That is the sky book. It is spent, and I will not open it again. But I will tell you two things about it that I did not tell you then, because they belong here and not there. The first is that the sky book belongs to an older stream of thought than many of the disputes we can see in the later writings. It describes ordered lights, gates and periods, and sets a year within that order. That does not prove nobody had ever argued about time when it was written. We cannot recover the first quarrel. But we can put its patient account beside the fiercer warning in Jubilees and hear a difference in emphasis. One spends pages showing how the lights go. The other tells Moses what will happen when the reckoning is forgotten. An ancient account of the sky, and a book that makes the keeping of time a duty. And the second is that the sky book knows the stars go wrong. Near its end, it says that in the days of sinners the years will be shortened, and the seed will be late, and the rain will be held back, and the moon will alter its order and not appear at its time, and many of the chiefs of the stars will transgress the order, and the sky book says this as a thing that will happen, a falling out of true, the whole sky drifting because the people on the ground have drifted. It is the same fear as the angel's in Jubilees, that the year will be lost, but it is said gently, as weather. The stars will be late. The rain will be held back. The whole order of the stars will be hidden from you. And the sky book knows it is arguing, near its end, even if it did not begin that way. It says, in Enoch's own mouth, having been shown it by Uriel, that the year is completed in three hundred and sixty four days, exactly, and that people go wrong in counting because they leave out the four, and it names the four as leaders, and gives them their places at the four corners, and says that the stars themselves know them, and that this is the true reckoning, and elsewhere it does the moon's sums against that year, and says the moon falls behind by ten days a year, thirty in three years, fifty in five, and the book says this with the certainty of a man who has been told by an angel, and the moon's sums are near enough right, and the year they are measured against is not, because it is the three hundred and sixty four that falls short of the real sun, by a day and a quarter, while the moon's year in the city, with its added month, was pulled back into step every few years, and I said on the first night that the book would rather have the pretty one, and here is the book choosing it, and I love it for that and I would not trust it to plant a field. I give you that because I think it is the real feeling under the whole quarrel, and it is not anger. It is the fear of losing the path. Of the year coming apart like a rope untwisting, which is what I said on the first night, and did not know then how right the image was. The people who kept the year of three hundred and sixty four were not counting for the pleasure of it. They were holding a rope, in the dark, in a dry place, and they believed that if they let go of it the stars themselves would wander, and I imagine a reader holding those words near a lamp, though we cannot identify a nightly reading of this count from the manuscripts, and the moon came in ten days too soon, and they held on. And I will give you the sky book's one tenderness about the moon, since the heavy book has none. The sky book counts the moon carefully, in fourteen parts, waxing and waning, night by night, and it says that the moon and the sun share the same gates, and use them in a different order, and it does not call the moon a liar. It says the moon completes its year in three hundred and fifty four days, and that this is ten days short of the sun's, and it says so calmly, as a fact about the sky, and only afterward, in a later chapter, does it say that the moon herself will go wrong, in the days of the sinners, and not appear at her time. The sky book devotes long attention to the moon. Jubilees gives us a polemic against using it for this reckoning. That is the difference between a book about the sky and a book about a quarrel, and the copyist has both on his shelf and reads them on the same Sundays. That is the sky book. Put it back on the shelf. It has done its work.
The hum. The cases. You have had the one hard thing and it is behind you. Here is the third layer early, because I want it out of the way before the singing, and because it is a thing this shelf owes you. The calendar was one quarrel among several. I have told you tonight as if it were the quarrel, and it was a great one, and it may have been the one that sent people out of the city to a terrace above a dead sea. But it was not the only one, and the scrolls say so, and I would be telling you a tidier story than the caves tell if I stopped here. There is a letter in the caves. In pieces, in several copies, addressed by somebody to somebody, and it is a list. We say this. You say that. Concerning the purity of liquids poured from one vessel to another, we say. Concerning the dogs in the holy camp, we say. Concerning the marriage of priests, concerning the blind and the deaf in the sanctuary, concerning the gifts of the Gentiles, we say. Some of our rulings, the letter calls them, and it goes through them, one after another, and at the end it says, we have separated ourselves from the multitude of the people, and this is why, and it lists the reasons, and the calendar is associated with one manuscript, beside the rulings. And in one copy of it a calendar sits at the head, before any of the rulings, as if to get it out of the way, and it ends by saying that the year is complete at three hundred and sixty four days, in almost so many words, though whether that calendar was part of the letter or only copied beside it is a thing the scholars argue, and then the letter goes on to the liquids and the dogs and the priests' marriages as if the year were the least of it, which to the writer, I think, it was. He had a great many things to say to the city. At least, the opening arrangement invites me to hear the year beside those other disputes. The letter can sound surprisingly conciliatory beside the hostile names in the commentaries. That surprised me when I first read it, and it may surprise you. It is not the voice of the pesher, calling names. It is the voice of somebody writing to somebody he still hopes to persuade. We have written to you, it says, some of the works of the law which we think are good for you and for your people, because we have seen that you have understanding and knowledge of the law, and it asks him to consider, and to seek, and it says that if he does, it will be counted to him as righteousness, at the end of time, and it says this to a man it believes has got everything wrong. That is the letter. Twenty rulings, or thereabouts, and a hope. Some scholars think it was written to the very man the pesher would later call the Wicked Priest, before the quarrel hardened, when there was still a table they might both have sat at, and if that is so it is the saddest document in the caves, a letter to the enemy from before he was the enemy, and I give it to you as a thing some scholars think. And there was the matter of the priests themselves. Who had the right to stand at the altar. The people of the caves believed that the priesthood in the city had gone to the wrong family, that men were standing at the altar who should not have been, and some scholars connect that concern with the title Wicked Priest, though the title alone does not settle his identity or his lineage. That was a quarrel about blood, not about days. And there was marriage, and who could marry whom, and how many wives a man could have, and the terrace said one and the city did not always. And there was the temple's own purity, and whether the city kept it. And under all of it there was the thing you heard two nights ago, the two spirits, and the belief that the people in the city had drawn the other lot. You do not go out to live in a dry place because of a calendar alone. You go because you have decided that the people you left are in the dark, and the calendar is the clearest thing you can point to, because everyone can see a feast day, and nobody can see a spirit. There is a thing the scholars say about this that I find restful, and I will give it to you and then set it down. They say the quarrel was, at bottom, about who gets to say what God said. The city said the priests in the temple, whoever they were that year. The terrace said the Teacher, and the rule, and the year written on the heavenly tables. And once you have decided that, everything else follows, the days and the dogs and the liquids, because every ruling is a test of who is listening to the right voice. You will hear that question again this season, in other rooms, from a woman speaking while a fisherman bristles, and from bishops with lists, and it is the same question every time, and I do not think this season is going to answer it, and I do not think it should. So when I say the calendar split a people, I am telling you the visible half. The invisible half was everything else, and the scholars argue about which came first and which was the excuse, and I am not going to settle it in this room. I only want you to have it straight. One quarrel among several. The one you can put a date on. And now the thing the calendar was for. Because beside the sums and the quarrels, the collection keeps songs for appointed Sabbaths. Thirteen of them. One for each Sabbath of a quarter of that year. And the songs are in this room, in pieces, and they are the best thing in the caves for this hour, and everything from here to the hill is singing.
Let the hum drop a note. Let the cases go darker. This is the sleep text of the caves, and I have been saving it. They were found in pieces, in more than one cave, in Hebrew, in several copies, which tells us that the work circulated, and they are called the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and what they are is thirteen songs. Not psalms. Not hymns of the kind you heard two nights ago, with a man saying I am dust. These have no I in them at all. They are instructions. Each one begins the same way, with a heading, like a rubric in a service book. For the Instructor. The song of the sacrifice of the first Sabbath, on the fourth day of the first month. And then the song. For the Instructor. The song of the sacrifice of the second Sabbath, on the eleventh of the first month. And so on, thirteen times, one Sabbath after another, every seven days, through the first quarter of the year of three hundred and sixty four days, which has exactly thirteen Sabbaths in it, because thirteen weeks is a quarter, and that is why there are thirteen, and that is what the calendar was for. And each song is a call to praise. But not a call to men. The songs call on angels. Praise, they say, you who are the highest of the high, the holy ones of the holy ones, the princes of the sanctuary, the priests of the inner temple. Praise. And then they say who is to praise, and in what order, and the order is the order of a temple, but it is not the temple in the city, and it is not the temple in cubits from the longest roll. It is the temple above. The one the angels serve in. The songs go through it, room by room, the way the sky book went through the gates, and they name the ones who stand in each room, the seven chief princes and their seven deputies, and the ones who carry the seven wonderful words, and they tell them, in order, to praise. They are preserved in several witnesses. Copies in the fourth cave, and a copy in the eleventh, and that copy on the rock, which I will come to, and the copies are in different hands from different generations, which shows that the songs were copied over a span of time. The copies show sustained interest, though they do not tell us that a worn out roll was replaced each quarter. And the songs have a shape that the year gave them. In the first songs we hear the ranks and duties of the heavenly priesthood. The sixth and seventh and eighth are the centre, the sevens, the praise of the princes and the praise of the building. And the last five go in, through the doors, to the throne, and end on the robes. A quarter of a year, thirteen Sabbaths, and the songs walk you in one Sabbath at a time, so that by the last Sabbath of the quarter you are as far in as a song can go, and then the surviving cycle ends. Whether it was repeated in the other quarters is uncertain. The dates we have belong to the first quarter. A walk toward a door, kept for us in thirteen songs. Nobody knows quite how they were used. Whether men on the terrace sang them, or read them, or whether the Instructor read the heading and the men were silent, listening to the angels being told to sing. I think it was that. I think it was the strangest and quietest service ever held on the earth. A man in white, on the Sabbath, in a long room with benches, reading aloud, not a prayer, but a description of a prayer that was going on somewhere else, in the temple above, at that moment, by the angels, in order, and the men on the benches keeping still so as not to interrupt it. That is why the day mattered. If the song for the seventh Sabbath is read on the wrong day, you have described a service that is not happening. The angels above keep the year of three hundred and sixty four. The people of the caves believed that. And so they had to keep it too, or they would be singing to an empty room. I am going to give you three of the songs now, or what is left of them, and I am going to give them to you slowly, and I am not going to quote them, because there is no old translation I may read from, and because they are not the kind of thing you quote. They are the kind of thing you let go past you, the way you let the sound of a service go past you from another room in the house when you are already half asleep. I hear the first songs as an approach to the inner rooms. They call the angels priests, the priests of the highest height, and say that they have been made holy, and that they draw near, and that they keep the laws of the sanctuary, and that they make atonement, the songs say this, for those who turn back from sin, and that their knowledge is more than any knowledge of men, and their praise more than any praise. Rooms, and priests in them, and praise going up from room to room. I will give you one phrase from them, not as a quotation, as a thing they say. They call the angels the priests of the inner sanctum, and they say that the angels do not tolerate any who pervert the way, and that they are the ministers of the presence in the innermost room, and that they have knowledge of the mysteries, and then, in a fragment usually assigned to the second song, they turn, for one moment, from the angels to the men on the benches, and ask, what is our priesthood in comparison with theirs, and what is the offering of our tongues of dust beside the knowledge of the angels. That is a rare surviving moment when the singers speak of themselves, and what they say is, we are dust, and our praise is dust, and we are singing anyway. You heard that voice two nights ago, in the hymns. It is the same voice, once, in the middle of a service, looking up. That is the first five songs. Let them go past.
The seventh song is the middle one, and it is the one that is best kept, and it is the one I would give you if I could give you only one. It is built in sevens. The seventh song, for the seventh Sabbath, and in it seven calls, one after another, each one to a different rank of the angels, and each one telling them to praise in a different way. Praise, it says to the first, you who are exalted among the exalted. Sing, it says to the second, you who are mighty among the mighty. Rejoice, it says to the third. Exult. Extol. Give thanks. Bless. Seven verbs, for seven ranks, each one the highest of its kind, and the song does not describe the praise. It commands it. Sing. Rejoice. Bless. Over and over, to rooms full of beings who are already singing, so that the song is not the music. It is the conductor's hand, moving, in a room where the orchestra cannot be seen. And the song before it, the sixth, for the Sabbath before, has the seven princes speak their praises and blessings. The repetitions are more intricate than a single list of seven words for each one. Sevenfold praise is repeated in sevenfold patterns, and then blessings follow, and the chief princes bless together. The actual words of those angelic utterances are not set out for us to hear. We hear their order and their kinds instead. Blessing. Exaltation. Thanksgiving. Rejoicing. One prince after another, and then their voices together. I will not turn that pattern into a total the song does not give. What I want you to keep is the succession. A voice, and another voice answering the same duty in its own place. The song tells us that praise is being offered, and leaves the exact utterance in the room above. There is an eighth song on the other side of that centre, and it helps show the shape of the sequence. The sixth gives us the chief princes. The eighth turns to their deputies, another ordered company of seven. The heading names its Sabbath too, the week after the seventh song. In the year's own reckoning, it is the twenty third day of the second month. The heading can place even the torn words on their appointed day, though much of the song itself has been lost. So the central song stands between two companies of praise. The order is not merely a list of rooms. It is a pattern of voices, one company, the great central call, and another company beyond it. In the broken eighth song, the voices are joined to one another through another sevenfold figure. One tongue is strengthened beside the next, and the next beside another. The text builds the company by succession. It does not leave each voice as a thing by itself. The chiefs and the deputies have their different stations, but the task is shared. That helps me hear the quiet human question near the beginning, about what a mortal voice can offer beside theirs. The songs do not have to make the human voice equal to the angelic ones in order to give it something to do. It can call for praise. It can name the order. It can follow the next appointed Sabbath. We do not know exactly how a room of people performed these words, but the words themselves keep making room for company. Seven chief princes. Seven deputies. A gathering that grows as one voice is brought beside another. Keep that pattern near the seventh song now. The building is about to join it. And then the seventh song does a thing I have never found anywhere else. It has the temple itself praise. Not only the priests in the temple. The temple. The seventh song calls the foundations and the supporting pillars into praise, and speaks of the beams and the walls and the work of the building. In the cycle around it, the picture widens. Furnishings, doors, engraved figures. The chariots and the beings around them. A whole sacred place made lively in the telling. I hear it as a house joining its worshippers. Not just a house that contains a song, but a house drawn into the song. The call reaches what supports it and what surrounds it, until the difference between the praise and the place that holds it becomes difficult to hear. I want you to stay in that for a moment before I let it go, because it is the most restful idea in the caves and it is very old and it is perfectly strange. A house, singing. Every stone of it. Not because anyone is inside it singing, but because the stone is what it is, and being what it is, in that place, is praise. The floor praises by being the floor. The door by being the door. The beam by holding up the roof. That is the picture I hear across the songs, with the seventh at their centre. I imagine a man in a room reading it out, and the men on the benches are still, and somewhere above, the beams are praising, and the men believe it, and I do not think it matters tonight whether you do. And in the surviving continuation, a voice of blessing comes from the princes of the innermost sanctuary, and the crafted furnishings join the praise. The language moves from sanctuary to sanctuary. The chariots praise together, and the beings around them bless. I hear a sound passed onward, though the broken text does not give a complete journey from the innermost room to an outer gate. That passage from one keeping place to another is my likeness, the one that brings me back to a lamp in a round church and to a chain of copyists handing on a book. A voice, and another place where it can be heard. The song gives us praise within the holy places. I bring it the thought of the rooms through which words travel. The hum, in this room, at this hour. The machines that keep the air. If the seventh song is right, they are praising too, by keeping the air. I will leave that with you.
The last songs go inward. Past the outer rooms and the seven ranks, into the innermost room, and what is there is the throne. You have heard of the throne. You heard of it on the first night, in the house of fire, from the doorway, a throne like ice with wheels like the sun, and a man on his face on the floor. You heard of it on the mountain, an empty seat with fragrant trees round it, kept for a day. The songs have it too, and they have it the way the prophet Ezekiel had it, as a chariot, a throne on wheels, with living creatures beneath it, and the songs describe the wheels, and the creatures, and the fire between them, and then they say the thing I brought you here for. Before the throne there are the songs that go through the doors. The tenth and eleventh songs describe the vestibules of the inner temple, the entrances, and the figures engraved on them, and the songs say that the figures are living. That the shapes carved into the walls of the temple above, the figures of the holy ones cut into the stone of the vestibules, are not carvings but spirits, and that they praise from where they are cut, and that when the cherubim pass through the doors the engraved figures praise too, in their places, and the songs say this the way you would describe a thing you had seen and could not explain. A door, with figures on it, and the figures singing. That is the way in. Past the doors, the throne. They say that the wheels praise. That the cherubim bless. That from between the wheels there comes a sound, and the songs say what kind of sound it is, and it includes quiet as well as tumult. Hear the sound of quiet. A murmur of blessing. The songs say, as they go into the innermost room, that there is a sound of stillness, a voice of quiet blessing, and that the creatures bless in the tumult of their going, and that when the wheels turn there is a quiet sound of divine praise, and I am giving you that as nearly as I can, and I am going to say it once more, because it is the line. One sound of the innermost room, in the songs of the caves, is a sound of stillness. Not silence. Stillness with a sound in it. The way a house has a sound at night when everyone is asleep and the timbers settle. The way this room has the hum. And the songs say that the cherubim fall down. That when the wheels turn and the sound of stillness comes, the cherubim, the living creatures, fall on their faces before the throne, and bless from where they lie, and rise, and the sound rises with them, and I want you to set that beside the man on the first night, on the floor of the house of fire, on his face, trembling. The same posture. In the songs it is not fear. It is what you do in that room. The cherubim do it. The man did it without knowing it was the custom. The songs went as far in as a song can go, past the priests, past the seven ranks, past the beams and the doors, to the throne itself, and among the sounds they name is a very quiet sound of something being blessed. And the text assigns that song to the twelfth Sabbath. The date belongs to the writing; the room and hour of composition are beyond what we know. And the thirteenth song is about clothing. I love that it ends there. The last Sabbath of the quarter, the innermost room, the throne, and among its surviving lines are descriptions of what the angel priests are wearing. Their garments. Embroidered, the songs say, with many colours, like woven work, and pure, and the colours of the most holy spiritual light, and the songs go through the vestments of the priests above the way the law goes through the vestments of the priests below, thread by thread, colour by colour. That is the end of the cycle. Not a great chord. A description of a robe. Scarlet and white belong to the surviving description. Woven work and embroidery bring the sacred pattern close to a body, after we have heard it in the beams and the entrances. I hear a connection between those pictures, though the fragments do not give us every step that once joined them. The carved figures belong to the holy place. The patterned garments belong to those who serve there. The song gives attention to both. It can bring us past a great entrance and then ask us to notice something as small as the work of a thread. I will leave the thread in the light, rather than weave the missing parts of the robe for you. I said the copyist on the hill takes sides without knowing it. He does here too, though not about the day. The priests in his church, on Sunday, wear robes embroidered with many colours, woven, and carry the crosses you have seen, and stand in the innermost part of the round church, behind a curtain, where the people do not go, and the people stand outside it on their staffs and hear what is said inside and do not see it. A room within a room, with a sound coming out of it. The songs of the caves would have understood that church at once. I bring the likeness to our imagined church, without claiming to know who there has heard of the songs. I have not described the one on the throne, and neither do the songs, and neither will I. They describe the throne, and the wheels, and the creatures, and the fire, and the sound, and then they say that the glory is there, and they say what the glory does, which is that it is blessed, and they stop. The songs of the caves went into the innermost room of the temple above and came out without a face. That is a kind of restraint this shelf honours, and I honour it, and the copyist on the hill, whose red ink is for the name and nothing else, would understand it without being told. There is one more thing to tell you about them, and it is not in the songs. It is where one copy of them was found, and it is the reason they are in tonight and not only in the calendar. Because a copy of the songs of the Sabbath sacrifice was found somewhere other than the caves. It was found on a rock, above the same dead sea, further south, in the ruins of a fortress, and the ruins were the ruins of the last stand of the war that ended the terrace.
There is a rock at the southern end of that sea. A great flat topped rock, standing up out of the desert by itself, with cliffs round its summit and steep approaches, and on the top of it, two thousand years ago, a king built a palace and a fortress, with storehouses and cisterns and a wall all round the edge, so that a man on the top could see anyone coming for a day before they came. I am going to tell you the ancient account in one paragraph, plainly, because it deserves to be named as an account. Josephus tells of families holding the fortress against a Roman siege, and of a ramp raised against it. He says that, as the end approached, most of those within died by their own community's hands rather than be captured, while a few survived and told the Romans what had happened. Scholars debate how fully that account can be reconciled with the remains. The siege is part of the place. Its last night reaches us above all through that writer. I will leave it there, without making the deaths into a scene. I will give you the rock as it is now, because it is the still image of the night and the one I want you to keep. One ancient way up is the winding path on the eastern side. At the top the wall goes round the edge, and inside the wall the ground is flat and bare and pale, with the low walls of the storerooms in rows, and the great cisterns cut down into the rock, empty, and the palace at the northern point built in three steps down the cliff, and from the heights the sea stretches below, grey and flat and white at the edges, and the mountains on the far side, and the desert going away south, and the wind, which never stops on the top of the rock, coming up over the wall. It is very quiet, in the way the terrace is quiet. Nobody has lived there, but for a few monks a very long time ago, in most of two thousand years. It is one of the quietest places there is. Two thousand years later, the rock was dug. Carefully, over two long seasons, by people who knew what they were doing, and they found the storehouses and the cisterns and the bath house and the palace, and they found traces of what the people on the rock had left. Coins. Sandals. Combs. Cloth. And among the ruins they found scraps of leather with writing on them. Books. The people on the rock had brought books. The dig was careful and it was large. The rooms, walls and broken objects were recorded, and the scraps of writing became part of the work of understanding who had lived there. I cannot trace every method on the rock to a lesson learned in one cave. But the two kinds of discovery belong beside each other. A fragment can be easy to overlook and still change the account of a place. Stone tells us how rooms were built. A written scrap can tell us something of the words carried into them. Here the excavators found both, and the songs could be placed beside the witnesses from the caves. Some of them were the Bible. Psalms, and Leviticus, and Ezekiel, and Genesis, and pieces of the wisdom of Sirach, in Hebrew, an ancient witness in its own language. And one of them was this. The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. A piece of the fifth song and the sixth, on a scrap of leather, in a good hand, in the ruins of the last fortress of the war, thirty miles or so down the same shore from the terrace, with the people who had held the rock. The scrap is small. A few columns' worth, broken, and on it the end of the fifth song and the beginning of the sixth, which is the song for the sixth Sabbath, the one that gives the chief princes their sevenfold patterns of praise and blessing, and the hand is a good one, careful, of the kind you find on the best rolls from the caves, and the scholars who read it said at once what it was, because they had the cave copies to lay it beside, and their surviving words could be compared where the fragments overlapped. The same song. In a fortress. With the sandals. Now stop and think about what that means, because it is a small fact with a long reach. A text known from the caves was also present on the rock. Its headings belong to the same counted Sabbaths. That is a connection between witnesses, not a travel record for the people who owned them. We cannot identify a particular refugee from the terrace, or hear a service held while the siege ramp rose. But we can say that the work was not confined to one find spot. A song preserved in more than one place can outlive the loss of each place, and here it has. Or it means something less. It means that the songs had travelled, that other people had them, that the movement was wider than the terrace, and that is what many scholars say, and it is more likely, and it is less strange, and I give it to you as one well supported reading. The songs were not confined to the terrace's caves. A witness to them was kept on the rock too. But I will tell you what I picture, in this room, at this hour, and you may set it down when I have said it. Somebody carrying a roll. A steep approach. A place found for it among other possessions. Perhaps a voice giving the sixth song to people who are listening. That is my imagined room, not a fact recovered from the scrap. The scrap gives less, and something firmer. These words reached the fortress. They stayed there through what happened to it. And when the writing was read again, the broken song could be placed beside another broken witness, and each could help the other be heard. And here is the thing I want you to keep, because it is what the rock does to the night. The texts give us a counted year, and the songs give thirteen Sabbaths their order. We cannot mark the last day that year was ever kept. We cannot say that no reader knew the songs between the siege and their modern discovery. What we have now are the witnesses that survived. Scholars compare their pieces and follow the headings, from one Sabbath to the next. The count becomes a way of reading, even for someone who does not share the faith of those who first used it. That is the afterlife we can see. A calendar that once set an appointed day now helps put a fragment in its place, and the song can be read again. And the copy is in this city, and we can set it beside the cave pieces in our imagined room. A scrap of leather from a fortress, with a song on it about the priests of the inner temple, found in the ruins with the sandals and the combs. The hum. Let the rock go.
The third layer, and the last of it, and it is short, because I gave you most of it in the middle of the night with the letter of rulings, and because the songs have said the rest. Here is what the calendar of these books was. A written reckoning of three hundred and sixty four days, with whole weeks and fixed weekdays for its feasts. It is shorter than the actual solar year. That difference is real, though we do not know exactly how its users handled it in practice. Nor was ancient Jewish timekeeping a contest between only two uniform peoples, one at a terrace and one in a city. The surviving writings show several positions and disputes. The later rabbinic calendar follows another system, with lunar months and added months to keep the year near the seasons. We can describe the difference without claiming that one feature alone explains why one tradition continued and another became difficult to trace. A month that begins with the moon has a visible sign, and a year that adds a month can be brought back toward the seasons. Those are practical strengths. But visibility alone does not explain a calendar's history. A written solar scheme can be checked against the sky too, and a lunar year still needs decisions about observation and counting. Both depend on people who agree to trust a way of keeping time. Tonight the difference matters because these books make that trust part of belonging. A calendar is carried by a community, as well as by the sky. What the year did was split a table. That is all a calendar can do and it is a great deal. It decided who you could eat the feast with, and different dates could keep people from eating the same feast together, and I think, from the rule and the songs and the letter, that this is what they wanted, and that the year was not the cause of their going out but the shape of it. You leave, and then you need a reason that everyone can see, and the reason has to be something you can point to on a wall, and a day is a thing you can point to. And the copyist, on his hill, keeps a different calendar too. The later rabbinic year is regulated by calculation, rather than depending each month on a witness coming down from a hill. Its added months belong to a fixed cycle. That gives communities a shared reckoning, though it does not mean every Jewish community in every period has used one calendar, or that a common date can prevent anyone doing harm. The old encounter in the commentary remains what it is, a hostile arrival on a sacred day. A modern calendar cannot answer for every person who keeps it. It can give people a day to recognize together. His year has thirteen months. Twelve of thirty days, and a thirteenth of five, or six, at the end, which has a name in his language that I will give you before we sleep, and which I have been calling, for myself, the month of the small days, and his new year falls in September, when the long rains end, and his Christmas falls in January by your reckoning, and his year is seven years behind yours, or eight, depending on the month, because his church counted the years from a different beginning and never saw a reason to change. He keeps it. It is used widely in Ethiopia. Not the year of the caves, a different one, older in some ways, worked out in Egypt a very long time ago, a year that keeps its feasts in their seasons because it adds its small days at the end where they can be seen, five of them, and six in the fourth year, and its slow drift is a different matter from the much shorter year in the caves. The survival of a calendar does not tell us that its whole history was free of conflict, and the feast of weeks' child on the hill lands on a Sunday, and the people stand on their staffs. And the year on the hill has one more thing in it that I want you to have, because it is the mirror of the caves. The church on the hill keeps a long fast before Easter, and it keeps the feast of the Cross in September with fires on the hills, and it keeps the feast of the Epiphany in January by going down to the water in white and being blessed with it, whole towns, in the rivers, and every one of those days falls on the hill's own calendar, on the hill's own date, and the living church keeps and explains them in its own traditions. The caves wrote a commentary to say what the Day of Atonement meant to them. The hill goes down to the river. That is one picture of a calendar gathering people. It does not erase the shared worship of ancient Jewish communities, or make one people peaceful and another divided by nature. The years are different. The wish to keep an appointed day with other people can be heard in both. I give you that as the last thing in the third layer because it is another way to hold the question. People can keep different years and still make room for one another. A difference of dates does not by itself explain every separation, and it does not by itself cause peace. What people do with the difference matters. On our imagined hill, the small days are coming. The copyist has a book with another year in it, and his own year going on outside the door. Tonight he can keep the book and hear the rain. An authentic book is not the same as a true event. The year of three hundred and sixty four days is in the most authentic books there are, in Enoch and Jubilees and the songs and the letter, in the copyist's hand on the hill and in pieces in the cliff, and it is a real year that real people kept, and the sun did not keep it with them, and both of those things are true at once, and neither one makes the songs less beautiful, and I have stopped trying, on this shelf, to make them agree. The guard has gone past. The hum. The Isaiah, or its likeness, going round in the drum. We are leaving this room now for the last time, and going up the hill, where the year has thirteen months and the rain is nearly over.
Leave the museum. Leave the cool and the hum for the last time. Go south, a long way, and up, into the highlands of Ethiopia, and into the rain, which is not what it was. It is late in the wet season now. You would not know it from the roof, which is still taking the rain, but the copyist knows it, the way a man knows the turn of his own year without a calendar. The rain comes later in the day now, and stops sooner, and there are hours in the afternoon when the cloud lifts off the valleys and you can see, for a while, the fifty miles, green, all of it, greener than anything, and then the cloud comes back. The month of the small days is near. The five days, or six, at the end of the year, that his calendar keeps by themselves, and then the new year, in September, and the yellow flowers that come up all over the hills for it, and the rain done. The thirteenth month has a name, and I will say it once, because it is a lovely one and because the copyist says it without thinking, the way you say the name of a street. Pagume. Say it once, slowly. Pagume. Five days, or six in the fourth year, at the turn of the year. Small days, before the months begin again. That is the copyist's year turning. Not only a sum. A pause at the end of one circle, before the next. The rain on the thatch is different tonight. Lighter, and with gaps in it, the way it gets at the end, when it has said everything it had to say for a season and is only finishing. He knows the sound. He has heard it every year of his life at this time. It is the sound of the small days coming, and of the fields being green enough, and of the path down to the village beginning, in a week or two, to be a path again. He does not think about that. He is where he always is, by the lamp, with the board across his knees, filling a ruled leaf, the last gathering, a column and a half tonight, and it is late, and his hand aches, and he sets the reed down and sits with his hands in his lap, the way he does. On the shelf, the old Enoch, with the red in it. The heavy one with the years counted, open tonight, because he was reading it, at the page where the angel gives the four days to Noah, the day the mountains showed, and Noah was glad. That page is on his shelf. In Ge'ez. The year of three hundred and sixty four days is described in scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church today, in that book, and was last Sunday, and the copyist keeps a year of thirteen months and has never once thought the two were in any disagreement, because they are not, on the hill. They are books. You keep books. He turns the heavy book back to its first leaf before he closes it, the way he does, so that it lies right on the shelf, and the first leaf is the angel beginning to read to Moses, with the name in it, in red, and the copyist touches the red with the side of his thumb, not reading it, the way you touch a doorframe, and closes the boards. The bundle that is not really here. The box, nearly full. The dark roll, in a case, a long way north, with the mother's speech in it. The songs, in pieces, in the same building, telling the beams to praise. The copyist stands. His knees are stiff. He crosses the small round room to the door and stands in it and looks out, the way he does every night, at nothing, at the rain, which is lighter, at the dark shape of the juniper, at the place where in daylight you can see fifty miles and could, this afternoon, for an hour. The air is cold and wet and smells of woodsmoke and thatch and, faintly, of the incense from Sunday, and, very faintly, of something else, which is the earth beginning to dry. Somewhere down the hill one dog, once, and then the rain again, closing over it, softly, because it is nearly done. Then he comes back in, and does not put out the lamp. He never does. It will burn a while, and go out on its own some time before morning, and nobody will see it happen, and the room will be dark, and the books will go on standing on their shelf in the dark exactly as they were, which is what they are for. Let the room be as it is. Let the rain go on, while it lasts. It has been going on under everything I have told you tonight, the sums and the moon and the four days of the flood and the priest at the door and the beams that praise and the rock, and you may not have noticed it for a long while now, and that is exactly right. It was never asking for your attention. It was only there. The way it was there for the copyist, and for his teacher, and for every one of them, back and back, and the way the year was there for the people of the caves, going round, thirteen weeks to a quarter, whether the moon agreed or not. In the morning somebody will open the door, and the light will come in across the floor, and it will be a little brighter than it was yesterday, because the small days are coming, and the leaf will be where he left it, and the books will be where they were left. But that is the morning, and the morning can wait. Sleep well. Goodnight.