The Diggings of Then

East of the Babel the green country dried out as it went. The grass went brown and thin, low hills of yellow earth rose up on both sides with gullies scored down them, and the dust on the road turned white and fine as flour. On the third day Inquirer came over a rise and looked down into a wide shallow valley, and the whole floor of it was holes.

There were hundreds of them, trenches and pits and square shafts cut neatly into the yellow ground, each with its heap of spoil and its wooden ladder, many with a little canvas awning stretched over against the sun. Narrow plank walks ran between them, and along the walks people in broad hats came and went with baskets and brushes and sieves and notebooks. Here and there the tops of old walls stuck up out of the earth, and broken columns, and the stumps of gateways.

At the head of the valley stood a long timber hut with a flag flying over it, a spade crossed with a quill.

This was the place called the Diggings of Then.

It was cool and dim inside the hut and smelled of earth. Tables ran down both walls covered in trays, and in the trays were things Inquirer couldn’t make out at first: bits of pottery, coins, little clay lamps, a bronze pin, a child’s toy horse with three legs. Every one had a paper label in a tiny hand.

At the far end a woman was bent over a tray with a magnifying glass. She was sixty or so, sunburnt and wiry, in a dusty khaki coat with a great many pockets, her grey hair cropped short under her hat. She straightened up when he came in.

“Pilgrim? Good. Plain-Sense said you’d be along. He came through three days ago and went on to the Clocktower. He left you this.” She fished a folded paper out of a pocket. All it said was: Stay as long as she’ll have you. She knows things. — P.S.

Inquirer smiled and put it in his pocket with the pebble.

“I’m Madam Setting. I run the Diggings. Sit down. Do you know why you’re here?”

“To learn about the world the Book was written in?” he said cautiously.

“Near enough. I’ll put it plainer.” She dragged a stool over and sat on it with her knees apart like a farmer. “You’ve crossed the Babel. You’ve got the words now, in their own languages, and you can carry them into yours. Good. But words don’t hang in the air. Every word in that Book was spoken by a real person to real people, in a real place at a real time, about real troubles. Paul, to the church of God which is at Corinth. That’s not a greeting card, that’s an address. There was a Corinth. It had streets and temples and a harbor and a meat market, and a church of maybe a hundred people who met in a rich man’s dining room and squabbled over who got the good food. If you don’t know any of that, you’ll read Paul’s letter as if he’d written it to you about your church, and you’ll get it wrong.”

“But isn’t it written to me too? Isn’t the whole Book for every reader?”

She nodded. “Every word of it’s for you. Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning. But it was written to them and for you, and the only way to the for you goes through the to them. That’s the road. Skip it and you’re back in Mine-Own-Meaning.”

She took him out into the glare and along the planks between the trenches.

“There are three things we dig for here, and I’ve got a digger for each. Come and meet them.”

The first trench was deep and narrow. At the bottom a young man with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead was brushing earth off a broken tablet as gently as if it were asleep.

“That’s Occasion. He digs for why. Why was this written? What had happened? What was the trouble, or the question, or the danger? Every book in the Book was written because something was going on. Galatians, because men were telling the churches they had to be circumcised to be saved, and Paul was furious, and it shows. If you don’t know that, you’ll wonder why he’s so sharp. First Peter went to Christians who were being slandered and knocked about. Habakkuk was written by a man who couldn’t understand why God was sending Babylon against His own people. Find the occasion and you’ll hear the tone. Miss it and you’ll hear the words in entirely the wrong voice.”

Occasion looked up and waved his brush. “Best place to dig for occasion,” he called up, “is the text itself! Always start there. Paul usually tells you, if you read properly. It hath been declared unto me… that there are contentions among you. There’s your occasion, lying right on top of the dirt. People want to dig halfway to China for it and forget it’s sitting on the surface.”

The second trench was broad and shallow, cleared down to an old beaten-earth floor with the stumps of walls round it in the shape of a house. A woman of forty or so knelt there laying out a grid of string.

“That’s Audience. She digs for who. Who heard these words first? Jews or Gentiles? Rich or poor? Old believers or new converts? Slaves, masters, both in the same room? Israel in the wilderness, or in the land, or in exile? It matters. When Moses tells Israel the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, he’s talking to a people standing at the edge of Canaan. He isn’t talking to you about your new house.”

Audience sat back on her heels. “This is a house church at Corinth,” she said, waving at the strings, “or one very like it. See the size? The dining room there seats nine or ten, lying down to eat. The courtyard takes the rest, thirty or forty maybe. Now read First Corinthians eleven. Paul’s angry that at the Lord’s Supper one is hungry, and another is drunken. Who’s eating in the dining room with the host? His rich friends, early, with the good food. Who’s out in the courtyard turning up late after work and getting the scraps? The slaves and the poor. Paul’s not giving a lecture on table manners. He’s saying the rich are shaming the poor at the very meal that says they’re one body. You can’t see that without the house.”

Inquirer stood at the edge of that trench for a long time without saying anything.

The third trench was the biggest, a great open pit full of tumbled stones and broken pots and animal bones. An old bent man in a skullcap sat on an upturned basket in the middle of it, turning a clay lamp over in his fingers.

“That’s Old Custom. He digs for how they lived. Marriages, meals, money, farming, wars, gods, jokes, how they said hello and how they buried their dead. Every bit of that’s in the Book somewhere, and a man from your city doesn’t know any of it. Custom, tell him about the sandal.”

The old man chuckled, in a voice like a gate that wants oiling. “Ruth, chapter four. Boaz is at the town gate, and the nearer kinsman gives up his right to redeem Ruth’s field. And how’s he do it? A man plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbor. Your polishers back home, what did they make of that, eh?”

Inquirer went pink. “I once heard it explained that the shoe stood for the walk of faith. The kinsman was giving up his spiritual journey.”

Old Custom laughed until he coughed. “Bless you, no. It’s a bill of sale. A man’s foot is planted on his land, see? Pulling your sandal off and handing it over was how you signed away the right to walk on it. The Book even tells you so, next breath: this was a testimony in Israel. Now, does that make the story less lovely? No. It makes it more, because now you can see what Boaz is really doing. He’s paying good money in front of the elders to take on a foreign widow’s debts and her dead husband’s name. That’s a redeemer. That’s a picture of Somebody, if you follow the thread far enough. But you can’t follow the thread if you’ve tied it to the wrong post.”

Madam Setting walked him back along the planks toward the hut. The sun was high now, and the heat came off the yellow ground in waves.

“So that’s the work. Occasion, Audience, Custom. Why, who, and how. You’ll use all three every time you open the Book for the rest of your life. Some of it you’ll learn from the Book itself, which is always the first and best place, and it’ll surprise you how much it tells you. Some you’ll get from good histories, and from what’s been dug up here and elsewhere. And some you’ll never learn, because it’s gone.”

“And if I can’t find the background? If the occasion’s hidden?”

She stopped and gave him an approving look. “Good question. Then you say I don’t know, and you read what’s in front of you as carefully as you can. The Book was given to be understood by ordinary people in every age, and most of them never saw a trench in their lives. Perspicuity will have told you that. Background helps. It sharpens the picture and saves you from howlers like your walk-of-faith sandal. But it isn’t a key to some secret door. If anybody tells you a passage can’t be understood without some fact only he happens to know, keep a hand on your purse.”

She set off again. “And that,” she said grimly, “brings me to the neighbors.”

At the east end of the valley, where the Diggings ran out, there was a low hill, and on top of it, blazing in the sun, stood an entire city.

It was all white plaster: walls and towers, temples and colonnades and markets, palaces and harbors, every bit of it done in elegant detail. A wide marble stair went up the hill to its gate, and over the gate in gold letters it said: The Grand Reconstruction. Ancient Corinth As It Really Was. Admission One Penny.

A crowd of pilgrims was going up and down the stair, and a great booming voice was coming out of the gate, lecturing.

“Dr. Uncontrolled-Reconstruction,” said Madam Setting, with deep disgust. “Come and look. You ought to see it once.”

They climbed the stair. Inside was a big square with a platform in the middle, and on the platform a large man in a white suit with a beard like a prophet’s and a pointer like a conductor’s baton. Behind him, on a velvet cushion, lay a single broken potsherd.

“My friends!” he boomed. “This,” the pointer came down on the sherd, “was dug out of the soil of Corinth. On it you see the letters KHL. From these three letters, by the most rigorous scholarship, I have reconstructed the entire Corinthian church. KHL! Plainly the remains of a name. Plainly a woman’s name: Khloe! Paul mentions her household! And here we have her very own pottery. Now. Who was Chloe? From this sherd I can tell you. She was a wealthy merchant. She was the secret leader of a feminist faction in the Corinthian church. She opposed Paul’s patriarchal teaching. She was the true author of the slogans Paul quotes in chapter seven. The whole of First Corinthians,” and here his voice rose to a roar, “is really a coded debate between Paul and Chloe! Read it again in this light, my friends, and everything you thought you knew is turned on its head!”

The crowd gasped and clapped. Several pilgrims were scribbling in notebooks as fast as they could go.

Inquirer turned to Madam Setting. “Is any of that true?”

“There was a Chloe. Paul mentions her people once, in passing, as the ones who told him about the quarrels. That’s all we know. The rest is plaster. That sherd might be off an oil jar. KHL could be the start of a dozen words. He builds a city on a potsherd and then reads the Book by his city, when he ought to read his city by the Book. It’s my own work turned inside out. I dig to find what was there. He makes up what he’d like to have been there and calls it digging.”

At the bottom of the marble stair, on their way down, they passed a little stall hung with bright cloths and heaped with souvenirs, with a cheerful round-faced man and a ledger behind it. The sign over it read: Background Facts! Fresh Daily! Every One Guaranteed To Make Your Sermon Sparkle! Careless-Background & Sons.

“Ah, pilgrim!” said the round-faced man, spotting Inquirer at once. “After background, are you? You’ve come to the right place. Never mind the old lady and her holes, that takes years. I’ve got it all ready-made. Look here.” He held up a little painted wooden gate with a hole in it no bigger than a cat. “The Eye of the Needle! You know the saying, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God? Well! There was a gate in Jerusalem called the Needle’s Eye, so small a camel could only get through on its knees with all its baggage taken off. So, you see, the rich man can get into the kingdom. He just has to kneel down and unload a bit! Lovely, isn’t it? Very encouraging. One penny.”

Inquirer looked at Madam Setting. She shook her head slowly.

“There’s no such gate. Not in any record from the Lord’s day. That story was made up centuries later by somebody who found the saying too hard and wanted to soften it. And look what it does. The Lord says it’s impossible. That’s His whole point; He says it in the very next breath: With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible. Nobody buys or earns his way in, rich or poor. Only God can bring a man in. The little gate turns that into a lesson about humility and travelling light. It makes the impossible merely awkward, and the reader goes off thinking he can manage it himself if he kneels a bit. That’s not adding background to the passage. It’s taking the Gospel out of it.”

Careless-Background wasn’t in the least put out. “Fair enough, fair enough, not to madam’s taste. How about this one?” He held up a little jar of ash. “Gehenna! The valley outside Jerusalem where the Lord said the wicked would go. And what was it really? A rubbish dump! Always smoldering! So when He talked about hell, He only meant a rubbish heap. Nothing to worry about!”

“There’s some argument,” Madam Setting said carefully, “about what that valley was used for in the Lord’s day. Some think there was burning there, some don’t. It had been a place of child sacrifice in the days of the kings; that’s certain, and the prophets cursed it for it. But whatever it was, the Lord used the name of a real cursed place to point to a real judgment. If you use a scrap of background to make Him mean less than He plainly said, you’ve used the background to get rid of the text. That’s not a fact. That’s a way of not hearing.”

“And this,” said Careless-Background, not a bit discouraged, holding up a tiny scroll tied with string, “is a list of seventeen things agape meant to the ancient Greeks, every one of which you can preach in a single…”

“No,” said Madam Setting, and took Inquirer firmly by the arm and walked him off.

“He isn’t wicked,” she said once they were out of earshot. “The Doctor isn’t either, not really. They’re in a hurry, that’s all. Careless-Background picks up anything that sounds old and sells it without checking, and Uncontrolled-Reconstruction takes one real fact and builds a whole city on it out of his own head. One’s too quick and the other’s too clever. And both of them use the background to overrule the text instead of serving it. Remember that. Background is the servant and the text is the master. Background helps you hear the text better. It never gets to tell the text what it’s allowed to say.”

That night there was a storm.

They’re rare in that dry country, but when they come they come hard. Inquirer woke in his bunk in the long hut to rain hammering the roof and water roaring in the gullies. Madam Setting was already up and pulling on an oilskin.

“The trenches! Everybody up! Cover the trenches!”

The diggers poured out into the night with canvas and lanterns, and for an hour they worked, stretching tarpaulins over the open pits, shoring up walls, carrying trays of finds into the hut. Inquirer was down in the deep narrow trench beside Occasion, who was holding his broken tablet against his chest like a baby.

Then a sound came from the east end of the valley that was louder than the storm, a long grinding, crumbling roar, like a hillside coming down.

They ran to the edge of the Diggings to look. In the lightning they could see the hill where the Grand Reconstruction stood, and the white city was melting. Rain was pouring down its towers and colonnades and dissolving them, and the walls were sliding down the slope in big slabs of white mud. While they watched, the gate with its gold letters leaned slowly outward and fell flat.

“There are people in there!” Audience cried. “He does night tours!”

They ran. Inquirer had his iron lantern, and he got the old Book open in front of it as he went, and the white flame lit the way through the downpour. When they got to the foot of the hill the marble stair was a river of plaster, and halfway up it a pilgrim was pinned under a fallen column, shouting for help.

Inquirer and Old Custom and Audience dug him out together with their bare hands. It was filthy, miserable work in the mud and the dark. The column was only plaster and broke up when they pulled at it, but there was a great deal of it. When they got the man loose he was bruised and terrified but not badly hurt, and he grabbed hold of Inquirer’s coat.

“It was all real,” he kept saying. “He told us it was all real. I believed it. I believed every word.”

Up at the top, in the wreck of his square, Dr. Uncontrolled-Reconstruction stood in his white suit, soaked through, holding his potsherd on its velvet cushion over his head and shouting at the rain.

“I’ll rebuild it! I’ll rebuild it bigger! I’ve got other sherds!”

In the morning the sun came out and the whole valley steamed. The Diggings had come through well. The trenches were wet but whole and the finds were safe in the hut, and down in the deep trench the walls of the old town stood exactly where they had stood for two thousand years, washed clean by the rain.

On the eastern hill there was nothing but a sprawl of white mud, and in the middle of it a large man sitting on an upturned bucket with a potsherd in his lap. Careless-Background’s stall had blown away altogether. Somebody found its sign later that day two miles off in a gully.

“You see?” said Madam Setting, standing with Inquirer at the edge of the Diggings. “What’s real stands. You don’t have to defend it. You only have to uncover it. What’s made up has to be propped up every day, and the first proper rain brings it down.”

She was quiet a moment. “It’s the same with the Book. The Book doesn’t need my background to stand up. It stands by itself. All my digging’s for is so pilgrims can see it standing, instead of their own plaster round it.”

Inquirer stayed at the Diggings three weeks. He learned to use a trowel and a brush and a sieve, to read the shape of an ancient house, and to tell one sort of pottery from another. He also learned to read a passage three times over: once to hear what it said, once asking why and who and how, and once more to hear what it said again. The third reading, he told me, was always different from the first, and nearly always better.

On his last day Old Custom gave him a present: a small, very plain clay oil lamp with a spout for the wick and a handle like a thumb. It was the lamp he had been turning over in his fingers the day Inquirer arrived.

“From a house in Galilee. The Lord’s time, or close to it. When He said, Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, that’s the candle He meant. Not a candle at all, see, a lamp like this. Little thing, gives a light you could cover with your hand. And He says put it on the stand and it gives light to all that are in the house. One room, see? That’s how big those houses were. One little lamp did the whole family.”

He put it in Inquirer’s hand. “You carry that. And when you read the Book, remember it was written by men who lit their houses with these. Not men like you, not in your world. You’ve got to walk into theirs before you bring anything back into yours.”

Inquirer thanked him and packed the little lamp in with the pebble and the Charter. He told me on the wall that he still lit it sometimes, the night before he preached.

Madam Setting walked him to the edge of the valley, where the road went on east toward a range of dark hills.

“The Clocktower’s next. Plain-Sense went that way. It’s an ugly place and I won’t pretend it isn’t. You’ve learned here to go back to their time. In the Clocktower the enemy will try to drag their time into yours, or yours into theirs, and knot the two together till you can’t tell which is which. He’s very strong. A lot stronger than my two clowns on the hill.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Anachron. He lives in the tower and keeps all the clocks. Go carefully. And when the clocks start running wrong, think of the walls in my trench.”

“The walls?”

“They were built when they were built. Not before and not after. Whatever he shows you, hang on to that.”

So Inquirer left the Diggings of Then and went east toward the dark hills. Behind him in the steaming valley the diggers had gone back down into their trenches. And on the eastern hill a large man in a muddy white suit had started, very slowly, to mix a fresh barrel of plaster.