Chapter 11 — Stories of Cosmic Rupture (2 of 2)

The Sleeper and the Uncorrupted Figs

The last cosmic-rupture story in this chapter comes from a text most readers of this book have likely never heard of: 4 Baruch, also called the Paralipomena of Jeremiah, composed in the first half of the second century and preserved as Scripture to this day within the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon — one of the "other Bibles" this book will return to later.

Jerusalem is about to fall to Babylon. Jeremiah sends his servant Abimelech out of the city on an ordinary errand: gather figs. While Abimelech is out gathering, God puts him to sleep — and the sleep does not last an afternoon. It lasts through the entire exile, sixty-six years, while the city behind him burns, the people are carried away, and decades pass that Abimelech does not experience at all. His basket of figs, remarkably, stays fresh the whole time he sleeps.

He wakes believing barely an hour has passed. He walks back toward a city he no longer recognizes, disoriented by streets that have not moved but that mean something entirely different now, until at last he is reunited with an aged, returning Jeremiah — and understands, all at once, exactly how much time was taken from him and given back.

What this is: non-canonical outside Ethiopia, canonical within the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Bible — not composed for that tradition specifically but received into it as Scripture, while every other tradition in Christendom, including the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches that hold the largest Old Testaments outside Ethiopia's, sets it aside as apocryphal. It sits in this book, not in the deuterocanonical chapters earlier, because its content belongs with the cosmic-rupture stories rather than the canon-history argument — a resurrection typology built on fruit that does not rot and a man who must be convinced, against his own certainty, how much time has actually passed. Whatever its canonical status in any given tradition, the image does something worth sitting with regardless of a reader's own church's shelf: waking into a world already remade, disoriented not because anything went wrong but because something went right while you were asleep to it, is a picture the resurrection hope will use again in every generation that tells it.