[86] English version, _fallen; i.e._, like our expression for the birth of animals, _dropped_.
The figures are bold. Israel achieves, through God's grace, everything but the recovery of her dead; this, which alone is worth calling _salvation_, remains wanting to her great record of deliverances. The living Israel is restored, but how meagre a proportion of the people it is! The graves of home and of exile do not give up their dead. These are not born again to be inhabitants of the upper world.
The figures are bold, but bolder is the hope that breaks from them. Like as when the Trumpet shall sound, ver. 19 peals forth the promise of the resurrection--peals the promise forth, in spite of all experience, unsupported by any argument, and upon the strength of its own inherent music. _Thy dead shall live! my dead bodies shall arise!_ The change of the personal pronoun is singularly dramatic. Returned Israel is the speaker, first speaking to herself: _thy dead_, as if upon the depopulated land, in face of all its homes in ruin, and only the sepulchres of ages standing grim and steadfast, she addressed some despairing double of herself; and secondly speaking _of_ herself: _my dead bodies_, as if all the inhabitants of these tombs, though dead, were still her own, still part of her, the living Israel, and able to arise and bless with their numbers their bereaved mother. These she now addresses: _Awake and sing, ye dwellers in the dust, for a dew of lights is Thy dew, and the land bringeth forth the dead_.[87]
[87] Technical Hebrew word for the inhabitants of the underworld--_the shades_.
If one has seen a place of graves in the East, he will appreciate the elements of this figure, which takes _dust_ for death and _dew_ for life. With our damp graveyards mould has become the traditional trappings of death; but where under the hot Eastern sun things do not rot into lower forms of life, but crumble into sapless powder, that will not keep a worm in life, _dust_ is the natural symbol of death. When they die, men go not to feed fat the mould, but _down into the dust_; and there the foot of the living falls silent, and his voice is choked, and the light is thickened and in retreat, as if it were creeping away to die. The only creatures the visitor starts are timid, unclean bats, that flutter and whisper about him like the ghosts of the dead. There are no flowers in an Eastern cemetery; and the withered branches and other ornaments are thickly powdered with the same dust that chokes, and silences and darkens all.
Hence the Semitic conception of the underworld was dominated by dust. It was not water nor fire nor frost nor altogether darkness, which made the infernal prison horrible, but that upon its floor and rafters, hewn from the roots and ribs of the primeval mountains, dust lay deep and choking. Amid all the horrors he imagined for the dead, Dante did not include one more awful than the horror of dust. The picture which the northern Semites had before them when they turned their faces to the wall was of this kind.[88]
[88] Extracted from the Assyrian _Descent of Istar to Hades_ (Dr. Jeremias' German translation, p. 11, and _Records of the Past_, i., 145).
The house of darkness.... The house men enter, but cannot depart from. The road men go, but cannot return. The house from whose dwellers the light is withdrawn. The place where dust is their food, their nourishment clay. The light they behold not; in darkness they dwell. They are clothed like birds, all fluttering wings. On the door and the gateposts, the dust lieth deep.
Either, then, an Eastern sepulchre, or this its infernal double, was gaping before the prophet's eyes. What more final and hopeless than the dust and the dark of it?