In the late eighth century b.c., a blind Israelite exile leans against a mud-brick wall in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. More than 300 miles east across the Zagros Mountains, a disgraced bride climbs the wooden stairs to an upper room in the Median city of Ecbatana. The dry heat of the Tigris riverbed bakes the clay in Mesopotamia while thin mountain air cuts through the Iranian plateau. Paranoia and exhaustion drag the man and the woman toward the ground. They each wait for an end to the crushing weight of their days. Finally, they both open their mouths and ask the Lord of Heaven to stop their lungs.
The blind man, Tobit, sits in the dark courtyard of his Nineveh home. A dispute with his wife strips away his remaining pride because he cannot work or trade. Meanwhile, the disgraced bride, Sarah, stands by a window in Media. Her father's maids mock her because seven husbands died in her bedchamber before morning. Ancient Near Eastern household servants held no legal power, yet their taunts drove a master's daughter toward suicide. Total social collapse threatens both individuals deep inside a Gentile empire. They surrender their lives to the Creator of All Things. The Master of the Universe hears both pleas through the heavy iron gears of his unseen court.
Down on the earth, the mud-brick courtyard wall and the slatted timber window serve as the final boundaries of human endurance. Grief drives people to the absolute edges of their physical space. A broken man retreats to the boundary wall of his property. A broken woman climbs to the highest floor under the roof. They hit the structural limits of their houses before they hit the limits of their despair.
A roof provides no cover when public shame forms the walls.
The physical walls of the Assyrian empire eventually collapsed into the dirt. Babylonians and Medes leveled Nineveh in 612 b.c. and left behind only shattered pottery and buried stone decrees. Long before those fires consumed the city, two simultaneous prayers from a courtyard and a window sent a healer walking down the road with a heavy wooden stick.