Salt wind off the Mediterranean hits the open doors of a carpenter workshop in Alexandria. Shavings of imported cedar cover the stone floor. Workers carve leftover timber into human shapes. They smear the finished faces with cheap red paint. The coastal city hums with trade and philosophical debate outside the workshop doors.
Hellenistic intellectuals drove this debate during the mid-first century b.c. inside local academies. Greek and Egyptian scholars argued over the divinity of fire, wind, and stars. Jewish writers living in the same neighborhoods countered these ideas in Greek. They pointed to the absurdity of the craftsmen. Shipwrights built massive wooden vessels for the harbor and used the twisted scrap wood to carve local gods.
A heavy idol from one of these scrap piles stands in the corner of the shop. It measures four feet tall and weighs nearly 60 pounds. The carpenter cut away the knots and smoothed the surface. He applied a thick coat of vermilion paint to hide the flaws in the grain. He secured it to a stone pillar with iron brackets to keep it upright. He then turned and asked this lifeless block of wood for a safe voyage across the sea.
He demands life from a dead object and begs for a profitable journey from a piece of timber that cannot even walk.
The red paint dries and cracks in the heat of the afternoon. The iron brackets begin to rust from the salt air. The woodworker locks up his shop and walks home through the crowded streets. The carved pine remains attached to the wall. It waits in the dark for a morning light it will never actually see.