The Tablets in Every Hand

In June 1947 the Syrian Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem took possession of four scrolls from a cave at Qumran, near the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. One of them carries a running commentary on the prophet Habakkuk. A scribe wrote its thirteen columns of Hebrew, each about ten centimetres wide, on two pieces of soft leather. A linen thread joins the two pieces between column seven and column eight. Along the bottom, time chewed the leather into a wavy break.

Column seven holds the passage that drew me into this essay. The commentator quotes God's command to Habakkuk, write the vision and make it plain, then explains what the command withheld. God, he writes, gave the prophet the events of the final generation but hid the hour of the end. The full secret, the commentator claims, went to one man: the community's leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God made known all the mysteries of the prophets.

01The seam at column eight

Turn past the linen thread and the claim shows its cost. Column eight promises deliverance to those who keep the Law, because of their suffering and their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness. The stitch binds the vision to a single man. A charge that named a runner ends in one teacher's hands.

Noam Mizrahi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem describes a community that read an ancient prophecy as a report on its own time and its own events. I read that column as a warning to anyone who says God opened a text to him, and I count myself among those readers. The charge I received sends the tablets the other way: outward, to every reader.

02The verse on the vision board

Habakkuk 2:2 never went missing. The syndicated columnist Jessica Johnson wrote with confidence in January 2020 that many ministers had preached the verse on New Year's Eve. Her friends, she added, turned it into colourful vision boards. In September 1988 Gregory T. Headen, then president of Shaw University Divinity School, preached from the same chapter in the chapel of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Headen urged his listeners to write the vision clearly and wait for God's timing.

I quarrel with neither preacher, since both kept the verse in circulation. Yet a vision board stops at verse two, and the chapter keeps walking.

Sixteen verses later, Habakkuk mocks the idol and the craftsman behind it, for the maker of his work trusteth therein. The next line reads like this year's technology news: Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach!

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, wrote on his blog in June 2025 that the takeoff has started, and he forecast systems able to produce novel insights in 2026. I charge no builder with villainy. I name an old temptation: a maker who orders his own work to rise and teach. Mankind now builds a kingdom on machine labour, casts the machine as its servant class, and then asks the servant for wisdom.

The servant answers at midnight but sends no neighbour to the door. The World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection reported on 30 June 2025 that loneliness touches one in six people worldwide. Its co-chair, Chido Mpemba, put the paradox in one line: Even in a digitally connected world, many young people feel alone.

Genesis tells how God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed life into his nostrils. The dust still shows: it envies, hoards and grieves, and no machine in a pocket lifts it off the ground. So I set down the question my whole work circles: how does a person rise from the dirt of human appetite to the heights God designed a person to reach?

03The text never hid. The tablets did.

I owe the reader a plain account of my claim. I claim no secret meaning in Habakkuk. The Qumran commentator mined this chapter some two thousand years before my birth. Paul set its line about faith at the head of his letter to the Romans. Martin Luther wrote in 1545 that the line, met in Romans, left him born again, walking into paradise through open gates.

What reached me came as a charge. By the Holy Spirit, through grace in Christ Jesus, God laid a task on me: carry Habakkuk's sequence to every person born on earth from this generation forward, and put the tablets in their hands. I received no new meaning. I received marching orders.

For most of recorded history, the tablets sat in a few hands. In 1820 about 12 per cent of the world's people could read and write. Scribes, printers, publishers and priests stood between a vision and its readers. Today nearly nine in ten people read and write, and a phone in a pocket carries a printing press, a studio and a library.

Paul gives me the frame I trust. In 2 Corinthians 3 he writes, we use great plainness of speech, and in the King James wording Paul echoes the command God gave Habakkuk. Then Paul turns to a veil. The veil, he says, lies over the old reading until Christ lifts it, and it lifts whenever a person turns to the Lord. Paul closes the chapter with a crowd rather than a teacher: we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord. Paul's Greek sets the words hēmeis and pantes, we and all, at the front of that verse.

So the text never hid. A veil lay on readers, and Christ lifts it for anyone who turns. The tablets lay in a few hands, and this century puts them within reach of nine people in ten. That second change sets the timing of my charge. For the first time in history, the runner can write his own tablet.

04Read past verse two

Read the chapter whole and a sequence surfaces. The sequence opens on a wall: I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower. The prophet searches before he writes. Then God answers with the charge in verse two, and translators still argue over its runner. Some see a herald who carries the message at speed. Others see a reader who takes it in at a run, the way a driver reads a roadside sign.

Verse three adds the wait: though it tarry, wait for it. Verse four splits humanity in two. On one side stands the soul that lifts itself up in pride; on the other, the just shall live by his faith. Verse nine names the proud builder's dream, that he may set his nest on high. Verses eighteen and nineteen show that builder at his workbench, asking a stone for a lesson.

Then chapter three turns the whole book. Although the fig tree shall not blossom, Habakkuk sings, and the fields shall yield no meat. The prophet names every failed harvest and still rejoices, because God will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places. The Qumran commentary covers only the first two chapters. The scribe never reaches the fig tree or the hinds' feet.

Two heights stand in this book. The proud builder sets his nest on high with his own hands. The just climb to high places on feet from God. Our age keeps trying the first height: lift the self, stack the tower, command the stone. Habakkuk points to the second height.

Here Habakkuk answers the question I carry. I call the summit Beingness: the eternal, glorified self God designed for each person, the self Paul names the image of the heavenly. Paul draws the same line from dust to glory: And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. For earthy Paul writes choikos, a Greek word that names dusty, soil-like earth. My own word runs plainer: dirt.

The copyists of that verse split. Some manuscripts read we shall bear; others read let us bear. One reading makes a promise; the other issues a command. I keep both readings. The rise from dust arrives as a gift of grace in Christ, and it arrives as a task a person takes up each morning.

A psychologist reached the same rung late in life. Abraham Maslow's 1943 ladder of human needs set self-actualization at the top. Later Maslow amended the model and placed self-transcendence above it, a motive that reaches past the self. The psychologist Mark Koltko-Rivera traces Maslow's first public statement of the change to a San Francisco lecture on 14 September 1967. Habakkuk carries a person up that same ladder and past its last rung: from survival, to self-aspiration, to concerns beyond the self, to the image of the heavenly.

05A practice for runners

A person can practise Habakkuk's sequence, starting this week.

Watch. Take a watchpost. Habakkuk chose a tower; choose a chair, an hour and a notebook, and return to them every week. Ask his two questions: what will God say to me, and what will I answer?

Write. Put the vision down as a life plan blueprint. At Qualped we begin with a person's own life data, the climbs, the falls and the flat stretches, and we trace the line they draw. The blueprint turns that line into a declaration in future-based language: the life the person commits to build.

Make it plain. Shape the blueprint into a form a runner can read. At Qualped the tablet carries a name: the simsbook, the multimedia smartbook I designed so a life plan can hold chapters, images, sound and video. A finished simsbook holds your intellectual property, the story no other author can write.

Wait. Keep the wall in view. Habakkuk wrote the delay into the vision and the barren field into his song. Write your obstacle on the same page as your vision: the debt, the diagnosis, the fear, the empty calendar. A vision that hides its wall breaks at the first delay.

Gather. Plant the book in good ground. Jesus told of seed that fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Build a core community around the intellectual property in your simsbook: people who read it, argue with it, and carry its declaration into their own rooms. A vision without readers feeds the birds, like seed on a footpath.

Put the machine under the pen. QwaiAI, the AI mentor we build at Qualped, gathered and checked the research for this essay as my cognitive executive. The machine hauled stone; I sign the page and answer for every sentence.

06For such a tome as this

I go first, because a charge nobody lives dies as a slogan. {{AUTHOR_INPUT_NEEDED: your vow in your own words, what you promised God, when, and where}} I keep that vow as a nomad novelist, at work on a planned ten-volume novel, Nightmares of Knowledge. I write for my son and my daughter and for their whole generation.

For such a time as this, Mordecai asked Esther, did you come to the kingdom? I put his question to every person born from this generation forward, with one letter changed. For such a tome as this, you came.

Picture one of those runners, an imagined woman ten years from now. She rides the last bus home after a double shift, phone at nine per cent, rent due Friday. She opens her simsbook and reads the declaration she wrote at her watchpost two winters earlier. Nine members of her core community read it too, and one of them sends a text before her stop: page forty, you promised.

The Israel Museum and Google put the Habakkuk commentary online in September 2011, in high resolution, for anyone with a screen. The scroll that tied the mysteries to one teacher went out to every reader.

The linen thread still runs between column seven and column eight. At Qumran that stitch bound the vision to one man. Take the needle. Stitch your vision to your own name, and hand the tablet to the next runner.

Shaun Michael Samaroo ◆ Ontario, Canada

This work uses SPELJ, Shaun Michael Samaroo's genre that fuses short story, personal essay and literary journalism. Simsbook shapes the multimedia format. QwaiAI served as cognitive executive for research and verification.