CONTENT ADVISORY: This song contains dark biblical imagery involving animal sacrifice, blood, divided bodies, dread, and ritual symbolism. Listener discretion is advised.
BETWEEN THE PIECES is a dark, poetic retelling of the covenant scene in Genesis 15.
Abram stands beneath a sky filled with promised descendants, yet his own household remains without an heir. When he asks how he will know that the land will belong to those who come after him, he is instructed to bring a three-year-old cow, a goat, a ram, a dove, and a young pigeon.
The larger animals are divided, and their halves are placed opposite one another, leaving a path between what had been slain. As the sun falls, scavenger birds gather, the blood darkens in the dust, and a dreadful darkness descends upon Abram. Unable to rise, he hears that his descendants will become strangers, suffer beneath another nation, and eventually return.
Then smoke and fire enter the open path. A smoking furnace and a burning torch pass between the pieces while Abram remains motionless upon the ground. The covenant is not sealed in a palace or written in ink, but enacted beneath the stars through darkness, divided bodies, blood, smoke, and flame.
BETWEEN THE PIECES remains within the strange and unsettling imagery of the passage, presenting the event as the biblical text describes it: a promise given beneath the stars and confirmed through a road cut between what had been slain.
Biblical source: Genesis 15:1–21, especially Genesis 15:5–18.
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