The Flooding Tigris and the Boats of the Ninth Day

A retelling based on Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J.E. Esslemont, an early and widely loved introduction to the Faith and its history. The narrative is retold in our own words.

The ninth day of Riḍván turns on a river. To understand why this day is hallowed — why, of the twelve days of the festival, this particular one is set aside as a holy day — we have to go down to the bank of the Tigris in the spring of 1863 and watch a flood that kept a family from a garden, and the morning the waters fell at last.

By that spring, Bahá'u'lláh had spent some ten years in Baghdád. He had come there an exile from Persia, and through a decade of banishment His influence had only grown, until the very greatness of His presence in the city alarmed those who wished Him gone. At length the order arrived from the Ottoman capital: He was to leave Baghdád for Constantinople. When the believers learned that He was to be taken from them, they were overwhelmed with grief, and they came to His house on the riverbank in such numbers, day after day, to take their leave, that there was no longer room to receive them all. To make space for the crowds, a garden across the Tigris was put at His disposal. And so, on the afternoon of the twenty-second of April, Bahá'u'lláh crossed the river and entered that garden — the garden His followers would ever after call Riḍván, the Garden of Paradise — and there, over twelve days, He declared to His companions the mission for which He had come.

But the crossing that the family had to make was not a simple one, and here the river enters the story in earnest. Baghdád is a city of the Tigris, set on its banks, and in those days the chief way across was by a bridge of boats — a floating bridge of vessels lashed together and decked over, that rose and fell with the river and depended entirely on the river's mood. In a steady season such a bridge served well enough. But the spring of 1863 was not a steady season. The Tigris had risen. Swollen with the melt and rain of the season, the river had overflowed its banks and become a flood, and the boat-bridge that ordinarily carried the traffic of the city was made impassable.

For Bahá'u'lláh and the small company of men who crossed with Him on that first afternoon, the passage had been made before the worst of the flood; they reached the Garden. But the rest of the household — the women and the children of the family, and those still completing the preparations for the long journey ahead — could not follow. The rising water lay between them and the Garden, an impassable barrier of the river's own making. And so the family was divided: Bahá'u'lláh in the Garden on the far bank, declaring the Day of God among the roses; His household on the near bank, held back by the flood, able only to wait.

It is worth letting that picture rest in the mind for a moment, because it is the whole meaning of the ninth day. Across the water, the most momentous announcement in the history of the Faith was unfolding — the long-veiled Glory of God at last disclosed, the fulfilment of all that the Báb had promised. And on this side of the water, the people who loved Bahá'u'lláh most in all the world — His wife, His daughter, His children — could only stand on the bank and look across, kept from Him by a river in flood. They did not abandon their patience or their faith. They waited, and they made ready, and they trusted that the waters would fall.

How many days did the flood last? Nine. For nine days the swollen Tigris held the family back from the Garden. And then, on the ninth day, the river relented. The waters fell, the flood subsided, the bridge of boats became passable once more — and the household completed their crossing at last and entered the Garden of Riḍván to be reunited with Bahá'u'lláh. The family that the flood had divided was made whole again in Paradise. For nine days the swollen river held them back; and on the ninth, when the waters fell, the boats carried the Holy Family across into the Garden of Paradise.

This is the day the Bahá'ís keep as the ninth of Riḍván — one of the holy days of the year, on which work is set aside. And there is a quiet wisdom in the choosing of it. The Faith might have hallowed only the day of the great unveiling, or only the day of the solemn departure into exile. But it chose also to hallow a day defined by a river and a delay — a day whose whole event was a family kept waiting, and then, at last, allowed to cross. In doing so it gave a permanent place, in the very calendar of the Cause, to the patience of those who waited, and to the joy of a reunion long deferred.

For the lesson of the ninth day is not the lesson of triumph; it is the lesson of trust. The declaration in the Garden was the work of God, unfolding in its appointed hour. The waiting on the bank was the work of a family who loved Him, holding fast while a flood lay between them and the One they longed for. Both belong to the story, and the Faith has hallowed them together. The river rose in its own season and fell in its own season; the family could not hasten it, and they did not despair of it; and when the waters fell, the way that had been closed was open, and the homecoming came.

So when the ninth day of Riḍván returns each spring, the friends remember a very human and very tender thing: a river in flood, a family on the bank, and the morning the waters fell and the boats carried them across into the Garden of Paradise. It is a day for everyone who has ever had to wait, in faith, for a closed way to open — and who has learned that the waters do fall, in their time, and that the reunion does come.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J.E. Esslemont.

Esslemont, J.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.