The sound of two things at once

Seventy years is long enough to forget the shape of a room. The people who had actually seen Solomon's temple — seen it standing, seen it burning — were old now, or gone. A whole generation had been born in Babylon and had never laid eyes on the thing they'd been weeping for by the rivers. And then, improbably, they were home.

You would expect one sound at a moment like that. Ezra records two.

Ezra 3 · 12–13

12…old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice… 13so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping.

“The mingled noise is the worship.”

Read that last line slowly, because the text is doing something careful. It doesn't say some people were happy and some were sad, as if we could walk the crowd and take a census. It says the sound itself could not be told apart. The joy and the grief had risen into one noise, and from a distance there was no separating them.