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The sky power answers the fire-theft not with death but with a permanent alteration of the thief's body · and in both cases the wound is generative rather than terminal: the liver regrows nightly forever; the shattered limbs become the joints every human needs to work, kneel, and forge. The punishment is the gift's price paid in flesh, and the flesh keeps the receipt.
The ancestral smith steals a piece of the sun from the Nommo's celestial smithy in his bellows; the Nommo's thunderbolt sends him sliding down the rainbow, and the collision with the earth 'broke the ancestor's flexible limbs into human joints' · the punishment becomes the anatomy of all mankind.
set against Hesiod, Theogony ll. 521-525
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