In Egypt, things went from bad to worse. Although Joseph worked hard, he ended up in prison, convicted of a crime he had not committed. He felt hopeless and lost. But in Egypt, people valued dreams and dreaming. When his fellow prisoners had nightmares, Joseph explained what the dreams meant; he was always right. The prisoners were astounded, but they forgot Joseph, of course, the moment the sunlight shone in their eyes again.
Luckily, when the pharaoh – the ruler of the country – was himself plagued with dreams that none of his advisors could interpret, someone remembered the Hebrew slave rotting in the city gaol. “Send for him!” said Pharaoh, black-eyed for want of sleep.
“You dreamed of cattle clambering out of the Nile,” said Joseph, as he knelt before the throne. “First seven sleek, fat cows, then seven bony, thin ones. The thin ones gaped their throats and swallowed down the fat.”
Pharaoh flinched from the memory of his dream. “But what does it mean? Can you tell me that, Hebrew?”
“For seven years, Egypt’s harvest will be marvellous – the granaries full of grain. But for seven years after that, every harvest will fail and your people will go hungry – unless you take steps to prevent it.”
So impressed was Pharaoh, so taken with this dream-reader, that he made Joseph governor of Egypt. From then on, Joseph spoke on the pharaoh’s behalf and was almost as powerful as the pharaoh himself.
The dreams had come from God, of course. So too did the seven years of plenty. Joseph gave orders for all the surplus food to be stored in great granaries and for nothing to go to waste. Sure enough, there followed seven years of famine, but, thanks to Joseph’s careful planning, no one in Egypt starved.
Far away in Joseph’s homeland, the sheep shook on their thin shanks. The brothers’ stomachs were empty. “Go into Egypt where the granaries are full,” said their father, Jacob, “and buy grain.” (His old face, drooping like the wax from a candle, had not smiled since the day they brought him Joseph’s multicoloured coat stained with blood.)
So that is how Joseph came to see his brothers again – kneeling in his chamber of state, asking permission to buy grain from the great Egyptian granaries. They did not know him, of course. He wore Egyptian robes, an Egyptian wig; his eyes were black-rimmed with Egyptian kohl. Besides, twenty years had passed since the business of the coat, the pit, the merchant caravan…But Joseph knew his brothers, oh yes, all ten of them…
Ten? Where was the eleventh? Where was little Benjamin, the youngest?
Joseph questioned them, demanded to know why one brother had stayed behind. To their dismay, he sent them home to fetch Benjamin. “But our father!” they protested. “He relies on Benjamin! His whole life is bound up in the boy. If anything were to happen…” They might as well have been talking to the pyramids themselves. Joseph was adamant.
So Benjamin was fetched, and the brothers were allowed to load their pack animals with good grain and to set off, marvelling at the generosity of that governor of Egypt, marvelling at the splendour of the Egyptian civilization.
Then the soldiers came after them, stopped them and began to search. “We took nothing! On our lives, nothing!” protested the brothers. “If you find anything on one of us, let the culprit be put to death!” How they must have regretted those words when the guards reached into Benjamin’s saddlebag and pulled out the silver cup and brandished it in their faces. “Not Benjamin! Benjamin would never…” Their hands fell helpless by their sides. Their knees failed under them.
Joseph (who had given orders for the silver cup to be planted among their belongings) looked on with grim satisfaction. His brothers were as afraid now as Joseph had been twenty years before when, wrists tied, he had stumbled into slavery behind the merchant camel train. Childhood dreams swam before Joseph’s eyes – their sheaves of corn flattened before his own; their stars dimmed by his brilliance. And Joseph went into a side room and wept – for all the lost years, for all the broken dreams, for the marvellous and confusing ways in which God worked out his plan.
When Joseph revealed his true identity to his brothers, there were no reproaches, no apologies, only tears of joy and relief and healing. Jacob was sent for – a frail old man rattling his weary bones over dusty roads to be reunited with the son he had thought dead for twenty years.
And Jacob’s family was not alone in finding a new home in a new country. Many more Hebrews travelled to Egypt to escape famine and stayed on there as settlers along the fertile Nile. God had promised to take care of them, and perhaps this move to Egypt was his way of doing it. Let the Egyptians worship their boatload of animal-headed gods; the Hebrews would stay loyal to their one God. After all, they were his chosen people – his favoured sons and daughters. Surely they were the ones to whom he would give the best gifts, the ones he could not help but love the best.
“You say that as if it turned out different,” said the boy.
“It did,” said the carpenter. “Within a few generations, life in Egypt all went horribly wrong for the Hebrews.”
“So God broke his promise?”
“He never promised life would be easy, only that he would stay close to his people – the children of Israel.”
“You can tell me tomorrow.”
The old man gave an irritable groan. As the church door slammed shut behind his visitor, he called after him, “No promises!” but probably too late to be heard.
“LET MY PEOPLE GO!”
“So what went wrong in Egypt?” It was a small voice, but it filled the big church. The boy came and stood at his elbow. “I’m hungry. The ice cream van didn’t come today. Is that a whip you’re carving? Did one of Jesus’ ancestors drive a stagecoach?”
“I am carving a whip to symbolize the time when the Hebrews – the Israelites, that is – were slaves. As the years passed, Joseph and the famine were forgotten. A new pharaoh was in power. Then the Egyptians suddenly looked around at the huge number of Hebrews living in Egypt and took fright. So they made the Hebrew settlers their slaves and worked them like pack animals or farm beasts.”
“But God had a rescue plan, I’ll bet.”
“Naturally.”
“Jesus!”
“Noooo, no no no no! Ignorant boy. This was long, long before Jesus. This time, God saw that his chosen people were in trouble and he sent Moses.”
“Did he help them escape? Cool! Tell us!”
Moses could not believe his eyes. A bush was burning – and yet it was not. As if extra leaves on the twigs, yellow and red flames covered the bush, but did not destroy it. Then, strangest of all, a voice spoke, out of the bush: “Take off your shoes, Moses. You are standing on holy ground.”
Moses shuffled out of his sandals, never once taking his eyes off the burning bush.
“I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I have heard the voice of the children of Israel crying out to me for help. So go to Egypt, Moses, and tell the pharaoh to let my people go.”
These were not words Moses wanted to hear. Oh, he was an Israelite himself, and he knew very well what they were suffering. He had grown up in Egypt – not as a slave but in the pharaoh’s own palace, adopted by the pharaoh’s daughter. Just once he had stood up for his fellow countrymen – he had killed an overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave to death with a whip. For that, Moses had had to flee from Egypt as a hunted criminal.
“I can’t. I’m sorry. You’re asking the wrong –”
“You shall. I have chosen you to speak for them and to fetch my people out of slavery. Find your brother, Aaron, and take him with you if you feel the need of his eloquence. I shall be with you both. Go.”
So Moses gave up his safe little life, tending sheep, and went back to Egypt where his fellow Israelites toiled all day under Egyptian whips.
“The God of Israel says, ‘Let my people go,’” said Moses nervously. Pharaoh laughed and, to punish his insolence, gave orders that the slaves in the brickfields should make bricks without the straw they needed for the task.
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sp; “Let my people go,” said Moses, while Aaron worked small wonders, turning a stick into a snake.
“A magic trick,” Pharaoh scoffed.
“Let my people go, or the God I serve will do terrible things to make you change your mind.”
But Pharaoh only curled his lip in contempt.
Then plagues like the strands of a slave-master’s whip fell across Egypt. The Nile turned to blood. Frogs by the million made fat red blots as they hopped ashore out of the crimson river or rained down out of the sky.
“Let my people go!” said Moses, but Pharaoh would not.
The frogs died in the street and black flies rose off them in swarms. A plague of flies. God sent diseases that shrank all the fat sleek cows, horses, camels into bony bags of hide. He plagued smooth Egyptian bodies with lice and boils and rashes. The crops died in the fields.
“Let my people go,” said Moses, but Pharaoh would not.
So God browbeat Egypt with fiery hail and freak storms, and sent locusts to eat up all the crops.
“Now will you let my people go?” said Moses.
But Pharaoh said, “No.”
The last plague was the worst of all. God sent the angel of death – dark as the storm, sharp as the hail, sickening as frogs or boils, winged like a locust, fearful as a blood-red river. Each Israelite family smeared its doorpost with lamb’s blood, and at the sight of that the angel turned away. But under every Egyptian door, shut or open, locked or barred, the angel slipped in like an icy draught and smothered the firstborn of the household.
“Let my people go,” said Moses. He had to raise his voice above the noise of weeping mothers, grief-stricken children.
“Go. Get out. Be gone!” said Pharaoh.
Out of Egypt streamed the Israelites, like rivulets joining into brooks, the brooks into a single river. A host of excited, happy faces hurried past the weeping Egyptian mourners, the newly dug graves. There were donkeys and carts, children and old people, women singing and men asking questions: “Where are we going? Where are you taking us, Moses?”
“To a land flowing with milk and honey,” he replied, “the one God promised to Abraham.” He had no more idea of the way than they had, but he had faith. Suddenly, away in the distance, a whirling spiral of darkness sprang up, like a genie, from the desert sands – a pillar of cloud. “That way,” said Moses (who knew a sign when he saw one).
The pillar of cloud led the way by day, a pillar of fire after dark.
Left behind in his empty streets, Pharaoh looked out at his unfinished monuments, his empty brickfields … and seethed. “Why did I give in to that insolent Hebrew? Why did I let them go? Fetch them back,” he told his army. “Fetch them all back!”
At the shores of the Red Sea, the war chariots caught up with the runaways. The whirling pillar of cloud placed itself between them, like a mother shielding its child, but the children of Israel had their backs to the sea and nowhere to run.
Now Moses stretched out his shepherd’s staff – the one that had turned the Nile to blood – and he struck the shallow surf. Slowly, sucking and shifting the shingle, the waves writhed. Like two sleeping people rolling away from one another, the two sides of the sea rolled apart, leaving a path of glistening wet sand, rocks, starfish and weed.
The fleeing Israelites started along this corridor through the ocean glass-walled with water fifty fathoms high. They carried their children, their lambs, their bundles, held their breath between their teeth.
The watching Egyptians gaped and gasped at the sight of a sea splitting in two. Chariot horses trembled in their traces. Then the pillar of cloud vanished. “After them, men!” Soft sand sucked at the chariot wheels, but in the Egyptians plunged, into the heart of the hollowed sea.
“They’re coming after us!” cried the Israelites, looking back over their shoulders, breaking into a run. They ran and they stumbled and they clambered out onto the sunlit stones of the far shore.
Then the walls of water crumbled, and the waves remembered to break. Like curtains being drawn closed, the two sides of the ocean rejoined. The seething foam tumbled with Egyptian wheels, helmets, reins, curses, whips, swords and prayers.
On the far side of the sea, the children of Israel lay panting on the shore. Behind them the smooth and silent sea sighed; ahead of them stretched the empty desert, humming with heat. After generations of slavery, they were finally free!
Free to do what? To go thirsty? To starve? After the happiness, panic quickly set in. The flat, hard bread they had hurriedly baked for the journey was gone now. How far must they travel to reach the land of milk and honey? “Trust God,” Moses had said, but for how long?
Next morning they woke, and the ground was caked with cobwebs – or was it thistledown, or moss? Hungry little ones plucked at it and put it to their mouths. Mothers snatched it from them, sniffed the strange stuff, touched it to their tongues.
It was food.
“Eat,” said Moses. “This is ‘manna’. God has sent it. He has spread the desert like a table for you.”
The manna would not keep. It was no good stuffing it in saddlebags or baskets, to eat the next day. By noon it had withered and shrivelled away. But each morning there was more. And so the children of Israel gradually learned to trust God’s promise, day by day, to feed them, to guide them and to take care of them.
“I’ve found a sandwich!” exclaimed the boy, looking over into the pew behind him. “Someone’s left half a sandwich!” and he reached over for it.
“You can’t eat that!”
“Why? Oh, is it yours? Sorry.”
“No! It’s not mine. But you don’t know who left it there or how old it is!” He watched with disgust as the boy bit into the sandwich, but he felt compelled to ask, “What is it?”
The boy shrugged and chewed. “Manna sandwich, maybe.”
THE FOREIGNER
The next morning, the boy did not come. Food poisoning, thought the old man. That sandwich. And he was angry, because he could not concentrate on the sheaf of corn he was carving. Fool boy. Even when he was not there, he could manage to make a nuisance of himself.
Then after lunch he came, his hair wet from swimming. “Didn’t Jesus have any girl ancestors?” he asked, not wasting time on “Hello”.
“Well, of course he did!”
“But they aren’t allowed to climb in the Jesse tree, right?”
“Of course they are… in fact this sheaf of corn I’m carving right now…” The old man broke off as soon as he realized his mistake, but it was too late. He was obliged to tell the story of Ruth.
Ruth was a Moabite, born in Moab, brought up with a Moabite religion. But when she married a foreigner – an Israelite living in her country – she found that she liked the thoughts in his head, the beliefs in his heart. She began to say her prayers to the God of the Israelites. Even when her husband died, Ruth did not fall back into her Moabite ways. Her greatest friend in the world was now her mother-in-law, Naomi.
Naturally, Naomi was heartbroken: her son was dead and she was marooned, penniless, in a foreign land. “I must go back home to my own people,” she told Ruth. “I can’t stay here with nothing to live on.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Ruth.
“But you were born here in Moab! Your people will look after you! You don’t want to be burdened with me!”
Gently Ruth took hold of the old woman’s hand and laid it against her own cheek. “Wherever you go, I shall go. Your people will be my people and your God my God.”
So Ruth and Naomi made the long journey to Bethlehem – two women without a man to keep them fed, sheltered, safe. They had no land to farm, no flocks to tend. In those days, life for a widow was harder than hard, and Ruth had two mouths to feed, not just one.
It was harvest time in the fields. Ruth went with the other women to glean – to pick up the ears of barley left behind by the reapers as they hacked down the crop. The spiky stubble pricked her ankles and hands; her back ached. The other women
shunned her, this foreign woman, this Moabite beauty. For every grain of corn she picked up, Ruth let a tear fall.
That was when Boaz saw her; the owner of the field. He was a good, kind man. He asked about the foreign beauty weeping amid his corn – and he liked what he heard. A remarkable girl, indeed, to leave home for the sake of her mother-in-law. Boaz called her over. “When you rest,” he said, “feel free to sit down with my reapers.” And he made sure that the reapers were not unkind to her and that they let plenty of grain fall as they hacked their way through the corn. Ruth told Naomi all about it when she got home that evening. And Naomi began to think what could be done.
Naomi may have had no money to share with her daughter-in-law, but she did have the wisdom of age. “I am distantly related to Boaz; he’s a good man… Ruth, I want you to do exactly as I tell you…” And of course Ruth did, though the advice was astounding… and more than a little frightening.
Later, Boaz went to work on the threshing floor, pounding the ears of corn with a leather flail until they jumped like crickets. The air around him was soon smoky with dust. Threshing is exhausting work, and no sooner had Boaz eaten his supper than he curled up alongside the threshing floor and rested his head on a bale of straw. His greying hair was greyer still with corn dust, his mind busy with business and prayers. He dozed.
When he stirred, the midnight threshing floor was pitch black but for the merest moonlight. To his dismay, Boaz felt a warm weight resting across his ankles – “Who’s there?” – and sat bolt upright, only to find the Moabite girl lying across his feet. Boaz blushed, and so did Ruth, though the dark hid their blushes. Her breath shook with fear, but she spoke the words Naomi had told her.
“I am Ruth, your handmaid. You are a kinsman of mine. Let me creep under your cloak and be safe.”
Boaz did better. He married Ruth, and gave her and her mother-in-law a comfortable home and a place where they belonged. There were whispers among the gossips, of course. Boaz betrothed? Boaz married? And to a foreigner? But God himself had whispered in Boaz’s ear. God, who had once made Eve as a helpmate for Adam, had brought to Bethlehem a wife of such courage and devotion, of such beauty and selflessness, that she would make his town immeasurably richer. The gossips were soon won round. On the day Ruth gave birth to Boaz’s son, they brought flowers and little presents and broad sunny smiles.
The Jesse Tree Page 3