Judging Noa

by Strutin, Michel;

  “A just ruling of inheritance would protect us,” Noa continued, ignoring Tirzah. “ . . . even if our husbands died. Even if we never married.”

  “I would be happy for a husband. One who is kind,” said Hoglah.

  At fourteen, already the tallest, Hoglah could control nothing about her developing body. Her feet flapped ahead of her like ducks. Now that her menses had begun, she wore a long, modest robe. She complained that her right breast was growing larger than the left. To compensate, she held her left shoulder a little higher.

  Hoglah did not mind that Malah considered herself the queen, but it was hard being in Noa’s shadow. Noa was blessed with a probing mind, luminous eyes, and sculpted cheekbones the equal of Nefertiti’s.

  “Asherah squeezed all her beauty into the first two,” Hoglah sighed. “And what of Milcah and me?”

  On this and most else, Milcah kept her thoughts to herself.

  The reed mats covering the floor were spread with bedding at night so that each daughter had a nest where she sat. Noa married hers to Milcah’s and watched as Milcah worked a bone hook to weave black and red threads into a unicorn medallion.

  “The sign of Manasseh,” Noa whispered as Malah held forth on which was more important in a husband, power or wealth. “Milcah, you have a gift. Stories told in thread.”

  “Malah, we will get you both. And, now, enough,” said Ada.

  After her daughters wrapped themselves in coverings and closed their eyes, she smothered the lamp, entered her husband’s compartment, and lay down beside him.

  In Egypt, before the worst of the Israelites’ slavery, Zelophechad had taken Malah and Noa everywhere: to the fields where he taught them how to care for flocks, to meetings where they heard tribal politics and their father’s well-reasoned arguments. Yet, for all his logic, when he lost his sandals in folds of the rugs, Ada was the one he appealed to. It was she who picked bits of wool from his beard before he went out to greet the day and anyone who might pass his tent door.

  “Zelophechad,” she whispered. “Malah must be married. Her shine will not last forever. Get a good match. The son of Gaddi ben Susi—he is the one. And Noa, who you think is so clever, she is not far behind.”

  His eyes heavy, Zelophechad mumbled, “Ummm.”

  Piercing his sleep, Ada said, “You train Noa for trouble. She will have trouble…and be trouble. If only you could see that you have daughters, not sons.”

  He did not answer. From the other side of the curtain separating the compartments, she heard Malah and Noa whispering.

  “ . . . and, when it comes to marriage,” said Malah, “the most important thing is how to change father’s mind if the man he chooses is completely unacceptable.”

  Tired of marriage talk, Noa anticipated tomorrow’sgreat gathering. “‘Make yourselves pure,’ Moses warned us. That will be difficult in this desert.”

  “Perhaps Moses meant more than our bodies,” suggested Malah.

  “And what do you know of purity?” Noa challenged.

  Malah and Noa whispered knowingly of purity as if it were like scrubbing a garment. Ada listened as she drifted to sleep. Talk of purity made her think its opposite. She remembered the feel of Zelophechad’s hand on her thigh, the warmth that spread from the quick of her. Wrapped in her robe, she rubbed her own hand along her thigh, feeling something of death there, the skin yellow and thick as a camel bag.

  CHAPTER 2

  WREATHED IN SMOKE & FIRE

  MALAH, NOA, AND Hoglah stood at the foot of the great mountain, waiting for the revelation Moses had promised. Behind them, the black goat-hair tents looked like shards of flint, arranged in dark, elliptical necklaces across the bleak beige plain. Ahead, the central peak rose sharp and gray against an overcast sky.

  “Hoglah, can you see Moses?” Malah asked. “Do you see what he is doing?”

  “No, just people. What should we expect?”

  “Nothing,” said Noa. “Then you won’t be disappointed.” Nodding toward the mountain, she added, “They’ve picked a bad day for this. A storm is coming.”

  Milcah and Tirzah ran up to join them.

  “Where’s mother?” Hoglah asked.

  “Her back hurts. You are to watch us and we will tell her all that happens.”

  Their uncle Boaz approached.

  “Stay behind your father, me, and the men of our house,” he cautioned. “We want to be able to find you should something happen,” he added to Malah specifically.

  Gathered on the lower slopes of the mountain, Moses, Aaron, and the elders were hidden by low-lying clouds. The people waited. The sun arced into afternoon. They became hungry. Stomachs growled. They waited, but were no longer patient. Small bursts of activity erupted. Some ran to fetch a cloak as the day cooled under the darkening sky. Some drifted toward the tents, feeling they had been played for fools.

  Suddenly Malah noticed the clouds atop the mountain had changed.

  “Look!”

  As they watched, dense clouds roiled over the central peak. None had ever seen such clouds, flashing with lightning then rumbling and groaning as though both light and sound came from deep within the heart of the mountain.

  The people drew back from the mountain, now wreathed with fiery smoke. They feared that Moses and Aaron must be consumed, leaving them alone with a monstrous, angry mountain. Then, the blast of an unearthly ram’s horn called them closer. Mesmerized, they approached.

  The air became still. A white breath rose from the top of the mountain, curled around the darkened peak, then gathered strength as it spiraled down the mountain until it swelled and burst.

  The land undulated. Malah fell, groping for Tirzah, blinded by a holy light.

  Noa heard an unearthly voice: “Justice. Pursue justice.”

  Hoglah was caressed by the sweet odor of broom blossoms.

  A scarf of bats fluttered past Tirzah, the wind from their wings tickling her arms, causing her to laugh before they vanished back into the mountain.

  Laws for living were revealed and the Spirit was made known to each person. Some saw sounds. Others heard visions. One man covered his eyes and wept. Another understood an aleph and, from that first letter, understood everything.

  A young man heard a terrible tintinnabulation and ran screaming from the foot of the mountain, past the tents, past the Midianite traders at the far edges of the camp. He ran into the wilderness howling, his hands stanching ears bleeding with holy noise.

  In time, the wind that had roared from the mountain slowed. It became a breath, a sigh. Black clouds effaced to gray. Tentatively, people gathered themselves, returning to a different day than the one they woke to. Some would forget what they heard by the evening meal. Others could not remember what had happened, but were transformed. Some remembered everything.

  Exhausted and dazed, Zelophechad’s daughters walked wordlessly to their tent. Their mother sat rolling balls of dough for the evening meal. At the edge of the fire pit a pot of red lentils mixed with onions bubbled quietly. She stretched the first ball of dough, before slapping it onto an ashy rock in the fire pit, then looked up and noticed her daughters’ shining eyes and drained faces.

  “What happened? Tell me.” She waited. “Tell me!”

  Unusually hesitant, Malah began, “It is hard to tell. A storm of sound . . . light . . . I can’t exactly . . .”

  The others coulddo no better. Milcah had neither seen, nor heard, nor felt anything extraordinary. Ashamed to admit she lacked vision or belief, she vowed to live her life as if she had.

  Finally, Tirzah said, “It was too much for us, uncle Boaz said. So Moses went up.”

  Noa explained, “Moses went up on the mountain, through the clouds and the lightning, to bring back something we can better understand. No one knows how long he will be gone.”

  “Well . . . quite a day, it sounds,” their mother said with a chirpy finality that hinted it was time to prepare the evening meal.

  WHILE WAITING FOR Moses to return with
God’s laws, people heard wisps of the new laws, but no one was certain.

  “One God,” said some.

  “No, one God above all other gods,” said others.

  “No stealing, that’s certain.”

  “But what about borrowing?”

  “The Sabbath is a day of rest. Work is unlawful.”

  “Ah, but for me, carving a toy for my child is restful.”

  “No,” said another, “rest is rest.”

  A group of Levites took it upon themselves to decide what was right and what was not. They called themselves the Guardians of Truth.

  “We cannot live without the rule of law, even until Moses returns,” they said.

  What they said made sense, so people allowed them to make decisions while Aaron waited for Moses at the foot of the mountain. The Guardians of Truth ruled that making an image of God was false, thus evil.

  “Yes, this makes sense,” people said, although they continued to keep small idols in their tents.

  “And what of Asherah?” Ada asked her husband. “Who will bring fertility when Malah marries if not Asherah?”

  “Ah,” Zelophechad said. “That is just a little idol. A goddess for one purpose. No great God would be troubled over her.”

  Yet, they spoke quietly about it, in their own home.

  No one in the camp raised a voice against the Guardians of Truth, so their authority grew quickly. Their ruling against images of God came to include images of people because, they said, “We are created in God’s image and to create images of people is to create images of God.”

  Tribal councils met and agreed, “We can abide by this.” But they said so reluctantly.

  The Guardians of Truth extended the prohibition to images of anything that experienced birth and death. They warned that women avoid any male outside their immediate family to prevent the excitement female presence provoked. And, they added, a female must obey when a male speaks to her.

  One father mocked, “Does this mean when my four-year-old stamps his feet and shouts to his mother, ‘I won’t go to sleep,’ she must bow and mumble, ‘Anything you say, my honored son’? Will I have such power, too?”

  His family laughed, and an older brother threw a pillow at the little boy, but they all behaved more carefully when the Guardians were near. None stood against the Guardians of Truth, who warned that those who strayed from their rules would be banished into the desert-without-end.

  Bezalel, the great artist, who worked exquisite designs in metal and wood, was warned to halt his evil craft. An apprentice, angered to see Bezalel aggrieved for the loss of his artistry, chiseled a gazelle’s head for his mentor, in defiance of the Guardians. When they heard of the figure the apprentice had fashioned, the Guardians of Truth cut off his thumbs as a warning to others. Bezalel found him bleeding and took him home to heal him. He seethed at what they had done to his ardent apprentice. But Bezalel was an artist, not a warrior. There were no warriors among this crushed people.

  The Levites argued over how to confront the Guardians and their assault on Levitic authority. Korach, a cousin of Moses and among the most intelligent of them, was disgusted by the Levites’ indecisive arguing and began planning his own solution.

  CHAPTER 3

  GUARDIANS OF TRUTH

  UNUSED TO THE responsibilities of freedom, the tribes tolerated the Guardians of Truth. The Guardians, at least, offered a sense of structure.

  The sect’s devotion to the Sabbath was particularly fierce. Those who dwelled near the Guardians of Truth were careful not to break their rules, and the number of rules increased continually. At the western edge of the camp, the tribe of Manasseh had little fear of attracting attention.

  Early one Sabbath morning, before dawn awakened the world, Ada felt the brush of an unearthly hand.

  “It is the Shadows of Pharaoh, the death-dealers, following us,” she whispered fearfully.

  “It is the wind,” Zelophechad soothed.

  “Yes, you must be right,” she agreed, but huddled closer to her husband.

  In the light of day, Zelophechad saw that Ada looked upset, so had taken her for a stroll. With a walking stick in one hand, she leaned on his arm as he escorted her to visit friends. When she was young, she had Malah’s broad cheekbones and full lips and Tirzah’s fiery eyes as well as her temperament. But the trial of too many daughters, dead babies, and endless pain had defeated her. He did not judge her, nor she him. Daily life had ground them down to worn familiarity.

  The twenty-odd tents of their clan formed a large oval on the desert plain. At night, the open area at the center of the tents protected camels and asses, tethered to stakes. During the day, it provided children a safe place to play.

  When Zelophechad and Ada walked out, they passed Boaz’s tent and nodded coolly to Seglit, his wife. Then they moved on, spending time with this one and that. Ada wanted to make one more stop, at the tent of Gaddi. Gaddi was second only to Gamaliel, Manasseh’s tribal leader. Gaddi’s wife, Tamar, knew all the news of the camp. More important, her oldest son, Hur, was the match Ada sought for Malah. Here she planned to linger.

  The men of Gaddi’s family were out, except for the deaf grandfather, who sat warming his old bones in the sun. Zelophechad excused himself, saying he would be back in good time, then walked toward low hills that edged the western side of the camp.

  Where hills met the plain, narrow valleys led into steep-walled canyons floored with ochre sands. Zelophechad wandered in the direction of one such canyon, whistling tunelessly, picking up pieces of dark flint and glittering quartz, examining the stones, then tossing them back. He walked through a sandy defile where blue-green caper plants grew from cracks in the rock walls. Zelophechad pinched off an unopened caper bud, popped it in his mouth, then pinched off another.

  He wandered on, spotted a dead branch on the ground, and picked it up. It was dense for deadwood. He looked around and saw more. Firewood was hard to come by, so he gathered the caperwood. After he had gathered an armload, he decided to circle back to camp through a more open route. He heard voices in what seemed the right direction and headed toward them.

  A narrow neck of canyon turned sharply to the right and opened into a broad basin. On one side of the basin, a group of ten or so young men sat on tumbled-down rocks, talking. It was their voices he had heard. He recognized a few as Guardians of Truth, just as they noticed him. He nodded, deferentially, and continued to cross the basin, the wood held in his arms like an offering. A dart of fear pricked his back, and he veered toward the opposite side of the basin.

  “Here. You,” called one.

  Zelophechad tilted his head again, but kept walking.

  “I said, ‘You.’ Are you deaf?”

  “He heard,” another shouted, loud enough for Zelophechad to hear.

  “Don’t you know this is the Sabbath? Don’t you know it is forbidden to work, to collect wood?”

  Not knowing how to answer, Zelophechad smiled as if he were dumb, but kept walking.

  “Stop there.” The two who had yelled jumped up and strode toward Zelophechad. The others turned to watch, some rising to their feet.

  The two Guardians with angry beards strode toward him, shouting, “No work on the Sabbath. No wood on the Sabbath.”

  Others took up the cry. Zelophechad stopped, dropped the load of wood at his feet, and turned to his pursuers as if he had just heard them. He opened his now-empty arms toward them and smiled again.

  “Good Sabbath to you,” Zelophechad said with as much cheer as he could muster.

  “You mock us?”

  “No. No. Not at all. I am a forgetful old man. I have a poor mind.”

  “You mock us and now you lie to us. We know you as a leader of Manasseh. Are you telling us Manasseh is led by stupid old men?”

  Zelophechad backed away, saying, “I only tell you the truth. I am what I said.”

  “We know there are those who talk against us. Perhaps you are one,” said a red-faced Guardian, picking up a
small stone and tossing it back and forth between his cupped hands. The others had gathered behind the first two.

  “No. Guarding the law is a sacred duty,” Zelophechad insisted, knowing the words, in the larger sense, were true.

  The first man tossed the stone to his companion, who pinged it at Zelophechad, lightly hitting his robed upper arm.

  “Eh. Maybe a small lesson will teach you. Something your poor mind won’t forget. Don’t forget, this is the Sabbath.”

  He tried to tease out Zelophechad’s fear, but the man’s twisted logic turned Zelophechad’s trepidation to anger.

  Zelophechad stooped to pick up the stone and pointed it at him. “ . . . and don’t you.” He instantly regretted giving in to his anger, but he had a feeling that no matter what he did the conclusion might be the same.

  Now the first man threw a small stone, “What’s a stone? A little stone? It can’t hurt. But it can teach.”

  The two men moved toward Zelophechad and the group behind them moved too, becoming more a mob than men. Zelophechad saw the hard, blank looks and backed away. He was breathing hard, as if he had run.

  One of the faceless group standing behind the first two men picked up a larger rock and threw it at Zelophechad’s chest, deflating what little breath he had. Without thinking, Zelophechad turned and ran toward the far canyon wall. Another man aimed, threw, then laughed, as if he were taking a practice shot at a rat. The rock hit Zelophechad squarely in the back and he tripped, catching a foot on a half-buried bone. The sun-dried thong on his right sandal snapped and he pitched forward onto the ground.

  His running and fall triggered something primitive in the men. Their arms burned with the hunger of the hunt. As Zelophechad fell, they grabbed rocks and ran after him, howling and throwing. Rocks hit his back, his arms, his legs. Some hit soft muscle, others broke bones.

  Zelophechad rolled into a ball and covered his head with his arms, trying to escape the pain. But two of the men grabbed his arms, pulled them wide, and laid him open. They took turns with a long shepherd’s staff, beating him again and again.