“‘In time, my son,’ his father said.
“Like all young men, he was impatient. He asked his uncle, a man known for his knowledge of magical arts. ‘In time, my son.’ But he preyed on his uncle’s good will until his uncle told him:
“‘Go to the cave at the edge of this plain. Enter and you will begin your journey to what you desire.’
“The young man walked for seven days to where a wall of rock edged the plain. There he found the entrance to a cave and entered. The cave was cool and dark. In the dim light, the young man saw a snake slithering toward him. He grabbed its tail, to fling the snake out of the way. The minute he grasped it, the snake became a stout staff.”
“Like the staff Moses brought to Pharaoh, only the other way around,” Noa interjected.
“Yes. He held onto the staff and moved farther into the cave following a glow that drew him deeper. He came to a chasm. By this time, the glow was strong, lighting a passageway on the far side of the chasm. He knew he was approaching the light’s source.
“The young man threw down his staff to bridge the chasm and, carefully, he crossed. When he turned to retrieve the staff, he saw that it had once again become a snake, slithering away toward the mouth of the cave. With great dismay, the young man realized his only choice was to continue.
“Cautiously, he continued toward the source of the glow until he reached the end of the passageway and an old man who was the source of the glow. He asked him, ‘What must I do to become a man?’
“‘You passed my brother on your way. He told me you would come.’
“The young man, puzzled, asked the question again. ‘Please, tell me what I must do.’
“‘Be patient, and I will tell you a tale. Once there lived a wealthy man with an only daughter. One day, a tree within his walled garden bore a beautiful golden-fleshed fruit. His daughter reached up to pluck the fruit when a crow landed on the branch. The crow told her that if she plucked the fruit, it would immediately wither.
“‘The young woman sat, day after day, pining for the perfect fruit that hung from the tree, longing for its juice on her lips. On the day the young woman decided to take the golden globe, despite the crow’s warning, an eagle flew down, plucked the fruit from the tree, and carried it off. As it did so, the young woman withered.
“‘The eagle flew to the other end of the world. Her aerie rested on a ledge at the top of a high mountain and, within, nestled three young eaglets. She offered the golden fruit to her young, and they eagerly tore its flesh. At the center of the fruit lay a clear jewel the color of the sky.
“‘The eagle knew the jewel was meant for man, for those who cleaved to the path of righteousness. She searched the world over, looking for those who might merit the jewel. She flew until her wings grew tired, but without success. She returned to her nest and, when her young ones grew, she gave the jewel to the strongest of them, to complete the mission.’
“The eagle flies still, each eagle passing the jewel to its young, from generation to generation. Each new eagle flies the world, looking for the people who can best care for this jewel. Perhaps, one day, the eagle will choose us. And that is an end to my story.”
“But, Yoela,” Noa said, confused, “what does this have to do with the young man? What became of him and his search?”
“Ah, he has not come to the end of his story. He is still discovering how to be a man—a lifelong journey.”
Noa thought about her friend’s story and said, “Yoela, I have learned many things from my father and my mother: how to breed sheep, how to make cheese. But you are wise in the ways of the heart.”
That was the day her heart became filled. They were at an age when their hearts were open and ready to be filled.
Now Yoela was preparing Noa for marriage. She finished Noa’s hair as the celebration began winding down. After nearly everyone had left, having wished Noa good fortune and many children, Bat-Sheva came to sit with them, bringing the pot of henna they had prepared earlier.
Bat-Sheva, who had set one of Noa’s feet in her lap, asked Yoela, “What pattern?”
“Love knot.”
Each began painting an elaborate pattern of vining flowers that twined up Noa’s feet to embrace her ankles. Her feet complete, they began traceries on her hands, spreading from fingertips to wrists.
While Hoglah and Milcah tidied up enough to lay out the beds, Noa’s mother and Bat-Sheva’s mother sat talking about the old days until Bat-Sheva’s mother said, “Come, daughter. It is late.”
The women wished each other good night and, following Hoglah and Milcah, their mother withdrew to bed.
Yoela held one of Noa’s hands in her own as she continued adorning it with love knots, even past the wrists, each of them loathe to part.
Tirzah, watching Yoela work, asked, “Aren’t you going too far up her arm?”
“And shouldn’t you be asleep?” Noa demanded.
“I’m not tired.”
Tirzah watched in silence for a moment, then asked, “Why do you always hold each other’s hand?”
Noa, about to scold Tirzah, changed her tone. “Perhaps our souls are bound up together. We are friends, as close as you and Adam.”
“Me and Adam, we’re warriors, not squeezy-hand friends.”
At that moment they heard a male voice outside. “Yoela. I am here to take you home,” he called softly.
“My brother,” Yoela said. “Well, I suppose that is the end. I must go.”
Noa walked ahead to pull the door aside for Yoela. As she did, Yoela grasped Noa’s wrist, slightly smearing the henna.
“We will be as we were,” she whispered. “Nothing will change that.”
Lying in the dark, Tirzah whispered, “Maybe I am tied up in a knot with Adam, like you and Yoela.”
“Our souls are bound up with each other, not tied in a knot,” Noa corrected. “And what could you know about souls?”
“What could you?”
Tirzah was silent for a moment, reliving parts of the evening. “Wasn’t tonight like,” Tirzah searched for the right words, “like Miriam’s dance at the sea?”
Tirzah’s delight woke Hoglah. In the haze between sleep and wakefulness, she realized that the next night she would be the oldest sister at home.
HUR AND NOA stood in the small tent that would serve as their marriage booth, then as their home. Hur had never been this close to Noa and never alone with her. Now she was his. The most valued possession he had owned until this moment was his spear. Struck by responsibility and her beauty, he wished he had something to occupy hands that hung awkwardly at his side.
She, too, felt tense, knowing what would come next.
“Smile,” Malah advised. “It will hurt a little, but it will be a good kind of hurt.”
Hur nodded to either side of the tent. “Of course, we will enlarge our home as our family increases. Of course, there will be a proper screen for your privacy,” he explained earnestly. He fell silent, not knowing what to say next. He remembered his father saying, “Praise her . . .” and remembered that Zelophechad’s daughters were known for their fine cheeses.
“Your cheeses are worthy of great praise,” Hur began.
“Cheeses?”
“They are like a taste of heaven,” he continued, warming to his subject.
Noa was thoroughly confused by his talk of cheeses.
“But I do not think you have ever tasted them.”
He was stumped for a moment. “Ah, but I have heard.”
Noa had been so absorbed by her own apprehension she had not noticed his. Hur detected the hint of a smile on her face and, suddenly, he saw what she saw.
“Am I not doing this well?”
“You are doing well enough,” Noa assured him, realizing how hard he was trying.
“You know, I can strike a target at a hundred paces.”
“Your spear arm is well known.”
“Well . . .” he said, expectantly.
“Yes, well . . .”
“Perhaps you would be more comfortable with your robe on?”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“Here.” He offered her the bed, a soft sheepskin atop a broad mat. She lay down with exquisite care, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. He bent and lifted her skirts to her waist. This was his, he told himself.
With her arms at her sides, grasping clumps of sheepskin, Noa knew the time had come to smile.
Hur saw Noa’s smiling face in a blur, his anxiety overwhelmed by animal desire. He ungirded his robe and lowered himself, fumbling at first. Then, shuttering and plunging, he lost himself in Noa.
Noa made not a sound and held her rictus of a smile so long her face hurt.
Afterward, when he saw the blood that he knew should be there, he asked anxiously, “Have I hurt you?”
“No,” she lied.
“You will see,” he said, as he tenderly brushed tangled braids from her face. “I will become very good at this, too.”
“MALAH.” LIGHTING UP at the sight of Malah’s familiar face, Noa tumbled out news of camp politics.
“Hur says there is talk of a meeting. Korach, the Levite prince—he’s organizing it. Something about ‘our new Pharaoh,’ as Korach calls Moses. He says Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s court and acts it. Korach is calling for broader leadership. Perhaps he is right. But who has asked me? Not the women of Gaddi’s clan. Stiff as sticks, and they speak only of weaving and . . . and . . . household. Oh, I hoped you would come sooner . . .”
“I could not. My obligations . . .” Her excuse floated in the air between them.
“No matter. Here you are. Come. Sit.” She ushered her into her tent. “It’s small.”
“But it is yours. The favored daughter does, indeed, have her own home.”
Immediately, Malah wished she could take back the bitter words. She bent her head, weighing what it would take to apologize. Then, as if nothing had happened, she said equitably, “Your husband? How is he?”
Noa let the hurtful words pass.
“Hur, oh, he is a good man . . . But good as Hur is, I do not feel as a wife should.”
Malah laughed. “And how should a wife feel?”
“I fear my heart has no room for him.”
“They say you will learn to love him,” Malah said, thankful that Boaz was her heart’s desire, despite Seglit.
Though her sister had her own tent, Malah saw misery in her eyes, and felt more magnanimous. She regaled Noa with stories told among her group of young wives.
“They all talk of the glory of marriage, but most are just polishing the truth. Not me. I tell them about the scorpion dance I do with Seglit.”
“I’m sure you give as good as you get,” Noa said, applauding her sister’s sting.
“Of course, I polish that up, too. It makes them laugh. And then the truth pours out. Stories like yours. Noa, why not join us?”
“No, I would not fit in your circle. But, tell on. Any news interests me.”
Malah described a pregnant wife and how taut her belly felt and added, “I feel the seed of life within me.”
“Yes?”
As answer, Malah smiled.
“I am so happy for you.”
“And, praise Asherah, you should be. Everyone knows a barren wife is worthless.”
“Let’s go to mother’s and work together. Let the flour fly!”
Then Noa remembered what she wanted most.
“Have you talked with Boaz about the Judges of Fifties?”
Remembering the heat of her fight with Boaz, Malah replied, “I have. But he has been so busy. To mention it again, well, when you have so many wifely duties . . .”
“Ask again. Securing our father’s land. This is my heart’s desire.”
“I will, I will.”
CHAPTER 10
JUDGES OF FIFTIES
WORK ON THE Tent of Meeting continued: silver plates hammered, inscribed, then stored in neat stacks; curtains woven and folded, to be fitted to polished poles. When the work was finished, the people’s journey would begin again. Everyone was anxious to move on. The mountain, which had once glowed with a holy presence, now glowered.
Long lines of irritable women waited at the few wells. Axes, cutting in the night, reduced the desert’s thin scattering of umbrella acacias. Flocks ate away the herbage of the lower slopes. People burdened the land, as the land burdened them.
The young learned the language and the customs of their harsh surroundings. They saw Midianites and Kenites rinsing their hair in camel urine, then dressing it with scented oil. They did the same.
The young men called each other by new, strong names, not the names of Egyptian bondage. They gave themselves names of what they saw around them: wolf, eagle, snake. They girded themselves with strong words: “Before we reach the lands promised us, we will let the desert temper us, like the point of a spear.”
Such talk frightened parents who had not raised their sons to be pointed spears nor their daughters to wash their hair in the stream of a camel.
Noa felt the camp’s need to push onward and wanted a hearing before the Judges of Fifties before they did. One evening, a few weeks after their marriage, she asked Hur to accompany her to a meeting with Boaz and Malah for an accounting of the livestock.
As they entered Boaz’s tent, Noa nodded to Seglit, who sat outside sipping tea and chatting with her bondmaid. While they took account of goats and sheep, Hur listened, and Noa took account of Hur. He soaked up information and interactions as if the whole world were full of instruction.
As they neared the end of their discussion, Noa reminded Malah, “ . . . and the bet din?”
“The bet din?” Boaz asked.
Hur, too, wondered what a bet din might have to do with his wife.
“Yes, yes.” Malah turned her face toward Boaz so that Noa could not see it. She gave her husband a look. “We talked about this when we talked about my tent. But, of course, you have had so much on your mind.”
Boaz tried to place what she was talking about, then remembered the argument and the promise she had extracted.
“Ah, yes. Yes, the bet din,” he repeated, stalling for time to review the circumstances and compose a reply. “You shall have the proper bet din. One that suits the situation. Prepare to go before the Judges of Fifties at the birth of the new moon,” he declared, as if he had been awaiting the moment.
Noa bit back a smile, seeing the subtext between Malah and Boaz.
As she and Hur walked home, she explained their pursuit of their father’s inheritance. Shocked that a young woman would be so bold, he softened as she talked, coming to see sense in it.
Hur was dazzled by his new wife. Her ideas and manner breached the boundaries of his world, which divided men and women sharply. They also intrigued him.
“My wife will be an Advocate before the Judges of Fifties,” he boasted to his companions.
They nodded agreeably, thankful it was his wife and not theirs.
“THIS BET DIN is the right match for you, Noa. The central judge is known for his open mind. Another is the father of many girls. The third I do not know well.”
“Thank you, uncle.”
“In a week’s time. You will be among the first heard. I have arranged the moment. The rest is up to you. But I am sure you will have success.”
“I wish I were that confident.”
Boaz was not confident, but he believed it could do no harm to plant the seed of success in her mind.
“Remember . . . when the sun is halfway to its height. Do not be late. This bet din does me a favor by allowing you ahead of others who have been waiting their day of decision.”
As Boaz left, she called out, “I will not disgrace you, and we will not be late.”
THE JUDGE WHO sat in the middle looked out over the semicircle of people crowded near the canopy of his tent. The trio had just finished their first hearing. The middle judge shouted again for people to move back and leave a clearing. The judge on his le
ft rubbed his sleeve across a sweaty forehead. Despite the heat rising from the desert floor, his puffy face and nose signaled he was suffering from a cold. Miserably, he turned his head and, with a finger closing one nostril, blew from the other nostril onto the ground. The judge to the right sat stoically, awaiting the next case.
The middle judge scanned the crowd for two young women, close relatives of Boaz, one who had recently married the eldest son of Gaddi ben Susi. A formidable match, he thought. He himself had attended the celebration, but saw no one fitting the description of the bride. He waved the next petitioners to come forward.
A man’s camel had broken loose and had knocked down his neighbor’s tent, ripping a hole in the side. The neighbor told his tale with relish, swooping and collapsing, demonstrating how his house came down, delighting the crowd with his animated tale until the judge cautioned him. The camel-owner countered that the neighbor had staked his tent too close to his camel. His fault for impeding the camel. The Judges of Fifties conferred, then called out their decision against the camel-owner: payment of goat-hair cloth equivalent to what had been ruined.
The middle judge was thinking about levying a small fine against the neighbor for taking up their time with entertainment, when he noticed a stir in the semicircle and annoyed faces as someone pushed through the crowd. A young woman pulling a taller young woman gained the edge of the crowd, then broke free into the clearing as some shouted curses upon them. Both had hot faces, and the taller one had red eyes, as if she had been crying.
The middle judge recognized the first as the young woman Boaz had mentioned. He narrowed his eyes, skewering them with displeasure.
Noa, terrified they had lost their case before they started, dropped to her knees before the judges and knocked Hoglah’s shin to make her do the same.
“We are so extremely sorry to be late, O judge,” Noa said, her head bowed. “We had a mishap along the way.”
“Get up. We’ve had enough of grand gestures.”
She did not explain that, at the last moment, Hoglah said she was too afraid to appear before the bet din. Noa dragged her along, scolding all the way.
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