Now, in a soft voice, she said, “We did not mean . . .”
“Enough. Come forward and do not waste any more of our time. Present your problem.”
Noa was so upset, she could not remember how to begin.
“You are, I believe, a daughter of Zelophechad, here about an inheritance,” the judge prompted brusquely.
“Yes. Yes, our father wanted us to inherit his portion of the land that is promised. He died before reaching the land. He was killed by the Guardians of Truth . . .”
“We remember the unpleasant particulars of their brand of justice. Go on.”
Finally, Noa launched into her prepared speech, about how much they desired to raise up their revered father’s name in the new land, how responsible they were, how they managed their own herds and were well known for their husbandry. At that point, Noa drew a small package from her sleeve and unwrapped a cloth to display two perfectly set cheeses, which she set on the ground before her. Then she pulled a bulging sack from Hoglah’s slumped shoulder and held out a skin of buttermilk.
“We have brought proof of our skills, cheeses, buttermilk . . . praised by many.” She spoke the last words into her robe, so as not to appear immodest.
“We have heard that Zelophechad’s daughters can manage some tasty foods from their flocks,” said the judge on the right.
The middle judge, who had softened, hearing Noa’s praise of her father and her clearly considered presentation, straightened himself. “You are not trying to bribe us, I hope.”
“Oh, no. Otherwise we would have brought three cheeses,” Noa blurted, then realized by admitting it she revealed she had thought about it. Her face turned red as an ember.
“Here,” he gestured to Noa, ignoring her embarrassment, “Give a sip to that woman-with-child. She looks parched.”
Noa looked down at the skin she held, doubtful about passing it when its purpose was to impress the judges.
“That woman, there,” the judge repeated.
Noa turned to see where he pointed, then followed his order. The crowd passed the skin to the pregnant woman, who drank, tipped her head gratefully, then passed it back.
The judge with the cold turned watery eyes toward the sisters and remarked, “No wonder Boaz was anxious for us to hear your case. It will increase his holdings, married as he is to the eldest daughter. Boaz—a clever fellow.”
He coughed into his sleeve.
Dropping his voice so the crowd could not hear, the middle judge reminded him, “As Zelophechad’s brother, Boaz would receive all of the land, as first inheritor in a situation without sons. Perhaps illness has put your head in a cloud.”
Noa asked for leave to speak again and pointed out that, in normal circumstances, the sisters might marry outside their clan, even outside their tribe. The judge again narrowed his eyes, not pleased with her presumption.
“But, if our petition is met with a favorable decision,” she continued, “we would be able to keep land in our name, honoring the house of Zelophechad and the tribe of Manasseh. No matter who we marry.”
The middle judge scowled disapproval at marrying outside Manasseh. Hoglah noted his look, but Noa, enthralled by her own argument, did not.
“And, if one among us remains unmarried, inheritance—in our own name—would keep us from becoming bondswomen. We help build our people more as inheritors in our own right than as the slaves of others.”
She ended with a flourish, flushed.
From behind, Hoglah pulled at Noa’s skirt. Hesitant, she whispered in Noa’s ear, “I do not think they like ‘no matter who we marry.’”
She considered Hoglah’s warning and quickly changed the path of her argument.
“What I meant to say is if the judges so honor our request, my remaining three sisters would want to follow in the steps our parents set for the older two—my sister Malah and me—and keep our legacy within the tribe of Manasseh where it would be best preserved. But, of course, we would follow that path, as our family would set out in any case . . . as you all know . . . which we, of course, would follow.”
Noa, ending on a flat note, hung her head, feeling she had tripped over her words and defeated herself.
The middle judge felt sorry for her. Until her confused coda, she had presented her case well, perhaps a bit too well for a young woman. Now she stood, miserable, feeling her whole performance, from late arrival to the meaningless dribble of her conclusion, was a failure.
Were it not for her look of meek defeat, the other two judges would have denied the case out of hand, fearing that a positive judgment might set a precedent for other forward and demanding young ladies.
The judges excused themselves, retiring to the tent to consider Noa’s case. While the crowd waited, some complained that the delay was costing them precious daylight hours. Others taunted the sisters, “You got an early hearing by Boaz’s favor.”
“For what? For a woman to inherit?”
“Maybe my she-goat should ask for an inheritance,” a man scoffed.
As the jeers of the crowd became uglier, Noa and Hoglah edged closer to the tent, clasping hands, their chests tight, fearing a negative decision, but fearing the crowd even more, remembering what a mob had done to their father.
Within the tent, the judges argued the merits of the case. The middle judge saw Noa’s claim as reasonable if highly irregular. The stoic judge felt that making a decision for females to inherit might lower the bet din’s credibility. The judge with the cold thought of his daughters and wavered. None wanted to make a judgment that might set precedent and come back to haunt them. The middle judge proposed a pragmatic compromise.
“We will send this case up to the Judges of Hundreds. If they decide for Zelophechad’s daughters, it makes us look all the better for having the wisdom to send a complicated case to a higher bet din. If they decide against, no one can find fault with us.”
When they emerged, the middle judge raised his hand and called for quiet. Standing a head above the two young women, he looked down at them and they bent their heads respectfully.
“You honor your father by presenting your petition well,” he said. “But it is an unusual request. One without precedent. This bet din believes that it is not within our purview to decide this case. As a result, we are recommending the request of Zelophechad’s daughters be heard by the Judges of Hundreds.”
Noa quietly blew out the breath she had been holding. They were afraid to look up at the judges, afraid to say anything. Still holding hands, Noa and Hoglah bowed before the judges and backed away, as the crowd, astonished by the judgment, opened a path behind them.
Word quickly spread that the judges had kicked the case up to the next highest court. Everyone had an opinion. Noa and Hoglah said nothing until they returned to their mother’s tent. There, Hoglah regaled Ada with the story while Noa sank onto a pillow, exhausted, relieved, and amazed because she was sure her last statement had lost their plea.
On her way home, she had exulted, softly, “Step by step. An easy path to the Judges of Hundreds and our promised land.”
THE SECOND YEAR of their leaving Egypt approached and the sacramental goods were nearly complete: the Ark of the Covenant with its golden cherubim, a sacred screen to enclose the Ark, jugs and jars, a seven-branched candelabrum, priests’ vestments, altars for incense and offerings, and the Tent of Meeting that covered all. Only bowls and lavers for washing remained to be cast.
Milcah had invited her sisters to see the embroidered screen she helped fashion. The sisters rarely left the confines of their narrow lives, making their walk through camp a simple pleasure. Tirzah ran back and forth in bursts of exuberance. Noa’s heart was light as a cloud.
The vast camp formed a quadrangle, three tribes to a side, with the Tent of Meeting centered on the broad space in the middle. The tents of Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and the rest of the priestly Levites served as a buffer between the other tribes and the Tent of Meeting.
Each clan circle formed its own
compact neighborhood, where children played and women prepared dinner. In one clan circle, a line of petitioners, their tired frames casting crumpled shadows, awaited their turn before a judge. They passed another where they saw sheep-shearers. Hoglah’s heart rose, then fell as she saw it was not her shearer.
Near the Tent of Meeting artisans labored to create a movable monument to God, one that would win the hearts of the people. At the smelting station, a man covered with a leather apron pumped a goatskin bellows with his feet, stoking a fire in the stone furnace. A thin stream of molten copper trickled from the furnace into a bowl, where it pooled.
Nearby, a heavyset man hammered the copper into thin plates. Tirzah ran up to him and tried to pull him toward her sisters.
“Can’t you see I’m busy? What do you want from me?”
“Uncle Uri,” Malah said, “we came to escort Milcah home instead of you. Mother said it would be all right.”
He looked at them, and said, “In that case, I’m sure I can’t stop you.”
Tirzah raced ahead, the skirts of her short shift rising with her strides. By the time the rest of the sisters reached the weavers, Milcah was waiting to present them. With careful courtesy, she began her introductions. “ . . . my sister Malah, our eldest, married to Boaz, a clan leader of Manasseh.”
Milcah looked the youngest of the ten weavers. Yet, Noa observed, she appeared assured, so unlike the Milcah of her mother’s tent.
“Do you mind if we see your work,” Malah asked one.
“Please,” she answered, with a sweep of her arm.
The linen screens hung from silver poles. A row of stylized palms in jeweled colors patterned themselves across fields of pure white.
“Which is yours?” Tirzah asked.
“Why I hardly know,” said Milcah. “They are all so well matched.”
Malah and Noa knew the weavers had made a vow to present their work as one to avoid a show of individual pride. But within the sameness they saw a bold hand here, a fluid hand there, and one section embroidered with particular precision. This, they knew, was Milcah’s.
“When she is our age,” said Rina, Milcah’s work partner, “Milcah will be a Bezalel of the loom.” She reached over and covered Milcah’s hand with her own. “Her devotion and skill has caught the eye of Oholiav.”
Milcah bowed her head and blushed, so did not notice Noa’s jaw tighten. Anticipating the Judges of Hundreds, Noa believed she would have to sweeten their bid for inheritance by promising to marry within their own tribe. Oholiav was from the tribe of Dan.
Rina saw Noa’s displeasure and cut in, “But we have one last thing to do. All the women who bore you young women did so at great risk. We are giving our precious mirrors to the metalworkers who will recast them as lavers to wash the hands and feet of the priests who approach the Ark . . . and God,” Rina finished with a rush of throaty emotion.
As they left for home, Tirzah asked, “What did she mean about the mirrors?”
Hoglah said, “Perhaps Oholiav will see the work of your hands and look for you as a wife. Shouldn’t such an artist have a wife with skills to match his own?”
“Husbands and wives are matched by their tribe, not by the work of their hands,” Noa declared, sounding like a judge laying down the law.
“But Rina said . . .”
Hoglah saw Noa’s dark look and stopped mid-sentence. No one thought of Hoglah as a discerner of the heart, yet she had just expressed a desire budding in Milcah’s heart. Milcah feared her desire was pictured on her face.
“Me?” Milcah protested. “A wife?”
“Well, I am next. And you are just behind me.”
“Hoglah, suddenly your heart points toward marriage,” Malah said.
“It’s because of the shearer with the red hair,” Tirzah piped up.
“Tirzah!” Hoglah’s cheeks burned red. She quickly changed the subject to the story of Moloch, horrifying the sisters all the way home.
“WHAT DID SHE mean about the mirrors?” Tirzah asked her mother, having received no answer from her sisters.
“You ask what this woman Rina means about mirrors? I will tell you.”
Although the time for evening meal approached, Malah and Noa loved their mother’s tales and decided their husbands could wait, and settled themselves against pillows. Hoglah reached for the wooden dough trough and began a rhythmic kneading.
“In the days of Joseph—the right hand of the pharaoh—Egypt was good to our people. My mother told me the evils started in her day. When your father and I married, the pharaoh feared that we, Israel’s children, would overwhelm him. With what? With the fruit of our bodies, that’s what.
“To make sure we would bear few children,” their mother continued, “Pharaoh’s slave masters made our men sleep in the fields near the construction. This was when they began killing the baby boys.
“But we would steal into the fields at night to sleep with our husbands. They were so tired, ruined by those accursed monuments. Before we went down to the fields, we dressed our hair as best we could, hoping in the light of the stars our husbands would not see how wretched we looked. Our mirrors helped make us desirable to our husbands.
“Get me my mirror,” she said to Milcah.
Milcah obeyed, running her hand over the mirror’s bronze surface before handing it to her mother. Ada held up the mirror to show off its surfaces.
“This was my mother’s and her mother’s before that. It helped build up your father’s house. I will contribute my mirror to those building the Tent of Meeting.”
Noa saw her mother in a new light and wondered at her bravery. If her mother had chanced the watchman’s cane to bring them into the world, Noa felt certain her pursuit of their inheritance extended that arc.
RINA HELPED MIRIAM collect the women’s mirrors, and Miriam told her brother Moses of their plan. Moses refused the mirrors as second-hand goods and trifles of vanity.
Korach’s wife smoldered to her husband, “Who is he to refuse? He who was raised in the lap of Pharaoh’s daughter.”
“Does Moses think our wives and mothers are not good enough?” Korach said among the Levites. “Let us hear from God, not Moses.”
God softened Moses’s heart, and the mirrors were made into lavers.
CHAPTER 11
INTO THE WILDERNESS
IN THE SECOND month of the second year since leaving Egypt, Moses and Aaron took a census of all men over the age of twenty from each tribe: from Reuben, Simeon, and Judah, from Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Asher, Gad, and Naftali, and from the tribes of Joseph’s sons, Efraim and Manasseh. They did not count those from the tribe of Levi.
“Why do they not count the Levis,” Hoglah asked her mother.
“Because they are the priests,” answered Milcah.
“I asked mother. You do not look like her.”
“Milcah is correct,” Ada said, patting Milcah’s knee. “She who spends time close to the seat of authority.”
“Why aren’t they counting us,” Tirzah asked.
“The census is to count the number of fighting-age men. Soon we will enter lands rich in trees and grasses, lands that were once ours. But they say we may have to fight for these lands we have been promised.”
“What kind of promise is that?”
“Tirzah,” Milcah admonished. “Stop this flood of questions.”
“Well, even if we have to fight, I can fight as good as Adam,” Tirzah prattled on. “If they count Adam, why can’t they count me?”
“They are not yet counting Adam . . .”
Tirzah did not wait to hear the rest. “I forgot . . . Adam and I are after the small prickly one,” she yelled as she ran into the twilight to set a trap for a hedgehog.
“Tirzah,” Her mother called after her.
“I’ll bring her back,” Hoglah offered before running out.
“Oh,” their mother sighed. “I wish Noa were here to manage my wild child.”
Milcah sighed. She would not
be going back to the center of camp. The work was done. Oholiav had said he hoped to see her again, and his eyes softened for her. She hoped he would ask after her, perhaps ask for her. Now that she had tasted something for herself, Milcah wanted more.
THE TRIBES PREPARED to travel again. The night before, Noa had found Boaz’s watchman and offered him silver if he would unbury their father’s bones. Before the moon quartered the sky, he returned, their father’s bones wrapped in the cloth she had given him. Noa secured the precious package in a large hide bag, relieved to have fulfilled her vow.
At dawn, Noa and Hur took down and folded their home. While her husband went to help his parents, Noa sought Yoela.
They wandered together along the base of the mountain, choosing a path through a narrow-necked canyon that opened onto a basin whose sides were strewn with boulders. Unknowingly, they had made their way into the canyon where the Guardians had bludgeoned her father.
Sitting on a sandy bed below the boulders, Noa said, “I fear the Judges of Hundreds will not hear us until we arrive at the next stopping place.”
“Is this so important to you?”
“I want the surety of my own birthright. For me and for my sisters. What could be more important?”
“More important than Hur?”
“Oh, he is kind and accomplished. I cannot find fault.”
As they talked, swallows celebrated the new morning, soaring against the canyon walls in winged dance. They did not notice the swallows nor did they notice Hur, who had followed them, jealous of Yoela.
Yoela sighed. “I am to be wed to Barzel, the eldest son of Zerach. Of Efraim, not even our tribe.”
“But not far. Oh, Yoela, I am happy for you.”
“Happy?”
“You will be cared for. Settled. We will have husbands and time together.”
“But what they tell of Barzel . . .”
They talked until the rising sun found a crack in the canyon and dazzled their eyes.
“Before we go . . .” Noa clasped Yoela’s wrist and guided her hand over the top of her slightly swelling stomach.
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