Judging Noa

by Strutin, Michel;

Moses slowly rose from the ground. Quiet roared in all their ears.

  Moses said to Korach and his followers, “Tomorrow morning, bring your firepans. Place fire upon them and incense upon the coals. In the morning, let God choose who will lead the way.”

  HUR’S FATHER GATHERED with others to discuss what Korach had said. Korach’s challenge to Moses voiced what many felt.

  “We will wait only for death in this forsaken desert,” said an elder from the tribe of Efraim.

  “Maybe our sons, too.”

  “None will be able to claim this land promised to us.”

  Before the group broke, a few vowed to stand with Korach in the morning.

  “Will you support Korach against Moses tomorrow?” Gaddi’s cousin asked, as they walked toward their tents.

  The silver light of a half-moon tinted the hills and spread a faint glow across the ground. The sheen of something slithering caught their eye, followed by a barely audible squeak. A night hunter and its prey.

  Because of his fear of Anak, he had failed his son, trapping him between Egypt and the lands of their ancestors. Gaddi hoped he would not fail again.

  Hur lay curled in his robe outside his tent, his head cushioned in the crook of his arm. He listened as the women’s urgent, pulsing songs of praise to Asherah waxed and waned in rhythm with Noa’s contractions, lulling him to sleep as Noa labored into the night.

  GADDI STEPPED OUT into the thin light of dawn. He rubbed his arms to warm himself in the sharp morning, then walked toward the place where Moses and Korach would meet to decide the leadership of all Israel.

  “To stand with Korach, or not?” His resolve tilted back and forth. “At least Korach is decisive,” he told himself.

  One of the elders of Efraim passed and asked, “Are you with Korach?” Without waiting for Gaddi’s answer, the man said, “I will not wait to die in the desert.”

  Gaddi, one of those responsible for the wait, heard reproach in the man’s voice.

  “Yes,” he said, suddenly decisive. “Yes, I am with Korach. Come, I will walk with you.”

  KORACH AND THE assembly who stood with him held their firepans, in defiance, against Moses and Aaron.

  “Stand aside,” Korach cried out. “We will make our own sacrifices to the one God. Who is Moses to make us wait until our bones bleach in the wilderness? Who is Aaron, so jealous to be the only priest? Did he not sanction the Golden Calf? Is he not of the same family as I . . . I who had no business with that wanton shame?”

  Moses, fearful of Korach’s arrogance, fell before God, crying, “Oh God, when one man sins, will You be wrathful with the whole community?”

  Moses beseeched the community to move away from Korach. Of those that remained, each had his reason. Gaddi stood with them to make amends to himself and his son for showing cowardice in the land of their fathers. He hoped to remedy one action with another.

  As Moses and the community fell back, Gaddi could not hear Moses say, “If the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, you shall know that these men have spurned the Lord.”

  As he said these words, the ground cracked and roared under Korach and those who stood with him.

  Those who had come to watch the confrontation fled, racing from long-fingered fissures that reached to grab them. Those who had stayed away felt the ground roll and shake. Bellowing camels rocked up to their feet and stamped at their stakes. Some broke loose and charged wildly, one crushing the leg of a young girl.

  Hur, who had fallen asleep outside his tent, was shaken awake. He leaped to his feet, grabbed a tent ropeto steady his sleep-shaky legs, then parted the tent door. The intensity of birthing rivaled the intensity of the quaking earth.

  “Not now,” his mother hissed. “We are almost there. Go. Find your father. When you return, you will be a father.”

  Hur went to seek his father.

  LOOKING FOR FRESH forage, Milcah and Tirzah had led the flocks into the hills overlooking the Kadesh Barnea oasis. They had left early, even before Gaddi stepped fatefully into his day.

  Perched on a rock, Milcah spun out thread from her spindle and looked toward the tents of Dan and Oholiav, her heart tight. From this distance, the tents looked no larger than the pebbles Tirzah lobbed down the slope. When she tired of pitching pebbles, Tirzah picked at a scab on her ankle.

  “Do you think Noa has pushed out that baby yet?” she asked, her head down, worrying the scab.

  Milcah was lost in silently mourning her dream of life with Oholiav, a dream now crushed. Rina had broken the news gently: Oholiav had been betrothed to a woman from his own tribe.

  Rina had held Milcah and whispered, “My Milcah, you would have been his choice had he chosen. It was his father’s decision.”

  Dutifully, Milcah hid her heartache.

  “I said, do you think Noa had her baby?” Tirzah repeated.

  “No.” Milcah bent over her work. “Babies have big heads. Not like lambs.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then why did you ask?”

  Tirzah sing-songed, “Milcah, Milcah, always right. Weaves her weaving out of spite.”

  Milcah leaned over to jab her spindle at Tirzah, who pulled back in mock horror.

  “Help me,” Tirzah called out to the sheep. “My sister is coming at me with a spindle.”

  Tirzah’s silly song and their little drama spread a smile across Milcah’s face, taking her away from her pain. Just then, the ground rumbled. The girls looked around, thinking a rockslide had started. What they saw was far off, at the edge of the camp. A dark cloud billowed up from the ground, filling the air with brown blooms that burst slowly in tendrils, floating toward the heavens like stray locks of hair.

  At the base of the cloud, fire flickered, then burst into a furious orange ball that shot up with fiery arms, searing the sky. Greasy soot spewed from the fireball in long, black tongues, twisting through the roiling cloud. From under the skirts of the cloud, fissures raced across the desert, knife-sharp crevices that thundered open. Milcah and Tirzah saw people, small as mice, swallowed into the earth.

  They stood, gape-mouthed, as sheep climbed each other’s backs, panicked.

  When Tirzah began running toward the chaos, Milcah threw herself on her sister.

  “No. Wait. Just wait!” she screamed.

  Hearing Milcah’s screams and smelling death, the flocks broke into full flight away from doom, and the girls ran after them.

  FLAMES SPEWING FROM abysmal fissures consumed Korach and his closest companions. The smell of their scorched flesh seared the air. Their bones, burnt to ash, swirled upward, the sooty tongues that Milcah and Tirzah watched from afar.

  Those who stood with them began to run, but the cracking earth dropped them into its molten mouth.

  Gaddi felt the ground part beneath his feet.

  “What have I done?”

  He fell forward, hoping to grasp a rock, a root, something. In the dust and commotion he saw those around him falling into deep crevasses. The earth was eating them alive, burying Korach and his followers under a rage of rubble that crushed bones and filled mouths, smothering them, returning them to dust. The earth that once nourished them now consort to a punishing God.

  Gaddi heard the cries and moans of those around him. One voice, in particular, echoed awfully in his head until he realized the cries were his own. His fingers dug into the earth, clutching, as he tried to climb out of a collapsing world. A boulder tore into him, knocking him deeper into the abyss, burying him half-alive as he realized he had thoughtlessly compounded one error of judgment with another. He, who others had thought so wise, would die for a stupid mistake. Tears flooded his eyes as cinders from the fires rained down upon him, burning the flesh that was still exposed until the earth swallowed what remained of him.

  WHEN HUR DID not find his father in his tent, he ran wildly into the chaos of panicked people, bellowing animals, and tangled tent ropes, asking if anyone had
seen Gaddi. They paid no attention. Most were stunned or frantically speculating about what might happen next. Some feared the sky would collapse, shattering its blue dome against the ground, destroying the heavens.

  He saw a friend of his father’s clutching a boy in his arms, both of them crying as the man stumbled away from the chaos.

  Hur grasped the man’s shoulder and asked, “Have you seen my father?”

  The man turned to Hur, the boy’s arms clinging around his neck, his small head rigid with fear, their faces streaked with soot.

  “Your father?” All he could say was, “Gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean ‘gone’?”

  The man jerked his head in the direction from which he had come.

  The great fire had consumed itself and now smoldered, blazing up here and there as it ate the remains of bodies caught in the cataclysm.

  Hur pressed on. As he approached the epicenter, at the blistered edge of camp, the few people left alive yelled, “Help us!” or “Come no closer!”

  He stopped and saw, ahead, a crevasse piled with boulders, shreds of tents, and human limbs. He feared his father had been caught in Korach’s web of deceit and lay somewhere in the smoking, rubble-filled devastation. His face a stricken mask, Hur turned back toward the tents of Manasseh.

  NOA HAD STRUGGLED through the night, bearing down as the women’s chants rose to urge her on, resting on their arms in between, sweat streaming from her body, her hair damp, curling down her shoulders in tangled ropes. Nechama had turned the child within and now saw a circle of dark hair.

  “Only a little more. One push. Two. Three at most and your child will be in your arms,” she urged.

  “I cannot. I am so tired.”

  Malah’s arms ached from supporting her sister. She wondered if she had the strength for such a trial. Images welled up: The unseen man who planted the seed, his smell, and the feel of him inside her. Seglit and how the balance between them would change. The child within her, Boaz’s child, rightfully. Malah imagined handing a perfect boy to his father, and she forgot her tired arms.

  Their mother began humming an old tune that the sisters loved, a wordless tune that had lulled them to sleep when they were little. Now she added words, singing of the child to come and the joy he would bring. It was not a perfect song, but so heartfelt that, in the next contraction, the baby’s head crowned. Noa grunted as her baby breached her opening and new life burst forth.

  Nechama caught the wet, wrinkled baby, held it upside down, and tapped its back until its lungs filled with air for the first time, and it cried. Nechama called for linen and fleece, wrapped the infant, and handed it to Noa’s mother while she asked Noa to bear down one more time to expel the placenta.

  Hur’s sister called loudly, “Liri.” knowing her younger sister would be awake and listening. “Call mother to come.”

  Almost immediately, Tamar rushed in, followed by Liri.

  “Prepare food for the ‘laborers,’” Tamar ordered her younger daughter, then addressed the women. “We will have a feast . . .” She pulled open the wrappings to see the sex. “Yes, a feast for our son.”

  On her way to fix food, Liri passed Hur coming the other way.

  “Brother, I am an aunt,” she said proudly.

  Hur rushed to the tent door and called, “May I enter?”

  “A moment. A moment,” his mother called out.

  Hur stood impatiently outside, wiping his hands on his robe, wiping away the smoke and the horror of what he had seen, the scarred earth that swallowed those who stood with Korach, all buried alive. Filled with dread that his father was among them, he imagined his cries. A wave of nausea swept over him. He needed to see new life.

  Finally, his mother called, “Enter, father, and hold your son.”

  Noa, wrapped in a warm robe, her face washed, her hair plaited, held a tiny, dark-haired boy. Swaddled tightly, only his head was visible, with lashes so long Nechama had to wash them to reveal his carob-brown eyes.

  Hur walked toward his son and wife, seeing nothing but them. Then, he remembered and stopped to kiss his mother. Her face, shining with joy and triumph, told him that she knew nothing of what had occurred beyond this tent. He continued to Noa. Heart pounding with far too much, he kneeled before her. Wondering at his clouded eyes, Noa offered their son to him. Hur held his son and wept.

  WHEN IT WAS confirmed that Gaddi had died in the Korach rebellion, the house of Manasseh mourned. Hur had lost a father and gained a son on the same day. In honor of his father’s memory and his mother’s loss, the feast for his son was postponed for seven days of mourning.

  Ignoring the question in his heart, why his father sided with Korach, Hur railed, “What did my father do to bring God’s wrath down on him? He was upright. This God. Cannot even see into the heart of one man. Who can rely on such a One?”

  “Hush. You foolish son of mine. Do you want to bring down God’s anger on this family a second time? The gods do with us as they will.”

  In her heart, Tamar held God accountable.

  As she did with everything in life, Tamar upheld propriety. She presented Nechama with a jar of olive oil and a red-trimmed robe as payment for guiding her grandson from womb to world. She arranged the feast for the baby who would be Gaddi’s namesake. She mourned publicly as befitted her position and kept her grief to herself.

  Noa had come to admire the way Tamar ordered her household and modulated her temper to fit any circumstance. If Hur inherited his father’s position and she were thrust into Tamar’s role, she wondered if she could temper herself, knowing her father’s volatility coursed through her.

  As Noa worried Tamar’s mantle would fall on her, Malah saw Tamar’s crown on her own head. Malah convinced herself that Noa would not care to become Tamar. She told herself that Hur would get his due when his time came, but now Boaz deserved the bright light of leadership, second only to tribal leader Gamaliel.

  And Gamaliel was dying. Over the years, worms from the waters of Egypt had weakened him, killing him from the inside. When the men of Manasseh met to choose Gamaliel’s successor, Gamaliel’s son was rejected as weak, with all the stature of a downy-lipped girl.

  Hur’s name was raised, matched with “upright” and “brave.” Then cut down with “inexperienced” and “young.” Long before the men met, Malah had worked her young wives’ network. She suggested to one, who suggested to her husband, “Why not choose Hur, but place Boaz as regent until Hur ripens?”

  At the meeting, the man offered his wife’s proposal. The problem of leadership was thorny, the men were tired, and here was a simple, acceptable solution. They praised the proposal, though Boaz saw Malah’s hand in it.

  Boaz said, “I would be honored to serve as tutor to the next leader of Manasseh, instructing him by example. If you judge my example as worthy.”

  Malah had determined that Boaz be the one. And so he was.

  Noa knew what Malah had done, seizing for Boaz what should have come to Hur. But, with a baby at her breast, she had no energy to act against Malah’s machinations or anything else. Exhausted, Noa relinquished.

  “Let Tamar provide guidance. I will hold my tongue.”

  Tamar, seeing the men of Manasseh had chosen experience over youth, sought Boaz.

  “I know you will provide excellent education for Hur’s leadership,” Tamar said, deliberately attaching the word “leader” to her son rather than to Boaz. “You will find him an ideal student, with all the qualities presently in place.”

  Boaz heard Tamar’s subtext clearly.

  “I hope I will prove a worthy model.”

  They understood each other perfectly, and warily.

  CHAPTER 21

  YOELA ASCENDING

  TAMAR BRUSHED AWAY Malah’s bid to supplant her as she might a sand flea. Tamar was mother to Manasseh’s chosen leader and that is how it would remain.

  “You poisoned my well,” Malah accused Noa.

  “Your well?”

  �
�You spoke against me to Tamar. Why should I not have Tamar’s place if Boaz has Gaddi’s?”

  “Tamar does not consult women beneath her, least of all me,” Noa remarked, cooing to Gaddi as if his were the only needs that concerned her.

  “Liar.”

  Noa’s placidity, meant to rankle her sister, did. Malah stamped off, vowing that her son, not Gaddi, would one day lead Manasseh.

  Although it was at her sister’s expense, Noa thought, “I am learning.”

  Hur was satisfied with the tribal elders’ decision. When the time came, he would reach for leadership and it would be his. Now he wanted freedom, not the yoke of leadership. He wanted to hone himself and the young men of Manasseh in order to triumph when it came time to regain their ancestral lands.

  And he sang his son’s praises to all who would hear. To Haddad, who told of his own new child.

  “A girl—Keturah,” Haddad said. “And the next will be a boy, a hero of Midian.”

  “A girl, a match for Gaddi. We will bind our peoples together.”

  “You say. I say she is too beautiful for your son.”

  “Stand in line, my friend. The offers of beautiful daughters have already begun.”

  They boasted back and forth, delighting in each other’s company, sitting under the tasseled shade of a palm, eating dates, and drinking sweet water. But Hur felt the Scarface lingering at the edges, a dark chaperone.

  YOELA HAD COME alone to the feast for Noa’s and Hur’s son. Noa wore a gracious smile, acknowledging congratulations from women who meant it and from women who wanted to raise their ranking with Tamar. Yoela noticed Noa’s tired eyes and knew she was overwhelmed. Noa said nothing, but tried to add a smile to her eyes. Yoela pressed into Noa’s hand a bead from one of her own earrings into which she had figured a sign against the Evil Eye and threaded it onto a slim, child-sized thong. She stayed only a few moments longer.

  When Gaddi was a few weeks old, secure enough in life, Noa snuggled him into a sling and made her way to Yoela, who sat weaving at a loom outside her in-law’s tent, her hair tucked beneath a tightly bound headcloth.