THE WORD WENT HOME before Pharaoh did. Triumph! This glorious, lion-hearted warrior—he has bound the land and broken the back of Hatti.
When, therefore, the king himself crossed the Egyptian frontier with prisoners of high rank and riches inestimable, priests met him with a profusion of flowers—and the sweet celebrations of victory and of grateful piety straightway began.
In a public place before Egyptian multitudes, the most important prisoners were commanded to make signs of submission. They turned the palms of their hands toward Pharaoh. He gazed impassively upon their defeat, nodded, and then, by the lifting of a small scepter, ordered their executions.
Next the various treasures of the Hittites were carried to a temple and spread out before the gods in order to be consecrated: cups and amphorae, rhytons and goblets of gold and silver, set with precious stones.
When Pharaoh himself appeared through a private doorway of the temple, he was frightening in magnificence. Upon his head he wore two crowns, one for the northern and one for the southern kingdoms of his realm. His chin was adorned by a ceremonial beard, dramatic in its length and plaiting. He wore a heavy necklace of gold from which hung chains and small silver flowers. Three pairs of bracelets flashed when he strode toward his seat, one on his upper arms, one at his wrists, and one upon his ankles. And down his back he wore a robe so light as to be transparent.
He was followed into the temple by more prisoners, their hands bound, ropes around their necks. These, too, in speechless dread acknowledged their defeat. But Pharaoh did not order their execution. Instead, he faced the images of his gods and raised his voice in a singsong hymn:
“I offer you homage, gods and goddesses, masters of heaven and earth and ocean, great of step in the boat of millions of years.
“Amon-Re! You unto whom I bring gold and silver, lapis lazuli and turquoise! I am your son, whom your two arms have brought forth. You have established me as sovereign over every land. For me you have made perfection on earth. I perform my duty in peace.”
Thus Pharaoh declared that all victory was but a gift from his god, and that these treasures were but a return upon what he had first been given.
When the ceremony ended, when Pharaoh in blinding splendor stepped through the temple door ahead of his priests and the whole procession, he was suddenly met by two men who fixed him with fierce eyes. Their faces were sunbaked and creased. One was dressed in the Egyptian loincloth, but the other’s robe was woolen, his beard full, his hair unruly, and his smell goatish.
A Shasu.
Pharaoh hesitated just an instant.
But swiftly into that instant the smaller man spoke.
“Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel.” He spoke in the nasal squawk of an up-country slave. Why, the man was nothing but a Hebrew slave! “The Lord says, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.”
II
SOMETHING IN THAT first encounter had seized Pharaoh’s interest. An odd refinement in the Shasu which made his unruly appearance seem just that: an appearance. When, therefore, the same two men begged an audience with him the next day, Pharaoh granted it.
“Who is this little ‘Lord’ of yours?” he asked.
The grizzled Shasu spoke. With amazing rapidity he said: “The God of the Hebrews has met me face-to-face, and by his authority I beg you to let us go but a three days’ journey to our ancestors’ paths in the wilderness and sacrifice to the Lord our God—or else he will fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.”
This wanderer’s eyes flashed a mordant fire. He grew more and more interesting as he spoke. Pharaoh leaned forward. It was the accent. The grammar and the vocabulary. Out of the mouth of a common Shasu was coming the most articulate Egyptian that Pharaoh had heard in years.
Therefore, he asked a second question of the Shasu: “What is your name?”
But the slave answered. “His name is Moses. Mine is Aaron. We are brothers.”
“I wasn’t speaking to you,” said the king.
“Nevertheless, he wants me to talk for him.”
To the Shasu the king said: “Who are your kin? Where are you from?”
Again, the other one said, “He is of Israel. His kin live here in the land of Goshen. The men are making bricks for your majesty’s buildings—”
“Shut up, slave!”
The man named Moses was gazing with a smoky passion directly into Pharaoh’s eye, working his mouth as if chewing, but saying nothing. An astonishing insolence, actually. A dangerous sort of audacity, because it could capture the fancy of more than one slave.
Abruptly, therefore, Pharaoh ended the interview.
“Lazy,” he declared. “You, slave, are lazy. Your people are lazy. And now you wish to justify laziness by a long trip to a little god. Absolutely not. Go on, get back to work.”
THAT SAME DAY the king called his vizier into his chambers and issued an order to those who supervised slave labor:
“Three points. One: no longer shall you give the people straw for making brick. Let them gather field stubble. Two: tell the Hebrew foremen that production quotas shall remain the same. Three: and if the people don’t meet quota, beat the foremen.”
To the vizier alone, Pharaoh said, “This people has caused trouble before. As long as eighty years ago my predecessors were trying by various bloody means to keep them in their place. Well, I will do it with work. I’ll make them too weary to listen to any leader. Except myself, of course.”
EVERY EGYPTIAN CITY was surrounded by a wall of brick fifty feet wide and sixty feet high. Only the gate-pillars were stone. Likewise, all the city buildings were constructed more of brick than of stone. And in those days the king had begun to build grandly in the Nile delta, cities of beauty, cities of protection against the desert people in the west and the sea people of the north.
The quantities of brick required were astronomical.
And because the Hebrew slaves made and baked them, they, too, were necessary for the plans of Pharaoh.
I will weary them.
In great tubs the slaves mixed Nile mud with sand and straw, striving for the right consistency. They trod the mud. They stirred it with mattocks. Then they poured it into brick molds, scraped it smooth, and snatched the mold away, leaving the single brick to dry in the sun a full eight days: brick by brick they worked.
I will weary them.
Without piles of chopped straw ready at their sides the whole operation slowed down. Slaves had to run the fields and yank roots from dried ground.
No, they could not continue to match the killing quotas for Pharaoh’s cities, even though the foremen also began to work with them.
And so the foremen, their kinsmen, were beaten in sight of everyone. The dull crack of an Egyptian stick on Hebrew bone became a regular, horrible music. Every man, therefore, drove himself harder and harder, and in the houses of the slaves there was no laughter at night.
Finally the foremen went to the king himself. How could their lot grow worse than this?
Pharaoh was seated on his golden throne, wearing a diadem and plumes, so august a presence that the Hebrews kissed the earth and averted their eyes.
They said, “Perhaps the king does not know that his supervisors have stopped giving straw to us, his servants, but that they still demand the same number of bricks, and they beat us for failing the quota, but it is their fault—”
“Their fault?” Pharaoh raised a smooth and powerful arm. Pharaoh, who could turn the armies of the Hittites by personal force alone, whispered, “Their fault?” and the foremen began to tremble.
“Your fault, slaves,” he said. “And I’ll tell you the fault: you are lazy! You are a lazy breed! Lazy and cowardly besides, sending me a Shasu stranger to ask whether you can go into the wilderness to worship some minor deity of whom I have never heard—and I, the son of gods, know them all! Get out of my sight. Go and make brick.”
The poor foremen stumbled backward, dismissed, silenced.
; But when they stood outside the palace they saw Aaron and Moses, those who had stirred the trouble in the first place, and then they were not frightened. They were furious.
“Who do you think you are,” they cried, “that you should speak for us? You’ve made us an offense to the king, and now his servants carry swords to kill us. Go away. Leave us alone!”
The man named Moses listened. He did not flinch. But neither did he answer, and his silence only enraged the men the more. Three men had to hold back one who offered to break the neck of this intruder.
They left him standing on the hard Egyptian dirt.
They did not see the sadness with which he watched them go.
WHEN HE AWOKE the following morning, the king of Egypt first sat on his bed-couch and read through his most recent correspondence. Then, attended by murmurous servants, he bathed and dressed and put on the insignia of royalty. Still within his palace and under the weight of divine authority, he was joined by the high priest of Amun, before whom he offered a sacrifice to that god and from whom he heard several prayers and exhortations.
This was customary, his daily ritual.
Somewhat unusual, however, was his decision to descend in the company of priests and magi to the banks of the river. Pharaoh decided to pay homage to Hapi, the Nile god shaped like a man so fat that his breasts hung down and his belly folded over his belt.
This trip was a whim of the morning. Pharaoh had not planned it. No one could have known that it was to take place. Nevertheless, as he approached the river’s brink he saw that fierce-eyed fellow, Moses, standing directly in front of him, waiting, holding in his right hand a rod as tall as he was.
But Pharaoh stops for no man, certainly not for a nomad. Surrounded by his entourage, he strode toward the water, assuming that the Shasu would be swept aside by the king’s cold countenance and royalty.
But the man stood ground, staring at Pharaoh—then all at once he began to roar in that articulate Egyptian tongue, causing others, if not the king, to hesitate.
“The Lord, the God of the Hebrews,” he shouted, “sent me to you saying, Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness—and behold, you have not obeyed.”
Now Pharaoh stopped. “I have not what?” he said.
But the wild man did not answer. He issued decrees of his own: “Therefore, by this you shall know that my God is the Lord: I will strike the water of the Nile with my rod, and it shall be turned to blood, and the fish shall die, and the river shall become foul, and everyone will be loathe to drink it.”
Immediately, he turned toward the water, raised his long rod, and brought it down with a whistle and a slap on the face of the Nile.
Those who had watched the man’s behavior with curiosity now stared at the water in astonishment. Where he struck it, the river began to bleed like a living thing. A bright red blood ran in ribbons downstream. It spread wider and wider. It began to creep upstream, too, against the current.
Pharaoh was furious.
“A trick!” he thundered.
He whirled around to one of the magi and threw his scepter at the man, commanding, “Do the same! Do it now! Make the river bleed!”
The magus obeyed. He scrambled down the bank and stirred Pharaoh’s scepter in clean water and that water, too, boiled up bloody—so Pharaoh closed his mouth, glanced once at the man named Moses, then withdrew and returned to his palace. He would reverence Hapi another day, when the river’s wounds had healed and there were fewer pests about.
III
THAT NIGHT in the houses of Israel there was another sort of silence, not weariness: wonder. They had seen the river run red with blood.
“Aaron,” they said softly. “Aaron, who is this man?”
“He is my brother. Moses.”
“He’s one of us?”
“Yes.”
“But he speaks like an Egyptian.”
“Well, but he is of the tribe of Levi, just like me and Miriam, our sister.”
“He has a foreign wife. A Midianite.”
“My brother has been gone for forty years. There were no women of Israel where he was living. But he grew up in Egypt. He was forty years old when he left.”
“Why did he leave in the first place?”
“He was running for his life. He had murdered an Egyptian.”
“Aaron! Your brother is a rash man!”
“In fact, that’s why he did it,” Aaron said. “He happened to see the Egyptian beating one of our people. He saw no one was nearby, so he jumped the Egyptian and snapped his neck and buried the body in the sand.
“The next day he saw two of our people fighting together, a big Israelite beating a smaller one. Moses could never help himself. He grabbed the big man, threw him to the ground, and said, ‘How can you hit your own brother?’ But that man only laughed and yelled, ‘So what? Are you going to kill me like you did the Egyptian yesterday?’ So he knew that his crime was no longer a secret. He didn’t even say good-bye to me or Miriam or our mother. He ran. That was forty years ago.”
“That’s when he went to live with the Midianites?”
“Yes,” Aaron said. “And that’s why he married a Midianite.”
“Yet even after forty years he is still one of us?”
“Why do you keep saying that?” said Aaron. “Yes, he’s one of us. He’s circumcised. His son is circumcised—and that is especially due to his Mid-ianite wife! For when Moses delayed too long, the Lord met him in the night and sought to kill him. But his wife took a flint and cut off the foreskin of their baby boy, then touched it to Moses’ feet and said, ‘Surely,
you are a bridegroom of blood to me!’ So the Lord did not kill him. He is one of us!”
“But why, after forty years, does he suddenly choose to come back?” Aaron uttered the following words so softly that the people had to lean forward and cease their breathing a while.
“He says,” said Aaron, “that God has heard our groaning. He says that God is remembering his covenant with our fathers, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Moses says that God has begun to deliver us from bondage, to redeem us with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. He says that God has sent him here as a servant to accomplish these things.”
ON THE SEVENTH DAY after the Nile had been struck bloody, just as the king was ascending his golden throne to make himself available to the common people, the man named Moses appeared in the doorway. This time he didn’t ask an audience. He entered boldly, perplexing the guards on either side, and began to speak in his headlong Egyptian:
“Thus says the Lord,” he said, “Let my people go, that they may serve me. But if you refuse to let them go, I will plague all your country with frogs. The Nile shall swarm with frogs, nor will it contain them. The whole country will crawl with frogs. Aaron will stretch forth his rod over the waters, and the waters will churn with an endless issue of frogs!”
Pharaoh shook his head and said nothing. He lifted his left hand, a minor sign, and the guards stepped forward to remove the man. But the fierce-eyed Moses turned before they could touch him. He strode out of chambers, his robe billowing at the sleeves—out of the palace, down a long street and onto the king’s own wharf. There he was met by the slave named Aaron. Together they walked along the edge of the wharf while Aaron trolled the end of his rod in the river. The small waves that the rod made were, in fact, frogs, a trail of frogs, individual, swimming, golden-eyed frogs. And the frogs tumbled up the banks of the river. Frogs went forth, swarming over the whole land, into the houses, into kneading bowls and ovens and bedrooms and beds.
Pharaoh commanded the magi to do the same, and they did, but that only doubled the populations of green, croaking creatures, filling the king’s palace with frogs of his own making.
Pharaoh’s roof dropped frogs like rain. His apartments were carpeted with moist bodies. He could not walk but that he squashed them. And when he entered his lavatory, when he sat on the limestone seat with a hole beneath, and when a frog fired itself
upward from the sand below, that was one frog too many.
The king commanded that Moses be brought to him.
Moses came.
The king said, “End it.”
Moses said, “Why don’t you ask your magi to end it?”
The king said, “They can’t. You must. Entreat your Lord to remove the frogs, and I will let the people go and sacrifice to him.”
Moses said, “Then, sir, in order that you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God, you choose: tell me the precise time at which you wish the frogs to be destroyed.”
“Tomorrow,” said the king. “At sunrise.”
Precisely at sunrise the following day all of the frogs, wherever they sat in their masses, died. The houses, the courtyards, and the fields were covered with dead frogs. The people raked them together into mountains, and the whole land stank.
But as soon as he recognized the respite, Pharaoh hardened his heart and canceled any promises he had made under the strain of an earlier moment.
NOW, IN THE HOUSES of Israel—deep in the night and in privacy—people were whispering one to another.
“What is it? What’s happening?” they said. “Some huge and holy thing is taking place.”
“Moses knows,” they said.
“He says it’s the God of our fathers troubling creation. He says that God has heard our groaning and wants to take us for his people. His own people!”
“Moses. Is the man one of us after all?”
“And if he is,” they said, “why don’t we remember him?”
“But he was here,” said Miriam, Aaron’s sister. “He lived in Egypt, but not with us. Surely you remember the time when our afflictions began?” she said.
“Yes,” said the people.
“You remember the king who first enslaved us because he was afraid of our great numbers?”
“Yes,” said the people. “How could we forget?”
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 10