The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  “He set taskmasters over us to wear us down. They made our lives horrible with labor in mortar and brick. But the more they oppressed us, the more we multiplied.”

  The people near Miriam smiled, recalling their toughness and the Egyptian’s frustration.

  “So the king conceived a plan,” she said. “He told the midwives who served Hebrew women to kill our baby boys. But the midwives feared God. They let all our children live, male and female. They said, ‘O King, Hebrew women are so strong, they drop their babies before we can get there.’”

  “Ha ha ha!” The people barked a bitter laughter for the idiot Egyptian, tricked by the women.

  Miriam paused a moment. Then in a softer, more serious voice she continued: “So the king abandoned cunning and went straight to slaughter. He sent his soldiers through our houses with orders to search out all the baby boys, and to drown them in the Nile.

  “It was then,” said Miriam, “that my mother bore a beautiful baby boy. For three months she hid him in the house, and the soldiers did not find him. But then he grew too large and too loud, so my mother took a basket and daubed it with pitch and laid her son inside and slipped it into the river among the reeds. She told me to watch from a distance. That very day I saw the king’s daughter come down with her maidens to bathe. I saw them stop at the little cove where my brother was floating. I watched the princess undress and wade into the water. She disappeared among the reeds. Suddenly she cried, ‘Look what I found!’ She came out of the reeds, pushing the basket toward shore. All her maidens rushed to look. The princess turned my mother’s blankets aside—and there was my brother, his little fists shaking. He was crying. I couldn’t stand it. I started to run down the bank toward her. She was saying, ‘It’s one of the Hebrew children,’ and she was holding the baby with such tenderness—such tenderness! I saw that tenderness. I said, ‘Do you want me to get a Hebrew nurse for the child?’ She looked up at me and said, ‘Yes.’ So I ran and got our mother, and by the time we returned together, the princess had named him. Mosheh. She called him Moses, because, she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.’ The daughter of the king of Egypt adopted my baby brother. He grew up in Pharaoh’s court. That’s why you can’t remember him. But he suckled Hebrew milk. He drank of the milk of our mother; he heard her prayers and learned our ways and therefore has been one of us from the beginning. Believe it! Heart and soul and might, Moses will always be one of us.”

  ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, Moses and Aaron went out and stood alone in a desert place.

  At a word from Moses, Aaron whirled his rod like a threshing flail and struck the dust of the earth, and the dust turned into gnats. The air in Egypt grew thick with a rising dust, but the dust was gnats, and the gnats landed on people and beasts.

  The king in his palace, seeing the cloud of a new plague coming, commanded his magi to do the same. But they could not. They could neither do nor undo the thing.

  They said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God.”

  Pharaoh curled his lip and dismissed his magi as useless fools.

  IV

  PHARAOH WAS NOT an old man. He was young and mighty. He had by the force of his glory and the smooth beauty of his arm turned back the accursed Fallen One of Hatti.

  But physical strength counted for nothing now.

  After the gnats, the man named Moses had appeared again on the bank of the river, promising flies—and the flies had come in swarms, making an infernal, universal buzzing, crawling on the faces and in the eyes of every Egyptian.

  At the same time it was reported that the houses of the Hebrews were absolutely free of flies.

  Something was favoring Israel.

  ALL HIS LIFE Pharaoh had been a pious man, honoring his ancestors and building magnificent temples to the gods. He reverenced Re, Atum, Thoth and Ounnefer, and the Divine Ennead. He had, in every year of his reign, kept the great festival of Opet.

  But where were the holy ones of Egypt now?

  And who was this interfering, desert deity which the fierce-eyed Moses called “The Lord”? How could an unknown god make such violent distinction between Egypt and a pack of powerless slaves?

  For when the flies had vanished (again, by an act of the God of Moses) there fell upon the cattle of Egypt a killing plague. Egyptian flocks perished. But the Hebrew flocks remained healthy! Egyptian donkeys and goats and camels perished. Yet not a beast of the Hebrews was touched.

  The king of Egypt began to pace his chambers in the night, beseeching divine assistance. He was himself a child of the gods; it was his right to call and their duty to answer; but all the gods were as silent as stone—all save one. In his darkest moment it suddenly seemed to the king that the sun-god, Re, said: “I will rise in the morning.” He took comfort in that promise.

  And in the morning the sun did rise.

  But soon it was shining on a new, more hideous plague. Several magi appeared uninvited before the king. “Majesty,” they said, but they could scarcely speak: their faces were thick with red boils, their eyes puffed shut, their necks and shoulders wet with a yellow pus. “Majesty,” they said, “the man named Moses took handfuls of ash from a brick kiln and threw them up, and the wind caught the ash and blew it abroad, and where it touched us…this happened. Everyone is breaking out in sores—”

  “The Hebrews? The Hebrews, too?”

  “No, sir. Not the Hebrews.”

  WHEN THE WORLD was not falling apart, Pharaoh took an extravagant pleasure in receiving the envoys of foreign lands. He blinded them with his splendor, building open pavilions in public and giving gifts of fabulous wealth.

  But for this particular envoy, whom he himself had summoned, Pharaoh did not consider splendor. He didn’t so much as change his clothes. He did nothing but wait, slouched on the golden throne, his knuckle in his mouth.

  At midday, the man named Moses strode into his presence wearing woolen robes and carrying a long rod, his hair like a white wild smoke, his eye afire. Shasu. Pharaoh sighed to see this ragged ambassador: how does one negotiate with the wind and the sand and the furious stars?

  Nevertheless, he muttered, “Go. Moses, go and sacrifice to your God. But do it within the land of Egypt.”

  The Shasu said, “No,” then closed his mouth.

  There was a silence.

  Pharaoh said, “No? Suddenly you don’t wish to sacrifice?”

  “Oh, yes, we will sacrifice to the Lord our God. But we must go three days’ journey into the wilderness, because he commands it.”

  “Into the wilderness?”

  Moses kept his gaze on the Pharaoh, saying nothing.

  So Pharaoh sighed again and said, “The wilderness, then. The wilderness. I will allow it. You may go three days’ journey into the wilderness. But choose who is to go.”

  Moses said, “There is no choosing. We will all go.”

  Pharaoh said, “No, that’s impossible.”

  Moses said, “All of us and all our cattle. Our young and our old, our sons and our daughters—”

  Pharaoh raised his voice: “I said No! Take only the men among you—”

  “—our herds and our flocks,” said Moses, “because we must eat a feast to the Lord our—”

  “Don’t you hear me, man?” roared Pharaoh. “God help you, if ever I let you take your young away. Shasu! Shasu, you have some evil scheme in mind.”

  Now, Moses lifted his own voice and delivered a speech of elemental power, because the spirit of God was upon him:

  “Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? For by now I could have put forth my hand and struck you and your people with such pestilence that you would have been cut off from the earth. But for this purpose have I let you live: to show you my power, so that my name may be declared throughout the earth. Yet still you continue to exalt yourself against my people. Now, then: tomorrow in the middle of the day I will cause a heavy hail to fall, such as has never fallen upon Egypt before. If you believe this word,
send your cattle to shelter. If not, cattle and people shall die together.”

  Moses departed.

  For a moment the king was speechless.

  Then he issued a terse, private command, and soon a priest was standing before him, holding a lotus and a golden globe, signs of the sun-god, Re.

  Pharaoh said, “Sing the song you sang at Neferhotep’s funeral. I liked that song. Sing it again for me.”

  The priest didn’t hesitate. In a eunuch’s voice he sang: “As long as Re shall rise in the morning and Atum shall set in the west, men shall beget and women conceive and breath shall be in men’s nostrils…”

  By evening, then, though some of his counselors had ordered their servants and their cattle to take cover from the storm to come, Pharaoh did not.

  ON THE FOLLOWING DAY the sun rose and ruled the morning.

  But directly at noon the light began to fail: a black cloud gathered over Egypt, and the wind blew. Lightning flashed. Thunder followed, and out of the cloud came hail, very heavy hail, hail such as Egypt had never seen before. It struck down everything and everyone in the fields; it tore limbs from the trees; both cattle and servants were killed; only those who stayed under cover survived.

  But then the night came, and in the morning the sun rose up as strong as ever. It turned the hail to water. Re had arisen and ruled. The king, therefore, called for an excellent supper. In the night he thanked his god with many pious expressions and slept.

  And the sun rose up the next day, too.

  But so did a wind. An ominous wind. An east wind blew across the land with steady intensity. Everywhere Egyptians held their breath against some new calamity. Then they began to whimper, for from the northern kingdom to the south they saw the wind was drawing a vast cloud like a blanket over the land.

  Pharaoh thought it was a dust storm, but the cloud came over the city and he could hear the sound of it: dry, chewing sounds and the rattle of a million wings. He looked, and the cloud had a million hungry mouths.

  Locusts! It was an endless swarm of locusts so loud that a man could not call to his neighbor, nor could he see his orchards. Locusts were eating every sweet thing, every green and living thing.

  Pharaoh’s counselors burst into his chambers. “How long will you let this Moses be a snare to us?” they shouted. “Egypt is ruined. Call him! Give him what he wants. Let him go and let us live!”

  Pharaoh set his jaw and nodded his head. Immediately a counselor ran out and returned with Moses and Aaron.

  Pharaoh said, “This time I have sinned. The Lord your God is in the right; I and my people are in the wrong. Entreat your God only to remove this death from me!”

  Without a word, the Hebrews turned and left. All at once the wind outside went into convulsions, and a strong west wind was sweeping the land, tearing the locusts from their million grips and driving them into the Red Sea.

  Finally all the winds relaxed. In the night there was but a mild breeze.

  But the king of Egypt could not sleep. He was seething with the humiliations now heaped upon him by his own people, his servants, his counselors. Therefore, his single prayer that night was a prayer of vengeance:

  “By my life,” he cried, “by Re, by my father Re who loves me, by the sun-god’s bright imperial power upon this earth, I swear: my majesty shall rise in the morning to terrify all!”

  And the morning came. But the sun did not arise.

  If there was a day, none in Egypt could see it. For now there was darkness over the land, a darkness so thick it could be felt. No one could see his neighbor, no, nor his family either. The Egyptians did not stir from their houses.

  Only the people of Israel had light where they dwelt.

  So there passed one day and another day in sunless darkness. Three days. But who could count them without the heavenly lamp? Pharaoh paced in a rabid impotence, neither eating nor sleeping, growing more and more frenzied as the long night continued.

  Finally he called Moses to himself. “Go!” he cried. “Go! Serve the Lord. Yes, and take your children with you. Take all your people. Only leave your flocks and herds behind.”

  The man named Moses showed neither triumph nor thanks at this grand capitulation. His expression was the same as when Pharaoh first met him on the banks of the Nile long, long ago.

  And with damnable insolence he repeated precisely what he’d said before: “We will all go. All of us and all our cattle.”

  The king of Egypt leaped from his seat screaming, “Get out! Get out!” He had drawn a knife. His whole body trembled to use it. “Never look on my face again,” he cried. “In the day you see my face, you shall die!”

  Moses said, “So be it. Neither one of us shall see the other again.”

  V

  ONLY THE PEOPLE of Israel had light where they dwelt. A

  And there it was that Moses, his hair like smoke on a mountain, took a stand before the whole congregation and spoke:

  “Listen to me and believe what I say,” he said. “I have seen the holiness of God.”

  In all Israel, no one uttered a word. Too much had happened since this man had arrived.

  Moses said: “He called to me from a flame of fire in the midst of a bush. I saw the bush burning on the side of a mountain, yet it was not consumed; so I went to look, and as I did the voice of God said, Moses! Moses!

  “I said, ‘Here I am.’

  “God said, Remove your shoes, for the place where you stand is holy ground, and I am the God of your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.

  “I hid my face, afraid to look at the living God.

  “But God said, I have seen the affliction of my people, and I am coming to bring them from bondage into a land flowing with milk and honey—the land I promised your fathers long ago.

  “Then God commanded me to carry his word to Pharaoh and to you. He said that I should lead you out of Egypt.

  “But I said, ‘Who am I to do such a thing?’

  “God said, I will be with you, and you shall know my name and use it.

  “In the midst of the flame of fire, then, the voice of God proclaimed: I AM WHO I AM! Say to Israel that I AM—YAHWEH, the Lord, the God of your fathers—has sent me to you.

  “I dropped to my knees, shaking with fear. ‘Lord,’ I said, ‘I cannot talk.’

  “God said, Who has made the mouth? Is it not I, the Lord? Then I will be your mouth.”

  Suddenly Moses lifted his voice and roared before the whole assembly of the people: “It is therefore not I but YAHWEH, the Lord, the God of our fathers, who has confronted the king of Egypt and by many signs has humbled him down in darkness.

  “And even now, this very night, it is not I but the Lord our God who commands you to prepare for one more sign, the final, most terrible sign he shall perform.

  “Prepare, O Israel!” cried Moses. “Accomplish the commands I now shall give you. By your obedience prove trust in the Lord. For tomorrow at midnight he shall with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm deliver you from bondage into the freedom of his beaming countenance!”

  AND SO IT WAS that the people Israel spent the next day in speechless excitement fulfilling the commands of the Lord their God exactly as Moses directed them.

  Every household took a lamb, a male one year old without spot or blemish, and killed it. They caught its blood in bowls, and with bunches of hyssop smeared the blood on the doorposts and the lintels of their houses. The flesh of the lamb they roasted.

  In the evening, then, inside their houses, they ate the lamb with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. They ate all of it, as the Lord commanded, leaving none for the morning. And they ate in clothes ready for a journey, their loins girded, sandals on their feet, staves in their hands. They ate in great haste.

  AT MIDNIGHT THE DESTROYER went forth. The angel of the Lord passed through all the land of Egypt. When he came to a house that had the blood of a lamb smeared on its doorposts, he passed over that house. But every other house was open before him, and he entered, and when he lef
t, a firstborn child lay dead.

  The Lord smote all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his golden throne to the firstborn of the prisoner in his prison. All.

  So there went up over the whole land a great and grievous weeping, for there was not a house where one was not dead.

  And Pharaoh cried unto Moses and Aaron: “Rise! Go forth from my people! Go, you and your children, and serve the Lord with all your flocks and all your herds. Be gone. Be gone—and bless me, too.”

  AND SO THE PEOPLE of Israel went out that night. They journeyed on foot from Rameses to Succoth, some six hundred thousand men and women and children.

  They had lived in Egypt four hundred and thirty years; and now, as they left the long slavery of that place, the Lord God said to Moses: Forever you must keep this feast as you kept it on the night I saved you—the lamb, the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs. Hereafter, this month shall be the first month of the year for you. And the feast shall begin on its tenth day. Make that day a memorial day throughout your generations forever. This is the ordinance of my Passover.

  So Moses told the people.

  And the people, when they heard it, bowed their heads and worshiped.

  SIX

  Sinai

  I

  WHAT THE CHILDREN most remembered—the little children, the young ones stumbling behind their elders—was the strange silence of the night of their running. No one spoke.

  Mothers and fathers walked swiftly with strained faces and many backward glances. They walked in the midst of an endless multitude of people; and though there were the sounds of a thousand sandals grinding sand and the stretch of leather, the huff of large cattle, the bleating of tired sheep, yet there was not a human voice to comfort them.

  So the children went forward, big-eyed and frightened.