Even when dawn began to streak the eastern sky, people continued grimly hurrying, hurrying. They did not stop.
But sunlight and the warmth of the morning seemed to change things. Here and there the children heard soft talking. A little early whispering. Then giggling. The young women were giggling. Suddenly a man let out a bark of laughter and immediately shut up. But then another man started to laugh and could not stop. He covered his mouth, but the laughter came out of his nose. His shoulders were shaking. The people who saw him began to grin. Then they chuckled; then they, too, broke into outright laughter. They roared with laughter. They laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks. They covered their stomachs and gasped for air and howled as if they were hurting.
Like flocks of wild birds the laughter rose up and flew from family to family, from tribe to tribe throughout the entire congregation of Israel—and this, finally, is what caused the people to stop running: laughter.
They made the round desert ring with the sound of their joy.
And all the little children laughed along, though they didn’t know why. They gathered kisses from mothers made beautiful by the mystery of this happiness, and from their fathers they received winks and pokes and mighty hugs.
So they remembered that the long night of silence had been followed by a day of laughter, loud, united, sweet, and free—and ever thereafter the children wished that such a day would come again. As they grew older they longed for one more day of a pure and infant innocence. It never came again.
II
ISRAEL TRAVELED SOUTHEAST to Succoth. They moved at the edge of the desert and encamped near Etham, a border fort where only a few troops were stationed. These poor soldiers stood on brick walls and stared in astonishment at a people who darkened the land for miles around: a plague of people!
Nor did the Egyptian soldiers sleep that night. They watched. And they saw a second wonder: a fire suddenly ignited itself in the midst of Israel, a fire which rose toward heaven then stood on one leg like a pillar. It did not go out. Rather, it began to move away at the pace of an old woman’s walking.
Before morning the fire was gone. So were the people. They had followed the fire in darkness.
Now, finally, the soldiers shook off their trance and leaped to their horses and rode back to tell someone what they had seen.
THE PILLAR OF FIRE that went before Israel in darkness—it was the Lord, leading them and giving them light. During the day it led them as a pillar of cloud. It was never again absent from them.
And Moses was the prophet of God, speaking his will in words the people could understand.
For forty years Moses had lived as a Shasu, a nomad. He knew the wilderness very well; and the Lord knew him: in a holy, terrible privacy, they spoke together.
When, therefore, Moses led Israel by a winding way along the eastern frontier of Egypt, it was not because he was confused. It was God’s command.
By the will of the Lord, Israel finally stopped and camped between the sea on their east and another border fort, Migdol, some distance to the west.
WHILE ISRAEL WAS encamped near the sea, a young woman happened to notice a tiny puff of dust near the distant fort called Migdol. Soldiers, she thought. She squinted, and what she saw comforted her: They’re riding away. Good.
Just before these months of upheaval, she had married a man named Carmi, a good man of the tribe of Judah. But then the river had turned to blood and the heavens went to war and the poor woman was never able to savor her marriage—not till now. Now they were free, and the wife of Carmi often went out alone to gather firewood. Then she would wander farther and farther from camp, heedless and completely happy, because she was huge, soon to bear their first child.
One afternoon, then, just as she knelt to pull dry roots, a flash of light caught her eye. She stood and peered westward. There was another tiny flash, and she thought, The Egyptians are riding away.
But then she saw that the entire horizon from north to south was seething with an angry yellow dust. Another flash! Another! Metal reflecting sunlight. Now, it seemed to the woman that the earth itself was trembling, and the wind blew odors of leather and sweat—and that metal! It was weapons! The sun was striking helmets and spearheads and the bright sides of chariots!
She dropped her few sticks and turned and ran back to camp as fast as her big body could go. “Egypt!” she cried. “Egypt! The soldiers are coming to get us!”
Just like that, their freedom was gone. A lie! An illusion.
By the time she reached her people, the woman was wild with sobbing. Her terror was like an arrow in the heart of the Israelites, who lifted their voices in wailing. The people looked and saw the armies of Egypt. They saw yellow dust stretch like a curtain across the west. But the east was blocked by water. They were caught between swords and the sea—and though Egypt was still distant, their skin already tingled for the whips and arrows to come.
They found Moses and screamed at him: “Why did you bring us here? To kill us? Weren’t there graves enough in Egypt to bury us?”
Moses turned his back on the accusers, climbed a solitary rock, then raised his arms and shouted: “Silence! Israel, be silent! Be still! Don’t try to fight! Do nothing at all, but watch and see how the Lord will defend you today.”
“Do nothing?” Israel thundered. “Nothing?”
“You need only be still,” Moses cried, “because the Lord will fight for you.”
“The Lord! Where is the Lord? For all his signs and all his wonders, here comes Egypt again—”
“LOOK!” cried Moses. “LOOK!”
He was pointing at the pillar of cloud. It was moving. It had risen above the people and now was sailing westward through blue air. At the same time it was spreading wider and wider, a thick grey curtain—higher and lower at once, like a wall between heaven and earth. The children of Israel were struck dumb by the sight.
For the cloud of God had divided Egypt and Israel one from the other.
At the same time, Moses took his rod and strode to the shore of the sea. There he turned and cried to Israel, “Break camp! Prepare to travel.” Then he stretched out his rod to the sea, and a strong east wind arose. It blew all night long. It blew mightily upon the sea until its waters were driven backward left and right.
Israel, surrounded by the elements of the Lord their God—by cloud and wind and water whirling—said nothing. They broke camp and stumbled eastward where the sea had been. In a stunned wonder and on dry ground they crossed all the way to the other side while the east wind beat their backs and pushed them forward. Moses was the last to go.
In the morning the pillar of fire and of cloud soared up from the ground, and the Egyptians saw where Israel had gone. They mounted their chariots. They whipped their horses and rode in wild ranks after their escaped slaves, plunging down into the bottom of the sea and racing between the walls of water.
But Moses, climbing the far side of the sea, stretched out his rod again, and the wind ceased and the waters were released. They collapsed upon the Egyptians who were whirled about in foam, who sank beneath a jubilation of waves. Wood only floated to the surface. Here and there a horse beat water, screaming. But armor held the soldiers under. So the horsemen and the hosts of Pharaoh perished.
The Lord saved Israel that day from the hands of the Egyptians.
Then Miriam, older than her brothers Moses and Aaron, took a timbrel and began to sing. For a while she sang alone, an old woman giving sweet expression to her faith and the praise of the Lord.
But then another old woman—the mother of the wife of Carmi—stepped forward and began to dance to the timbrel with gestures smooth and unspeakably lovely. “Because my daughter gave birth to a son,” she said, “in the midst of the sea she bore a child, and they did not die.”
Other women, both old and young, wept in the knowledge of deliverance. They could not contain themselves. They clapped. They joined the mother of the wife of Carmi, dancing. Soon all the women of Israel were fo
llowing Miriam with timbrels and motion, and she sang to them these words:
Oh, sing to the Lord,
for he has triumphed gloriously:
the horse and rider he has thrown into the sea!
The Lord is my strength,
my God and my father’s God the same!
And he who is salvation now has given me his name:
his name is the Lord!
I will exalt him day and night!
Forever will I praise my God,
my song, and all my might.
III
THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL followed Moses from the sea through the wilderness of Shur for three days. They found no water.
Carmi kept watch over his wife, who was nursing their baby. He saw that she was growing pale and fearful.
“Elisheba,” he whispered, “Are you sick?”
“It’s the baby,” she said. “My milk is drying up.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I need something to drink,” she said.
“Moses told us that we’re coming to a pool tomorrow. Be patient, Elisheba. Wait till tomorrow.”
But when Israel arrived at a spare desert oasis, they found the water brackish and bitter.
Carmi was desperate. He ran from family to family looking for water, but he only found others distressed and wondering what they were to drink.
Then Moses came through the congregation, dragging an odd, wiry tree he had cut in the desert—Moses, intent upon the bitter pool.
He raised his voice. “If you listen to the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes—” He heaved the tree into the water. “—then the Lord shall be your healer. Drink!”
Carmi was the first to kneel and drink. “Elisheba!” he cried. “Elisheba, come! The water is sweet.”
NEXT ISRAEL ENCAMPED in a large oasis where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palms. They were glad for the abundance and begged Moses to stay here. But inexorably he led the people toward the wilderness of Sin.
It was now a month and a half since they’d left Egypt and entered the desert. They scarcely knew how to survive apart from civilization. They had never foraged in a dry land. They hadn’t learned to hunt, to live in skins, to patch old tents, to walk the day long carrying all their possessions and all the provisions wherever they went.
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob had been nomads. So had the twelve fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. But this vast and mighty company, their descendants, knew a better life, houses and gardens and ready food.
“Moses!” they said. “Where are you taking us?”
Fierce-eyed Moses didn’t answer. He kept walking forward through the blistering desert, swinging his long rod, his wild hair like a thundercloud.
“Moses!” they yelled. “We wish we had died in Egypt, where we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread till we were full. But here you will kill us with hunger!”
And Carmi, who knew how to make brick but who could not make one morsel with which to feed his hungry son, named the child Achar. He did it in a fit of despair. The name means Man of Trouble.
But his wife hid the harder meaning from her baby by calling him Achan instead.
Finally Moses stopped and spoke to the people. “Who am I that you should blame me?” he said. “Your complaining is not against me but against the Lord!”
The Lord. Even the anxious Carmi cast his eyes down to the ground.
Moses said: “But the Lord has heard you. And to show you that it is he who brought you out of Egypt, at twilight he will give you flesh, and in the morning you will be filled with bread.”
Even while he was speaking, the people saw across the wilderness the glory of the Lord: a great black cloud was rushing toward them. When it had approached the camp they saw that the cloud was quails, a huge migration of quails flying low for sheer weariness.
Carmi took a club and beat several quails out of the air, then he ran to Elisheba with arms full of meat.
In the morning another wonder appeared, a gentle thing, a snow from heaven.
There had fallen on the face of the wilderness a fine, white, flake-like substance, sweet as coriander, something that tasted like wafers made from honey.
The children of Israel went out and gazed at a wilderness of white, whispering, “What—? What—?” which in their tongue sounded like the single word, Man? Man?
“What is it?” they said. “Manna?” they said.
And Moses said, “It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat. He will send it as long as we need it—even until we are done with our wanderings. Gather it, every man among you; gather one omer for each member of your family, no more, no less; then eat it all that same day. Trust the Lord. He will send you more in the morning.”
So there was a great and sudden harvest. The people called their new food manna, and most of them obeyed Moses’ instructions.
Carmi, however, was a man of extremes. He was worried for his baby and brought home six omers. During the day they ate three. That night he congratulated himself on having provided for the next day, but by dawn his store was stinking and crawling with worms. So Carmi had to go out and gather again with the rest of the children of Israel.
IV
BY STAGES THE PEOPLE crossed the wilderness of Sin. Moses walked in the vanguard, following the glorious pillar of cloud whose head was in the heavens.
But one morning the children of Israel saw that the cloud was gone and Moses was leading them alone.
When someone asked whether God had abandoned them, Moses pointed. “Don’t you see where we are going?” he said.
Far, far ahead of them, almost invisible for distance, the children of Israel saw something like smoke rising from a stony hill.
“What is it?” they said.
“It is our cloud upon the mountain of God,” Moses said.
Day by day as they moved forward, it seemed to Israel that the stony hill was growing on the horizon. It became a crag. A grey, bleak eminence. The wrinkled face of an ancient effigy.
The Mountain of God.
In a week the rock had filled the entire southern sky. It filled their hearts, too, with a gaping trepidation. All talking had died among the children of Israel; their bodies had shrunk; they could not tear their eyes from something so huge on a flat plain—this grisly, rough, and frowning mountain whose summit was covered in cloud. It was not green. It was a heap of obdurate rock.
But the cloud was alive. Lightning troubled its interior. Thunder muttered.
In the third month since their escape from Egypt, Israel entered the wilderness of Sinai, which was dominated by a mountain of the same name: Sinai, the Mountain of God.
“There!” cried Moses over the thunder: “There is the ascent where I saw the bush which would not burn up. It is there I first met God. And now it is there, O Israel, that the Lord your God is coming to you in thick cloud and thunder-blasts and fire and smoke.
“For he says: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you forth on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself. If, then, you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples;
for all the earth is mine. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
“Therefore,” Moses said, “prepare for the Lord. In three days he is coming down upon the mountain in your sight. Wash your garments. Do not go near one another for sexual contact. Build a fence around the base of the mountain so that every living thing stays back. For if anyone touches the mountain when it is holy, he shall die.”
THE MORNING OF the third day broke with violent lightning and thunder. The ground itself began to quake. Smoke like the smoke of a kiln went up from the mountain, for the Lord was descended upon it in fire. And a sound like the blast of a trumpet began, growing louder and louder until the people ran backward for fear.
“Moses!” they cried. “Speak to us and we will hear. Let not the Lord God speak to us, or we will die.”
M
oses shouted, “Don’t be afraid. God has come to test you, so that your awe for him may keep you from sinning.”
But the people ran farther and farther away.
So Moses himself crossed the bordering fence and by a steep, stony ascent went into the darkness where God was. He climbed the mountain alone.
And when he stood in the rolling blackness of cloud, the Lord God spoke to him, and Moses remembered the glorious words which he heard. Ten words. These words:
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods besides me.
You shall make for yourself no graven image nor the likeness of any created thing, to bow down and worship it. For I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me—but showing mercy unto thousands who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day. Keep it holy. Six days you shall do all your work, but the seventh is a sabbath to the Lord. On that day none of you shall work—for in six days I created the heavens and the earth and everything in them, but on the seventh I rested, and I made that day holy.
Honor your father, honor your mother, that your days may be long in the land that I shall give you.
You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or suffer a secret desire for his wife—not for his wife, nor his servants, nor his cattle, nor for anything that is his.
When the Lord had uttered these ten words, Moses climbed down the mountain and took a stand before the whole congregation of Israel and told them what God had said.
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 12