It best he could do in his reduced circumstances, and presently their bare-bottomed first-born, Gershom, joined the sheep and goats, the dust, and the blowflies. The boy grew to manhood, was given a wife, and then Jonathan, a grandson, joined the family of Mosheh. The grandson in turn became a youth and soon would be given a wife. Then into the long silence of exile and self-forgetfulness came the call of FC, the Covenant God of Israel, El Elyon, on the single most reluctant component of the letterman, Gimel. Poor Mosheh! Or was it poor Jeruham? Once again he was going to be forced to face the pain and trouble of two natures residing in one person. Now, when he thought he had finally attained peace of mind, it was to be torn from him in a moment of time, and he would again be at war--war with himself. Proud king against lowly servant, uncouth shepherd against court-trained prince, Mosheh against Jeruham, this mass of conflict and contradictions struggled to keep his footing in the battle waging in his spirit.

But even now, before the final touches of the Master Potter could shape a champion out of a crazy quilt of weakness and strength, things had to be set right back in Mizraim, admidst the sorely oppressed Hebrew nation within the nation. Those who still recalled Mosheh feared and despised him. His brother Aaron, the people dearly loved, a lover himself of humanity, who had brought “ron,” or gladness into his parent’s home from the day of his birth with his smiles and winsome, conciliatory ways. And Miryam? She was respected but disliked--which was strange and unfortunate because this fearless, truly godly woman had everyone else’s interests in mind and neglected her own--and would never give up the Hebrew cause and the hope of a Deliverer, even if everyone else did.

Miryam trudged homeward, her ears still burning with the remarks of dissolute, shameless men. She had completed her arduous task for the day. She had brought the daily ration to her brother Aaron at the brickyard compound. Without it he would starve to death, since the compound fed no one in it except the guards and the camp taty. Even then she knew--and he denied it to her face--that he divided the food into three portions to give to those who were in the last extremities of starvation, to ease their dying. What he lived on after that, she had no idea. That was Aaron. After all these years, she knew better than try to change him. So why did she bring the food so faithfully? It was a long, hot walk from the Hebrew ghetto. She had to endure taunts from the soldiers at the ghetto’s gates, then more taunts and dirty talk from the soldiers stationed at the Pylon of Reception, the main entrance so hateful to her since she never had time to get over the daily humiliations she suffered there for Aaron’s sake.

“Why feed your worthless dog of a brother?” a guard at the ghetto gate called out as Miryam paused for permission to enter. “He thinks he’s some kind of holy elder, eh? Well, for crimes like that against the Per-aa he will die there, so you’re wasting good food you might need yourself! Why, you’re nothing but a stick, and no man would want to embrace a thing like, he would feel you stick like a bramble--”

Resisting a terrific desire to kick the guard’s teeth down his lying throat, but afraid to show her hidden hand, she grimaced with as much of a smile as she could manage for Aaron’s sake, and was allowed to pass into the enclave.

But the boorish, ignorant guards here at the ghetto were not much to be feared. It was the compound guards, who exercised the power of life and death, that made her hot blood run cold every time she saw them. For she had no husband’s name to protect her from the worst, who forced every woman they could get their hands on to give them pleasure in the nearest ditch.

“Unclean!” she cried to these brutes, holding out a soda-whitened hand and arm, and that had kept her safe, though her heart beat hard each time she had to lie, for if she was ever challenged and found out, it would be a terrible penalty to be both ravished repeatedly and then, after unspeakably shameful things done to her, killed as a lesson to other Hebrew women.

Only a lepress was safe from molestation at the compound gate. Since they wouldn’t permit her to enter the compound--a place of infamy where she had no desire to go in anyway--her brother was allowed to take her parcel at the Pylon.

Somehow they weren’t concerned that the parcel might carry death into the compound, for they seemed to relish the thought of the most dire of all sicknesses spreading to the Hebrews--a hardy, stubborn people whom, it seemed to them, they could not torture and kill fast enough with a regimen of slave labor, starvation, and crowded, filthy conditions in which not even dogs could live.

Reaching her parent’s hovel, she nearly collapsed on the threshold, but she somehow pushed open the heavy door, swung it shut, and secured it, before a faint which cast her face down on the bare dirt floor. Everything had been sold years before, just to keep alive one more day, until nothing was left. Except for the oven out back, there was absolutely nothing in the hut. Now that her parents were dead--she had buried her mother just a few weeks before--the hut was stark and cold, the winds of the night piercing through the cracked walls with howling sounds.

She slept where she fainted, hearing the loud chorus of the first crested swallows before the rising of the Day Moon.

Dragging herself up to her feet, she went out back, feeling her way in the dark, removed some bricks, found the tiny bit of meal she had put away for safekeeping, then put the bricks back for the time being.

After washing her soda-whitened hand--for she needed the fakery of leprosy only to trick the compound guards--she was short of household water, so she took her jar and went to the big, miles-long channel that her own people had cut for some Per-aa, which one she could no longer tell, they came and went, and conditions always got worse with each change of administration.

Drawing out water practically under the snouts of several sleepy crocodiles, she took it on her shoulder and returned. It was so early and dark she must have been first to go, for she met not one soul either at the water or on the dirt road back.

As soon as she washed her face in the privacy of her home, tied her hair decently, ate a bit of the meal, and got Aaron’s bread baked, the first women (and sometimes an elder or two, with their wives, of course) would come visiting her as usual.

Though they hated to do business with a prophetess directly, lacking Aaron they managed to overcome their distaste for her personally in order to hear God’s word on any matter they needed to hear it.

Whatever they could spare they brought as a tithe, and it was usually precious little, that is what kept her and Aaron alive, for she was too old now to work in the women’s compound making bricks, and they had sent her home to die with her aged parents.

This fact gave her some satisfaction. They had consigned her to death, but she was still living. Every day she lived was a triumph over the Per-aa!

Why struggle to hold on to life amidst so much suffering and misery? Many people gave up, and those who found an opportunity threw themselves into the channel, or maybe they just fainted or stumbled into it--it came to the same thing in the end. The crocodiles were all huge and monstrously fat, but they could always manage one more Hebrew.

“Adversity without belief in the Most High has no value whatsoever,” she thought. And her people, unmistakably, showed all the signs of lost faith, lost hope, lost reason for living.

Per-aa after Per-aa, the Oppression lengthened, without one sign from the Almighty that He heard and would deliver His Chosen People. Oh, there was an old legend to the effect that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph had promised a deliverer, but no one believed it anymore.

No one but Miryam, that is. Even Aaron, she knew, had given up on the idea that their own lost brother, he who was Jeruham to his family and Mosheh to the Mizraimites, was their promised savior.

By now the Day Moon was above the horizon, flooding the sky and land with red and gold.

But this morning no one knocked. It was one of those days, she realized with a sinking heart.

There would be nothing for Aaron but a little bread. And, worse, there would be nothing for the coming day.

What was she to do? She could not work. Who wanted her labor? Not even the Per-aa! She had nothing. Nothing!

“Oh, that is not so! You have something!”

Who said that? She spun around.

“Am I become addled in my wits?” she wondered, taking her head in her trembling hands. “I’ve lived too long, and now my mind is going! What’s Aaron to do if I go mad here in this hut. I will die. And he will die! What good then was our lives? We have lived only to see nothing come of our brother! No!

Finally, after a time, she realized she was screaming “Nooooooooo!” so loud it must have waked the dead in the Mizraimite necropolis. And she had kicked so hard against the hut that she had a leg half through a wall and out into the street.

Still, no one came to investigate the disturbances in the house of Amram and Jokabed, for everyone assumed it was just Miryam again acting up--Miryam the eccentric daughter, Miryam the aged spinster, Miryam the diehard believer in El Elyon, Miryam the sister of a long-lost brother whom she kept claiming was the promised Deliverer. Who could be more mad than a woman whose name meant “Bitter”?

So, except for certain elders of Levi and their womenfolk who respected Aaron and his deceased parents, she received little attention these days.

Recovering her self-control, Miryam did what she always did when the rock of hard circumstances had yielded its last drop of sustenance--turn to El Shaddai, the Almighty Rock of Israel.

And a lot of good it did her!

An hour’s bitter supplication produced nothing but brass heavens and utter silence.

Exhausted, she kept on for an hour more. Or was it two hours? She had no idea how much time passed, except that the Day Moon’s beams began to stand above her head when she looked out again upon the world and its wretchedness.

She saw something at her feet. A crumbled swallow’s nest. She knew it well. Day after day she had followed its progress, as swallows darted in and out, depositing a beaker of mud at a time, until little by little the nest began to form in the corner of her dooryard, just below the lintel.

But now her shaking of the hut had dislodged the nest, and it had fallen and all their work had gone for naught.

She stared at the broken nest, and it seemed it contained all her dreams and hopes for her oppressed people.

At that moment a boy was passing in the lane, herding a single, small goose with a stick to which a string was attached.

The goose had a mind of its own, and stopped to peck at something by Miryam’s door. Then it spied the nest, and it went for it.

“No, you don’t!” old Miryam cried, waving her hands, and the goose was frightened off.

“It’s only a swallow’s nest, why can’t she have it?”

Startled by the lad’s perfectly sensible question, Miryam settled down and gave him a steady look, without the anger that she would have awarded an adult who had addressed her in such a familiar way as this child.

“It’s my nest, child, or, I mean, it’s been something I’ve watched them build for days, and I won’t have it snatched away like that!”

The boy gazed at her, his big eyes seemingly taking her meaning. “Oh,” was all he said.

Miryam’s eyes clouded. “It was a lovely nest, not broken like you see it now. I was looking forward to the fledglings. I really could see them straining their beaks to gather the food their mother and father brought. Then soon they would be flapping their little wings, getting ready for flight into the wide circle of the heavens. It was a delight to think of, but now--now--they’ve given up and gone and--”

Suddenly, the grieving prophetess felt her ragged sleeve tugged. Surprised, she found the lad at her elbow, and he was pointing skywards.

“No, Madam, look!”

Miryam looked up. It was hard to see now, her eyes had a hole burned into each, so that she could see only around the edges of the world. But as she moved what vision she had, she caught a glimpse of flitting swallow wings, a multitude of them. Never had she seen so many. And what were they doing, flying about like that?

It wasn’t her imagination, for the boy was there to watch with her, as the swallows formed giant letters in the sky, which dissolved almost immediately into succeeding letters, as they spelled out recognizable words!

“I am Yeshua, the Aleph and the Tau, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last! Behold, I am coming soon, riding on the back of a beast both lion and a lamb!

Suddenly, the birds flew off out of sight. “Yeshua,” riding on the backs of a lion and a lamb? What could that mean? Astonished, Miryam turned to the lad, to thank him for telling her to look up when he did, but there was no boy and goose. They too had vanished.

Shaking her head and muttering, she went back indoors, and from habit she went and did what she did every single day of her life, she felt into the secret place where they kept the ring of the daughter of the Per-aa and the few remaining silver pieces of the payment for nursing given her mother by the princess, the woman her mother called “Bath-YAH,’ meaning Daughter of God, because while a pagan Mizraimite she had befriended God’s People and saved the Deliverer’s life when he was a baby.

It was there--no one had stolen it. Satisfied, she would have drawn out her hand, but the ring came out too, fixed on her finger.

Miryam paused. This was just too strange. First the message written by the birds in the sky, then this! She had not unwrapped the ring. It had been unwrapped, and it was now on her finger. She tried to draw it off, but it resisted.

Alarmed but unafraid, she thought fast. “It must be the wickedness of the gods that are inscribed on it, that it should catch my finger like this and not let go!”

Yet she was equal to the test. She would think little of cutting off her finger to remove the ring if she had to. But a little fatty grease would ease it off without taking that trouble, she knew. But where was she going to get fat or grease? She kept no livestock. She could afford to buy no oil.

Would anyone give her a dab of oil? But who could afford to keep a household lamp anymore these days?

Still wearing the ring, she went to the dooryard to think, and was going to stand there when a voice nearly knocked her flat. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even audible. But it was Almighty God.

Arise, Daughter of Amram! I am the Lord, the Aleph and the Tau, He who came to you on the wings of the birds. The wicked king is dead and a worse king has taken his place--a king whose heart I have prepared to turn to stone, that My glory might be seen again in the earth. Sell the ring of the Per-aa’s daughter to the trader who passes by the necropolis every third day of the month on his way to the port. When he makes an offer that is good, I will release the ring, and with the silver he gives you will buy Aaron’s freedom as well as sustenance for your living until such time as you will have provision given you by the people. The wicked will gladly sell him, since he is too old to make bricks and must be killed if he will not die. Then Aaron will go and seek his lost brother, and I will direct his steps. For now I will arise and have mercy on Zion, for the set time to favor her has come.”

Swallows! Beautiful Crested Swallows! They had returned and were everywhere, it seemed, or at least Miryam’s tear-flooded eyes saw nothing but swallows as she stumbled out from the dark hut of dead dreams into the glorious light to do the bidding of Almighty God.

“--the set time to favor her has come”! The words echoed again and again in Miryam’s heart, a never-ending litany that she would carry to her grave on a far, cloud-crested mountain.

At the compound opposite the great royal city of Ain Pher a guard from the entrance, the Pylon of Reception, crossed the burning stretches of filth-littered ground and found the Hebrew elder he was seeking, to give him his walking orders. The man was free to go.

Aaron was so surprised he was struck dumb. He who had a golden tongue since his youth, able to make Mizraimite lions lie down peaceably with Hebrew lambs, now found no words to express his astonishment and bewilderment.

“Where will I go?” he blurted out finally, when the words came back to his tongue.

The guard pointed toward the exit, the Pylon of Shipping, out of which bricks, never human souls, streamed forth in an endless river of loaded wagons to build the glories of Mizraim.

“But say nothing of what you saw or did here, Hebrew!” the guard warned him. “If you say one word, we will hear of it and you will be dragged back and impaled on a stake in sight of your brethren. That will teach them not to lie about all the joy and good luck you were given here.”

“Joy”? “Luck”? Those were really the two supreme gods of Mizraim, though not officially deified and set up in temples as mighty golden images. Everyone, including Aaron’s people worshipped them from the palace to the brickyard.

Aaron, supported by helping hands, climbed out of the muck and mire of the brickyard pit which stretched farther than his eye could see these days. Led by the guard he tottered toward the freedom promised him at the Pylon of Shipping. He had entered the compound a young, virile man. Now he was going forth old and emaciated, a wreck of a human being. And it crossed his mind, “How was he to live now? What on earth would he do? He only knew brick-making--the Mizraimites had seen to that.

He couldn’t help mumble his distress, “Where will I go? What will an old man do?”

Hearing him, the guard laughed. “That’s your business--just go, Hebrew! Go before we change our minds!”

Watching the old man stagger through the ranks of guards toward the bridge that spanned the moat ringing the compound wall, the guard fingered the silver piece he had been given as his payment for setting this worthless old stick of a man free. It was well worth the risk of being found out by the camp taty--with a silver piece he could spend all night and the next day in a inn with all the wine, women, and song he had dreamed of but could not have afforded on a guard’s wage.

One night and a day of bliss--for that he would risk his life. He had Joy and Luck on his side this day! Goddesses beyond peer, Joy and Luck would give him unspeakable pleasure, and what did he care about the morrow? Let the morrow take care of itself!

The guard handed the papyrus of release to the proper official at the Pylon, and Aaron was allowed to continue walking out of the compound, no one preventing him. Just beyond the bridge a Hebrew woman approached.

She had come from the Pylon of Reception just now and had hurried as best she could at her age to the compound exit. Having seen her so often, Aaron knew her at once as his sister Miryam.

“I brought your freedom, and the thieves demanded a king’s ransom, thirty and thirty and thirty and thirty pieces of silver!” she hissed in his ear as she came up. “It was a good thing I didn’t bring what is left of the princess’s payment to mother, they’d have gotten that too! Say nothing, and let us go quickly from this midden of the Per-aa!”

Refraining from protesting his liberty for the moment, Aaron did as told.

They walked fast for old people until they were out of eyeshot of the compound guards in the watchtowers set all along the great walls. No one now would come running to seize them and drag them back. Aaron was free! Free at last! Free to starve and fade away, that is. Free to do nothing but die, to be sure.

He still did not understand why. “Why did you buy me back?” he lamented to his sister. “They need me in the camp. The old ones who are dying, they need what you bring every day. They die happy in my arms then. Now what will they do? The flies will feed on their eyes and open mouths, and no one will brush them away. Oh, my sister, you did wrong to bring me out! Wrong!”

Now Aaron was over three score years of age, and the camp was all he had really known.

Ignored by Miryam who was furiously angry because she had so few silver pieces left, he was still asking and lamenting when they reached the hut of Jokabed and Amram in the Ain Pher ghetto.

“What will I do now?” he was muttering with tears streaming down his face as she led him into the hut. He stood, overwhelmed by desolation, his white-haired head bowed. Even Miryam’s stout heart turned over at the sight. But she remained resolute.

“You’ve been a minister to death long enough. Now be a minister to life. Go find our lost brother!”

“Wh-wh-what?”

“Jeruham! Who else? You must go and seek him out, and then bring him to us, for he is the deliverer God has promised our beloved people.”

Jeruham, the lost brother, he who was called Mosheh by the Mizraimites, a deliverer of Holy Israel? His face showed what he thought, and he shook his head slowly. “Yes, that is right,” he said in the spirit of conciliation, “but whither has he gone, dear sister? It was so long, long ago that he left us. How shall I find him? I am too old to wander the world in search of him. He is maybe dead in the desert. Many people think so.”

Miryam was prepared for this response. With the Omnipotence of Almighty God backing her up, she wasn’t going to let Aaron’s pitiful weakness stop the Golden Plan of Deliverance in its tracks.

So she told him everything the Almighty had done to secure Aaron’s release so he could be sent to find Mosheh and bring him back.

Aaron could not deny Miryam’s account. It was new to him, but he had never known her to speak untruth. He was very impressed by the power of God in it, but that same Power troubled him increasingly, for what next would that Power do? Who could contain it?

Everything he had labored to make of the dire circumstances of life into which his people had been thrust, all the conciliation he had yearned to see established between the two nations, his and the Mizraimite, was now cast into grave doubt.

It was another road that now thrust itself up into his fading vision. A road that led to the abyss, as far as he could see! And Miryam claimed the Almighty was leading his people that way!

Maybe, maybe--but that wasn’t good enough. No, they had best cling to the ground they knew, lest they perish in the desert with poor Jeruham-Mosheh who, by accounts, had also claimed to be led by the Almighty once upon a time to do the terrible things he had done.

Murderer! That was all he turned out to be! He had murdered a Mizraimite who was applying the bastinado to a Hebrew laborer, then fled---disgracing his family, a holy family among the people and tribe of Levi. No, Miryam and her way were quite wrong, an unacceptable risk.

So, thinking this way, he did as he had always done when thrust between a rock and a hard place and forced to choose one of the two evils.

“Ah--ah------all is well---I say, ‘tis well---as for that---it may be---yes, all is well, I say, as far as it goeth, but--”

Acquainted with his delaying tactics, Miryam cut the process short. “But nothing!” she exploded. She wagged her finger at him, which neither could see since it was so dark in the unlighted hut. “Don’t you dither about with me, Aaron!” I won’t have it! You’re going to go find our brother. It’s your family duty as the elder son, not mine. And, you can’t deny, the Almighty One has commissioned you to do it. Would you oppose the Holy One of Israel?”

Only viewed by six invisible angels, the Black Watch of a time to come, Aaron’s face was absolutely mortified as Miryam’s rebuke sank in. He began to weep helplessly. “No, I did not mean that--I just do not see my way clear to leave---I just do not see.”

Miryam was beside herself. “Oh! You are just a doddering old man, my brother! With no sense, just a big heart that loves everybody and can’t tell a Hebrew from a Mizraimite anymore. You’d embrace an uncircumcised Amalekite or Ammonite too, wouldn’t you? We’re all just one big family to you! Let’s all just put away our little differences and try to get along, and quit squabbling about fine details concerning worship and gods and emphasize our common humanity, irrespective of anything else! That’s your way, isn’t it? Well, it’s not MINE. And it’s not a holy God’s? He may be no respector of persons, but he does divide sheep from goats. And WE are the holy sheep, and THEY are the idolatrous goats. Sorry! But that is the way El Roi sees it. And they, who have a choice, have chosen to remain goats. Hell is what they’ve chosen too, and I can’t prevent their going if they’ve chosen it, so why try to include them in holy Israel. That’s an abomination! An abomination in the sight of El Roi--mixing the holy with the unholy--UGH!”

Now Miryam could go on this way indefinitely, once started.

Aaron, his ears burning, was sorry he had ever been bought and set free.

“It won’t work, this way of yours, brother!” Miryam cried, her voice carrying all the way out and down the lane called Almond Tree, because an almond had once grown and flowered there in better times, reputed to have been planted by Joseph when he said farewell to a beloved friend who was going on a long journey to Gilead, meaning that when the spring came they would be never be parted again. “It has been tried a thousand times by fools with good intentions and tender hearts like yours, dear brother! And utterly failed! You see, God is holy and righteous, and He chose a holy and righteous people to serve and follow and worship Him alone. Those Mizraimites! We can’t make peace with them, don’t you see? They hate and loathe us with an eternal hatred and repulsion, because we worship the One Invisible God. They’ll never accept us in return as long as we spit on false gods. You know that perfectly well, if you’d admit it! So--so--so go get Mosheh to put things right here. God wants to deliver us from the heel of the Per-aa! Obey the will of God! Are you going to or not? Or will I have to go in the place of a man? Say now or never! I’ve had all I will take from the likes of you!”

Even now Aaron tried to put the best construction on the hopeless brick he saw Miryam was trying to make of things. “Oh, I know all that, sweet sister. But--”

“There you go again!” she spat out. She flung off into the gloom, for once in her life holding back things she could have said to an elder of Israel that he richly deserved. But even an eldest sister, sorely tried in the furnace of affliction, was not entitled to say them, she knew.

The night came on in the unhappy household. Aaron prayed where he sat on the floor, then leaned over to the bare ground and fell asleep. Meanwhile, his sister strode about in the tiny court beyond the back door.

Presently, all was changed. God, who had spoken to Miryam, spoke to Aaron in a dream.

“Aaron, my son. Listen to your elder sister. Go into the wilderness of Midian and find Mosheh your brother.”

Aaron’s eyes shot open in the pitch dark. After a time, with nothing happening, his lids shut upon the darkness.

Then God spoke again, repeated His word.

Aaron sat bolt upright this time, knocking over something in the dark.

Sensing something, Miryam had come in.

“Aaron? What is the matter?” she called out. “Aaron?” Her foot struck something, and she reached down with old bones making cracking sounds and touched something that felt alive.

Rearing back, she thought it must be a night-roving snake or scorpion, though it was only the staff of Aaron, left behind over forty years before in the house, a staff he had fashioned himself out of the gnarled trunk of a dead almond on the street outside the house.

Considered worthless, it had never been offered for sale. Forgotten, it had flowered again and again in the gloom of the hut--for it was almond, a most splendid spring flowering tree--yet no one, except a guarding angel perhaps, had seen its blossoms promising rebirth in the midst of death and darkness.

Not about to let a Mizraimite take over her house, Miryam fought back, giving whatever it was a vicious kick, and the staff flew across the floor, rebounding back into the lap of Aaron.

“My staff!” Aaron cried. It was the return of an old, old friend--or it seemed so at that moment, for he had no idea how it got to him, despite all the racket Miryam had been making.

“Get up, brother!” Miryam shrieked. “There’s a serpent abed with you!”

“No, no, dear sister. It’s only my dear old staff. Thank you, Lord of all! I shall have a dear friend to help me rise up and to sit down. I missed it so terribly in the camp. Words can’t say!”

“Oh!” Miryam expostulated. “So that’s it! Well, back to business! As I was saying--”

Aaron’s voice, for once, assumed a commanding tone. “Silence, dear sister! The God of our fathers has spoken to me. He said I must go and find our brother in the land of Midian.”

Miryam danced up and down at the news. “See! See! Just what I told you! Bur you wouldn’t listen to me! You wouldn’t listen to old Miryam! Oh, no! But now you heard from God Himself, so you can’t deny what I was telling you was the truth! Glory be! I’ll get you on that donkey to Midian if it’s the last thing I do, brother! Hurry! You start at once. Now where’s the donkey? Where’s the bread for your journey. Oh, no matter! Let the Almighty figure that out. Just start walking in obedience, brother, and God will provide your mount and your bread, just as he provided the enormous price for your redemption from the compound. What he did he can do again. Just start walking! Angels will carry you on their golden wings if there’s no donkey! Wouldn’t you like that, brother? Are you listening? Get going! There’s no time to waste!”

Miryam stopped to catch her breath, and Aaron, he was trying to get up with the aid of his beloved staff.

“Midian!” Miryam thought. “Where--what is Midian?” She knew little about the place, because everybody knew there was so little worth knowing. It was a byword for far-off, unspeakable desolation and worthlessness.

“I’ve been given the accursed land of Midian!” was an expression used when someone meant he had been suckered into accepting in payment something absolutely devoid of value, like the title to what was supposed to be a rich meadow but turned out to be a stretch of burning ground enlivened only with a parched waterhole in which a dog had died.

“So that’s where he’s been hiding out all these years from the Per-aa’s men. They searched the whole world for him, I know, but they wouldn’t go to Midian--it’s too out of the way, too hot, too much a nothing and an emptiness. Not even the caravans would think of going there, and they go everywhere else.

What would anyone but the Midianites want with so many hot rocks and big piles of drifting sand and flying serpents and scanty grass enough for only a few scrawny sheep and goats?

Midian of the Cushites! Of course! How cunning Mosheh is! It was the perfect refuge for him! He’d never be disturbed there! For who could care about him if he went to a place like that? He would be as good as dead!”

Word spreads fast as wind-driven fire in a close-packed ghetto made up mostly of finger-thick walls of thatch and a little mud plaster. With daybreak, the first sleepy eyes noticed something different about the abode of the prophetess Miryam.

It was always a place of curious glances, for it provided much entertainment. She was always kicking a hole in a wall, or setting up a sign with lime on her fingers for brushes and paint, exhorting the people to love and obey the Almighty and to hope for His promised deliverer. What would this eccentric, old spinster do next?

Thus, someone with a long, poking nose and raven-sharp eye looked--there is a women like this one in every kindred and people--and saw the door ajar, and peeking in overheard just enough to tell the eavesdropper that a man was in Miryam’s house. Scandal!

No, not at all, for the disappointed person soon heard Aaron’s name and everyone knew it in the ghetto. It had to be Israel’s last leader, the only one who spoke for the Hebrew these days, even though he was incarcerated for life in a brick-making compound.

The raveness hurried off, her black rags flapping like tattered wings and pausing here and there all down the lane to drop off tidbits, then off to another neighborhood just like this one of Miryam’s, and then to another, and so on.

“Aaron’s home!” was soon the news in every household, and the sound of scurrying feet filled the tiny, criss-crossed lanes and all the connecting mazy lanes that crossed them in turn until it seemed the entire enclave was headed toward the hut of Amram and Jokabed.

In a few moments the shanty was flooded with well-wishers. The overflow filled the lane, then the sagging roofs. Still more people pressed into the mass of bodies until people could hardly breathe. But they were used to that, and no one complained. It was wonderful to be there. That was all they felt. Wonderful to be present to welcome dear, old Aaron, Israel’s sainted advocate, back home for good.

Other news, not so welcome, spread just as quickly, to the effect Miryam was kicking Aaron out of the house, so that he would go and seek the long-lost Mosheh whom no one in his right mind would want to see returned to Mizraim.

Shock and disbelief engulfed the people. “Aaron--leaving so soon for parts unknown? Oh, no! It cannot be! Miryam is cruel, she can’t be allowed to do this to our beloved Aaron! Someone--someone with authority--speak to her, talk her down, hold dear Aaron back from going. Someone, help!”

Donah and Huah, enterprising twin brothers who had some business with the last Per-aa’s administration and now had some business with the new Per-aa, stepped into the gap for the sake of Aaron and his people against Miryam. Tsiph’oni and Tseph’a, their wives, urged that she be humbled.

“Don’t tithe a single grain of corn to them!” they cautioned the people, who had all struggled to bring some gift along. “She’ll use it to provision him, and send him away! No, keep it back, and let us deal with the woman personally. We’ll stop this bit of nonsense of hers in its tracks!”

Pushing into the shack, the pair confronted Miryam.

“We hear that you are sending our beloved brother out into the wilderness on a wild goose chase! We don’t countenance any such thing! We hear from God too! If He wanted Aaron to go as you say, then He would have confirmed the word with us first. After all, we are men, and you are just a woman. God always speaks to men first! Everyone knows that! If He can’t find a servant among the menfolks, then maybe He will condescend to speak to a mere women, but he has plenty of good men like us available, so, you see, there is no need whatsoever for Him to speak to your likes--er, to you, Daughter of Amram. Now, desist on this matter. Aaron is not leaving us. Absolutely not!”

Miryam was prepared for Donah and Huah too. She knew them well. Expensive girdles encircling their wide bellies, hair and beards sleeked with oil, mouths always munching on something, and ears cocked for the latest news, the brothers had a way of getting around and keeping abreast of everything.

“Windbags! Slippery tongues! Cockatrices!!” she returned to their faces. “You dare set yourselves up this way to my face? You are nothing, the stinking dust and blowflies off the land of Midian before the Almighty, though you are something--you miserable, scraping pulse-worms--before the Per-aa!”

Stung to the quick, the brothers were equally hot with words, protesting her charge of complicity with the enemy by inferring that Miryam wanted to get Aaron out of the way so she could set herself up as ruler of Israel in his place.

It was an old charge, and Miryam could fling the dirt back as hard as she received it.

“Ha!” she crowed. “You’ll have to do better than that. God has spoken twice, and both Aaron and I have heard him. Haven’t you, brother?”

Put on the spot, unable to deny the truth of Miryam’s words, Aaron could only dither.

Now Donah and Huah were masters of demagoguery. Seeing no advantage in Aaron’s words confirming his sister’s, they turned to the judgment of the holy assembly of the brethren.

“He’s not to go! Say, O Israel! Say!”

The crowd roared, then took up a chant. “Aa-ron! Aa-ron! House of Gladness, House of Gladness!”

Aaron, whatever he was trying to say, was completely drowned out. Miryam too could not be heard as she protested their dirty tactics.

After a time, when the hubbub died down, Donah and Huah held the center stage as they harangued the crowd concerning the matter, and how things, by this sign of Aaron’s reappearance, were going to get better for Israel. Truly, if they played their wari wari right, they would find their abodes transformed into houses of gladness and prosperity. Even though conditions in the whole country had become difficult due to the prevailing, poor crops and troubles with weather and certain devouring insects and animals, the new Per-aa cared for all people and cared for the Hebrew nation.

“This new ruler of the land, what is he like?” someone close to the brothers inquired.

This was the brothers’ special province! Happy to inform the people, they regaled the crowd with information they had gleaned first-hand from the Per-aa’s exalted Ministry of Ma’at, where they had recently gone by invitation to speak concerning the needs of the Hebrew people in the present distress of the countryside. In return, they would be informed of a few alterations that would be made regarding the administration of all Hebrews.

Aaron did not want to hear any more. Mosheh’s head was bent down, and he was gasping for breath, his hand clawing at his chest, and tears were streaming down on the tent floor like rain. “I was consumed in the qu-qu-qu-QUICK of my innermost being, and grown so faint I could not stand, but then a Voice in the flame called out to me from the--from the--”

He broke off the account entirely, but the Midianite brethren of Mosheh must have understood, Aaron realized, for at this point they had all drawn up their gaudy robes to shield their faces.

Mosheh, when he found a measure of renewed spirit, returned to his account. The night came on, and Mosheh made no sign of retiring, nor did anyone else. Aaron, exhausted by now, listened to word after word of God as it poured forth from the Voice in the flame.

Mosheh’s face showed utmost pain, bewilderment, and even obstinacy.

“‘I cannot d-d-d-d-d-d-DO this thing You ask!’ I said to the Almighty, when he told me I must go to Per-aa and demand the release our sorely oppressed people for a sacrifice to the Most High in the wilderness.”

“How could you s-s-s-s-s-SPEAK like that to God Almighty?” Aaron echoed in shock, but no one was listening to him. It was Mosheh who held the floor.

“Finally, the Almighty said that you, elder brother, would be my mouth before the Per-aa, since my tongue has grown halting and I am poor in speech. And He took my rod and gave me signs. My rod will turn into a deadly serpent when you cast it down for me, my brother! And if I put my hand here--” He put his hand into his garment. “--then draw it out thus--” He drew it out, and it was covered with leprosy, so that everyone leaped back in horror, though Zipporah held to her place at his side, watching him intently. “It is sorely afflicted as you can see, but I have only to do this--”

And he put his hand back, then drew it out again. “--and it is restored to perfect health and strength, as you see.” But a better thing by far is that God t-t-t-t-t-t-t-TOLD me His Name. He said He is Yeshua, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, the Aleph and the Tau.””

Aaron’s mouth fell open. He could scarcely take it in. Finally, his golden tongue nearly losing all its ability, he stammered out, “What--what is the Name He gave unto you, brother?”

Mosheh wasn’t listening to Aaron and was not about to repeat himself. Somehow he was back on the high slopes of the Mount of God--staring awestruck at a bush that was burning but was not consumed by a brilliant flame of a sparkling whiteness of a bright morning star that no human eyes could have ever seen on Earth after the East Gate closed on Paradise.

And it was a Light that searched out the darkness, piercing to the very marrow of the bones after dividing the sinews and the flesh.

Who could stand before such a Search Light? Yet it was the sense of Ineffable Sweetness and Winsomeness that was most penetrating. It was that goodness, sweet beyond any honey on earth, that broke him to pieces.

“Mosheh, Mosheh,” the Voice in the flame sweetly called.

“Here am I,” said Mosheh, trembling but too fascinated and ravished in his spirit to flee for his life.

“Don’t come any closer,” the Voice advised. “Take off the sandals from your feet, for where you stand is holy. And know this. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And I am the Yeshua, the First and the Last, the Aleph and the Tau.”

The blinding Radiance and the Presence of so much sweetness and so much terror was just too much for a mortal. Mosheh hid his face, and he did so before Aaron’s astonished gaze.

Later, it was days before Aaron pieced it all together. He came to understand that God had commissioned Mosheh as the Deliverer of captive Israel. Moreover, he, Mosheh’s elder brother, was the servant of the younger brother. He must attend Mosheh as he went to the court of the Per-aa to ask release of God’s people from the hand of the Oppressor.

Aaron quailed at the thought. The Per-aa would never release the people of Jacob willingly. Never! Mosheh, too, knew that very well, being forewarned by the Almighty that the Per-aa would refused to release the people. Yet Almighty God had promised to do great signs and wonders that would ultimately force the Per-aa to give them up.

All this was a bit much for Aaron to take in. He finally begged leave to get some air, and he stepped outside the tent and he happened upon Jonathan, Mosheh’s dashing grandson with the sartorial flair and the silvered tongue, standing and relieving himself shamelessly like a goat a foot or two from the door of the tent. But this show of bad manners and poor training was not so bad as the discovery that his grandnephew was utterly innocent of holy circumcision.

Aaron was so shocked that he could not help blurt out, “Dear grand-nephew, why has not your honored father Covenanted you? You are far too grown to be going about like a pagan idol-worshipper.”

Grandnephew Jonathan laughed as he pulled his pom pons and colored garments around himself. “Forsooth, that is a custom of the old times, beloved grand-uncle. We are children of Abraham’s loins too, and Father Abraham did not require it of us, since we of this fair land are favored above the rest of his children.”

The grand-uncle’s face growing purple in places, Aaron requested more information on the point. “But surely you have not considered something. All children and kindred of Abraham must receive the sign of the Covenant if they expect to share in the Promises of his holy line. Aren’t you afraid you will be accounted pagan by the Lord and miss the wonderful blessings of the children of Abraham?”

The youth gazed at Aaron with surprise. “But my father never told us that. Besides, our images have never commanded us to do anything like that to ourselves. We’ll follow them if that is what your El Elyon requires, for our people know that as long as we keep the morning and the evening vessels apart and the women’s skirts from touching them, we are clean and righteous before the gods in heaven!”

Then his grandnephew took a little pouch, removed some ill-smelling and very potent weed, rolled the weed and lit it with an ember from the campfire. Taking a long drag of the narcotic, he handed it to Aaron, who waved his hands and stepped away.

Aaron, hearing, seeing, and smelling enough, went back into the tent. These half-bred, half-baked Midianites! The more he saw of them, the more he suspected their heathenish ways were those of Gypsies. He had known many Gypsies in the compound, and they remained cheerful, colorful people in the darkest circumstances. He had heard they had once been a great, ruling people somewhere in the northeast, but there was no sign of that now, so it must have been an old wive’s tale.

Finally, when Mosheh was satisfied that Aaron understood it all, even the matter of why his family and brethren went uncircumcised--they would when be when they fully understood the workings of the Covenant, he advised his brother--he turned to Aaronr as Israel’s new commander. “We must go! I will take my wife and children, and we will go together to Mizraim and to the court of the Per-aa.”

Aaron could hear the authority in Mosheh’s voice. It was utterly unlike the old Mosheh, who had commanded armies in the field. This authority was so strange, yet so compelling. He, Aaron, wanted to follow Mosheh despite the matter he had discussed with the grandson. Before Mosheh he felt like he was the younger, not the elder, and that Mosheh, in a real way, was the founding father of the Hebrew people, just as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been founding fathers of the people and nation of Israel--only Mosheh was somehow the greater personage!

The Midianites must have sensed this, for the laughter and mockery in their eyes came seldom now, and it was replaced by a profound fear and an awe of Mosheh. His wife bowed deeply before him as she ministered to his wants, and his brethren did the same. They seemed to wait on every word and glance of his. Yet he did not seem to notice all the signs of respect. He lived in the past.

“I am a foul, crawling b-b-b-b-b-b-BEAST before them, less than a gnawing, boring pulse-worm on a leek or tomato in Mizraim! They are a good people, I have no complaints at how they have served me. I have ruined them, poor c-c-c-c-c-c-c-CHILDREN, yet they did not drive me out as they should. Now I am a wasted old man, with nothing to pass to the fruit of my loins. But still they do not drive me out as an accursed thing. God has been angry and poured his wrath on me all these years. Yes, they are a good people, and I am a base w-w-w-w-w-WORM!”

“How very abject my brother has become among the strutting peacocks of Midian!” Aaron marveled again and again. “But if he is become so debased in his own eyes, how can he lead a nation mighty in numbers like the Hebrews, or face the wrath of the mighty Per-aa in all his pride and glory? I do not know how this could be the Deliverer God has chosen. He cannot even lead a flock of Midianite sheep properly!”

As if Mosheh divined Aaron’s doubt and hesitation, Mosheh turned to him, his countenance changing quickly. “There is a third sign I can show you.” His voice was hard and angry, and his face was fierce, no longer soft, weepy, and lamblike. Mosheh took a water pot ritually reserved for the evening and overturned it with a kick, and the contents splashed over Aaron’s feet--water, but water that turned to blood in an instant.

Crying out, Aaron stumbled to his feet, and then Mosheh and the others laughed, for they had seen the sign before.

Yet even holy signs couldn’t hold the camp’s attention for very long. At the drop of a turban the young men would leap up to dance, and so it happened now. The young men leaped up and were performing, wildly swinging pom pons and inflated bladder balloons while the women cheered and rustled their ritually unclean flounced petticoats.

By this time Aaron was grown very homesick for plain Hebrew company. When Mosheh turned to him amidst the celebration of exactly what Aaron could not make out, Mosheh’s voice was merry. “We will go now, you and I, and deliver the holy nation of Israel?” Mosheh had a hard grip on Aaron’s shoulders, the kind that crushed if any resistance was offered.

Aaron now was the meek one in the grasp of a magnificent lion. His eyes and head whirling with the dancers and feeling dizzy, he nodded, perhaps not vigorously enough in his distracted condition..

“No, “ Mosheh said, shaking his head, his eyes glowing with indignation. “Why are you so reluctant to obey the Almighty? Shame on you! You aren’t absolutely convinced. I can’t have that! You must believe for certain that everything is just as you have been told it is and serve me willingly, not as a forced slave. Now here is another sign that will surely convince you that the power of the Almighty is with me.”

Aaron’s poor, tired feet did another frantic, soft shoe shuffle as Mosheh threw down his staff and it became a huge, dangerous reptile, its jaws sprung wide open like a steel trap, hissing, ready to strike. Mosheh seized its tail, and it stretched out stiff in an instant and became a wooden staff again.

“That is sufficient, “ Aaron pleaded, Three terrible signs of great power, and he could not deny having witnessed the Finger of God operating on Mosheh’s behalf. “Wonderful, my brother!” Mosheh shouted. “I’m glad you came to your senses befor

e I had to call for a whirlwind to pick you up and sail you upside down over the top of the mount and back. The Most High said it would not be necessary for you, but I asked the power of it anyway because Zipporah’s people here would increase their faith by it.”

He clapped his arm around the wincing, trembling shoulders of the newly-made true believer. Aaron peeped out only, “But my dear brother, is this not a good time to circumcise your sons and brethren? God requires it of his Chosen, you know. Surely, they understand everything after all this talk we have had.”

Mosheh gave Aaron a warning look for his trouble. “No, not yet!” he breathed hard into Aaron’s ear. “And not another word about the matter. They have tender ears, and sharp, these children of holy Midian. Even though they have few rules governing them, regarding mostly their pots and vessels, and the defiling touch of women’s skirts, you may upset them, and then I won’t be able to protect you! They may dress like women, these men of theirs, but their hearts are fierce as lions when they are offended.”

And that very day the paltry little camp of Mosheh was struck, and they and Mosheh’s hashish-smoking, uncircumcised sons and brethren were on their way to Mizraim, by way of Jethro’s camp, of course. Having served for many years as a slave serves a master, Mosheh also deferred to his father-in-law as priest of the Most High to the people and land of Midian.

Mosheh’s new career as God’s man against the might of Mizraim, as the Deliverer of Captive Israel from Oppression, was to go as Father Jethro--who had seen plenty things go awry in the affairs of men--suspected. He could see very well that his foolish witted son-in-law would land himself in a world of trouble, presuming himself called of God, when in fact he had drunk too much fermented goat’s milk and seen and heard things spun from ague or fever of the head. As for the signs, they were powerful enough, but the magicians of Mizraim were world-famous for such things. Would they be impressed? Jethro thought not.

But how was he to keep peace in his household? His eldest daughter, Zipporah the comely pillar of his tent had lost her head too, and she was now supporting Mosheh in his madness. It was time to let both go, and they would have to learn the hard way.

Someday the inexperienced, young couple would be back at his tent door, old Jethro reasoned, with their tails dragging. It was only a matter of time. He could wager a flock of sheep he was right.

“Go in peace, son of Amram,” he said to Mosheh, knowing full well there could be no peace for such a clown under the dome of heaven.

And Jethro was right. Things did go as the crafty, old Jethro expected. They had no more than got to a caravansary on the edge of Midian that took in caravans that came from north and south and turned toward Mizraim when disaster struck. Unwittingly, Mosheh strode before the little caravan like the conquering hero he had been forty years before.

A quick head fever toppled Mosheh. Instead of reigning at the inn like a rube Midianite potentate he lay there a dying man. Having watched this man closely, the keen Zipporah discerned the cause of the Almighty’s wrath. If she wanted to remain a wife and not become a widow, she had to do something quickly no woman should have to do to grown sons.

How was she going to get them to submit? It proved simple. She threatened them with wives of her choosing that would cut off their manhoods if they found their bridegrooms still possessing pagan foreskins. After her threat, they suddenly became very meek, indeed.

Ordering them to lie down on the bed, throwing a cloth over their faces, she took a flint knife and accomplished what Mosheh had long put off doing, though he knew full well the God of the Covenant required it of all male Hebrews in order for them to share in the rights and the blessings of Abraham’s line.

Whipping the cloth off the groaning faces of her sons, her eyes averted from their shamed and outraged expressions, she took the foreskins and threw them on her dying husband’s body spread on the bed next to her sons’. Immediately, life was restored to him. She saw with her own eyes the Almighty hand of wrath immediately lifted off. Only then did she collapse slowly to the floor between the two beds and lie there until he called to her to bring him water.

After that close call, Zipporah no longer had the heart to continue the journey, and neither did his son and grandson. She begged off, saying that her aged father was maybe ill and calling to her. Knowing full well the cause of his near death, Mosheh did not argue with her. He had argued with her on the matter of circumcision, and what had that gained him?

Shaken to the core of his being by so close a call, Mosheh the lamb surfaced and got hold of the lion in him. Acting like a different person altogether, he and Aaron completed the journey to Mizraim, and there was a wonderful, brotherly peace and camaraderie between them for the first time. Freed of Midianite influences, their fellowship was like precious, fragrant oil poured on them both so lavishly that it ran down their garments and covered their feet. Like David and Jonathan of old, their hearts were knit together and Mosheh did nothing without Aaron’s full knowledge of it first.

About a day’s journey from Mizraim was a spring gushing straight out of solid rock. Here Mosheh stopped, not so much to take the refreshment but to worship God. “I was d-d-d-d-d-DYING here. There was no strength in my body to go on. There was no water, nor had there ever been water in this place. I had fallen on the ground and butted my head on a rock. I t-t-t-t-t-THOUGHT of all I had done in the land of Mizraim, and how my family had come to me, and how I had killed the taskmaster and yet my own people had mocked me sorely. I wanted only to die. Then water burst out of the rock just ahead and flowed to me where I lay.”

In this manner, the hand of God providing water and provision where there were none, he had reached safety in Midian. Yet his spirit still grieved sore within his breast, he told his brother. He had dreamed many great things for his people, only to see his dreams expire in the burning dust. Twoscore years of obscurity and fumbling about as a shepherd in Midian passed, and then the Almighty’s appearance in the burning bush changed everything. Everything!

Yet it was just as well Mosheh’s family was not along, for otherwise things went badly for them at the start, not with the elders of Israel, who believed once they heard Aaron’s words and witnessed the signs of Mosheh, but at the court of Per-aa.

Now wherever the Per-aa stepped on the ground, the Keepers of the Royal Feet spread a gold carpet before him. One day he was proceeding in regal dignity toward the entrance of the throne room when courtiers following behind gasped, drawing his attention. He turned and saw that all of his footsteps were marked with fresh blood on the carpet. Glistening red prints stretched all the way to his bedchamber.

He looked at his footprints, and at the same time felt a tense feeling, hard and burning, over his entire body. A magician was summoned, and the Per-aa commanded him to duplicate the feat with his own footprints, and he was able to do it. He too felt the strange, crackling current on his limbs, but for him it grew worse, so that he began to jerk about as if an invisible power had seized him.

Pher-Enath III ordered the magician out of his sight and the carpet drawn up and destroyed, and he went on as if nothing had happened, though the incident flew from tongue to tongue, ear to ear, throughout the royal palace.

It would have been a usual day except that he had declared a holiday for celebrating the anniversary of his first year of reign. Everything had been planned out, and giant festivities were in progress everywhere throughout the United Kingdom. Tens of thousands of marchers were gathered on the edges of the city, waiting the command to proceed down the processional way that led round the east wing of the royal palace where the Per-aa viewed the people from a roof pavilion.

To show the people how much he cared for them, he had announced a time of special audiences where common people could come and present petitions during a pause held between two massive parades and rounds of festivity and banqueting. The venue was the tamar palmed and flowered palace gardens fronting the River back of the palace.

Even outdoors the court maintained full ceremony and splendor. Flaming colors of massed flowers, the flash of jewels on the throats of noblewomen, gold gleaming from javelin blades, spotless white linen court robes, polished black Kushan bodies of guards standing ranked around each tall lotus pillar, their bodies naked but plumed with many-colored feathers and patterned animal skins, the performing musicians and dancers, the playing fountains--the splendor was overwhelming, the spectacle of so many hundreds of officials and royal guards standing in their appointed places beneath the brilliant canopies and waving banners was more than enough to take the heart out of the suppliants.

Some, no doubt, wondered if they would leave the scene alive, as the faces of the guards and the officials were so stern there was no hope for anyone who happened to bring offense onto those exalted grounds. The emphasis on points of etiquette, so practiced and polished, permitted no mistake or awkwardness to go unnoticed. Bows had to be performed just so. Salutations had to be given just so at the exact time. The machinery of court, running with absolute precision, crushed anyone that made the slightest slip. This was, beyond doubt, the most powerful court on the face of the Earth, and its greatest ruler was present.

Going forward among the terrified Mizraimite petitioners allowed to enter the grounds of the royal palace, no one questioning them like the others were questioned, Mosheh and Aaron reached the inner court of the Per-aa. Since they were among the first, they did not have long to wait, for the Per-aa was inclined to be open-handed and petitioners were seldom disappointed by what he awarded them.

When Mosheh and Aaron stepped forward in turn to the Grand Taty and the Cupbearer, who would tender their request to the Per-aa in turn, the Per-aa’s counselors and officials could see at once that there had been a grave mistake made by the guards who conducted the screening process.

These men had the appearance of Hebrews, for they did not wear the Per-aa’s special sign on their brows and wrists as proof that they sacrificed to him as god of the land. Many Hebrews had taken the sign, but still most had refused. These, obviously, were among the rebellious Hebrews.

“How is it that slaves are allowed to speak to the Per-aa?” a shocked Cupbearer said to the Grand Taty standing in the pavilion set in front of the Per-aa’s. “It has never been so in my tenure.”

Hearing this, before the Per-aa or an official could order them removed, Aaron, at a signal from his brother, spoke. “I am Hebrew, as you say, sire, but my freedom was bought after I was sent home from the compound where I fashioned the Per-aa’s bricks during the prime of my manhood. My brother here was never a slave except as an unweaned infant, as your fathers knew and you may know. Surely, you will listen to his words from my mouth, since he was once a prince in the royal palace.”

“But we know nothing about this brother of yours!” replied the Chief Cupbearer. “How dare you presume on us and the Royal Tribunal in this manner! What is his name, that we should know him and allow him audience with the god? A prince in the royal palace, did you say? It could not be, since he is Hebrew!”

The Grand Taty, older and longer in memory, nudged the Cupbearer. “Oh! I believe he’s that renegade prince, the Hebrew impostor Mosheh come back after all these years! My father knew him at court, the so-called son of Princess So-and-So--Hetepheres, I think her name was. He committed some offense or other and ran off, and he was thought perished in the wilderness. Could this be him? If it is we must do something quickly.”

The Chief Cupbearer standing guard by the Per-aa’s monteith of chilled wine was alarmed as much as the Grand Taty, so they were motioning to guards to come and pluck the two Hebrews out of the august company of the Per-aa when the older of the pair stepped quickly beyond the two officials and bowed before the Per-aa a short distance away. No one daring to remove him now, while the Chief Cupbearer and Grand Taty waited white-faced to see what would happen, Aaron lifted his head, and spoke to the Per-aa at a nod from the ruler. “Our petition, O king, is simply this: “Let my people go, says the God of Israel.”

This was the worst that could possibly happen. Heads would certainly roll now. Yet the Per-aa, after a single glance toward the Masgeh and Opeh and the other officers, showed no sign he was displeased. Instead, he smiled.

“You two will come with me,” said the Per-aa rising with his crook and mace held against his chest.

Flattening itself to the ground, silence fell on the whole assembly as if time had ceased. No one dared breathe.

The Per-aa dismissed the public audience and began the next parade with a sign from his hand, and he strode toward the palace between the crouching granite images of Mizraim’s chief gods. Scrambling to their feet, Mosheh and Aaron hardly knew what to think as they alone were permitted to follow the Per-aa.

At a safe distance, not knowing if their mistake at letting Hebrews reach the Per-aa’s person, the by now very fearful Grand Taty, Chief Cupbearer, and the taties of the civil service followed by the dozens, wisely stopping at the palace door to await developments.

His royal guards greeting him with rigid attention and stiff-armed thrusts upwards of their javelins, the Per-aa stepped, still smiling, into the palace through the towering doorway. Going in, he led the way to a flight of stairs, and then ascended, everyone halting to flatten himself or herself on the floor as he approached with Mosheh and Aaron in his train.

Instead of stopping in any of the grand halls of the addition called the New Palace, he continued on into the immense, old palace maze of Machitha called “The White Wall.”

Passing unattended, silent guard rooms, lizard-infested chambers of high officials, weedy, overgrown gardens, dry fountains, desolate courtyards and empty pools, a boarded-up throneroom and harem--all considered defiled by the Hyksos--he finally turned in at, he thought at random, a door which opened to an antechamber, little used since the unmentionable times before Ahmoseh I.

Storing such items as aging peacock-flywhisks and a pair of boom boxes, titanium tweeters brought in by a northern tribesman as a gift to Khian the Hyksos Per-aa that no one knew what to do with, it had once provided a Grand Taty a place for preparing himself for court appearances. “Zaphenath-Paneah” and the Hebrew “Betsel Kenapheka” had been inscribed beneath two outstretched wings, but the cartouche glyphs and Hebrew letters had been excised, leaving only the vague impressions.

It was a long walk to reach the antechamber, and the place was dusty, with an old royal chair decorated with Horus the Divine Hawk-god, its blue paint fading, and who knew what spiders and scorpions roaming about? Yet the Per-aa had seen fit to hold his private audience with two Hebrews in this particular room, which, of course, was well beyond the spy network that covered every inch of the New Palace.

Going to the chair, he seated himself, divesting himself of his royal insigne, the mace and crook, in order to be more comfortable in private.

It was one thing for the pharaoh to behave informally when he chose; but it was death for his subjects to presume to do the same in his presence. His subjects all understood this. Bowing low and repeatedly according to court ettiquette, Mosheh and Aaron entered the room, and the Per-aa spoke first.

“Shut the door securely.”

Aaron did as he was commanded.

“Secure the bolt, slave.”

Aaron obeyed.

Unused for several hundred years, it was a most strange place for a royal audience, and even the uncultivated Aaron could see that at a glance. Too small to be a Per-aa’s hall, yet holding three magnificent seals emblazoned on bronze shields attached to the high walls, emblems that somehow had escaped the notice of the chisel-wielding, expunging priests following Ahmoseh I’s victorious army, there was only one window that let in light, and it was cut high, affording just enough light to illuminate the cartouche of the Grand Taty on the shields and the accompanying Hebrew inscriptions:

God reigns over souls, ever blessing, unlocking doors. God sits on His holy throne. The princes of the people have gathered together, the princes of the God of Abraham, for the shields of the Earth belong to God. He is greatly exalted.

Yet the window was not too small that it could keep out the roaring of the multitudes celebrating the first year of Per-aa’s reign. Outside tens of thousands marched in unison to the thunder of Kushan drums, making the god-king’s sign with their marching bodies, while other tens of thousands cheered.

Here in a long-forgotten Grand Taty’s antechamber the next few moments of the royal audience seemed to drag like an eternity.

Amazed by the Per-aa’s action in calling them to private meeting, but in no position to ask the Per-aa’s reason, Aaron’s mind whirled as he tried to gather his thoughts and words as he gazed down at the stones of the floor, which were cracked and worn-looking as if a river of petitioners’ feet had gone to and fro over them in former days. Distracted by the roars that penetrated the gloom of the antechamber, he seemed at a loss for what to do. The Per-aa, paying no attention to the name-shields over his head or what personage they represented and sitting like carved stone in the chair, seemed to be growing impatient, though they had not been there more than a moment or two facing each other. What Aaron could not know is that the chair was turned to freezing cold and the Per-aa was regretting his impulsive move from the comfortable gardens just to satisfy his personal curiosity concerning Hebrews.

Normally, there would be many palace officials, with scribes writing furiously to catch every word of the Per-aa or some high official. Here there were no scribes and witnesses.

Closely confined, the Per-aa appeared to catch a whiff of something unpleasant from Mosheh and Aaron’s homespun sandals.

They had come directly from the sheep-and-goat infested warrens of their countrymen. The royal nose twitching, he looked at Aaron with repulsion and a certain interest playing in two eyes hard and black as the jetstone in his seal ring.

In turn, the Hebrews found the indecency of the Per-aa’s presence hard to bear, for he was virtually naked, his fine-spun linen robe furnishing no covering from the eyes.

The interview began as Aaron bowed and then addressed the Per-aa, repeating the request that he let the Hebrew people go free to perform a sacrifice to their God.

“What? Let your people go and perform a sacrifice in the desert to your god?” the Per-aa responded, shifting again as the chair turned from frigid cold to overly warm. “Who is this god of yours that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I don’t know this Lord, and I won’t let Israel go.”

What was the Per-aa looking at when he spoke those words? Aaron had to wonder, for this gaze seemed distant, fixed on things beyond the room. Mosheh, knowing the ways of the Per-aa and the court intimately, could have told him those things were, on his right hand, the proud, power-hungry priesthoods and temples, his rival wives and concubines and chief eunuchs of the women’s quarter, court officials and wealthy merchants, the nobility, and the army.

And on the Per-aa’s left hand? The people of Mizraim and the people of Israel, with bands of Romany traders and other foreigners wedged between. Yet which class, right or left, was exerting the strongest demands on the Per-aa’s attention when he spoke the fatal words? Which group was most effective in putting the finger on the raw nerve of his hidden anxiety? His feelings of insecurity and inferiority?

Worse, his fears of being demeaned before the eyes of all these powerful interests, with the despised Hebrews somehow getting the upper hand over him?

Second-Born in the royal household, reviled for his slight, not very noble physique, passed-over, humiliated, but suddenly, thanks to the death of the Crown Prince in a river cow hunting accident, thrust upwards from ignominy by the army and the Grand Taty to the throne and position of a god-king!

Despite all the evil he had suffered in his youth, all the envy and resentment that had grown darkly within his breast until he could scarcely breathe when the Crown Prince passed by without speaking to him, he had weathered all and taken everything the Crown Prince had thought was his alone.

He, not the First-born, was the favored child of destiny, Pher-Enath III, exalted among the gods! Now he would show the world the mistake it had made in slighting him.

And he would be sure to repay pain with pain to whomever repayment was due.

Yet Mosheh, if he had looked the Per-aa’s way, which he did not, would have perhaps seen and identified with the Per-aa’s third estate, which was far more potent and powerful than the first two on the right and left hand of Per-aa. Shadows of the past rose up, not from the chamber, but from his own sealstone of jet, which gleamed on his upraised hand as he held the crook and mace, symbols of his godship and power over the land.

They were only shadows, but they rose to intertwine with the serpents in the Per-aa’s own breast. Whipping about and locking together, there was no real difference between them.

They were all black, and fanged, and deadly with venom. Dreams deferred until they died and rotted, dreams poisoned with envy and spite until they grew long, black bodies with hoods and fangs, dreams that started out golden and bright with promise and hope and ended up monsters of malice and hate and fear, all waiting to strike.

As for the fourth estate, the Topaz, it had done its work extremely well. Power-hunger, ambition, ruthlessness, division, conspiracy, suspicion, rivalry, terror--all were flowering in Mizraim thanks to the Topaz and its resident scorpion. Flowing out from Mizraim, the whole world was being infected.

Forewarned by God that the Per-aa would harden his heart and refuse their request, Mosheh and Aaron stood their ground in the very own chamber of a Revealer of Dreams, but the Per-aa wasn’t having explanations.

He came at them with irony, accusing the brothers of seeking to make life too easy for his lazy, good-for-nothing-but-brickmaking people.

“You are idle, idle! You all want only to eat and sleep and make more babies for my nation to feed. Why, your women must sport with the clay figurines and then conceive, for we keep them separate from the men. Yet nothing avails! You increase and increase! And now, instead of work, you demand that I allow you to all go and play! That is the reason for this sacrifice of yours, for you are feigning piety!”

Meanwhile, the dynamics of the chamber, as well as the blue chair, were changing by the moment. The noise of the Per-aa worshipers entering the chamber seemed to withdraw, and as it faded there grew a sense of power draining away from the Per-aa himself. Everyone in the antechamber could feel it. Power for the Per-aa had been withdrawn outside the antechamber. Within it he had grown powerless and futile!

What had caused this? No one had time to think the reason, or words to state it. It just was so.

His face showing uncertainty, his eyes darting toward the bolted door, the Per-aa shifted on his alternating too cold and too hot chair, for the first time showing lack of ease, as though he, though officially a divine god-king, knew he had become a mere mortal. As if he were looking for a scapegoat, his eyes fixed on Mosheh, the silent party to the interview.

“Who is this man with you?” he said to Aaron. “Why are you speaking for him? He signs to you, and you perform like his trained monkey.”

“He is my honored younger brother, Your Divinity,” Aaron explained patiently. “He is slow of speech, and he has asked me to speak for--”

The Per-aa was not listening. Mosheh’s head, during the Per-aa’s remarks, had turned slowly round until Pher-Enath III and he were looking into each other’s faces, each drawing the measure of the other man.

A thundercloud storm darted meanings swift as lightning in the first instant. Of the many, “So this is that Great Serpent, the so-called third son of the chief moon gods, Pher and Nath, the latest foul and bloody Oppressor of my people!” Mosheh’s glance seemed to say. And the Per-aa’s expression in turn seemed to infer, “Dung-worm of a Hebrew! Scrapings of a she-donkey in heat! Offal of a miscarried hyena! We have every right to tread upon and exact full service from such dirt as you! The throne has always belonged to us, and subject peoples such as yourselves have no voice in the matter. We rule, you serve! It has been that way since time immemorial, and the gods have decreed it, for since the dawn of time and the Dawn Kings we were destined the superior race, the only one fit to rule as supreme lords over all the Earth!”

Hebrew outrage converged with Mizraimite presumption, slave converged with tyrant, a holy people with a divine mission converged with pagan idolatry, the Covenanted converged with the Uncovenanted, an upstart, nomadic, tribal people converged with a sophisticated, highly learned, rich, ancient civilization.

The clashing of two worlds, two religions, two peoples charged the air, clarifying the issues so sharply they were made black and white with absolutely no gray zones between.

Aaron, gathering strength of spirit from the gracious, wise spirit of the room, his eyes no longer so dazzled by the splendidly jeweled pectoral necklace, ceremonial clothes, and royal insignia and cobra-hooded headdress, renewed his petition to the Per-aa. “Yes, Your Divine Majesty, we are inclined to be lazy and idle as you say, but grant this one request to your humble ser--”

“Never, “ the lord of the Land of Red and Black cut in, and the chair shot burning heat through the ruler’s backside, which made him nearly lose his godlike dignity and cry out humanly in pain.

Aaron spread his hands toward the Per-aa. “But would Your Divinity permit me to add a few words? This is not our undertaking. Idle or not, our God has commanded us to perform this sacrifice in the wilderness.”

But the Per-aa’s attention had a difficult time centering on the discussion with Aaron. Besides the chair causing him so much physical discomfort, discomfort he could not show mere mortals, he could not help eyeing Mosheh, who after taking good look at his opponent at close range, was again turned gazing at the wall of red alabaster.

“‘Your god commanded it’!” the Per-aa echoed Aaron with a grimace, showing his teeth. “Who is this god that I should pay attention to him? You still haven’t told me.”

This time Aaron glanced at Mosheh helplessly, and the Per-aa caught Aaron’s glance.

“He has no temple, no image, far as I can tell,” the Per-aa egged Aaron. “How then shall I know him and worship him? Must I make you an image for him? Tell me, what does he look like?”

“But--” Aaron weakly began. Mosheh, in response, shook his head, and Aaron’s protest subsided.

Seemingly, the Per-aa had prevailed, for Aaron said no more, and the Per-aa rose from the tormenting chair, forcing the two Hebrews to the floor.

Going to the door, the Per-aa knocked on it with his mace, and Aaron, taking his cue, rose awkwardly from old knees, and drew the bolt.

The Per-aa took a few steps beyond the door when he stopped, turning to Aaron.

“Do you perform signs confirming your authority?” he challenged them. “This god of yours, I would like to know if he has any power to give his servants? If so, give me a sign now. If you cannot produce any, you will be whipped for presuming to approach my Divine Majesty with your ordinary humanity.”

Though all through the interview Mosheh had been a sulking presence, at the mention of a whipping he suddenly stiffened, his eyes growing fierce and fixing on the face of the Per-aa for the first time. He thrust the rod of God at Aaron, who took it gingerly, then threw it down on the floor.

The staff no sooner struck the stone floor then it came to life, rearing its hooded head, hissing, and showing all the deadliness and vivacity of a Royal Cobra.

The Per-aa himself forgot royal dignity and stepped away to save himself, while his officials, hurrying forward, fled back away at the sight.

“Have my chief magicians, Jannes and Jambres, brought!” the now rattled Per-aa commanded the Grand Taty.

It was done quickly, and the brother magicians too threw down staffs and they turned into serpents.

But there was no time for the magicians and Per-aa to congratulate themselves that Mizraim was more than equal to any foreign god’s power, for Mosheh’s cobra caught the magician’s serpents and devoured them.

Horrified, the Mizraimites turned helplessly to the Per-aa, who seemed at a loss as to how to proceed.

Reaching out as he was instructed by the Almighty, Mosheh grasped his serpent’s tail and it immediately stiffened and became a staff in his hand.

Now that the danger was gone, the Per-aa regained his composure. “That is only a cheap trick, and I will still not let them go,” he repeated, walking away from Joseph’s wardrobe chamber and its blue chair.

And that same day the Per-aa issued instructions to the officers over his taskmasters assigned to the Hebrews. They should no longer furnish straw for the bricks, but the Hebrews would have to gather the stubble for straw and still make as many bricks as they had been required to make when straw was provided them.

The next day the Per-aa , who had begun a precedent by holding a private audience with a Hebrew prophet and his spokesman, called for elders of the Hebrews to be brought to account before the throne. He told them they were in arrears. Where was the scheduled amount of bricks? It was lacking in number, he informed them. Six hundred thousand able-bodied men! Yet, he jeered, they had produced less than the women.

Not since Joseph had a Per-aa called to Hebrew leaders to speak publicly for their people before the Per-aa! This one, apparently, was determined to deal directly with the problem since the meeting with Aaron and Mosheh, and the elders, though possessing no mighty signs to impress their interrogator and terrified almost out of their skins, had no choice but to go with guard escort to face Pher-Enath III the god-king.

“But we have no straw given us,” the elders replied when they could find words and breath amidst all the splendor of court. “We cannot make up the usual levies of the Per-aa without provided straw.” The Per-aa’s dark eyes grew darker and harder, if that was possible. “You are idle, idle! From this day you will make double the amount of bricks, and without any straw given you. The straw you must find yourselves.”

This doubling and trebling of their labor without any straw being given them as before cast the Hebrews into absolute despair, and their elders, after being beaten and thrown out of court with their robes cut to the waist in parting by the palace gate guards, sought Mosheh and Aaron out on the matter as soon as they could be found.

“You’ve made life even worse for us than it was before you came!” they cried to Mosheh and Aaron, and Mosheh could not deny it. He went in despair to God in prayer. But the Lord replied that he was still the Lord, and he would make the Per-aa let the people go. He reaffirmed the Covenant He had made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and promised that they would inherit the land after He had delivered them from Mizraim and the hand of Per-aa.

One plague after another struck Mizraim, to force the Per-aa to release Israel. Each time Mosheh and Aaron went to the palace, they demanded that the Per-aa let the people go, or else God would send a plague, and each time the Per-aa only grew more obstinate, and another judgment fell upon the land by the hand of God and his servant Mosheh.

The Sacred River, the Ioteru, which to the Mizraimites was a god, was struck first, and it turned to blood. The fish died. Drifting toward shore, the dead and bloated fish caused the frogs to flee onto the land and climb into the houses, even into the royal palaces by uncountable thousands. Wavering, since the River was the life-giving god of Mizraim and the frog was sacred as the Frog-God of Machitha, the Per-aa seemed to hesitate. But then something small and dark, itself froglike, darted into the royal ear, whispering, “Ah, Great One, you will lose your glorious Throne if you don’t assert thy strength now over these wretched Hebrews before you!”

Stung to the quick, the Per-aa got his second breath. Against the advice of his counselors, he refused to let the people go.

Plagues of gnats and lice followed, called for by Mosheh when the Per-aa again refused to let the people go. Colossal images and altars of the Gnat Goddess and the Louse God, popular deities in Mizraim with temples throughout the land, were thronged with supplicating priests and covered with flowers and votary candles lit day and night, yet the Divine Gnat and Divine Louse proved unable to stem the plagues or turn them back from the sorely afflicted Mizraimites.

This time the Per-aa seemed to be breaking enough in resolve to let the people go. Not only were their multitudes of frogs to contend with, but these had been joined by even greater numbers of lice and gnats. Life was not intolerable in Mizraim.

Mosheh said to him, “Do you want me to turn back these plagues now that are ruining your country and people, so that no one would want to live in it?”

The Per-aa, his back turned so as not to show his gnashing teeth to common mortals, nodded, and said, “Tomorrow let these plagues end.”

“All right. According to your word, tomorrow it will be, that the plagues ends, so that you will know that there is none like our Lord God.”

The moment the Hebrews were gone, however, the Per-aa fell to the carpet, gnawing at it with fury as his attendants stared in horror. He had done it before, in fact, after each audience with the Hebrews, but they could never get used to it, fearing he might arise and order all their executions as scapegoats for his exceeding great wrath.

Mosheh went home, prayed, and God rolled back the plague of lice and gnats and frogs, for they died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields. It was a further divine proof that the Hebrew God was the Most High over all the earth and that there was no god in Mizraim that could deliver.

Rejoicing, the people of Mizraim gathered the frogs together in heaps, and the whole land stank, but at least the vermin were dead and would no longer invade and defile the people’s dwellings, beds, grain storage urns, water pots, and eating vessels.

But the moment the Per-aa saw that the land was delivered, he grew stubborn again, looked to his own gods, and refused to let Israel go as he had said.

God spoke to Mosheh, knowing the Per-aa’s heart, and flies took the place of the previous plagues, making the land uninhabitable again. The air turned black with them. Interior house walls swarmed with flies, and they could not be kept out of any vessel or container. Royal palaces, mansions, civil service buildings, and temples were full of flies too. There weren’t enough fly-whisks in the kingdom to keep the Per-aa from the infestation either, and he was soon desperate and called to Mosheh to come and call off the flies.

“Take your people and go sacrifice to your god,” he ordered Mosheh. “Choose a place just beyond the banks of the River. The sacred waters must not be defiled, or the god will be angry and smite the land as yours has done.”

“But we cannot sacrifice so close to your people, they would consider it an abomination and riot against us. We must go further out from your country to perform our sacrifice.”

“Go, and take these flies with you, but do not leave the land entirely with your people.”

Mosheh went and prayed to the Lord, and the flies died away from all the land and all the houses and palaces and temples, and the Mizraimites washed their drinking and eating vessels and even their household linens, all of which had been defiled by flies. But the Per-aa changed his mind once again, since his counselors said the flies had perished after the common way of flies, not by divine intervention by the God of the Hebrews.

Plague after plague followed. Beasts, plants and crops and trees, then people were struck with terrible blains and skin lesions. Hail, darkness over all the land, with the additional sign that no harm came to anything in the Hebrew communities, yet the Per-aa continued more stubborn than before, until the tenth plague was announced: the death of all the first-born in the land.

Per-aa himself will sacrifice his first-born to Me, though I did not ask him to do it. What is pleasing to Me is a contrite spirit, the sacrifice of a broken heart, for I do not require any sacrifices other than the One I provided. Now Mosheh, be careful to do what I command. Take my Sacrificed Lamb’s blood and mark the lintel and posts of your door. Every door marked with My Lamb’s perfect blood will be passed by the angel of death. The Blood atones for the guilt and sin of every soul within that house. See that you mark the door’s posts and lintels, which is your own body and soul, your forehead and your limbs.

Mosheh was utterly mystified. “W-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-WHAT Sacrificed Lamb?” he cried out to God. “Mark my forehead and limbs with its blood? How will I g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-GET the people to do this strange thing? They abhor being marked with the living blood of any slain beast. It is impossible to get them to do this thing you ask. It is too strange and h------h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-DIFFICULT!”

Then tell them they will die, even as the first-born of all the nation of Mizraim, both of men and beasts, will die, slain by the death angel. Tell them there is life and forgiveness in the Passover Lamb’s Blood! Tell them choose this day, whether life by the Blood, or death by their own righteousness. There is no other way provided for their escape from judgment. I have provided My Own Way. There is none other by which men can be saved when the Death Angel passes through the whole land.

Mosheh was right. The whole people of Israel rose up in a storm of self-righteous fury. “Who do you think you are, O vagabond princeling of Mizraim and Midian, that you tell us, Holy Israel, that we must be marked with a lamb’s blood in order to escape judgment along with the wicked? A pox on you too, for suggesting we defile ourselves in such a manner! We do not need saving by such a “way.” Just see to it that the angel of death knows who we are, and we will be just fine within our houses when the death angel comes to slay the Mizraimites’ first-borns! But don’t ask us to apply a slain beast’s blood to our forehead and limbs! How horrid! We are holy enough as we are!”

Mosheh, hearing this from the elders and the people, was exceeding upset and enraged. “I know you p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-PEOPLE! Most of you are no whit better than the Mizraimites you despise! You s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-SEEK every niggling advantage over one another, coveting what the other has, and if you think too well of yourself to steal it, whether a maidservant, or a comely daughter, or an a-a-a-a-a-a-a-DONKEY, or a piece of clothing, or a breadstick, or even a wife, then you get it some other way by using the elders against an innocent man, declaring he is guilty in some way that would force him to give you what you want lest he c-c-c-c-c-c-c-ENTER into judgment. You extort one another of goods, for you are never satisfied with what you have from God’s hand. But you do worse, most of you! You lie, you prevaricate constantly against each other, in your houses, in the streets, in your work places, at the well, at the washing, at the baking, at the gate buying and selling, each s-s-s-s-s-s-s-CONSPIRING on your beds at night to gain some advantage in the coming day in the eyes of others. Your tongues are the t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-TONGUES of the wicked asps which are quick to leap out of walls unexpectedly and strike wayfarers. Then your eye is just as quick to note evil-doing in the houses of your neighbors, so that you can murder the man or the woman with your lips! I’ve seen you do this abomination daily! Need I go on? You are not h-h-h-h-h-h-h-HOLY, for your hearts are soiled, your hands are soiled, both body and soul, you are s-s-s-s-s-s-s-Dirt in the Holy Eye of God, Who cannot look upon uncleanness and be pleased. Now, either mark your forehead and limbs with the cleansing Blood provided, or suffer the consequences when the Death Angel comes to s-s-s-s-s-s-s-SLAY the first-born of the land!”

Put that way, Mosheh forgetting Aaron and speaking directly to the people, the people were abashed and were forced to admit their guilt and unholiness before El Roi and His Righteousness. In fact, they felt so stained with their trangressions of the Golden Rule, which they all knew from childhood training at their mother’s knee, that they rushed to apply the Saving Soap of the Lamb’s Blood!

And Mosheh first, with all his family, made themselves ensamples for the rest. They went to the Lamb which God provided. The Lamb was laying on a white sheet beneath a cross-beamed tree growing flrom a stony hill not far from the River. It was an unspeakable sight. Everyone hushed as they climbed the rocky path to the Lamb and the Tree. Wounded on his hands and feet and forehead, with a spear wound in His side, the Lamb was stretched on the Tree. Above the Lamb’s head was inscribed, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man comes to the Father but by Me.” Mosheh, taking the Rod of God, which he had wrapped at the head with a pure linen, dipped the head of the Rod in the Lamb’s Blood, as many times as needed, and touched the foreheads and limbs of all who came forward to be cleansed and saved from their sins.

Then the people went home. Only a few were lucky, since they had no first-borns, be

ing childless. In this group were Donah and Huah and their beautiful, young, half-Mizraimite wives. They did not join in with the people at the Tree on the rocky hill, and when asked about it said their deeds were sufficient to please an Almighty God anyday.

They thought they could well afford to abstain from the procedure, considering that they knew they were both second-borns, and their wives were safe too, since the Death Angel was coming to smite the first-born males of land, both man and beast.

Released by the Per-aa’s own decision, the death angel struck the land of Mizraim. Reeling from the loss of his first-born, the Crown Prince, the Per-aa gave in and let the people of Israel go at last.

Standing in a mortuary chapel of the New Palace with his dead first-born lying on a bier, Pher-Enath III sent word for Aaron and Mosheh to come to him.

Standing on carpet that bore signs of a beast’s tearing, bloody teeth, he spoke to them calmly, with eyes downcast on his golden crook and mace.

“Your god is strong. We cannot hold you back any longer. Go!”

Rejoicing, Mosheh and Aaron strode out of the Per-aa’s humiliated presence like conquering lions. The God of Israel had, indeed, triumphed over all the gods of Mizraim and the power of the mighty Per-aa. They were completely humiliated. It was a day of triumph unlike any in the annals of the world when the Hebrews streamed forth, by the millions from the land of bondage led by Mosheh the Lord’s Deliverer.

Guards and taties of the brickyard compounds, camps of slave labor, starvation, and murder, were astounded as royal couriers brought the Per-aa’s directive, and they were forced to open to the gates and let the suffering masses go free. At first, all listened, but could not comprehend what the guards announced over bull-horns. “Go home, Hebrews!” the shout went. “Go, by order of the Per-aa!”

Starved, emaciated skeletons looked at other living skeletons. Free? Free to go home?

Still nobody dared to move, so the guards had to start pulling the freed slaves out of the brickpits and shoving them in the direction of the open gates. It took some time to persuade the rest that nobody would harm them for going, and finally the truth dawned: they were emancipated. Delivered at last!

With shouts that carried over the high walls into the surrounding Mizraimite cities and countryside, the once-enslaved and doomed Hebrew men and women clamored and scrambled to exit the gates of the death camps as fast as they could. No one was left behind, for the only way they had survived as long as they did in them was that everybody helped one another, no matter how infirm. Aaron’s example had spread to all the camps, and it was still being followed.

And, true to divine word, the Hebrews didn’t go forth empty-handed. So glad were the plague-afflicted Mizraimites to see them go by this time, so disaffected had they become with the Per-aa’s policies, that they covered the Hebrews with Mizraim’s horde of golden treasure, just as Miryam had prophesied many years before.

The Hebrews were made rich in a single day, from the greatest of them to the least, they were heaped to the point of making them stagger under the load of treasure, so that the country was stripped of gold even up to the altars of the chief gods--just as God had said it would be when he called Mosheh and spoke to him from the burning bush on Mount Horeb.

Mosheh’s eyes gleamed more fiercely than the Per-aa’s. This was no lamb of Midian. This was truly the Lion of Levi. He had done what he had set out to do, deliver his people. Whether all wanted deliverance or not, they got it.

“Lead the people, but my Pillar of Cloud will go before you to show the way,” the Lord God said to Mosheh as the people were celebrating all round him.

Mosheh gave the command, and the vast congregation of the Israelites, followed by certain believing Mizraimites and even some Romany people too fearful to remain behind at the mercy of the Per-aa, set off. Now this was the second great Exodus of the Chosen People, and it was every bit as glorious as the first.

Oddly enough, the Pillar of Cloud did not take the Way of the Philistines, which led along the water’s edge of the coast, being the shortest route that would land them in the Promised Land within a week.

Mosheh was not dismayed. There was a second, better route he knew God would choose, since the first would set them against a powerful, hostile league of Philistine cities who would surely war against Israel to keep her from passing through.

Yet Mosheh’s hopes were dashed. The Pillar of Cloud ignored Mosheh’s good reasoning and passed by the Way of Shur, which led to the backdoor of the Promised Land, by way of Bath-Sheba at the northern edge of the Negeb desert wilderness.

By now the people were all turning to stare at Mosheh and talk, for they too had this route in mind.

Mosheh, his face steaming with frustration and bewilderment, could do nothing. The Pillar of Cloud continued leading them further and further away from the Promised Land. Presently, they came to border fortresses, the Bitter Lakes, and the Reed Sea.

This was a bad place to be going, everyone could see.

Donah and Huah could not let this go on. They too had some knowledge of the world, and even some knowledge of certain ancient scriptures that told how the People of Abraham, while being chased by a former Per-aa, had taken refuge in the marshes of the Reed Sea.

Armed with all this knowledge, they rushed to confront Mosheh. “Leading us here is absolute perversity and presumption, son of Amram! We refuse to go further, for the Per-aa will follow with his army and catch us and kill us all. Our only hope is to turn aside into this ready refuge, the Reed Sea, where fugitives flee and are not easily caught. We can hide in the thick reeds from Per-aa’s eye, and his chariots cannot go in so much mud and grass, so he will be forced to turn back.”

But Mosheh looked to the Pillar of Cloud, and it continued to move slowly away from the Reed Sea.

“No, we must go on wherever the Almighty in the Cloud leads us,” he declared, his heart sinking.

Donah and Huah grew all the more outraged. They ranted and raved that Mosheh was a madman and an idiot leading them into sure doom. Thousands joined their company, and they too shouted and wept and grumbled all at once, standing back and halting the vast company behind them.

Perhaps remembering the incident at the far-off inn on the edge of Midian, and profoundly affected by the Passover Lamb-Death Angel incident even if he couldn’t grasp its meaning, Mosheh continued walking resolutely after the Pillar of Cloud, so the people pressed forward, fearing being left behind, though some turned aside into the Sea of Reeds and found spots to hide from Per-aa’s army when it came. These soon found the Sea lived up to its name and fell victims to quicksand and serpents, however.

Screaming oaths at Mosheh’s white head, Donah and Huah kept up their tirade as they followed him.

Finally, the Pillar of Cloud halted. And where were they now? Those who knew the lay of the land could tell the others. They all stood on the shores of the great Sea called Wall of Red, sometimes called the Sea of Adam, because like the red clay from which the first man was formed, red sands covered the beaches. But the same people went on to say that the sands were the color of blood--Hebrew blood--which would surely flow and stain the sea when the Per-aa caught up to them with his mighty army!

How the people groaned and wept to hear this. What a place for them to be led! Up against a wall, with no way around! Thanks to Mosheh, it appeared to everyone but Mosheh, Aaron, and Miryam, they would all soon perish!

The Pen of a Ready Writer

Hallelu-YAH! Hallelu-YAH, O Israel! Horse and rider are thrown into the sea! God has done this great thing for us! Drowned are the king’s mighty men and chariotry! Sing praises to our God, the Most High over all the Earth, For He made a way where there was no way, to return us to the holy land of Yeshua’s birth! Glorious things will be said from age to age, how the Almighty shattered the sword of the king in His righteous rage. Yes, glorious things will be said that eyes and ears can scarcely behold, And God’s own pen will write them on sheaves of pure gold, on sheaves of fine beaten gold!

At last, taking heart by Miryam’s example, their bonds of fear and dumbness dropping away like dark, filthy rags, women of all the tribes seemed to wake up, open their eyes, and catch the same enlightening joy. One by one, then by the hundreds, they joined the magnificent daughter of YAH Who rides upon the fiery, dark clouds, the darkness a covering for unapproachable Light.

Their eyes could not see it, but she too, a spirit, was flying with Him, circling round the Majesty in unspeakable rapture. By and by the entire assembly had awakened from the long slumber of the night of Mizraim, and, Mosheh included, was dancing with utmost joy, children and adults together.

The original song was a bit too long to handle, so the whole congregation sang over and over the simpler phrase, “Rejoice! Rejoice! Horse and rider are thrown into the sea! The Rock of Israel has crushed the king’s chariotry!”

The joy was so electrifying, that the diehard naysayers and doubters gathering a second breath after the Crossing round the likes of Donah and Huah were hushed and rebuked into momentary silence as they witnessed the wonderful rejoicing of the people.

One lad ran into the waters and tried to drag out a golden bow torn from Prince Pher-enath’s hand, but a jealous wave snatched it away and pushed him back. Unmindful of the risk, grown men jeered the boy and ran down to retrieve scattered swords and bows and other costly booty floating in the surf, but the waters crackled with power and the terrific shocks that greeted greedy hands sent the foolish men bellowing with pain and terror back to shore without a single thing, not even an arrow being taken.

On the opposite bank gasped a mortified, bare-headed Per-aa. Even his high rock wasn’t high enough to escape the back-wash of water.

Half-drowned, his wig and false beard blown away and kepresh fallen off, royal clothes mud-spattered, he scrambled up a steep escarpment to escape thundering breakers that had just swallowed up his precious son the dauphin prince and heir, together with his entire chariot corps of flower-cars.

“Pher-Enath! My son!” the father cried until he choked and began retching out swallowed salt water.

Not one Mizraimite struggled out alive from the crashing waves. But corpses by the hundreds and the wreckage of fire-chariots--these were tossed hither and thither like leaves on the waves! All had perished! All!

As he lay in unspeakable misery on the crest of the escarpment, he knew nothing until a big shadow fell across him. Somehow a fire-chariot had been made to climb the path to the top.

Through the burning veil of his tears and sweat, the Per-aa dimly made out the sleek, fat face that had promised him victory a short time before. The face was now sticking out the window of a tamar-green fire-chariot that carried a shining “E” on the tip of its puckered snout.

“O Divine One, would you like a ride back to the palace?” offered the Per-aa’s concerned sorcerer as he opened the door of the chariot and made haste to spread a nice rug for the king’s sacred feet. “Let the rays of your Countenance shine on your humble servant! The liver was a bad one, a bag swollen with the pus of treachery and deceit, and misled me! And the gods have deceived me! Something angered them, and--and--I could not have known the slaves’ god was just as potent here in the wilderness as he was in our own holy land! Please, Your Celestial Goodness! Pardon your humble ser--”

The shock of being accosted in his grief by such a worm was hard enough for the distraught Per-aa’s spirit. But the man made a terrible mistake in his efforts to secure mercy by reminding the Per-aa of the vast, unhealed wounds he had lately suffered at the hands of Mosheh’s God in his own land..

The disgraced liver diviner, his leopard-skin quivering on his fat shoulders as he got everything ready for the Per-aa’s ride home with him.

The Per-aa’s face turned most terrible as he looked upon an odious but convenient scapegoat. He drew out his ceremonial sword from its sheath, pure-gold and hilted with jewels. He thrust it deep in the supplicant.

But he did not stop there. He kicked at the priest, struck him with the sword, mauling him in a frenzy that could only be madness.

Gasping, covered with the priest’s blood, the Per-aa’s rage was finally exhausted, and he finished by pushing the butchered carcass of the lying diviner back into the fire-chariot, then he sent both over the escarpment into the turbid waters below.

This accomplished, the Per-aa collapsed back like a broken arrow on the burning rock of defeat, humiliation, and mourning.

Hours of hellish pangs and delirium passed. The Per-aa was forced to consider his own survival. Could he die and let the Hebrews crow about his death at their hands? No, pride would not permit so ignoble a death of a Per-aa of Mizraim. All the nations and peoples would be laughing at him!

Accompanied by a few curious goats who couldn’t be made to cross the sea for any amount of coaxing and tears, the bedraggled, once splendid lord of the Land of Red and Black struggled back toward civilization with no water, no food, and nearly perished in the desert.

Plodding alone through the sands and rocky, snake and scorpion-infested wastes, his tongue swelling between cracked, bleeding lips to which tormenting flies and gnats clung, he found plenty time to contemplate events he had so recently directed, events in which he had lost both first-born and second-born.

It is not known what more he thought or felt, or even whether he reached a border fort of his kingdom, but at the first (and possibly last, for him) nightfall his eyes were dazzled with an effect of certain stars that gleamed above the horizon to his right.

They really belonged more to the northern sky than to his, yet for a brief time both hemispheres shared them.

Known as the Scribe’s Pen, or, simply, The Pen, they glowed most brightly at this perilous fork in the road when so many Israelites were of a mind to turn right around and follow the Per-aa back to bondage.

“Why sh-sh-sh-sh-shu....OUGHT these things be written down?” Mosheh wondered afterwards, when the Glory Cloud left his tent temporarily and he was free to think over things alone. Mosheh the Drawer-Out of a Per-aa to destruction, Mosheh the Drawer-Out of a nation to liberty, Mosheh the Drawer-Out of God’s Everlasting Covenant Promises, this man of manifold and glorious destiny was now asked to be a common scribe!

“Will a-a-a-a-a-a-a...any--y-y-y-y-y--” He stopped, drew a huge breath into his red face and continued. “--BODY believe what the Most High has shown me? Two more years of the Per-aa’s reign have passed. If he lived after our Deliverance! Yet without chariots he is a wounded lion and cannot pursue us, so they forget the danger he was, and already people are denying that God parted the waters of the sea and smote Per-aa just as they previously had denied every mighty work of judgment and plague by the Lord in Mizraim. If it was not a dream altogether, it was only a big desert wind, now they claim, though their eyes witnessed what we all saw, that the waters divided the moment I struck them with my staff! Forgetting that, they say such things as divided waters are known to happen sometimes in the Sea of Reeds. The wind blows very hard for day on end and finally the water is pushed back and the land appears and people can walk there dry-shod for a time. Well, many wagging tongues following Donah and Huah’s lead say it happened in the sea too. Somehow, though they only had it bad there, they can recall every onion, leek, garlic, and honey gourd of the good food to be had in Mizraim, forgetting their taskmasters wrenched such things from the very mouth and gave them animal fodder to eat! And they fear the vengeance of her gods, saying we have done wrong to forsake them and follow ‘this strange, foreign, imageless hill-god of Mosheh’s” instead. And the ringleaders of this faction of the Simeonites, the brothers Donah and Huah, shoot out the lip without shame against God’s anointed and rail against me at every opportunity, saying how vain and proud I have exalted myself to the heavens to think my God parted the waters of the great sea for us when it was only fierce wind!”

Time passed and he had not settled the question when Zipporah crept back from the latest site of her father’s tent (Mosheh, at God’s bidding had the congregation peg their tents down in rows according to various unknown signs; one was an “A,” the other a “Z.” Donah and Huah had immediately taken issue with them. “There are no such signs as these known or used among men!” they informed the whole congregation. “This Mosheh you follow has turned a heretic, concocting fancies such as these in order to ensnare you away from the truth that we know! Beware! He will yet lead into a wilderness where you will all perish in a day!”

Yet another sign for the encampment was like a tree trunk with a single cross-branch).

Donah and Huah seemed to dislike this one most of all. In fact, they refused to set their tents inside it, saying that they preferred remaining orthodox to becoming heretics with the rest.

They added, “At least we have the courage of our convictions and follow the honored teachings and customs of our holy people! Hear, O Israel! Judge whether this sign is of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob our fathers, or whether this prince of Midian thought it up! Judge!”

Yet this sign, like the others, was not a matter Mosheh would adjudicate with anyone. He was the Judge of Israel.

But, even with working day and night on the cases, he could not keep up. Coming to visit, her father Jethro saw the solution immediately. Bowing to his father-in-law’s experience and insight, Mosheh instituted the change.

Jethro’s excellent advice to the over-worked Mosheh that appointed elders serve as judges in the mass of civil and familial disputes was working well--there wasn’t a single case waiting by the door of the tent, the plaintiff and defendant, supported by relatives, friends, and hangers-on, shouting oaths and accusations at each other over some disputed, pregnant ewe or she-goat.

She peered around carefully as she made sure she was not intruding on the Almighty, who was known to strike impious eavesdroppers dead in their tracks if they dared intrude on what the Most High wanted Mosheh alone to hear.

Indeed, a month before, a man of some weight and reputation among the people, knowing whose tent it was and leaning forward on his ass to better hear Mosheh talking to himself and pretending it was the Almighty, was utterly consumed by a fire bolt that burst out of the tent. The ass, after a shrug that sent the man’s charred dust pelting to the ground, brayed as it walked off unscathed.

As with many other things said against Mosheh, the dead man’s allegation did not die with him, however. Finding congenial soil in the vicinity, it was like an evil mist of sedition as it invaded tent after tent, turning many a tongue and opinion more sharply against God’s shepherd.

Satisfied the coast was clear, Zipporah slipped into the black, goat-hair tent. She sighed before what she found. As for the shepherd of God’s people, old Mosheh was mumbling seeming nonsense to himself, so keeping her misgivings to herself his good wife went about domestic duties, which at that time of day was getting ready for bedtime, though she knew it would probably be interrupted. Why these conferences her husband had with the Almighty had to go on for hour upon hour, upsetting her entire work and eating and sleeping schedule, she had no idea.

Shouldn’t respectable people eat at proper times, and retire at proper times? Mosheh was old. She too was old. Her bones were thin and brittle and certain vitals had fallen within her body. Her children were grown and bearing children without her feeble aid. She was old and experiencing a decline in vital strength every passing day. Her time was drawing near for her to be laid beneath cairn stones on some wilderness mountain--for no one would carry her back to Midian, she knew. How long could she go on like this? she had to wonder.

She shot a glance at Mosheh as she stacked the last cushions and placed Mosheh’s carved wood pillow at the head and drew the fly curtain. He never ceased to amaze her.

How could he remain so hearty and hale carrying on as he did? Yet he seemed none the worse for scanty meals, snatched at odd moments, and so little time in bed he could scarcely be said to sleep.

It was as if the words of God nourished him! For he could not have gotten any other bread as things had been going ever since the Almighty led Mosheh and the Hebrews forth into the wilderness.

At last Zipporah had the bed prepared, then waited to see what would happen. As usual, Mosheh seemed not to notice. He paced up and down, mumbling the same things in Mizraimite.

Shaking her head, for she knew little of that language, she lay her head down on the tent floor as was her Midianite custom and dozed off, her nearly-toothless mouth wide open.

When she awoke it was dark and she felt about but Mosheh, as usual, was not by her side. She knew, without having to look, he was sitting up, either asleep or awake, still thinking and stewing about something the Almighty had previously told him.

This time he turned and spoke civilly, tenderly, to her. “I cannot fa-fa-fa-fa-fa--” Big breath. “--UNDERSTAND this at all! Why sh-sh-sh-sh-shu...MUST I write it all down? He told me himself they will laugh and scoff at every word of mine, saying several men have written what one man was later claimed to write, and that the writings themselves are no more than mixed legends and myths, like a ragpicker’s collection!”

Fortunately, he had burst out in Midianite this time concerning his heart’s troubling matter, so she understood every word. And she knew he would not have used her tongue unless he were deliberately drawing out her counsel.

Even for her at her age, it was wise not to reply too soon, lightly, or hastily. She had learned early in their marriage that this great man who carried the rod of God possessed two natures, a lamb’s and a lion’s, which strove with each other. The meek and mild Mosheh-Jeruham was real.

So too was Mosheh the prince of Mizraim in breeding and culture, even if he was an exile leading an army of shepherds and their flocks.

Trained in the ways of the great palace of the Mizraimite kings and tutored in its school of high officials sons and royal princes, one word, one glance to an underling, could freeze the loose-lipped speaker to a state near death.

Once, once only, she had piped up about some matter to him that he instantly judged was trivial women’s tittle-tattle though people were always fingering the best in his meager flocks.

It concerned hotly contested property she knew belonged to her, a prize milch goat a sister’s relatives--who were Kenites and begrudged her people the best pastures back in old Midian where they were few in numbers--had taken into their flocks, and the meekness dropped away from him in an instant.

As she gazed at his face, it assumed a lion’s magisterial awesomeness to the point she felt her heart seized by a fist of iron within her breast. Transfixed by that look, she could do nothing except wait, and gradually he relented and gave way to Mosheh the meek lamb, and she began to breathe and get her breath.

Her lesson learned, she let a sufficient time pass--too much time and he would become annoyed, and that was asking for trouble.

“Yes, my lord!” she answered with spirit, eyes fixed on him steadily without dropping for she was a chieftain’s first-born, even if he was a former royal prince of Mizraim. “Are you saying that the Most High has commanded you to write down the dividing and crossing of the great sea and the destruction of your oppressors in its depths?” It was a mouthful for anybody, but she had no lameness in her tongue and could speak as swiftly as a swallow or a Midianite arrow could fly.

“Uh-uh-uh-uh...CERTAINLY!” Mosheh the lion prince snapped, impatient with her tactic of long delay. Why couldn’t women speak up when spoken to? he wondered. Why did they always make him wait? Was his time nothing to them? “Well, wife, what should I do then? Write it all down? He wants it all written down, from beginning to end, and I am to start now while the events are still fresh in my eye and mind. Oh, if only I could get a scribe in my place to do this, but He wants them preserved by my hand and pen, though He told me Himself that no one would believe a word I write. In the latter days to come there will again arise tribes of a gnawing worm with scorpion tail--the BAR-minimites, they are called--who know no shame before holy things and will delight to tear every sacred writing to pieces with their fine teeth while stinging to death anyone who disagrees. Well, these BAR-minimites will scoff up a storm and say I, Mosheh, son of Amram, never came forth from the womb, drew breath and walked on this earth, just as the first to bear my name never came forth from the womb and walked the earth; therefore, the second Mosheh was never laid in a basket in the river, nor raised up to live in the Per-aa’s palace and all the rest, so that he could not have witnessed these events and written these things--things they will claim never happened--because Mosheh prince of Mizraim and shepherd of Israel never existed, whether first or second. Pretending to seek the truth, setting themselves up as a supreme kirbet, they enter into arbitration over every word. They will pick apart this word and that word I have written, saying it was too early a time for me to use it, or too late, so that all is cast into question, and on and on they will go sifting the words into chaff while saying they find nothing they can call true corn, until everything written is accounted drivel and nonsense composed by an idiot no sensible man could possibly believe. And what’s more, on the foundation they have laid, they will declare from the rich men’s housetops and various tall towers of ivory that this God of ours is not what we say, nor could He do anything we say He has done since he has been miscast in a false bronze-monger’s mold, and...and...OH!”

Mosheh the lion prince smacked his fists together and his “OH!” nearly pulled out all the pegs and blew the tent flat. Zipporah, heart pounding against her rib-cage, knew half the camp, the whole of the Sacred Letter “Z” must have heard and been woken up.

What a husband she had taken on! But what could she do now? She must humor him as best she could back into a peaceable, lamblike state, or no one would get a wink of sleep again that night!

“Yes, dear,” she said with her most soothing accents. “The daughter of Father Jethro quite understands why you are wroth. But--”

“Well? What sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-shu...DOTH I do, eldest of Jethro? Speak now, or I’ll turn my face against the daughter of Jethro and spirit her back to her father’s tent on the backside of the burning desert! He is wise enough in handling of foolish men, unlike all the others. But let him reflect that even a wise man--which he is, blessed be the Most High!--ought not send a foolish, white-curd-armed daughter to share my bed and bread if she hath no wits about her!”

Zipporah kneaded her lip with her gums. She dreaded this sort of thing. How was it her husband had this amazing ability to always put people on spots that were impossible to hold, or in places where there was no way out?

Thrust between the Rock of Israel and a hard place, a situation recalling the recent one at the Red Sea, Zipporah’s blood ran cold. She was more than a bit afraid.

She knew she mustn’t cross the Almighty’s will on the matter. Yet her sometimes very daring husband, the great deliverer of his people and her family, had call on her too to stand with him.

“Forsooth, it doth not matter that you are a master builder for kings and not a scribe, you, husband and bridegroom of blood, are also the chosen and elect pen of God,” she said with a flash of genius born of desperation. “You must write down all He says without a single hesitation, every divine word, every jot and tittle exactly as He dictates, for a pen only does what the hand of its owner directs it to do, and the hand of the Almighty can make no error. As it is written in the holy Book, ‘--My heart is overflowing with a goodly theme; I recite my composition concerning the King; my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”

His pen not quite so ready to write, perhaps, Mosheh grunted, and stumbled to his bed and lay down.

Who could argue with such a statement, particularly since it quoth holy scripture as the foundation? As always, Zipporah was perfectly correct, beyond dispute. She had even reduced her flowery Midianite turns of speech for his benefit, since he was so plain a Hebrew and did not relish fine talking.

Knowing her ability to fix on the one thing that mattered, that was the reason he seldom asked wifely counsel.

There was no way out for him now. His woolly old head whirled even now with full-color scenes the Almighty had already pictured on the wall of his tent night after night, as he sat goggle-eyed with a bowl of parched “What is it?”--the fine, honey-tasting angel food that God dropped on the ground for their sustenance every day.

Unlike his namesake the first Mosheh, who experienced only the parts leading up to his death on old Mount Nebo on the border of the Promised Land, he saw everything from first to last.

It seemed impossible to write it all! This thirteenth tribe of deliverers, for example! Starting with the strange letters of the unknown, heavenly language the Almighty was teaching him, “D” would train the champions who would lead the people to future victories.

Following “D,” there would come “U,” then “B,” then “E,” “S,” “O,” and finally “R.” If they weren’t strange enough, the Almighty had shown him, as a taste of what was coming, a forerunner of this tribe named Nor, a merchant of substance who lived long before the present world and the place it had found pasture in a new sheepfold in the heavens. In Nor’s day there were wagons and chariots that could be filled with as many people as ships could carry on the sea, and they flew through the air pushed by captive dragons that breathed great heat and wind, enough to lift the huge sky chariots and take them anywhere people wanted to go on the wide earth.

Now this Nor was a common, good man in an evil time when tides ran stiffly against righteousness and piety. Nevertheless, he had believed in the Most High since he was a child.

He had an aged, widowed mother who was a woman devoted to godliness and much prayer. When he came to her concerning his long holiday journey by sky chariot with many people, she prayed for him, then broke down weeping before she could finish her prayer, so that he finished it for her.

His sky chariot, as large as anything the Titans built and filled with people, flew to a sky chariot stable on a small island in the midst of the sea and landed. Armed men of a neighboring isle defying the government of these islands threatened destruction, so they had to wait until it was safe and they were given permission to go. And they must wait for word from the rulers in the Tower directing the sky chariots on the little island. Nor’s big sky chariot was near the short road that crossed the isle, and he could see another big sky chariot of the same size waiting nearby.

The day had been bright and clear, but it then became very cloudy, and no one could see very far.

After a long wait people became weary and impatient, and their food and water was nearly gone aboard the sky chariots. After much waiting the second sky chariot was granted permission from the Tower to fly first and proceeded down the road, preparing for flight. It too was filled with many people and marked “KLM”. Intending to fly a much greater distance than Nor’s sky chariot, the KLM ordered more liquid fodder for its sky dragons. It came in large jars rolled on wheels and flowed into the cisterns aboard the sky chariot like foaming beer, and was of that color, but it stank most evilly and could burn fiercely in the sky-dragons’ bellies. The KLM’s dragons began to wax hot with burning winds that pushed out behind so strong any man would be killed who walked into them.

Finally, the KLM was ready to go and moved faster and faster down the short road, wheels rising off the ground. Ahead of Nor’s sky-chariot another plane appeared in its path, but it was too late to turn. Seeking to fly up over Nor’s sky chariot, it reared up but could not high enough to avoid fatal convergence and its wheels and legs clove Nor’s sky chariot into several parts, mighty dragons tearing loose, roaring this way and that in Nor’s chariot cabin, ramming holes through everything with butting heads at one end fiery breaths at the other. In the same second KLM’s ruptured cisterns burst into the Nor’s sky chariot’s interior where he and the other people sat rigid with shock, belted in chairs, row upon row.

Death stalked every soul on board. All except Nor were sprayed and drenched with foul dragon food, which engulfed them like a crashing wave of Divine Judgment that had once engulfed the Per-aa’s son and chariots, only this time it was fire and not water. As they were burning like torches and dying, people cried out.

Many cursed and blasphemed the God Most High, but the righteous Nor stood up from his seat. Thinking to help an aged mother and her daughter sitting next to him, he turned, but saw they were stricken dead in their seats. Empowering words from Most High’s everlasting Book, among them “When thou passest through the weaters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle up on thee. For I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Savior,” flashed through his mind. “I stand on Your Word!” the man cried in the midst of the fiery inferno which had been birthed by the “waters” of the dragon food.

Suddenly, a piece of the ceiling blew out above him, dropped straight down toward him, and he put his hand out and brushed the man-crushing object away like a piece of lamb’s wool. Seeing the open sky through the hole, the man jumped for it, and though he was of very large size and no young age he flew over five cubits straight up, each cubit being seven palms of a man’s hand. Tearing the flesh of his fingers severely, yet he managed to scramble safely out on top of the sky chariot. He had escaped immediate death, but the plane was a raging inferno within, rocking with one explosion after another.

He had to jump and get to the ground or be consumed. But could he escape death by jumping? People, covered with blood and their clothes afire, were dropping out of broken windows and killing people below on whom they fell--it was so far.

Still believing and empowered by God’s Word, the man leaped into the waiting hands of the Most High, and he fell and landed safely, breaking bones in one foot but still able to walk away to safety.

With both sky chariots exploding and dissolving in flames, all around him charred and bloody fragments and torsos of people littered the grass beside the road. His clothes still untouched by fire, there were no burns on either his skin or his clothing. Sixty souls were all that escaped out of nearly six hundreds on both sky chariots.

Mosheh shook his head as he recalled the deliverance of this precursor of the Dubesor. Nor thrilled his old heart, since it was so like God’s deliverance of His people at the Sea of the Red Wall, when there was no way of escape but by a miraculous road through the waters wrought by God’s Covenant Blood-Line.

Nevertheless, he would never tell Zipporah about Nor and the convergence of two sky chariots long before! Knowing only the flying clouds and the birds of the sky, she would think he had turned as mad as many people led by Donah and Huah in the camp whispered he was. He might have to write it down, but, fortunately, he was not required to let any people read his account.

Nor would they request to read them if they did not know anything. Unless his wife’s Midianite tongue wagged, his visions and revelations were safe from prying eyes and the gossips all around him in their tents!

Feeling better, Mosheh fell asleep and slept a whole hour until dawn. Then he sprang up from his bed like a young man, ready to start a new day, whether to march or stay, he was ready for anything the day brought.

As usual, the Almighty paid him a personal visit before Mosheh even had time to wash his face and smooth his hairs and beard.

Well acquainted with such events, Zipporah dropped the preparations of breakfast and dove headfirst out of the tent just in time before the conference began. This time the Most High seemed to be in an unusual hurry to get started.

On all previous occasions He announced His coming with a blast of wind and angelic trumpets at the front of the tent that sent Mosheh’s hair and robes flying straight back. This time no wind and trumpets.

And, most fortunately for her, there was no blazing cloud and thunderbolts, as on Mt. Horeb, the sacred Seat of the Most High.

Only the sound of wings, whether of doves or eagles or quail there was no time for Zipporah to tell. From where she lay on the ground outside the tent with a cracked rib, Zipporah regained breath and strength. As she struggled to her old feet on the uneven ground the tent of Mosheh lifted right off, revealing Mosheh’s feet and legs, which were also off the ground, supported by something glistening like a jewel or crystal on fire. The tent then turned round and settled slowly back down.

Too startled and frightened to flee--forgetting whether she was located in “A” or “Z ”-- Zipporah remained there, crouched, and so she heard Mosheh cry out.

“No, sl-sl-sla-sla...SMITE me to smoke and ash if You must, but I’m not doing it!” he said, his voice sounding like a rash, spoiled child’s.

Again, the tent lifted, spun around, and this time several lightning bolts showed in the space between the hanging tent pegs and the ground but they did not strike out at anyone and turned instead to swooningly-fragrant roses and lilies that banked up all around the tent.

When the tent set back down once again, her husband’s voice sounded as meek and cooperative as anyone could wish.

“I am your servant, O Lord! Use me as Your pen! ‘Mold me, melt me, use me, fill me, Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.’”

That is exactly what the Living God’s Spirit wished to do, to fall afresh on the man of destiny.

The Lord God, the Alpha and the Omega, the Aleph and the Tau, the A and the Z, the Same who endured the Cross after dragging it through the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem, the same gate through which one day He would return as ruler of the Earth--this holy One faced Mosheh and spoke to his prostrate, worshipping servant.

“Write everything I tell you, for I have already lettered you and your brother and sister Gimel and set you and your brother and sister in the hall of My champions. I will gather the sheaves and make one book of them and the Sixth of the Black Watch who is named Azmon, one who keeps the last works of the seven letters, will watch over it, and it will be safeguarded and kept until I break the seal.”

“But why, Lord God, is a se-se-se-se--COND writing of Mosheh necessary? “ the lion-prince half expostulated. “Hear, O God of Israel, my own time is important to me. I may be se-se-se-se-se--COND, but I am not Your t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-TOY to be trifled with!”

Zipporah, frozen in her impossible spot somewhere near the end of the holy congregational Z, felt the thrilling sensation in every particle of her heart and being that the presence of Almighty God always evoked. Feeling unutterable unworthiness before the Most High, eyes flooded with repenting and grateful tears, she was too afraid to move away to safety lest her forbidden presence be noticed. This was not shame because of years of abuse from the Hebrews, who regarded her Midianite connection with huge distaste and condescension, routinely muttering old oaths and throwing garbage at the tent door of Father Jethro if they should be passing that way. No, it was not shame, nor its foul sister, bitter resentment. It was the only reaction mortal flesh could possibly entertain before the Awe of Abraham, the Gracious, Loving God Who covenanted with His Chosen Ones.

Yet, overcome as she was, she could not believe her ears, that her husband had the temerity to question the Sea-Dividing Lord Almighty once again after nearly displeasing Him just a short time before!

There was a pause, noticeable to Zipporah because everything seemed to stop in the natural order. Birds, flying overhead, stopped, in wing-stroke. Clouds stopped scudding. Dust stopped whirling between the tents. Donkeys stopped twitching. Squalling children fell silent in mid-cry. Flies stopped biting donkeys’ ears and flanks...everything came to a sudden halt!

God’s words, when they did come, were more a mournful dove-sigh of the wind in the secret places of the high cliffs than an audible voice. Was this the same sound heard Mother Eve chose to believe a lie against her Creator and plucked forbidden fruit so that she could also be a god, knowing good and evil? Or when Cain slew his innocent brother? Or when later whole earth was filled with violence, rebellion, and sin, and after much warning by Father Noah the clouds dropped their first rains at the beginning of the Great Flood?

Zipporah, covering her head, fell to her face. She heard the heart of God pouring out unashamedly to mere flesh the grief of Omnipotence when faced with the unbending arrogance, spite, and boastings of mortal creatures.

Write, beloved! For it will doubly reveal the deceit in the hearts of scoffers and naysayers when a second Mosheh testifies of My mighty acts. Claiming that they could not tell the truth of the first Mosheh, they refused to believe any of My mighty works, nor would they accept any words of My other Prophets, Evangelists, and Martyrs, nor any of the words of life I spoke to living men personally while I walked the Earth, nor My miracles performed in the sight of all, nor the meaning of the laying down of my life on the Cross on the Hill of the Giant’s Skull, whom David My servant slew; thus they defamed My Deity, Name, Holiness and Power by denying My Word and Testimony to all men, saying it was produced by mere men and their imaginations, thus calling Me a liar. So let your latter testimony be written, telling of many same works that I have once again enacted upon the Earth in the sight of many witnesses. This testimony will be a final page of the volume of their stumbling. Their children, who are just like them, shall stumble over it, just as their fathers before them stumbled, led by their deceitful hearts. Between milling rocks, My Book and now yours the netherstone of testimony and stumbling, they and their children will be crushed to powder, and the powder will be cast into the everlasting fire and burned forever. It would have been better if they had not been born! But to all others, those who have a different mind and heart, all these things I have done will testify to them that I the Lord who was, who is, and will come again am alive; and they will believe I possess all power, and that I can divide great waters of tribulation and make them a way where there is no way. These I will make My holy children, just as I have made you and your people My children.

The Glorious Way-Maker had spoken. The next thing Zipporah knew was that she was hearing the deliverer Mosheh praise Israel’s Almighty with an old song from God’s Book as only he could--a former royal prince who knew he was God’s slave, not man’s.

“If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, let Israel now say--if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us alive, when their wrath was kindled against us. Then the waters would have overwhelmed us, the stream would have gone over our soul. Then the swollen waters would have gone over our soul. Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as prey to their teeth. Our soul has escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers. The snare is broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the Name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

So far so good! It was probably going to get no better. Zipporah, summoning last reserves of strength and stamina, crawled away to her father’s tent. This was enough Glory for her that day and she badly needed a respite. Still alive but grown as old and wrinkled as the everlasting hills, Father Jethro afforded shelter whenever the goings-on in the tent of Mosheh became too much for her--as often it proved the case.

Behind the wife of Mosheh wending her way between close-packed tents, the Pen of God had already begun to write the “Book of Stumbling” (stumbling to some!) that Azmon the Sixth Angel would keep safe until the breaking of its seal. What stylus did he use? Having forsaken all his exquisitely fashioned writing and drawing materials in the royal palace in Mizraim, he did not think to ask first. He went and pulled out a neighbor’s brass tent peg, anointed it with fire and oil and fragrant spices, then took the Almighty’s dictation down on sheaves of pure gold that the Sixth Angel brought to him as they were needed.

It all went reasonably well until Mosheh was writing down the Crucifixion of Yeshua I and the events leading up to it. Since this was the place in the account where the Mystery of the Ages was first revealed, it was not surprising that Mosheh required enlightenment on some points of the action.

“Y-y-y-y-y-y-y-YOU mean to say, sacrifices were all done away with by You on the Cross? How, then, could our sin be washed away?””

“Certainly, My blood shed for you remitted all your sins. If salvation was by men’s works, then you could boast before God. But I shed My blood freely for you, and it is a free Gift to every man and women and child who believes. No longer are sacrifices any good in My sight. They never could wash away your sin, they only pointed toward My blood which could. That was their only value--to point sinners to My all-sufficient blood-sacrifice.”

Mosheh pondered the point. Even if the first Mosheh understood it, he still had his own mind to make up on the matter. “B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-BUT how did it cleanse and wash us of our sins?”

“It is all how We look upon the Gift, not how you see it in your sinful state. For it won your complete pardon and release from the curse of death and sin for all time. I, Yeshua, have left the Cross, ascended to my Father’s right hand, and I was the Cornerstone the builders of the religious system rejected. But, beloved, back when I took my Cross through the Eastern Gate, understand I was carrying you and everybody who ever lived and who will ever be conceived of man, I took all of you along with Me in my own loins, and when I lay My life down on that Cross you and all your sins died with Me, but when I rose again on the third day you all rose with Me as new creations. All this is a Gift. But you must receive it, believing, or it will never be yours.”

Mosheh the lawgiver and legislator was still, struck speechless for a long time.

“You mean to say, You were our Complete Sacrifice? You won our pardon for all our sins? You shed Your blood as the price for our iniquity? You took Your Cross as the instrument of our Salvation through the East Gate of the city, and thereby regained Paradise which our father Adam lost? Oh, bless me, I think I see it! I see it! The first Adam brought death to us all by sinning in the Garden, right?. You, the Perfect Second Adam, died so that You could restore all, and bring us Life. Only God could do this prefect Work. No man, especially sinful, fallen man, could do it. It’s--it-s--0-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-OH!”

No writing but worship followed, for the tent peg fell out of Mosheh’s trembling hand and he fell to the floor before his Savior and his God.

The moment came when Mosheh wrote the last word, but he did not set down his tent peg for he was somehow not satisfied with the ending. Still holding his “pen,” he went to the doorway of his tent and looked out. It so happened that his tent faced open wilderness, and he saw at that moment a blue butterfly alight on a branch of a flowering wild almond, the tree that was supposed to awake the year with its bright blossoms.

The butterfly had been chased by rays sent out against him by the attacking Topaz, which took away his good viewing spot in the window of a certain antechamber in the Machitha palace, but that wasn’t keeping him from observing other developments now that the Topaz itself had suffered a major reverse with the collapse of the Per-aa’s power and his programs.

“A new one, flexing his new wings!” Mosheh mused, for it was early in the year and this had to be the first of its kind.

His face took on a different expression, as if the matter troubling him had been resolved. He grasped his peg pen with determination and went straightway to his writing desk, daring to add to the holy scripture the single concluding phrase: “Who makes a way where there is no way.”

”Let those who wish my ruin pour coals on my old head for this, but I think the Almighty will take my part in this heresy!” Mosheh laughed to himself as he rolled the golden sheaf up into a scroll and set it aside with the others.

He had no sooner done so than Azmon’s blood-red mandorla shimmered within the tent, and he stepped out, come to pick up the sheaves for the gathering into one book and the placing of the seal.

“N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-NO!” Mosheh cried, wagging his finger at the angel as if he were catching a child at mischief.

Azmon said nothing in protest. No mortal in his flesh could command an angel. He stood in the doorway regarding the deliverer of Israel.

Mosheh approached the angel without a shred of fear or wheedling manner. “I did not go to all this work for you to spirit my writing away and scatter it to the winds!”

The angel peered into Mosheh’s fearless eyes. In deference he did not take the sheaves and shoot immediately into the heavens, with a suddenness that would have destroyed the tent of Mosheh and those around it. The delay was causing a certain commotion in the camp as well. A dignitary was paying his respects at the tent of Mosheh and Azmon, deferring to the visitor’s mission, disappeared from view.

A cracked shofar with an hoarse, primeval, low sound was blown at the tent entrance, which gave Mosheh time to draw a curtain dividing the tent where the sheaves lay from where he stood.

Attended by servants shaking pleasing Midianite harmonies out of a strange collection of gilded milkweed pods, painted rattle-gourds, and bells and sistrums of various kinds, Jethro the father of his people entered in full robes and trappings of his office. He carried a chieftain-priest’s carved myrtlewood staff and wore a once sporty, star and pearl-emblazoned purple turban, which had gone well in earlier days with black robes, and silver slippers that curved high at the toe and flat at the back, not to mention a brass girdle and Damascus scimitar with jeweled sheath--an outfit that the Hebrews turned their noses up at because it reminded them of idolatrous Babelite wizards.

Unfortunately, too much wear, too many moths, the rip and tear of Midianite foliage, had reduced magnificence to a tawdry shadow of former glory.

Mildly surprised at a personal visit from so old and rickety a collection of sainted bones, Mosheh was temporarily distracted from the more important matter at hand--keeping his sheaves from the powerful angel.

Decrepit as he was in frame, his mind was still able enough, and Jethro sized up the situation in a flash. His darting eyes fastened on Mosheh’s like two hot bolts, and the flames behind them grew hotter by the moment. It was the elder man’s turn to wag his finger, and Jethro’s finger was a very long instrument, indeed. “Now, son of Amram,” he chided the deliverer of Israel like a small child, “what is this nonsense, eh? Eh? You refuse to release the writing of your hand to the Holy One?”

That was beyond denial the matter. Mosheh, his eyes smitten by the burning coals of Jethro, felt somewhat cowed, though he was still in his lion-prince phase.

Old Jethro’s bent turban began sliding backwards off his nearly hairless head, but he shook his finger vigorously in Mosheh’s face. “Give the writing over! Give it over, I say! You must obey my word, or I will take back my eldest from your bosom, and then how will you fare? You’ll never find another like her, I wager! I gave you the pick of my flock, when you were only a hireling herdsman without herds and prospects.”

Turning to go, the old one seemed to forget his mission in coming. Son-in-law Mosheh, chastened, let him depart without protest. Forgetting Mosheh’s presence almost immediately, Jethro began muttering.

“I remember that one,” old Jethro reminisced to an attendant only his eyes could see. “The prince of Mizraim--he said he was--stumbled onto my fine, green pastures, with the darling lambs of fair Holy Midian dancing round their dams’ bursting udders, and his eyes and face were more like a lion than a lion’s--but we tamed him--oh, we made him meek as a sheep, we did! Yes, meek as a sheep! I believe it was the full skin of fresh ewe milk I made him drink every day before I taught him out of the ancient learning of the Most High. Forsooth, it must have been the milk. It can tame a lion in all his pride--that sweet as honey milk!”

Half-right, Jethro navigated more or less out the door, his arms supported by servants who were old men too, having grown so in long service. Outside, he took a few exploratory steps, then halted and turned to someone that everyone else could not see, and inquired, “Who was that fellow in there? He had the face of a lion, and then when I spoke to him about the Most High it changed to a sheep’s. And what am I doing out of my own tent? What could you be thinking of , dragging an old man like me out into the cold on a night like this? Take me home at once, children, or I’ll thrash the lot of you with my staff!”

Later, comfortable with his aged wives around him, Jethro took ease and his mind returned to the events of the day, rather clearly, too.

“He is doing better, that son-in-law!” he observed. “Why, my beloved pomegranates, I even saw a special sign of it, provided by the hand of the Most High, just when I was departing the tent of Mosheh. It made me stop in my tracks, that sign! For it was most striking. A jewel, it appeared, or a star--but it flew up into the heavens, shooting to the north at great speed. What do you think? Is that not a nice sign for my son-in-law? It says he is doing better, much better!”

Jethro the old fox and priest of Midian had spoken more truly than he knew of a man who was part lion, part lamb, three-flagged and three-countried without any one country truly wanting him, cunning enough to made chariots that flew in the sky and roared like simoons on the ground yet couldn’t tell a ewe from a ram to save his life--nevertheless, Jethro could see there had been noticeable improvement in this hopeless case of a man, improvement that could only be attibuted to the finger of God the Most High.

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