Amram Laid One Brick While Jochebed Hid the Babes

Click for full size

Amram Made One Brick

The overseers laid a shekel on the brick table and smiled. One coin for every brick. Hebrew hands went faster than they had ever gone. Men who had never stacked so high stacked higher. The money glittered. The quota wrote itself in wet clay.

Amram looked at the coin, made one brick, took one shekel, and went home while the light was still good.

When the wages vanished, the quota stayed. Egypt wanted the number made when pay still glittered. From the others they could demand towers. From Amram they could demand one brick, because that was all he had ever made in a day. He had never signed the first bargain with his body. The single brick looked small beside the ambitious stacks. In the long year of unpaid labor it became the only honest unit left, and no taskmaster could argue past it.

An overseer came at dawn, pointed at Amram's one brick, and opened his mouth to shout. Then he shut it. The old contract was still in the clay. One shekel. One brick. The law of the whip could not invent a larger number than the man had freely made.

The Hangmen Found Nobody

Amram took as wife his aunt Jochebed (יוֹכֶבֶד), born the same day as he, daughter of Levi. Her name meant Divine Splendor because light came off her face. She stood among the midwives who hid the little Hebrew babes and kept them alive against Pharaoh's order.

Pharaoh sent hangmen for Jochebed and her daughter Miriam.

The men opened the door. They saw a stool, a basin, a wall. They did not see the two women standing in the room. God had taken the midwives out of their eyes. Miriam held her breath anyway. Jochebed did not move. The bailiffs searched the corners, swore, and went back to the palace with nobody in their hands.

The house that would hold Moses was already a house heaven had hidden from murderers.

Light Filled the Birth Room

Jochebed carried him without pain. She birthed him without pain. Pious women stand outside Eve's curse of sorrow in conception and childbearing. When the child came, the whole house filled with a radiance equal to sun and moon together.

Before a day had passed, the infant walked. He spoke with his parents. He refused milk from his mother's breast as if he were already grown. Greatness arrived before the Nile basket, before the palace, before the staff.

Jochebed held a walking child in a house the hangmen had already failed to find. Pharaoh's decree was still out there, hunting boys. Inside, light sat on the walls as if it had nowhere else to go.

Instructors Left Humbled

At great cost, instructors came from neighboring lands to educate the boy. Some came unasked, pulled by rumor. He excelled them. He reached for an answer and found it already in his mouth. When scholars disagreed, he chose the true view. His mind refused to store what was false.

Egypt paid for teachers who left humbled. The child of the invisible midwife sat among foreign sciences and sorted truth from error as if he were sorting grain. Palace education could not erase the light that had filled the house at his birth. It could only give that light more languages in which to refuse a lie.

Moses Left the Portrait Hanging

After the exodus a king of Arabia sent an artist to paint Moses so the likeness of the holy man might stand before the throne. The painter returned. Experts in faces read the canvas and named a villain: covetous, haughty, sensual, loaded with ugly traits.

The king raged at their science. They blamed the painter for a false portrait. The artist swore the work matched the face. Unable to decide, the king traveled to see Moses in the flesh.

Canvas and man agreed.

Moses did not flinch. "If the good in me had been born with the bone," he said, "I would be no better than a log, which stays as the tree made it. Your experts read my face correctly. Those traits were mine, perhaps worse. I mastered them with a strong will. What you see now is not what I was given. It is what I built. Honor on earth and in heaven rests on that change, not on a forehead that fooled no one."

The king looked from the canvas to the man. Moses did not ask him to take the painting down. He left it hanging, ugly and accurate, and went back to the work that had unmade the face.