An Angel Gave Levi a Sword and He Told No One for a Century

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Grief Sat Down at Abel-Maul

Levi was eighteen and supposed to be watching sheep. He was watching walls instead.

Wrongdoing had built them. Lawlessness sat on the towers like a garrison that did not sleep. The flock moved on the slope at Abel-Maul. He did not. He prayed to be pulled out of a world that had already organized itself against the good, and sleep took him where he stood.

He was on a high mountain he had never climbed. The sky came apart over his head. A voice said, "Levi, enter."

He went in. The first heaven held a great sea hanging over nothing at all. The second was brighter than any morning he had worked through, lit from no direction he could name. He asked the angel beside him why.

"Do not marvel at this," the angel said. "You will see a heaven brighter than this one. When you have climbed to it you will stand near the Lord and be his minister."

The Angel Put a Sword in His Hands

The gates opened on a temple. On a throne of glory sat the Most High. He gave Levi the priesthood and the blessings that went with it, there, before any altar on earth had felt his hand.

Then the angel walked him back down and put two things into his palms. A shield. A sword.

"Take vengeance on Shechem for Dinah your sister. I will be with you, because the Lord has sent me."

Levi asked the angel for his name, so he would have something to call on when the trouble came. He did not get it.

"I am the one who pleads for Israel," the angel said, "so that they are not wiped out altogether. Every evil spirit attacks them."

Levi woke. The sheep were still around him. The grass was wet. His hands were empty.

A Brass Shield Lay in the Grass

He was walking home to his father when his foot found it. A shield of brass, lying where no smith had been. There had been no metal on that mountain when he lay down. He picked it up. He carried it. He said nothing about the sword that had not come with him.

The hill south of Abila has been called Aspis ever since. The word means shield.

What he did say, he said to Jacob and to Reuben. Tell the men of Shechem not to circumcise themselves. Leave them as they are. He lost that argument. The men of the city took the covenant knife and went home to their beds to heal.

Levi killed Shechem first. Simeon killed Hamor. Their brothers came in behind them and put the rest of the city to the sword.

What broke Jacob was not the killing. It was that those men had been brought into the covenant and then cut down inside it. He was sick for the whole of that day. Years later, when he stood over his sons to bless them, he looked at Levi with that day still on his face.

Levi gave him the reasons. The men of that city had tried to take Sarah and had tried to take Rebecca the way they took Dinah. They had hounded Abraham when he was a stranger passing through. They had harried his flocks when the ewes were heavy. A man named Eblaen, born in Abraham's own house, they had shamed. Jacob heard it all and stayed sick.

Seven Men in White Dressed Him

Seventy days later, at Bethel, it happened again.

Seven men in white stood over him. "Get up. Put on the robe of the priesthood, and the crown of righteousness, and the breastplate of understanding, and the garment of truth, and the plate of faith, and the turban, and the ephod of prophecy."

They dressed him one at a time. The first poured holy oil over his head and handed him a staff for judgment. The second washed him in clean water and fed him bread and wine. The third put the linen on him. The fourth tied a purple sash at his waist. The fifth pressed a branch of rich olive into his hand. The sixth set a crown on his head. The seventh laid the priest's diadem over the crown and filled both his hands with incense until they were heavy.

He was nineteen. He woke knowing this was the same dream as the first. He hid this one too. He told no man on earth.

He Spoke at Last on the Bed

He married Melcha at twenty-eight. Gersam was born, then Kohath, then a third son who came so hard out of his mother that Levi named him Merari, my bitterness, because the child nearly died with her. Jochebed was born in Egypt when he was sixty-four. He watched his sons have sons. He said nothing about the mountain.

Then it was revealed to him that he was going to die. He was in good health that day. He called all of them in.

He told them the sea hanging in the first heaven. The angel who would not give a name. The seven men and the incense. He told them what he had taken out of the writings of Enoch, and it was not comfort. His own descendants would sin against God. They would be punished for it. Only after the punishment would a new priest be raised up, one to whom all the words of the Lord would be revealed.

"Choose now," he said. "Light or darkness. The law of the Lord or the works of Beliar."

"Before the Lord we will walk according to his law."

"The Lord is a witness. His angels are witnesses. I am a witness, and you are witnesses, to what has just come out of your mouths."

"We are witnesses," they said.

He stopped talking. He stretched his feet out on the bed. He was gathered to his fathers at a hundred and thirty-seven. They laid him in a coffin, carried him up to Hebron, and buried him with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.