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

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The Sheep at Abel-Maul

Levi was eighteen and watching his father's flocks at Abel-Maul when the grief came down on him.

He had been looking at the world too clearly for weeks. Wrongdoing had built itself walls. Lawlessness sat up on the towers like a garrison. He prayed on the hillside to be pulled out of it, and then sleep took him where he stood, and he was standing on a high mountain he had never climbed, and the sky came apart over his head.

A voice said, "Levi, enter."

He went in. The first heaven had a great sea hanging in it over nothing at all. The second was brighter than any morning he had ever worked through, lit from no direction he could find, and he asked the angel beside him why. "Do not marvel at this," the angel said. "You will see a heaven brighter than this one, and 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, and on a throne of glory sat the Most High, who gave him the priesthood and the blessings that went with it.

Then the angel walked him back down to the earth and put two things into his hands. A shield and 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 that 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."

Then Levi woke on the hillside with the sheep still around him and nothing whatever in his hands.

The Shield in the Grass

He was walking home to his father when he found it lying in the grass. A shield of brass. There had been no shield on that mountain when he lay down on it. He carried it back and said nothing about where the other half of the gift had gone, and the hill south of Abila has been called Aspis ever since, which is the word for a shield.

What he did say was this. He went to Jacob, and he went to Reuben, and he argued that the men of Shechem should be told not to circumcise themselves. Leave them as they are, he said. He lost the 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, and 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 exactly as they took Dinah. They had hounded Abraham when he was a stranger passing through and harried his flocks when the ewes were heavy, and a man named Eblaen, born in Abraham's own household, they had shamed. Jacob heard it all and stayed sick.

Seven Men in White at Bethel

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 understanding that this was the same dream as the first one, and he hid this one too, and told no man on earth.

The Last Hour of a Very Old Man

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, and he called all of them in.

He told them the whole thing. The sea hanging in the first heaven. The angel who would not give a name. The seven men and the incense. And he told them what he had taken out of the writings of Enoch, which was not comfort: his own descendants would sin against God, and would be punished for it, and 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, stretched his feet out on the bed, and 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.