Angels Stripped Israel After the Golden Calf

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Two Armies Left Egypt

Two armies went out of Egypt that night. One of them had feet.

The other moved above the road and left no dust, and heaven had already counted that one. The host God claimed as his own, the one he said he had brought out, was the host with feet: men with staffs in their hands, women with kneading bowls still warm on their shoulders, children losing the step and running to catch it. Slaves the week before. Now an army, and the word used for them was the word used in the court above.

They Put On the Name

At the mountain they dressed.

Not in linen, not in wool, not in the Egyptian gold still knotted into their sleeves. Israel put on the Name of God, and the way a man looks when he is wearing the best clothes he owns is the way the whole camp looked. Backs that had bent under wet brick came straight. Faces that had learned to watch the ground came up. They stood in front of each other and could not stop looking.

Before God they were beautiful. Before God they were good. Dressed in that clothing they held the same rank as the ministering angels, and while it lasted no one could have told the two courts apart by looking.

The Gold Went Into the Fire

Moses stayed too long on the mountain.

Down below, fear went looking for something it could put its hands on. Earrings came off. Gold changed hands and went into the fire, and what walked out of the fire was small and hard and shining, and it could be pointed at, which was the whole of its appeal.

They danced around it wearing the Name. That is the part that cannot be softened. The glory was still on their shoulders while they sang to the calf, and nobody in the camp took anything off.

Sixty Myriads Came Back That Night

God was angry, and the anger arrived with a number.

Six hundred thousand ministering angels came down into the camp after dark. Not one of them brought anything. Each went to the Israelite whose glory he had come for, and reached for it.

No one held still willingly. The garments had made them beautiful. They had made a camp of brickmakers look like the court of heaven, and men who had worn that were not going to hand it over between one breath and the next. It made no difference. What was taken was taken, and some of it did not wait to be taken. Some of the glory came loose on its own and left, the way a thing leaves a house where it is no longer honored.

Bare Before the Mountain

By morning the camp was ordinary.

Wool. Linen. Skin. Six hundred thousand people standing in front of a mountain in the clothes they had carried out of Egypt, the calf still somewhere in the wreckage, and not one of them able to say out loud that he had been robbed. They had put the Name on themselves. That was the sentence that would be remembered afterward. Not that it was taken from them. That they stripped themselves.