Angels Stripped Israel After the Golden Calf

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

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The other moved above the road and left no dust, and heaven had already counted that one. The host God claimed as his own 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 Dressed at the Mountain

At Sinai they put on clothes no loom had made.

Not linen. Not wool. Not the Egyptian gold still knotted into their sleeves. Israel put on the Name of God. 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.

A man who had carried brick last month looked at his own hands and did not know them. Before God they were beautiful. Before God they were good. Dressed in that clothing they held the same rank as the ministering angels. While it lasted, no one could have told the two courts apart by looking.

They Danced Still Wearing It

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. What walked out of the fire was small and hard and shining, and it could be pointed at.

They danced around it wearing the Name. The glory was still on their shoulders while they sang to the calf. The man who had not known his own hands yesterday did not take the Name off. Nobody in the camp took anything off. They pointed at the calf and the Name stayed on them, as if a garment could not tell what the body under it was doing.

Six Hundred Thousand Hands

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 a gift. Each went to the Israelite whose glory he had come for, and reached for it.

The brickmaker felt a hand on his shoulder. He grabbed at the garment. He had been beautiful for the first time in his life. He was not going to hand it over between one breath and the next. He pulled. The angel pulled. Around him other men were doing the same, fists closed on light that would not stay. A woman cried out once and then stopped, because the thing on her back was already gone.

The Name came away in the angel's fist, and the brickmaker stood in the clothes he had carried out of Egypt, ordinary, shaking, his mouth still shaped around a song he should not have sung. All through the camp the same work went on. What was taken was taken. Some of the glory did not wait to be taken. It came loose on its own and left, the way a thing leaves a house where it is no longer honored.

Morning Without the Name

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 lay somewhere in the wreckage. Not one of them could say out loud that he had been robbed.

They had put the Name on themselves. That was the sentence remembered afterward. Not that it was taken from them. That they stripped themselves (Exodus 33:6). The brickmaker looked at his hands again. They were only hands. The mountain was still there. The Name was not.