Crowns of Egyptian Gold on Hebrew Children

She knocked with the blood still tacky on her own doorpost.

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Four houses down. Then the one across the alley. Then the woman who lived against the other side of her wall, close enough that for eleven years each had heard the other's children crying through the mud brick. She asked for silver. She asked for gold. She asked for the good clothes folded in the chest at the foot of the bed.

The Egyptian woman brought all of it out and did not look at her once while she was doing it.

The Order Came at a Thornbush

Months earlier, a long way east, God had told Moses how the last hours would go. "Every woman is to ask her neighbor, and the woman who lives against the wall of her house, for vessels of silver and vessels of gold and clothing."

Then the part that does not sound like packing. "You shall set them as crowns upon your sons and your daughters. And you shall leave the Egyptians empty."

Not sewn into a hem. Not buried in a sack for the road. Crowns. On children.

Moses had argued with almost everything else at that bush. He did not argue with this.

Cold Metal on Small Heads

On the last night the women came home with their arms full and started fitting metal to skulls that were nowhere near the size of it.

A girl of five laughed when the band settled on her hair, because a child laughs at anything that comes down on her head in the dark. Her mother did not laugh. She turned the band twice to find where it would sit, listened past the doorway for whatever was moving in the street, and pressed her thumb once against her daughter's forehead.

A boy across the room got a hand under his crown and pulled. His father put it back and said nothing.

The gold on those children had bought bricks. It had gilded the doorframes of temples they had been marched past. The silver had gone through the hands of the men who counted their fathers' quotas. None of it was a gift. Four hundred years of wages walked out on the heads of the smallest people in the house.

The Mouth That Ordered the River

Long afterward, in a shrine in the hill country, Hannah would sing with a child of her own in her arms: let no arrogance come out of your mouth.

Proud words do not evaporate. They come back with the same shape they went out with. The arm Egypt raised over Israel got raised over Egypt. The plan Egypt cooked got served at Egypt's own table.

Pharaoh had opened his mouth once and said, "Every son that is born, throw him into the river."

That sentence stayed on the books. On the night the women were fastening crowns, the firstborn of Egypt were dying in the same houses the gold had just left. God gives bread to the hungry and judgment to the ones who have been ground down. The ones who had been ground down were sleeping under borrowed metal three streets away.

They Left in Daylight

One line says the Lord took Israel out of Egypt at night. Another says they marched on the morrow of the Passover, in the open, in the sun, with everyone watching (Exodus 12:51).

Both stand. The walking happened by day. The redemption started in the evening, in the dark, in the smell of roasted lamb and hurried bread, in a doorway marked with blood, at the moment a woman knocked on a neighbor's door and asked for the gold.

By the time the road filled, the child had been asleep for hours with a crown pushed crooked over one ear and the metal gone warm against her hair. Behind her, chests stood open all over Egypt with nothing in them.