Crowns of Egyptian Gold on Hebrew Children

She went out into the street 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 own wall, close enough that for eleven years each had heard the other's children crying through the mud brick. She knocked. 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 out all of it and did not look at her once while she was doing it.

The Order Came at a Thornbush in Midian

Months before any of that, a long way east, God had told Moses exactly how the last hours would go, and the instruction had sounded almost domestic. Every woman is to ask her neighbour, 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 is not domestic at all. You shall set them as crowns upon your sons and your daughters. And you shall leave the Egyptians empty.

Not carry them. Not sew them into a hem for the road. Crowns. On children.

Moses had argued with almost everything else at that bush. He does not appear to have argued with this.

Crowns for Heads That Small

So 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 felt cold weight settle on her hair and laughed out loud, 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 through the street, and pressed her thumb once against her daughter's forehead.

A boy across the room got a hand under his and pulled. His father put it back and said nothing. Some things are taught by weight and not by speech.

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 and none of it was theft. It was four centuries of wages walking out on the heads of the smallest people in the house.

The Mouth That Ordered the River

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

She meant it as a warning and the sages heard it as a verdict on Egypt. 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, measured out with the care the Torah uses on a man who schemes against his neighbour.

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

That was the sentence. It went out of his mouth and it stayed on the books, and on the night the women were fastening crowns, the firstborn of Egypt were dying in the same houses the gold had just come out of. God gives bread to the hungry and judgment to the ones who have been ground down, and 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.

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 neighbour'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.