Egypt Forgot Joseph and Crowned a Cubit-Tall Pharaoh

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The Coffin They Carried Out of Goshen

Levi died at a hundred and thirty seven, the last of the twelve brothers to go, and his children laid him in a coffin and kept it in the house. No procession north, no cave in Canaan yet. The box stayed in Goshen, on land a king had once handed to the sons of Jacob for nothing.

The reason behind that gift was buried too. Joseph had kept Egypt breathing through seven years when the Nile gave nothing, and Egyptians had sold him their fields for bread, then their cattle, then themselves. His brothers came down from famine country and were given the best pasture in the kingdom for it.

The men who had knelt for that bread were dead now, and their grandsons had forgotten the famine along with the Hebrew who ended it. They rode past Goshen and counted foreigners on good soil.

The taking started small. A field here, a house there, a well dug by Hebrew hands that was suddenly not theirs. Whoever argued about it got beaten in the road and went home without the well. Within a few years the sons of Jacob were worn thin enough that living itself had become a weight they carried.

The Elders Counted Israel and Were Afraid

The old king died and Melol took the throne, and the counselors and elders of Egypt came into the hall together.

"Behold, the people of the children of Israel is greater and mightier than we are," they said.

They had the fights in mind. Small parties of Hebrews had gone into Egyptian companies many times their size and come out the far end still walking. Put a war on the border, the elders argued, and men like that choose a side, and the side will not be Egypt. They will take the country and then leave it as its owners.

Melol did not order a massacre. He had something slower, and it began with money.

Wages First and Then the Whip

Heralds went through Egypt and through Goshen with an offer. The king was raising two cities, Pithom and Rameses, storehouses and walls, and he wanted hands. Daily wages. Egyptian and Hebrew alike, same pit, same coin.

They came. Men stripped of their fields picked up the shovel because the shovel paid, and for a month the arrangement held exactly as announced. Egyptians and Hebrews stood in the same clay and drew the same silver at dusk.

Then the Egyptians began to leave. One from this crew, two from that one, slipping off quietly week by week until the pits held Hebrews and nobody else. The men who had walked away came back with rods in their hands and stood on the rim of the pit, and the paying stopped.

A man who set down his tools and asked for his wage was knocked into the clay and told to keep working. No decree was read out in Goshen, no chain was fastened on anyone. The coin stopped and the beatings started, and by the time the word slave was spoken aloud the lower courses of Pithom already stood.

One tribe never entered the pits. The sons of Levi had turned the offer down on the first day, having read the shape of it before a single wage was paid, and the Egyptians left them where they were.

The rest made bricks, and they made one joke, the kind available to people with nothing else. The king's name was Melol. In Goshen they called him Meror (מרור), bitter, and the name held for the ninety four years he sat on the throne.

He worked them to break the birth rate. That was the design under the mortar, since a man who comes home at midnight with his back opened does not father children. The counts climbed anyway. The harder Egypt pressed, the more Hebrew children filled the lanes of Goshen, until Egyptians crossing that district went quiet with dread.

The Small King Counted the Bricks Himself

Melol died, and Egypt crowned his second son at twenty.

Adikam stood a cubit and a span tall. His beard came down to his feet and swept the floor when he walked. The wise men of Egypt, who called every king Pharaoh the way a title swallows a name, gave this one a second name behind their hands. Ahuz, short. It fit the body, and it would fit the reign.

He did not run Goshen from the hall. He came down to the brickfields with his officers, stood in the dust while the work went on, and set the daily count in his own mouth, and then set it higher. What his father had squeezed out through overseers, Adikam took in person.

The count was not a target. It was a line with a punishment underneath it.

What They Put Into the Wall

When a crew came up short at the end of a day, the taskmasters walked into the houses.

They took infants out of their mothers' arms. They carried them to the unfinished courses, set them among the bricks, and sealed the mortar over them alive to make up the missing count. Women were held back from the scaffolding while it happened. The men laid the next row on top. Two hundred and seventy children went into the walls of Egypt that way.

What came up out of Goshen afterward had no words arranged in it. It went up regardless.

God heard the voice of the children of Israel and their cry in those days, and God remembered the covenant cut with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

No sea moved that night. No hail fell on Egypt.

Across the border, in a garden in Midian, a staff of sapphire stood planted upright in the dirt with the Name of God cut into its length. It had been in the hand of Adam after Eden and had come down through Noah and Shem to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, who took it off Esau by force, and then to Joseph, and after Joseph into the ground of Reuel the Midianite. Strong men had put both hands on it and pulled. It did not shift for any of them.

Under Reuel's house, in a pit, an Egyptian-raised man was finishing his tenth year of imprisonment on food that Reuel's daughter Zipporah carried down in secret. His name was Moses. The staff was standing there for whoever had a right to it.