Eleazar Drew Twelve Tribes and Twelve Lands From Two Urns

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Eleazar Stood Between Two Urns

Eleazar the priest, son of Aaron, stood where every tribe could see his hands. Two urns waited at his feet. One held twelve names on slips. The other held twelve pieces of Canaan. The swords had been busy for seven years. Now they were quiet, and the quiet was the harder work.

Behind him the hills caught the late light. Give a tribe too little, and the anger would last longer than the men in this field. Give a tribe the green valley its neighbor had bled for, and the war would only move inside the camp. A line drawn wrong here would outlast every man standing on this ground.

Joshua stood near him. Joshua could take a city. He had no taste for this part. He could not look twelve brothers in the eye and tell them which one was lying when each swore the lot had cheated him. So the dividing was lifted out of human hands on purpose.

The Breastplate Caught the Light

On Eleazar's chest the breastplate caught the sun. Set into it were the Urim and Thummim (אוּרִים וְתֻמִּים, the lights and the perfections), the stones through which Heaven answered. No one could say exactly what they were. Everyone knew what they did. When the priest asked in a moment of dread, they answered.

The first urn held Reuben and Simeon and Judah and the rest, each name waiting in the dark of the vessel. The second held the districts carved out of the conquered country, each portion some family would one day call home.

The whole congregation of Israel had gathered. They had crossed a sea and wandered a wilderness and buried a generation in the sand for this ground. They pressed close to learn whose it would be.

He Named Judah Before He Drew

Eleazar did not reach in first. The stones lit his mouth. He named the tribe and named the land in the same breath.

"Judah," he said. "And the south."

Only then did his hand go down into the first urn. It rose with the slip that said Judah. It went down into the second and rose with the slip that named the south, the very portion he had already spoken.

A man could rig an urn. No man could make his own voice call out, before he had drawn, the precise pairing his blind hand was about to lift from two separate vessels. The match was the proof. Heaven was cutting. Eleazar was only the mouth and the hand.

Zebulun Came Up With Acco

He did it again.

"Zebulun," he said. His hand went into the first urn and came up Zebulun. His hand went into the second and came up Acco, the district the stones had already put in his mouth.

Tribe after tribe the voice came first and the hand came second, and each time the two agreed. Reuben learned the shape of his ground. Simeon learned his. A man who meant to shout that he was robbed would have had to shout it against a pairing the whole field had heard before the slips ever left the dark.

The grumbling never found its footing. The field had heard the names before the hands moved. What the record later calls a lot (Joshua 14 to 21) was, in that hour, a held breath repeated a dozen times. A voice over a silent crowd. A hand disappearing into darkness and rising with the very name the voice had spoken.

Joshua Planted a Root That Would Not Die

When the last match was done, every tribe had its ground, and not one of them could blame Eleazar, or Joshua, or each other. The lines had been drawn by something no man could lean on or bribe.

Joshua still had a problem. A line in the dirt can be moved. A neighbor can plow a furrow a cubit over and swear the lot had always run there. So he planted the hazubah, a rootstock so stubborn that once it took, a plow could not kill it. A blade could cut it down. It sent up new shoots through the grain. It kept the old division visible in the field season after season, a living marker no one could pretend not to see.

The war for the land was over. The war over the land, the one that should have come next, had been answered before it began. The last slip lay in Eleazar's palm, matching the name still in the air. The hazubah took in the furrows and would not die.