Israel Wept at the Tent Doors Over Forbidden Kin Marriage

Click for full size

The Sound Outside the House of Study

Moses came out the door of the house of study and walked straight into it. Not thirst. Not the cry for meat. Weeping, and it was organized: family by family, each cluster sitting at the door of its own tent, so the sound reached him in blocks as he went past.

They had waited for him. They knew which door he used and they had picked the hour when he would be out in the open with nothing to teach from.

What He Had Forbidden

The ban had come down in public, in front of the whole assembly, and that was the part that cut. A man could no longer marry his sister. He could no longer marry his father's sister or his mother's sister. Those had been ordinary matches. Households had been built that way for as long as anybody in the camp could remember.

Hearts had swelled around the practice, which was the trouble with it. This was not some rare vice hidden in three tents at the edge of the camp. It was how families held onto each other, and it had been declared dead in a single afternoon while everyone stood there listening.

Half the tents had someone inside them whose marriage now had a name it had never had before, or a wedding already arranged that a sentence had just cancelled.

Tears That Were Also a Threat

So they sat at their thresholds and wept where he would have to walk. A man with a match arranged with his mother's sister sat in his doorway and cried the way people cry at a funeral, and something had in fact died: the shape his life had been going to have. Children watched their parents weep over aunts they had just been told to call forbidden, and learned early what a boundary costs a household.

The grief was real. It was also an instrument. Every open tent flap was a small demonstration, the demonstrations had been arranged along his route, and the thing being asked of him was that he take the words back.

He kept walking. Nobody stopped him and nobody spoke to him. They only made sure he heard.

The Prophet Who Did Not Beg This Time

God's anger came down hard on the camp. In Moses' own eyes the thing was evil.

Once before, when they had melted their gold and danced around it, God had raged and Moses had thrown himself into the gap and argued Him down, pleading for people who had no case. This time the positions traded. God held His anger back, and Moses did not. The man who had begged for the calf-worshippers stood in front of the weeping tents and refused to treat the crying as a passing mood.

He had reason. At the mountain he had heard what came attached to the word against adultery: not only the act but the company a person keeps, so that the children coming after would not inherit it, with the hands and the feet and the eyes and the ears each named separately, and plague promised to a world that let it spread. The word against theft ran the same way. A man who kept the company of thieves would raise thieves. Famine followed robbery through the world. God would pardon idolatry in a man sooner than He would pardon stealing.

What the families at the doors were asking him to permit was that kind of inheritance. Not one wedding. A pattern that would run down through the tents into children not yet born.

After the Tears Dried

Nothing was reversed. The weeping went on for a while and then it stopped, the way weeping stops, and the tent doors went back to ordinary use: cooking, sleeping, a woman nursing at the same flap where she had sat and cried a week before.

Some houses rebuilt themselves on the new ground. Some carried the old want around like a stone in the shoe for the rest of the wilderness. Moses went on leading people who had shown him their worst grief over his hardest line, and he had to look at those faces every morning afterward.

He had heard two things that afternoon, the anger above him and the crying at the doors, and he had chosen which one to answer.