God Chose Levi as He Chose Sabbath and Zion

Levi had his children brought in close to the bed because his voice had gone down to almost nothing, and what he wanted to leave them was not a blessing. It was the pasture at Abel-Meholah, and what happened to him there, and what it was going to cost them.

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He had been out with the flocks that day, an ordinary man with wool on his sleeves and nothing holy about him. Then the spirit of understanding of the Lord came on him in the middle of the grass, and he stopped seeing sheep.

What the Shepherd Saw in the Grass

He saw all mankind corrupting their ways. He saw injustice building walls for herself, course on course, the way a mason builds when he expects to be paid, and towers going up on the walls, and impiety climbing the towers and sitting down on top of them as though a seat had been prepared. The sheep went on tearing grass around his feet. Nothing in the field had changed, though he could no longer stand up in it.

So he sat down among the animals and grieved over the generations of men, one after another, all of them under those walls. He prayed the only prayer he had. "Save me," he said, and he did not mean from a lion or from a bad year.

Sleep came over him where he sat. A mountain stood in front of him, taller than any hill he had walked a flock up, and while he was still measuring it with his eyes the heavens opened over the top of it. An angel of God stood in the opening and said one word to him. "Enter."

He told his children he did not move at first. He had asked to be taken out of a world with walls in it, and here was the door, and a door that opens for a man opens for his seed after him, and he was a shepherd with dirt in the seams of his hands. Then he went up the mountain and through, because a man who has prayed for exactly this does not get to say he meant something smaller.

Chosen the Way the Sabbath Was Chosen

What he understood on the other side he spent the rest of his breath explaining to the children on the bed. God had made days and kept one of the seven for himself. He had made lands and kept one of them and called it his own land. He had made tribes, and out of twelve he took Levi to be his priest, not because Levi was the eldest or the strongest, but because he loved him, the same reason he took the one day and the one land.

Then Levi told them what being kept looks like from the inside, which is being counted. "A man will come with a roll and a reed and count you by name, every male among you," he said, "and the next year he will come and do it again, and it will feel like bookkeeping." It is not bookkeeping. A king who loves his troops takes them out and numbers them for the pleasure of it, and this King would number them from Sinai to the end.

Silver That Comes Out Even

The counting reached everything they touched. When the firstborn of Israel were redeemed, Moses would not hand the redemption silver to Aaron and his sons on his own judgment. He stood there with it until the word came from the mouth of the Holy One, give it to them, and only then did he give it, half to Aaron and half to his sons, the father weighed against the children and neither pan dropping.

Market silver never behaves. Weigh a heap of ordinary shekels one coin at a time and then weigh the heap whole, and the two numbers argue, a little over or a little short. Sacred shekels do not. One at a time or all at once, the weight comes out the same, no surplus and no shortage, and the tribe that handled them lived by the same rule. Nothing about them was approximate. Everything about them was counted.

Why the Numbers Kept Falling

The counting also told on them. The tribe grew thin, and it grew thin for the reason no other tribe had: they saw the Divine Presence, and they saw it often, and no human being sees it and lives. They carried the tent, they stood inside the curtain, they served where the glory sat, and each generation came out of that service with fewer men in it than went in. Their nearness was the whole of their honor and the whole of their loss.

It took centuries to reach the bottom of that arithmetic. When Israel came up out of captivity, Ezra stopped the whole company at the river and looked them over before he would move, family by family, priests and people, checking the muster against the roll the way a man checks a load before a long road.

He found none of the children of Levi. Not few. None. He went back through the camp and looked again, since a tribe does not simply fail to appear, and the second pass gave him the same nothing as the first. The men who had been counted more often than any other family in Israel had been counted down to the line where the counting stops.

Over that gap in the roll the Holy One said what he had been keeping. "In this world they were destroyed for having seen my Presence, because no human shall see me and live. But when I bring my Presence back to Zion, I will be revealed in my glory over all Israel, and they will see me and live, eye to eye, the Lord returning to Zion." Every one of them would put out a finger and point at it and say, this is our God.

Ezra folded the list where the name should have been, gave it back to the man holding it, and called for the next family by the water.