God Rode a Cherub and Answered Pharaoh's Arrows

Pharaoh's archers loosed first, because the columns ahead of them were slow and packed and had a wall of water at their backs, and there is no easier shooting in the world than that.

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What came back was not bronze. The arrows that answered were burning, and they did not fall the way arrows fall. Stones flung by the Egyptian engines turned to hail in the middle of their arc and came down as weather instead of shot, and the catapults coughed up coals. The horses knew before the men did.

Above the spray a bow was drawn that was made of fire. The arms holding it were flame, the spear beside it a torch, the shield a bank of cloud, the sword one long stroke of lightning. The Egyptian magicians had told Pharaoh months before, back when the lice were still in their beards, that a finger of God was at work in the country. A finger. Now the whole arm was out over the water and the country was on the wrong end of it.

Do You Have a Cherub

He did not stand off and manage the battle. He rode. A cherub came up under Him and He went out over the sea on its back, stepping from one wing to the other the way a man shifts his feet on a moving deck, and the heat of it rolled down onto the Egyptian line.

Then He leaned down and taunted the king. "Wicked one, do you have a cherub? Can you do this?"

Pharaoh had six hundred chariots with iron on all of them, and a god of his own on every second street in Egypt. He had no answer that could get up that high, so he kept shooting, which was the only thing left in his hands.

When I Go Out, I Go Alone

The hosts of heaven had been arming themselves since the first arrow. Swords out. Bows strung. Lances angled down toward the shore. They had watched the brick quotas and the drowned infants and the night of the firstborn from a great height without permission to touch any of it, and now the man responsible was standing in a chariot in the open with nothing over his head.

They came forward to join the strike, and He waved them back.

"I do not need your help," He told them. "When I go out to battle, I go out alone."

So the sea closed on Egypt with every blade in heaven still drawn and unused. No angel got a share of it. No one above the water could say afterward that he had been in on the thing, and when the singing started on the far shore the song had one name in it and no others. The Lord is a man of war. The Lord is His name. Miriam took up a drum on wet sand, and the angels heard it from a distance, holding weapons that had not been permitted to fall.

The Face of Abraham

Because they had been kept out of the war, they were watching very closely when Moses came up the mountain, and what they saw was a man climbing toward the one thing in heaven they had wanted for themselves.

You ascended on high, the psalm says, you took captives. A conqueror usually hauls off whatever the locals think is worthless. Moses took the Torah, which was not worthless to anybody up there, and he did not get it handed to him at the door either. The word in the verse means acquired as much as received, so he had to work for it, argue for it, stand in front of beings older than the sea and make a case. The tablets themselves ran six handbreadths. Two of those handbreadths were in the hand of God and two were in the hand of Moses, and the two between them stayed empty the whole time, which is exactly the distance the angels objected to.

They moved on him, and there was nothing on that mountain to stop them.

Then God changed the man's face. In the space of a breath the features rearranged themselves into a face those particular angels had seen before, at midday, under a tree, at the door of a tent near Hebron. "Are you not ashamed," He asked them. "Is this not the one whose house you went into? Did you not eat at his table?" The swords came down. They had taken bread and curds from those hands and there was no unmaking that meal, so Moses walked out through them with the tablets and nobody laid a finger on him.

The Tent Outside the Camp

After that He stopped visiting. Moses pitched a tent well outside the camp, far off, and whoever wanted anything from God had to walk out of the settlement to get it. The people stood in their own doorways and watched him go until he was inside and the flap dropped. Then the pillar of cloud came down and stood at the door of that tent, and every man bowed at his own entrance, because the thing was happening in plain daylight. Inside, God spoke with Moses' face to face, the way a man speaks to his friend.

Later the cloud settled on the finished Tabernacle and the glory filled it so completely that Moses could not get in. He put a hand on the fabric at the opening and stopped there. The Presence takes up room, and there was no room.

Everything above had been copied below by then, and the copy was the one He wanted. A dwelling in heaven with a thick cloud in it, and a house down here built to hold a thick cloud. Seraphim standing up there, acacia beams standing in the Tabernacle. Cherubs surrounding Him above, and two cherubs of beaten gold below, facing each other over a lid with their wings out.

He left the upper house for the lower one, and the voice came down between those two gold wings like a pillar of flame, and Moses standing under it heard it as though it were coming from inside his own chest.