God Sent Moses Down to Fetch Aaron for Sinai

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Seven Days at the Thornbush

The bush burned for a week and the argument inside it went the whole week.

"Go on My errand," God said.

Moses said, "Please send somebody else." That was the first day. On the second day God said go, and Moses said send somebody else. It ran on like that.

He had a reason, and it was not only fear. "My brother is older than I am," he said, "and I am going out ahead of him."

"You have spoken rightly," God said. "And when he sees you, he will be glad in his heart." Twelve stones would be laid on that heart before it was over, four rows of three, each one cut with the name of a tribe.

But on the seventh day Moses was still saying send somebody else, and God stopped negotiating.

"I tell you go, and you tell Me send somebody else. By your life, I am paying you back for this. Soon enough, when that Tabernacle is being built, you are going to be thinking privately that you should be the one serving as high priest. And I am going to say to you: call Aaron to serve."

Moses picked up the staff and went down to Egypt.

Go and Call Your Teacher

A year later Sinai was smoking, the camp was pressed up against the boundary rope at the bottom of it, and Moses was near the top where the air had gone strange.

"Go down. Warn the people," God said, "in case they break through to look."

"I have already warned them," Moses said.

He had. He had set the boundary himself and told them twice and the whole camp had washed its clothes and kept back for three days. He wanted to be standing exactly where he was standing when the Voice came, and he said so.

"Go," God said, "and call your teacher."

Aaron. Go and get Aaron.

So God sent him down the slope to fetch his brother out of the camp, and while Moses was on the mountainside with his back to the summit, God began. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

He had wanted to be up there for that. He was down among the tents, looking for Aaron.

Seven Days He Did Not Leave the Door

Then the Tabernacle went up in the wilderness, and for seven days Moses did not go out from the door of the tent of meeting.

He did the whole service himself. He slaughtered. He caught the blood in a basin and threw it against the sides of the altar. He burned the fat and the kidneys and the lobe of the liver, washed the inner parts, dressed Aaron and Aaron's sons in the tunics and the sashes and the caps, and left them standing at the door while he went back in.

Seven mornings of it, with his arms red to the elbow.

"What are you thinking?" God said to him. "That you are the high priest? Call your brother, and let him serve."

The Eighth Day

On the eighth day Moses called Aaron, and Aaron's sons, and the elders of Israel. God had been specific about the elders. Call them, and ordain him in front of them, so that nobody says afterward that he took the priesthood on his own.

Moses said it flat out. "The Holy One has told me to make you high priest."

Aaron did not reach for it.

"You did the work on the Tabernacle," he said. "You have not been out of that doorway in a week. And I am the one to be made high priest?"

"By your life," Moses said, "even though it is you being made high priest, it is as if I were being made high priest. You were glad for me when I was raised over you. I am glad for you now."

The elders stood in a half circle and watched him say it.

The Stones Went on the Heart That Was Glad

They put the tunic on Aaron and the robe over the tunic and the ephod over the robe, and then the breastplate, and into the breastplate the twelve stones, four rows of three. Sardius, topaz, carbuncle, and the rest, and every one of them cut with the name of a tribe. It sat on his chest and it was heavy.

That was the heart that had been glad in Egypt, forty years earlier, when the younger brother came back from Midian with a mission.

Later in the wilderness, Aaron's staff, a dead length of almond wood, was left overnight in the tent and by morning it had sprouted, blossomed, and put out ripe almonds. Most trees go up as one trunk and stop. A palm sends shoots out on every side. Aaron's went out the same way. His son Eleazar, and Eleazar's son Phinehas, and Phinehas's son Abishua, and Bukki after him, planted in the house of the LORD.

Moses' own sons are not on that list, and never were.