The Letters Flew Home When Moses Broke the Tablets

Moses walked a line in the dirt at the foot of the mountain and told the people that the ground on the far side of it would kill them. No hand was to touch it. Whoever touched the mountain would die (Exodus 19:12).

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He spent the last morning before the revelation walking that line until the camp understood it in their feet, because a people who rushed the mountain would not live to hear the words.

The Poor Man Saved the City

The mountain sat like a small city with very few men inside it. A great king came up against it and threw a siege around it. The city was Sinai. The few men were Israel. The king was the King of kings, and the siege works were six hundred and thirteen commandments, two hundred and forty-eight of them saying do and three hundred and sixty-five saying do not.

Inside the walls He found one poor wise man. Moses saved the place with a boundary and a threat. He was not rich in anything but the nerve to tell a nation to stop.

Then he went up, because the city still needed the words that would live inside the siege.

The Question That Got No Answer

For forty days God handed him a matter and, in the same breath, its uncleanness and its cleansing. This is how a man is defiled. This is how he gets clean again. Every single time.

They reached the priests. Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, that none of them shall make himself unclean for a dead body among his people (Leviticus 21:1).

Moses asked the obvious question. "Master of the universe. If one of them does become unclean, how is he cleansed?"

Nothing came back, though he waited long enough for an answer to form.

His face changed, because he had been given the way back from every other kind of defilement, and this was a priest, and the answer simply stopped. They went on to the next matter, and the next, but the silence stayed where the words should have been.

The Letters Left the Stone

While he was still up there, the camp below went a different way. He came down around the shoulder of the rock carrying two stones with writing cut into them, and he walked into the noise of a people dancing around a calf of gold.

He threw the tablets at the ground so they broke.

The holy letters did not break with them. They came up off the stone and flew home, the way a man's wealth sprouts wings and goes up to heaven the moment he takes his eyes off it (Proverbs 23:5). What stayed in the dust was rock, because the writing had been alive, and the living thing had left the vessel.

Moses stood over broken stone that no longer held a sentence. The calf kept making its sound. The letters were already gone.

Ashes Instead of an Answer

When they came at last to the portion of the red heifer, God went back to the thing He had left lying between them.

"That matter I gave you, speak to the priests, and you said to Me, how are they cleansed, and I did not answer you. This is their cleansing. They shall take for the unclean some of the ashes of the burning of the purification, and put running water on them in a vessel."

Moses stood with that in front of him. A cow burned to powder. Ash and water on a man who has touched a corpse.

"Master of the universe. Is that purification?"

"It is a statute," God said. "I issued a decree, and no creature born can get to the bottom of My decree."

The silence had not been empty. It had been waiting for a law that would not explain itself, so Moses had to carry the hole until the ashes arrived.

Do Not Speak to Me About This Again

At the end of his life Moses stood on the wrong side of the Jordan and asked to cross. He asked in the morning and he asked again, and he kept asking, because a man who had waited years for ashes did not know how to stop waiting for a country.

"I wrote of you that you are wise," God said to him. "And here you stand, talking on and on, and in this you are not wise. Do not speak to Me again about this matter" (Deuteronomy 3:26).

He had asked one question at the mountain and waited years for an answer that turned out to be a wall. Now he asked for a country and got a door shutting.

The verse about the small city does not end well. The poor wise man saved the place, and afterward nobody remembered him.

"You did not remember him," the Holy One said. "I remember him. Remember the Torah of Moses My servant."

The first letters had gone back up. The second stones were cut and carried down and kept. The man who drew the line in the dirt was buried where nobody could find the grave, on the wrong side of a river he never crossed. The only one still saying his name out loud was the King who had refused him.