The Staff from Eden That Moses Carried Into Egypt

The Stick That Predated Creation

The sapphire staff was made at twilight on the sixth day of creation, in the final minutes before the first Sabbath. God made it with the intention that it would pass through specific hands in sequence. Adam took it out of Eden. He gave it to Enoch. Enoch gave it to Noah. The chain ran through every patriarch, Abraham to Isaac to Jacob, and then into Egypt with Jacob's sons, and then out of Egypt to Jethro of Midian, where it was planted in the ground in his garden.

The staff waited in Jethro's garden. Men came and tried to pull it free. They could not. The staff had the names of the ten plagues written on it. It did not belong to anyone who came before Moses arrived. Jethro had a daughter named Zipporah. Moses showed up, helped her and her sisters at the well, and was invited to eat. Jethro offered him Zipporah in marriage. Moses walked through the garden, reached down, and took the staff out of the ground without effort.

Jethro understood what had just happened. This was the man the staff had been waiting for.

The Lions at the Door

When God told Moses to go to Egypt, the problem of approach arose. The Pharaoh Adikam was cruel in a way that was architectural. He was a cubit and a span tall. His beard reached his feet. He had designed the brick quotas to be impossible. When Israelites fell short, their infants were taken and built into the walls. Jasher gives a number: hundreds of Jewish children used as building material.

Moses arrived at the palace gate carrying the sapphire staff. The gate was guarded by two iron lions. No one entered the palace without first being mauled by them. When Moses lifted the staff, the lions fell quiet. They lay down. They behaved like domesticated dogs in the presence of their owner's command. Moses walked between them and into Pharaoh's court.

Pharaoh's officers panicked. This was not supposed to be possible. The lions were the palace's last line of personal security, and they had just yielded to a shepherd from Midian holding a stick.

Zipporah Cut With a Stone on the Road

Before Egypt, there was a moment on the road. An angel blocked Moses and was about to kill him. Zipporah took a flint stone and circumcised their son and touched Moses's feet with the blood of the circumcision and the angel withdrew.

Jasher places this incident in the frame of the staff narrative without resolving the tension it creates. Moses was the chosen man who lifted the staff from the ground. He was also the man who had neglected the circumcision of his son, which meant an angel nearly killed him on the road to his own mission. The staff did not protect him from that lapse. His wife's emergency action with a stone in the dark on a road in Midian protected him.

After the incident, Aaron came to meet Moses in the wilderness. Aaron asked who the woman was. Moses explained. Aaron told him that the Israelites in Egypt were already suffering enough. This was not the time to bring additional people to add to the burden. Zipporah took the children and went back to Midian. She and her sons watched the Exodus from Jethro's household. Moses went into Egypt alone with the staff.

The Staff's Final Entry Into the Palace

The staff's history across every patriarch is a record of rightful ownership. Only the person to whom it belongs can hold it without resistance. The lions at the gate are the last test before Egypt, and they pass Moses because the staff passes Moses. Every hand the staff had moved through since Eden was a hand that was supposed to hold it at that moment, and Moses at Pharaoh's gate was the moment the staff had been made for, in the last minutes of the sixth day of creation, before the first Sabbath.

Pharaoh looked at Moses with the staff in his hand and the lions lying quiet at the gate and gave the order to bring him in. The ten plagues written on the staff had not yet been activated. The staff was still just a stick in a man's hand. But the palace had already bent.