Israel Attacked Aaron With Words About His Son's Wife

Every time the camp moved, Aaron went in first and covered the holy things with his own hands.

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The Ark first. Then the table, then the lampstand, then the golden altar, then the altar of burnt offering, in that exact order, because that was the order they had gone in when the Tabernacle was first raised, and everything came down along the line it had gone up.

He and his sons did the covering, and only then were the sons of Kehat allowed in to lift. Those men carried what they were not permitted to look at. A Kohathite who put a hand on an uncovered vessel died where he stood, so Aaron's hands were the thing between those porters and their own deaths, at every departure, for forty years.

The Mouth That Was Not Allowed to Hurry

The other half of the work was his mouth.

He lifted his hands over the whole people and blessed them, and that blessing came with rules running down to the smallest movement. Standing, never seated. Hands raised, the way he had raised them the first time he came down from the altar. In the holy tongue and no other language. Inside the sanctuary, with the Name itself, the one nobody says anywhere else.

Face to face. Not to the back of a head, not over a shoulder. The way one man speaks to another man.

And there was one more instruction folded into the spelling of a single word. Say to them: amor, written long, carrying a letter it does not need. Do not bless them like a man carrying out an order he wants finished. Do not rush it. Bless them with the whole intention of the heart, so that it settles on them completely.

That was the command given to the man Israel was about to go after.

Then They Asked Who His Son Had Married

The tribes had encamped by their banners, and the order came to register them.

Aaron went out to establish the lineage of Israel, family by family, name by name, and somewhere in the middle of the counting a man in the crowd found the soft place.

"You are establishing our lineage?"

Others picked it up. Before you write down our fathers, go and write down your own. Elazar your son, whose daughter did he take for a wife? The daughter of Putiel, is it not?

Everyone standing there knew the name. Putiel meant Jethro the Midianite, who had served idols for years before he ever heard of the God of Israel. So the priest taking down their pedigrees had a grandson with an idolater's blood on his mother's side, and now it had been said out loud, in the open, in front of the queue, while Aaron stood there holding the register.

Aaron Said Nothing

He had done this before. On the day the Tabernacle was consecrated he watched fire come out and take Nadav and Avihu in front of the entire camp, and he did not say one word then either.

He said nothing now. The counting went on. The banners stayed where they were. They had attacked him with words, and the commandment they broke doing it is not filed with the laws about hands and weapons. It sits among the rules for buying and selling, and it governs the mouth: no man shall wrong his fellow. A bruise closes over. Words about a man's blood do not.

God Wrote the Lineage Himself

The answer took forty years and arrived in writing.

Out at Shittim, with Israel going after the women of Moab and a plague running through the camp and the leadership standing in the doorway of the Tent weeping and doing nothing, one man got up and took a spear. Phinehas, son of Elazar, son of Aaron. He walked into the tent after the couple, ran the spear through both of them, and the dying stopped at twenty-four thousand.

When the covenant of priesthood was handed to him for it, the record does not call him the son of a Midianite's daughter. It gives him three names in a row: Phinehas son of Elazar son of Aaron the priest. Priest son of a priest. Zealot son of a zealot. The one who turned back wrath, son of the one who turned back wrath, because his grandfather had once run out into a plague with a fire pan in his hands and stood between the dead and the living until it stopped.

Aaron and Moses, in That Order

There is one more line, easy to walk past. When the family is set down in the Torah, it reads: these are the generations of Aaron and Moses.

Not Moses and Aaron. Everywhere else in the wilderness it is the younger brother first, Moses and Aaron, the prophet and then the priest. Here the order turns over, and it turns over at exactly the place where the camp had gone at the older brother's household in public.

Aaron went on blessing them regardless. Standing, hands up, face to face, in the holy tongue, and never once like a man in a hurry to be done.