Israel Loathed the Manna on Edom's Long Road

The column turned south from Mount Hor to go the long way around Edom, because Edom would not let them through, and somewhere on that road the people's patience ran out.

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Manna lay on the ground in the morning the way it had lain for years. Somebody looked at it and called it nothing. "Our soul loathes this insubstantial bread."

They had said something worse in the same breath. They spoke against God and against Moses in one sentence, setting the servant beside his Maker as though the two were the same size.

The Generation That Could Not Be Satisfied

There is a reason this camp in particular could not be fed.

Death had been decreed on every adult in it who had walked out of Egypt. Their children would find rest in the wilderness and cross over. These would not. Every morning a hand fed them, and it was the same hand that had already struck their names off the roll of the Land, and they knew it. A man in that position tastes nothing. Bread from heaven arrives on his tongue as sand.

A King With Two Fields

Years earlier, when the sentence was still new, they had worked out an argument for it and told it to each other in their tents.

A king has two sons and two fields. One field drinks from a channel and fills whenever the gate is opened. The other lies there and waits for rain. Which field does a king give the son he loves, and which does he give the other one?

Egypt drank from a channel. Canaan waits for rain. He brought us out of the first and is walking us toward the second. That, they said, is what it looks like when the Lord hates you.

They said it in the hearing of a God who had just told them He loved them.

Up the Mountain Without the Ark

The next morning they buckled on their weapons, every man of them, and turned toward the high ground.

Moses stood in front of them. "He said do not go up and do not fight, because I am not among you. You told me yourselves that our brothers melted your hearts. You said the people up there are taller and the cities are walled. You said it. Now you want to climb?"

They went anyway. They fastened themselves together like men strapped into one belt, and they had a proverb ready for that too: drop by drop the measure fills. The Ark of the Covenant did not move from the middle of the camp. Moses did not move either. They walked up the mountain and left behind them on the ground the only thing that had ever won them anything.

They Came Down Like Bees

The Amorites came out of the towns above.

A bee dies the moment it strikes. It went that way on the slope: one of them would touch a man and a soul would leave on the spot. And they flew. They were above the column, dropping onto men who had spent the whole morning climbing to reach them.

There had been a time when these nations heard the name of this people and came apart. Peoples heard and shook. The inhabitants of Canaan melted where they stood. That was before. Now they chased Israel down the mountain and beat them along the road.

The survivors came back and wept in front of the Lord, and the Lord did not listen to their voice. They had leaned so hard on justice that there was nothing left for mercy to stand on.

The Basket That Could Kill Them

After that came the years of walking, and then the long way around Edom.

Merchants came out to the camp with produce. Someone would open a basket of fruit from the Land in front of that generation, and men would die looking at it. Not one man of this evil generation shall see the good land. The fruit was not poison. The sentence was. They had been barred from the country so completely that its harvest was fatal at the length of an arm.

That is the camp that looked down at the manna and called it nothing.

The country was already deeded, and they had asked about it once. Why does He keep calling it the land of your dwelling instead of the land of Canaan? Because I gave it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, He answered, all three of them, and it is written down. Canaan's name sat on the map only because Canaan had packed up and left when he heard Israel was coming, and he was given a country of his own for the courtesy.

God is not a man, that He should deceive. When He says He will do good He does not hold it back, not even from a generation that has earned worse. When He says He will bring evil, the evil can still be pulled off the table, the way Moses stood in the road at the calf and made Him reconsider. He told Abraham four hundred years of servitude and the servitude ran two hundred and ten. He told Abraham to count the stars, and the count came in.

So the parents went the long way around Edom, loathing their bread, dying at the sight of grapes. Their children crossed.