The Tear in Jacob's Robe Reached Esther and Joshua

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Two Pieces of Silver Each

The caravan took the boy and left the money, and the money came to twenty pieces of silver, which is two pieces a man for the ten of them standing there.

They spent it on shoes.

Every one of them walked home that evening on new leather bought with the price of his brother. Then they sat down where they were and broke bread, with the road still visible and the dust from the camels not settled, and ate.

They Made God the Tenth Man

The eating was the easy part. The secret was the problem.

Somebody said they should swear among themselves that not one of them would ever tell their father Jacob what had happened. Judah counted heads and found the count short. Reuben had gone off, and a ban needs ten men to hold, and nine were standing in the field.

So they took the Holy One as their tenth and swore the ban with heaven inside it. Not to do justice. To keep a boy's father from learning where his son had gone.

Then they dipped the robe in blood and carried it home and let the old man do the rest himself. He knew the robe in his hands before anyone had to say a word. He tore his clothes from the neck down and would not be comforted, and the sound of that tearing went into the family like a debt into a ledger.

The Cup in Benjamin's Sack

Years later ten grown men stood in front of the second-most powerful man in Egypt and did not know him. He accused them of spying. He locked them up for three days. He took Simeon out of the line and bound him in front of them, and sent the rest home with their money hidden back in their sacks so that even their innocence looked like theft.

They brought Benjamin back, as they had been ordered to. They ate at the man's table. They were let go in the morning, and the horsemen caught them on the road, and the search went sack by sack down the line to the youngest, and the silver cup came up out of Benjamin's grain.

They tore their clothes on the road.

That was the first payment. Their father had torn his because of them, so in Egypt they tore theirs.

Joseph could have kept collecting. He had them exactly where a wronged man dreams of having people. Instead he sent the servants out of the room and told them who he was and wept loud enough for the household to hear it, and told them that it was not they who had sent him there but God. He did not undo the sale. He stopped the interest.

The Drinking in Shushan

The account was still open, and it came due in a Persian capital generations later.

Haman was an Amalekite and second in the empire, and every man in the palace gate bowed to him because the king had commanded it. Mordecai, a Benjaminite, kept his own law and stayed on his feet. Haman looked at the one man standing and decided that one man was not worth asking for. He went to the king and described a scattered nation, unsociable, keeping laws unlike anyone else's laws, and offered forty thousand talents out of his own estate to cover the tribute the crown would lose by wiping them out. The king waived the money and gave him the people.

The scribes wrote the letters. Riders carried them to a hundred and twenty-seven provinces. Every man, woman, and child, on one day, and nobody was to prefer pity to obedience.

Then the king and Haman sat down together to drink, and the city outside the palace came apart.

Word reached Esther inside the harem last of all, from a servant, secondhand, in a room full of perfume. She had been queen for years and had never told anyone in the palace what nation she came from.

Their fathers had sold a brother and sat down to eat bread. Now their children were sold in Shushan while two men sat down to wine.

Mordecai tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and threw ashes over his head and walked through the streets shouting that a people who had injured nobody were going to be destroyed. He came as far as the palace gate and stopped there, because no man dressed like that was allowed to go through it.

You said, let us sell him as a slave. So once a year, forever, your children will sit at a table and say out loud that they were slaves.

Joshua Tore His Clothes at Ai

The last tear came on a hillside in Canaan.

Thirty-six men went up against a small town and came back down dead, because Achan had taken forbidden goods out of Jericho and buried them under his tent floor. The camp lost its nerve in one afternoon. Joshua went down on his face in front of the Ark and stayed there until evening, and his hands went to his collar, and he tore his clothes.

Joshua had not been at the pit. He had not eaten the bread or bought the shoes. He came from Joseph, the one who was thrown in.

Joseph had made his brothers tear their clothes on the road out of Egypt, and the tearing came back through his own line and found his descendant lying in the dirt in front of the Ark of God.

The shoes had worn out centuries before. The robe was dust. The sound of an old man tearing his clothes had reached a queen in Persia and a commander in Canaan, and it had not finished moving.