Joshua Leaves the Cloud of Glory for Amalek

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The Bribe That Started the Chase

Pharaoh's officers would not harness the horses. Riding out after a crowd of runaway brickmakers was beneath the dignity of Egypt, and they said so in the hall. Then somebody did the arithmetic on the silver and the gold that had walked out of the country on those people's backs, and the horses were harnessed after all.

Even then the appetite ran thin. When the men worked out how small a share of Egypt's wealth had actually left with Israel, they began asking what was in it for them. So Pharaoh raised the offer. Equal shares of the plunder for every man who rode. And more than that: he threw open the royal treasure houses, the silver, the gold, the cut stones, and promised to hand it out himself.

Out at the water, Israel sang the enemy's boast back at him. The foe said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil. Nobody had carried them the minutes of that meeting. The Holy Spirit came down on them and they simply knew what had been argued in a palace two days behind them, and they stood on the far shore singing it while the chariots settled into the mud.

The Bodies on the Beach

Then they looked down at the shoreline.

The sea had laid their masters out on the sand. The men who had counted bricks and set the quotas and swung the sticks were lying at the edge of the water with the foam moving over them, and Israel walked along the line and looked into the faces.

And they drew the wrong conclusion. Not, we are free. What they said was, there is nobody left in Egypt. The country is standing open. "Let us appoint a captain and go back."

It did not stay talk. Generations later Nehemiah was still reciting it in a prayer: they stiffened their necks and appointed a captain to return to their slavery. They picked a man.

Moses Drove Them With the Rod

Rabbi Eliezer said that in most places Israel moved at the word, the cloud lifted and the camp lifted with it. But here it says that Moses made them journey, and that is a different sentence. He moved them against their will, with the rod.

So the picture is not a nation marching into freedom singing. It is an eighty-year-old man walking the line of tents at dawn with a stick in his hand, getting them up off the sand, turning them away from the water and the corpses and the open road south, while they argued with him about a country that had spent a century breaking their backs.

Nehemiah kept the rest of the accounting too. They refused to listen and forgot the wonders, and God did not abandon them anyway, not then and not later when they built the calf. The rod and the mercy went down that road together.

A Jar Set Before the Lord

In the wilderness of Sin the bread came down with the dew, and every man gathered an omer of it, and they ate a miracle every morning until they stopped noticing.

Moses told Aaron to take a jar, fill it with one omer of the manna, and set it down before the Lord, to be kept for your generations.

Kept for whom, exactly? Rabbi Yehoshua said for the fathers, meaning the very men standing there with the stuff sticky in their hands. They were living inside the wonder and they would still forget it. Rabbi Eliezer said the jar was waiting for the days of Jeremiah, who would carry it out centuries later in front of a generation that told him they had no time for Torah because they had a living to earn, and hold it up in the daylight: this is what fed your fathers, and He has more than one way of feeding you.

Either way, the jar went into the dark of the sanctuary and sat there as evidence.

Out From Under the Cloud

At Rephidim, Amalek came. They did not hit the head of the column where the armed men walked. They came in at the back, where the stragglers were, the ones who were faint and worn out and could not keep up, and they cut them off there.

Moses turned to Joshua son of Nun. Joshua was walking where everybody wanted to walk, under the clouds of glory, inside the canopy, with the heat and the flies and the raiders all on the outside of it.

"Why are you guarding your head?" Moses said to him. "Is it not for the crown? Go out from under the cloud and fight Amalek. You have nothing to fear."

The crown was the whole of the argument. The command of Israel was coming to this man, the river crossing and the war for the land and every camp after that, and nobody has ever been handed an army from inside a shelter. So Joshua picked his men and stepped out of the cloud into the glare, and Moses climbed the hill above the fighting with the staff of God in his fist, and when his hands sank Amalek pushed forward, and when Aaron and Hur held his arms up Israel pushed back, and it went on like that until the sun went down.

Afterward God told Moses to write it in a book as a memorial, and to say it out loud into Joshua's ears. The younger man stood in the dust with the sword still in his hand and listened to the sentence he was going to inherit.