Seven Men in White and the Road That Made Levi a Priest

Levi had been in Bethlehem seventy days when the feeling returned. He knew it the way a man knows a fever climbing back into his blood. He had felt it once before, on a mountain, with the heavens splitting open above him. Now it came again on an ordinary road, the dust of the day still on his feet.

This time it did not lift him to the sky. It stopped him where he stood.

The Road That Would Not Let Him Pass

Seven men stood in the road ahead, and every one was robed in white. Not the white of bleached wool. The white of something that had never touched the ground. The road simply ended where they were, and Levi could go no farther.

He was young still, barely past the years when he and Simeon had taken up swords for their sister Dinah and emptied Shechem of its men. His hands remembered that work. They were not the hands he would have chosen to put on holy things. The seven did not seem to care what his hands had done.

"Rise up," they said, "and array thyself in the priestly garments."

The words landed like a sentence handed down, not an invitation offered. There was only a future arriving whether he reached for it or not.

Seven Garments, Seven Hands

Then they came to him one at a time, and each carried something to put upon him.

The first set the crown of righteousness on his head, and its weight pressed down like a verdict. The second brought the ephod of understanding and fixed it to his shoulders. The third draped him in the robe of truth, so that to lie afterward would be to tear his own clothing. A fourth fastened the mitre-plate of faith against his brow, a fifth set the mitre of dignity over it, and the last laid upon him the shoulderpieces of prophecy, the garment of a man who would be made to speak things he had not thought of himself.

With each piece the world grew heavier and more real. A shepherd had stood in the road. A priest was standing in his place, and the change came on without his consent, the way dawn comes on without asking the night.

When the last garment was set, the seven spoke as one. "Henceforth be the priest of the Lord, thou and thy seed unto eternity."

A Promise Stretched to the End of Days

They did not stop at his own life. They reached past him into generations he would never meet. His children's children would eat all that was lovely to look upon, the table of the Lord would belong to them, and out of his line would rise high priests and judges and scholars without end. By their mouths, the seven said, all that was holy would be guarded.

It was too much for one man on a road outside Bethlehem. He had gone out that morning a son of Jacob, third of twelve, with blood on his record and a temper his father feared. He would carry home a lineage that ran to the edge of time. The vision did not explain itself. It robed him, named him, promised him a thousand descendants, and let him go.

The Mountain Behind the Road

He understood it because of the first vision, the one on the high mountain. There the spirit of understanding had fallen on him while he tended the flocks, and grief for the corruption of the world had driven him to his knees. Sleep had taken him, and an angel had called him up through one bright heaven into a brighter one, until he stood near the Throne of Glory itself.

There God had spoken without any softening. "Levi, upon thee have I bestowed the blessing of the priesthood, until I come and dwell in the midst of Israel." The angel had sent him back with a shield and a sword, and when Levi asked the angel his name, the answer came back larger than the question. "I am the angel that intercedes for the people of Israel, that it may not be destroyed utterly." He had woken to find a shield of brass beside him, the exact shield he had carried in the heavens. After that, he could not pretend any of it was only sleep.

The Confirmation at His Grandfather's House

Two days after the seven men robed him, Levi went with his brother Judah to their grandfather Isaac. The old man, whose eyes had long gone dark, looked up as if he could see, and blessed Levi exactly as the vision had promised. Jacob too was shown that his son had been chosen, and set apart a tenth of everything he owned into Levi's keeping.

In Hebron, Isaac taught him the law his garments demanded. Which wood was fit for the altar. How much salt belonged on an offering. In what order the acts of sacrifice must fall. And one warning above the rest, repeated until it stuck: keep the line clean, guard against unchastity, because the same blood being lifted up could one day be the thing that defiled the holy place.

Levi listened, a shepherd learning to be a priest, fitted with garments he had not gone looking for. Years later, gathering his own sons to his deathbed, he set the same choice before them that the road had set before him. "Choose, now, light or darkness, the law of the Lord or the works of Beliar." He had not chosen the priesthood. It had stopped him on a road and dressed him in it. The choice he passed down was real, and his sons swore, before God and the angels, to walk in the law.