Mastema Attacked Moses, and the Coffin Waited Centuries
Zipporah already had the flint. Moses could not name what held his throat. Blood hit his feet, and the lodging place went still around the child.
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The lodging place had a door, a night, and not much else. Moses had come out of Midian with Zipporah and the boys, a staff in his hand, and the words from the bush still burning in his mouth. He had already lost a throne in Cush and sat at a well rather than walk back into Egypt. Now God had sent him into the empire that had raised him and then hunted him.
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He did not make it far.
Something met him on the road and tried to kill him.
The Accuser at the Lodging Place
Mastema, Prince of Accusation, had been watching. He had heard the voice at the bush. He understood what an Israelite walking toward Egypt could crack. He put his whole power into the strike, to slay Moses and deliver the Egyptians from the hand that had been sent against them.
The Torah writes the attack in two sentences and will not name the face (Exodus 4:24). God, or an angel acting in God's name, sought to kill him at the lodging place. Moses could not speak. The pressure sat on his throat like a court already in session.
Mastema had a brief. Moses had not circumcised his son. The covenant that bound Abraham's seed had not been cut into this child's body. An accuser can work with less. A man who had failed to mark his own house had no standing, Mastema argued, to carry covenant obligations into Pharaoh's court.
Zipporah did not wait for the argument to finish.
Zipporah's Flint
She took a flint. She cut their son. She touched the foreskin to Moses's feet and said the blood had done what it had to do. The threat withdrew. Mastema's case collapsed on a piece of skin and a mother's speed.
Moses stood. The road opened. Egypt still sat at the far end of it, brick and river and a king who would not know he had already lost.
Zipporah wiped the flint on her skirt and did not ask Moses to explain the attacker. She had closed a door heaven had left open. The boy cried. The lodging place went still. They walked on.
Serah Walked Him to the Nile
When the night of leaving finally came, another obligation rose out of the ground. Before Joseph died he had extracted an oath. When God remembered them, they would carry his bones out of Egypt. Do not leave me here. For four centuries that oath had been waiting in the river and in the dirt.
The camp filled its sacks with gold and silver, as God had commanded them to strip Egypt. Moses went looking for a coffin.
He hunted three days and three nights. The coffin was nowhere. His legs shook. Serah, daughter of Asher, found him emptied out and asked why he could barely stand. He told her. She did not offer comfort. She took him to the Nile.
The Egyptians had sunk a leaden coffin in the river, sealed on every side, at the urging of magicians who knew Israel could not leave without it. Honor for Joseph on the tongue. A chain on Israel in the water. Serah pointed at the place and told Moses what waited under the current.
Joseph, the Time Has Come
Moses stood on the bank and called into the river. "Joseph, the time has come. God is keeping the oath. Your descendants leave tonight. If you are willing, rise."
He threw a plate into the water and called again. The coffin did not move. He threw another. He threw a third. The river kept its dead. The fourth plate bore a human figure. The fourth call used Joseph's name the way a man uses a name he is done postponing.
The coffin floated.
Moses seized it and lifted. Lead and bone and four centuries of waiting came up into his arms while the rest of Israel carried jewelry. He bore it on his shoulder as if the oath had weight he could feel in the joint.
Two Arks in the Sand
Two arks would travel the desert together. The ark of the covenant with the Torah inside it, and the coffin of Joseph with the bones of a man who had made his people promise not to forget him. The living law and the faithful dead, side by side.
Mastema had tried to stop Moses before either obligation could be kept. The attack on the road was not random night-violence. It was a last attempt to find a legal flaw and void the redemption before it began. Zipporah shut that door with flint. Joseph's coffin shut another. Israel could not properly leave Egypt without the bones.
Moses had come from a well in Midian, from a throne he did not keep in Cush, from a lodging place where an accuser had him by the throat. He walked into the wilderness with a coffin on his shoulder and a people who still thought gold was the thing worth carrying out of a grave.
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