When Miriam Died, the Well Vanished and Moses Struck the Rock

The water was gone before anyone noticed the body had stopped breathing. Miriam died at Kadesh in the wilderness of Zin (Numbers 20:1), and somewhere in the dry hours after, a sound the camp had stopped hearing simply ended. The well that had walked with them for forty years went quiet. No one ran to announce it. The animals went to drink and found stone.

The Gift No One Counted

Three people had carried Israel through the desert without anyone naming the debt. Moses brought bread out of an empty sky. Aaron walked under a cloud that shaded the whole camp from the white heat. And Miriam brought water. Wherever the tribes pitched their tents, the well arrived, a spring that followed her like a dog, and the people drank and washed and cooked and watered their flocks and forgot to be amazed.

That is how the well disappeared from their attention long before it disappeared from the ground. It did not split the sky open the way Sinai had. It did not march at the head of the column like a pillar of fire. It came as the next mouthful, and the next, until the camp treated it like the tent poles and the banners, a thing that was simply there.

Then she was gone, and it was gone, and the two facts arrived together so fast that the people felt the second one in their throats before they had mourned the first.

Six Hours of Weeping

Moses did not know. He and Aaron had withdrawn from the camp to grieve their sister in private, the woman who had stood among the reeds at the Nile to watch over an infant in a basket, the woman who had lifted the timbrel at the sea and sung while the water still ran off the chariots. The two brothers wept where the people could not see them. Outside, in the streets between the tents, the mourning was loud and public, and under the mourning a different fear was rising.

For six hours Moses sat with his face wet and never once thought about the well. The camp thought about nothing else. By the time the people came for him, their patience had burned down to nothing.

"How long will you sit here and weep?" they demanded.

He answered the only way a brother can. "Shall I not weep for my sister, who has died?"

Their reply cut straight through the grief. "While you weep for one soul, weep at the same time for us all." They were saying it plainly. The water is gone. We are dying. He rose and went to look, and where the spring had been he found nothing but a dry mouth in the earth.

The Rock That Hid Itself

There was supposed to be an answer. A rock, promised to him, that would open and pour. The trouble was that when the well departed, the rock that had fed it pulled itself back into the crowd of ordinary stones and refused to be known. It was indistinguishable from every other rock in the vast plain. Moses, with the whole nation at his back, walked the field of stones looking for the one that mattered, and they all looked the same.

The people came with him, tired and cracked-lipped, and they came grumbling. "How long will you lead us on?" Moses kept his voice level. "Until I bring you water out of the rock." But the words sounded thin even to him, because he did not know which rock he meant.

They found one that was already weeping a little moisture at its face, and the whole crowd stopped, hoping, pressing in close around it. The rock's surface was small and all Israel somehow stood gathered at it, the multitude crowding onto a thing the size of a doorstep.

Hear Now, You Rebels

Something broke in Moses then. He lifted his voice over the thirsty thousands and called them what the desperate get called. "Hear now, you rebels!" The word he used, morim (a word the coast-dwellers carried in the Greek tongue, meaning fool), landed on the people like a slap, the prophet who had once pleaded for them now spitting their stubbornness back at them.

He raised the staff, the one engraved with the holy Name, and he touched the weeping stone, and he said, "Shall we bring water from this rock?" He did not even mean that rock. He did not recognize it. It was a guess, an exhausted man's gesture at a stone that happened to be damp.

And at the touch of the Name, the stone began to drip in earnest.

Two Blows and a Flow of Blood

The dripping should have been enough. It was the rock answering. But Moses had a memory in his hands, an old instruction from a different rock in a different year: strike the rock, and water shall come out. Seeing the drip, he reasoned the way he had been taught to reason. A blow was needed. So he raised his hand and brought the staff down. Once.

What came out was not water. It was blood. The first blow drew red from the stone, gushing as it gushed (Numbers 20:11), and the word for that gushing is the word used for the flow of a woman, blood pressed out of a wounded thing. The rock had refused him. It had been struck, not spoken to, and it bled before it would pour.

So Moses struck a second time. Only then did the water break loose, abundant and cold, enough for the whole congregation and their cattle to drink their fill. The people got their water. The camp lived. But two blows had fallen where words had been asked for, and the man who delivered them would not cross into the land he had spent forty years walking toward (Numbers 20:12). Miriam had died, and the cost of her death was still being counted out, stone by stone, blow by blow, in the body of her brother.