Miriam Watched the Basket an Hour and Israel Waited a Week
Moses was given the queen of Kush when he fled from Pharaoh, and he sent her away. His sister said out loud what the camp had noticed about that marriage.
Table of Contents
Click for full size
She Went Out in Front of the Women
The sea came back down on the chariots and the shore went quiet, and while the water was still dragging bodies up onto the sand, Miriam picked up a tambourine.
She did not stand at the back of her brother's crowd. Moses had the men. She turned and faced the women, and every one of them came out after her with drums and instruments, dancing, and she sang them the same morning in her own voice. Sing to the Lord, He is high over everything high, horse and rider He threw in the sea.
Two services on one beach. He led one. She led the other.
The Wife He Had Sent Away
What she said in the wilderness years later, she said about a marriage.
The camp called the woman the Cushite. Some meant it kindly, the way you would say a Cushite is unmistakable among other men, because Zipporah was unmistakable among women for the way she spoke and the things she did. Others meant it flatly. When Moses had run from Pharaoh as a young man the Cushites had taken him in and married him to their queen, and when the call came he had put her out of his tent.
That was the part Miriam would not leave alone. Not the woman. The sending away.
"Has the Lord spoken to Moses only?" she said, with Aaron beside her agreeing. "Has He not spoken to us as well? We did not separate ourselves from our marriages."
It was heard above. Moses himself said nothing. He was lower in his own mind than any man on the face of the earth and their words did not touch him.
Come Out, the Three of You
The order came to all three at once. Come out to the tent.
They came out and the cloud came down and stood in the doorway, and out of it two names were called, Aaron and Miriam, and the two of them stepped forward without their brother.
"Hear what I am saying. Every prophet who has ever stood up in this world got what he got in a vision, asleep, in riddles. Not this one. With him I speak the way one speaker speaks to another. He has separated himself from married life because of it. At the bush I showed him the likeness of My Presence with nothing between us. And you were not afraid to open your mouths about him."
The glory went up off the tent and left.
Aaron turned to look at his sister and her skin had gone white to the wrist.
Do Not Let Her Be Like the Dead
Aaron went straight at Moses, and what came out of him was not an argument.
"I beg you, my lord, do not put this on us. We were fools and we sinned. Do not let Miriam stay in that tent defiled like a corpse, like a baby that has gone the full time in the womb and dies coming out of it. She was with us in Egypt. She saw the whole thing, the slavery, the scattering, the years of it. Now that we are finally going up to take the land she is the one held back. Pray for her. Do not let her righteousness be worth nothing in front of this congregation."
Moses prayed with four words in his mouth. God, please, heal her, please.
Sixty Myriads Stood Still
The answer that came back did the arithmetic out loud.
"If her father had corrected her to her face, would she not sit in shame seven days? I have corrected her. By rights it should be fourteen. Seven will do. Shut her outside the camp for seven days, and because of your righteousness I will hold the Cloud of My Glory and the tabernacle and the ark and all Israel here until she is healed and brought back in."
So they held. Sixty myriads of Israel, eighty legions of them, with the cloud overhead and the well beside them and the tents pitched, sat down at Hazeroth and did not move. The scouts did not go out. The ark did not go forward. Nobody struck a tent for a week, because a woman was sitting on the wrong side of the boundary line with her face covered.
She had once stood a little way off in the reeds of the Nile, an hour at most, to see what would be done with her baby brother in a basket. That hour was on the books. It was paid back at Hazeroth by six hundred thousand people, the cloud, the tabernacle, and the well, all of them waiting on her.
On the eighth day she came back through the line and the camp got up and went out into the wilderness of Paran.
← All myths
