Miriam's Well Followed Israel Through the Wilderness

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Abraham's Sheep at the Stolen Well

Abimelech's men had taken the well by force, and Abraham went to the king of the Philistines to get it back. "I do not know who did this thing," Abimelech said.

Abraham proposed a test that needed no witnesses. Each of them would send sheep down to the water. Whichever man's flock the water rose to meet was the man the well belonged to.

The flocks went down. The water came up for Abraham's. And standing over the recovered well while his sheep drank, he said a strange thing that no one in that field could check. From this same well, the seventh generation after me will draw their supply, out in the desert.

The Rock That Kept Up With the Camp

The seventh generation came, and it came into a place where sand does not feed anyone and stone does not water a flock. The well went with them. When they marched it marched. It climbed the high mountains behind them and came down again into the low hills, going around the whole camp and giving every household its drink at the door of its own tent.

The fathers of the world had dug it. Moses and Aaron found it again in the desert with their rods.

When Israel halted, the well came to rest in the courtyard of the Tent of Meeting, and the princes of the tribes stood around it with their staffs and sang to it. Spring up, O well. Spring up, O well. And it sprang up.

Nothing rose before the singing. A people who had sung once at the sea had to go on singing in a country with no sea, out of dry mouths, before there was anything at all to drink.

Three Shepherds and Three Gifts

Israel had three good providers in the wilderness, and each of them carried one of the things that kept the camp alive. The manna fell for the sake of Moses. The pillar of cloud covered them for the sake of Aaron. The water followed them for the sake of Miriam.

They lived inside all three at once for forty years, which is long enough for children to be born, grow, and marry without ever once wondering where the water came from.

The rock itself was older than any of them. It was made on the second day of creation, before there was anyone to be thirsty, and it waited through the generations for a nation that would need it.

It failed them once on the way. On the borders of Moab, at the top of the hill that looks toward Beth-jeshimon, it hid itself, because there the people had let the words of the Law go.

What the Crowd Wanted

Miriam died in the wilderness of Zin, and by the time the camp had finished burying her there was no water anywhere in it.

Moses and Aaron were still sitting in their grief for their sister when Moses lifted his head and saw people coming toward them across the sand, a great many of them.

"What do all these crowds want?" he said.

"Are they not the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?" Aaron answered. "Kind people, and the children of kind people. They are coming to say they are sorry."

"You cannot tell a procession from a rabble," Moses said. "If they were coming in order they would be moving behind their captains of thousands and their captains of hundreds. Look how they come. They come in packs."

They came for water, and they came angry, and the two old men stood up to meet them with nothing to give.

Twelve Springs Still Owed

The well came back for the sake of Moses and Aaron, and the camp drank again for a while. Then Aaron died on the mountain and the cloud lifted off them. Rabbi Abahu turned the verse around and heard a second thing inside it. Do not read that all the congregation saw that Aaron had died. Read that all the congregation were seen, because the covering had come off and they were standing out in the open sun where anyone could look at them.

When Moses died the last of it stopped. Miriam died in Nisan, Aaron in Av, Moses in Adar, so the prophet who says three shepherds were cut off in a single month cannot be counting funerals. He is counting the manna, the cloud, and the well, which all ended together the day the third shepherd was gone.

The sages would not leave the account closed there. They shall neither hunger nor thirst, and neither the heat nor the sun shall strike them: the manna, the well, and the cloud, all three named again and all three promised back. And where one rock once followed one nation, the promise is plural. Springs. Twelve of them, one for each tribe, still owed.