Moses Drove Israel From the Egyptian Dead

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The Count on the Beach

A man knelt at the waterline to look into the face of a dead Egyptian, and what he said when he stood up went along the shore faster than the news of the sea had. He knew the face. It belonged to the overseer who used to count his bricks at the end of the day and dock him for the ones that cracked in the mold. Now it was rolling in the foam with the mouth open.

By midmorning the arithmetic had gone through the whole camp. They had the plunder of Egypt in their packs, the clouds of glory over their heads, a split sea behind them, their masters face down in it, and the song already sung, and since the Holy One had taken them out for exactly those five things, the account was closed and paid. So the word started as a mutter and hardened into a plan before anyone thought to argue with it. Let us return to Egypt.

What Moses Said and What They Answered

Moses came down the beach with the staff still in his hand and his arms still shaking from the night. He threw the sentence at them like a rope. "As you saw the Egyptians today, you shall not see them ever again" (Exodus 14:13).

But they pointed at the water, and the water answered him better than they could. "They have all died already." That was the whole argument, and it was a good one. Because the Egyptians were dead, Egypt was empty; because Egypt was empty, it was a house with the owner gone, full of ovens they knew how to light and streets they knew in the dark. The wilderness in front of them had none of that. It had thirst.

So Moses played the note he had been holding since the bush stopped burning. "When you take the people out of Egypt, you will worship God upon this mountain" (Exodus 3:12). A debt, then, not a gift. The mountain was still out there with no Israelite song on its stones, and the exodus was only half paid.

They did not move.

The Leader They Wanted Instead

What moved instead was a suggestion, going from one family to the next while the bodies kept coming in on the tide. Let us appoint a leader, and return to Egypt (Numbers 14:4). Not this leader. Another one, who would walk west.

And a column heading west would want something to walk in front of it, since a people that has just watched a sea open does not follow a man with a stick out of habit. So they talked about making a thing. Small enough to carry at the head of the line, solid enough to look at, quiet enough never to ask anyone for anything.

The Staff Came Down on His Own People

Moses raised the staff.

He had lifted it over water twice in a night, and the water had gone where he pointed. Now he was lifting it over the tops of his own people's heads, close enough to see which of them flinched and which of them only stared at him, and for about five seconds his arm stayed up there while he understood what he was about to do with it. Then he brought it down. Not on a body. He swung it flat through the air in front of the nearest faces, the way a man moves cattle that will not take a gate, and again, and again, until the front of the crowd broke and stumbled east because east was the only direction with nobody hitting the air in it.

They did not travel at the command. They traveled because he forced them to travel. A child cried over a sandal left in the sand and got pulled along without it. An old man spat toward a chariot wheel turning slowly in the shallows, and then turned his back on it under the shadow of the staff.

The Thing in the Pack

Halfway down the column he found what he had been half expecting since the talk about making something to walk in front of them. A pack, opened, and inside it a little god, small enough to hide under grain, heavy enough to turn a man's neck the wrong way for the rest of his life.

He took it out with his hand. The word for leading them out that day is also the word for taking a thing away, and both happened in the same motion: he pulled the column east and he pulled the idol out of the middle of it, walking, without stopping the march to hold a trial about whose pack it was.

They refused to heed, and did not remember the wonders (Nehemiah 9:17). Their feet kept trying to point west while the sea was still wet on their legs.

Behind them the Egyptian dead stayed where they were, face down, quieter than they had ever been alive. Ahead was a mountain nobody had seen yet and a debt nobody had agreed to. Moses walked east at the head of them with the little god shut in his fist, and nobody asked him whose it was.