Moses Raised His Hands and Israel Lived by Looking Up

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Go Out From Under the Cloud

The clouds of glory traveled with the camp, and under them nothing reached Israel. Not the sun. Not the sand. For a nation a few weeks out of Egypt, still learning what free legs felt like, that cover was the difference between a people and a rumor.

Then Amalek came at them at Rephidim, and Moses turned to Joshua with an order that had a knife in it.

"Choose men for us, and go out from under the cloud, and do battle with Amalek."

Out from under it. Past the edge of the one thing that had been keeping them alive, onto open sand where a sword is only a sword and a man's footing is his own problem. Joshua chose his men. Then he walked them out through the last of the shade into ordinary daylight, because that was where the fighting had to happen.

The Hands Went Down

Moses climbed the hill with the staff and put his hands up, and from the moment the lines closed below him he did not eat.

He prayed through the morning. He prayed through the middle of the day, when the valley went white with dust and the shouting came up the slope in pieces. Everything down there followed his arms. Up, and Israel pushed forward. Down, and Amalek came on.

By afternoon the arms were failing.

What Was Pressing on His Hands

It was not muscle. The sin of Israel had settled onto those hands and was pushing them toward the ground, and there was nothing in the living generation strong enough to push back. So Moses reached past the living generation.

Aaron and Hur took a stone and set it under him, and he sat down on it.

It was an ordinary rock. Anyone walking past would have seen a tired old man sitting on a rock in the middle of a battle. What actually held him were the deeds of the fathers, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, who is called the Stone of Israel, and under him, where he sat, the deeds of the mothers, Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah. Moses had run out of the present and sat down on the past, and the past took his weight.

Until the Sun Set

The hands stayed up. Not on his strength, and up anyway, all the way to sundown, while below him Joshua did the day's work outside the cloud with the men he had picked that morning.

Then the light went and Amalek broke and pulled back into the desert.

Moses came down the hill with arms he could not feel. Joshua came back in under the cover with other men's blood drying on him. Nobody moved the stone.

The Bronze Thing on the Pole

Years later and further into the same desert, the snakes came.

They came out of the sand into a complaining camp and bit whoever was nearest, and people died in the open where the whole camp could see it. There was no army to send out this time and no hill worth climbing. A man bitten in the leg at noon was a corpse by dark, and the burning in the wound gave him the entire afternoon to think about it.

God told Moses to make a saraf, a fiery serpent, and set it up on a pole. Moses hammered one out of bronze and raised it where the camp could see it.

A snake of metal kills nobody and cures nobody. It hung up there in the heat with no more power in it than a tent pin. But a man on the ground with the venom climbing his leg would lift his head and look at it, and in looking he put himself back into the hands of the One who had ordered the thing made. He looked, and he lived.

The bronze stayed on the pole. Men who had been flat on the sand an hour earlier stood up in a camp that was still full of snakes, and not one of them had been saved by anything but the angle of his own head.