Moses Named Tribe After Tribe and God Rejected Each for the Priesthood

The altar was finished before the priest was chosen. God told Moses to appoint one, and Moses asked the only question that mattered. "Which tribe?"

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What came back was not a name. It was a file.

Reuben's Bed and Simeon's Blade

Do not put Reuben in front of Me. He went up onto his father's bed and lay with Bilhah. The eldest son's portion had already been spent on one night in a tent, and the tent was still standing in the record.

Moses tried again. "Simeon, then."

Weapons of violence are their wares, and violence is the thing I hate. Moses did not argue that one. He had heard what those brothers did at Shechem, walking into a city of men three days after the knife and leaving nobody upright. A house that settles its accounts with a blade cannot be handed the one knife whose entire purpose is peace.

Dan's Image and Joseph's Whisper

"Dan."

They will bring My anger down. There will be a carved image set up in Dan, poured from silver a son stole out of his own mother's house, and that tribe will keep it, and keep a hired priest standing in front of it, for as long as the house of God stands at Shiloh.

Moses moved down the list. "Joseph."

They carry evil talk about their brothers back to their father. Moses knew that file too. A boy comes in from the flock with a report, and the report is accurate, and by the end of it there is a coat dipped in goat's blood on a table and an old man tearing his clothes over an animal that never touched his son. A priest who deals in accurate damage will empty the courts faster than a foreign army.

Judah on the Roadside

One name left before his own. "Judah."

Arrogant of eye and wide of heart. He saw a woman sitting veiled at the entrance to Enaim and took her for a harlot and turned aside to her, and she was his own son's widow, and he left his seal and his cord behind as a pledge. An eye that quick does not belong near a curtain nobody is permitted to look behind.

Moses had run out of tribes worth naming. "Whose tribe, then, shall I appoint?"

Appoint From Your Own

Appoint from yours.

Moses waited for the list of Levi's merits. It did not come. Levi had been named in the same breath as Simeon when the blade was condemned, since the verse that damned the weapons put both brothers on it. Nothing was read out about Levi that morning. Every other door had simply closed on a sentence written into Genesis in ink that does not lift.

So the priesthood went to the tribe with no land coming to it, and to the man who had just heard five families rejected out loud before he was told to look at his own.

Judah's Hands Were Given Other Work

Forty years later, on the last day of his life, Moses went down the tribes again. This time he was blessing them.

When he reached Judah he did not mention the roadside. He asked that Judah's hands fight for him, and that God be a help to him against his enemies. Two fights sat folded inside that: the one where Judah brings down Esau, and one already finished, in a grain palace in Egypt, when Judah walked toward a vizier he did not know was his brother and offered his own body in place of Benjamin's.

Hands that could not be trusted with the basin could still open in a foreign court for the youngest child in the family.

The Name Moses Would Not Leave Out

There was a tribe missing from the blessings that day. Simeon was not called. Everyone standing in that field could count, and everyone knew why.

So Moses hid him inside Judah's blessing. Hear, O Lord, the voice of Judah. Master of the world, he meant, whenever the tribe of Simeon is in trouble, get him out of it. He had refused Simeon the altar at the start and would not let the name fall off the end.

The prayer was paid out in land. When the tribes went up to take their portions, Judah turned to Simeon and said, "Come up with me into my lot." Whole districts were cut off Judah's inheritance and handed to Simeon's children, because Judah's share was larger than he could hold and Simeon's was nothing at all.

The tribe that lost the altar for violence got a home from the tribe that lost the altar for lust. The man who had disqualified them both was buried in a valley in Moab that nobody has ever been able to find.