Moses Sang Az with the Tongue That Complained

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The Straw Ran Out

Moses and Aaron got their audience and used it badly.

"Let my people go," they told Pharaoh, "so they can hold a feast for me in the wilderness."

Pharaoh looked at them. "Who is the Lord, that I should listen to his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go."

He gave the order the same day. Stop supplying straw for the bricks. Let them go scavenge it themselves. And do not reduce the count by a single brick, because they are idle, and idle men start asking for festivals.

So the people scattered all over Egypt pulling up stubble out of the fields, and the quota stayed where it was, and the Israelite foremen who had to report the shortfall were beaten for it.

The Foremen Met Him at the Door

The foremen went to Pharaoh themselves, still bleeding, and asked why he was doing this to his servants.

"You are idle," he said. "Idle. That is why you keep saying, let us go sacrifice to the Lord. Go work. No straw will be given you, and the full count of bricks you will deliver."

They came out and saw Moses and Aaron standing in the road waiting for news.

"May the Lord look at you and judge," the foremen said, "because you have made us stink in front of Pharaoh and in front of his servants, and put a sword in their hand to kill us."

Then they walked past him back to the brickyards.

What He Said to God That Night

Moses turned around and threw the whole thing at heaven.

"Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? From then, from the hour I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all."

The complaint had a small word at the front of it. Az. From then. It was the word a man reaches for when he is dating his own disaster.

God did not defend himself. He answered with what he was about to do, and the argument went into the ground for a while, under a year of blood and frogs and darkness, under the night the firstborn died and Egypt shoved a whole nation out its door before dawn.

The Water Stood

They came to the edge of the sea with six hundred chariots closing behind them and no road anywhere.

An east wind ran all night and drove the water back and the seabed came up dry. Israel walked in between two standing walls of it. Not everyone who walked through was clean. Someone carried an idol into the corridor of the sea, wrapped and hidden and moving along with the redeemed, and the water stood for that man too.

Toward morning the wheels of the chariots started coming off in the wet sand. The walls fell back into themselves and the Egyptian army went under, and Israel came up on the far shore in the early light and saw bodies on the beach.

Then everybody stopped and looked at Moses.

The Word He Chose to Open With

He stood at the waterline with wet ankles and a whole nation waiting, and he opened his mouth on a single small syllable.

Az.

Then. The same word. He could have started anywhere. He reached for the one that had carried his accusation and made it carry the song instead.

"With the tongue I ruined it with," he said, "with that same tongue I set it right and praise you."

Then he sang, and the people sang the lines back after him, and the one they came to was that the Lord is a man of war. Not a man of war in the abstract. A man who had just fought their fight for them, on their side of the water, while they stood there holding their children and doing nothing at all.

Miriam picked up a drum. The women came out behind her with drums and dancing and she sang the first line back at them across the sand.

Nobody standing there knew where Moses had gotten his first word. He had complained his way to it years earlier in the dark, alone, after a beating that was not even his.