Moses Argued With God for Seven Days and Lost the Priesthood

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The Baby Who Announced What He Wanted

He was four months old and already talking. Not babbling. The household of Amram heard the infant say, out loud, that in days to come he would receive the Torah from the middle of a flame.

At two years his mother carried him up to the palace and handed him over. Pharaoh's daughter named him Moses, for the water she had pulled him out of, and God took note of what she had done. He said to her, that child was not yours and you raised him as if he were, so I will call you My daughter though you are not My daughter, and from then on heaven called her Bithiah.

The boy grew up in that palace with the sentence he had spoken as an infant still standing. He would get the Torah out of the fire.

Seven Days at the Bush

The fire came. It stood in a thornbush on the far side of the wilderness and it did not consume the branches, and Moses turned aside to look, and the voice inside it sent him to Egypt.

He said no. He said it for a week. Seven days God stood in that bush coaxing a shepherd who kept producing reasons: not yesterday, not the day before, not since You started talking to Your servant, I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue. Six days of that. On the seventh he stopped arguing the details and said the thing he actually meant.

"Send whoever You are going to send."

The bush answered him with something that sounded almost mild. "You say that. As you live, I will tie this one to the hem of your coat."

He went to Egypt. He carried the hem.

Be Silent, Thus Have I Decreed

Later, at the top of the mountain, he walked into heaven and found God bent over the letters of the Torah, adding little crowns to the tops of them. Moses stood and watched and said nothing until he was asked whether people where he came from bothered to greet each other.

"Should a servant speak first to his Master?"

"You could at least wish Me success in the work."

He wished Him success. Then he asked what the crowns were for, and was told that a man named Akiva ben Joseph would be born long after him and would pile mountains of law onto every stroke of every one of them.

"Show him to me."

"Go back eighteen rows."

Moses sat down in the eighteenth row of a study house that would not exist for a thousand years, and listened to a lecture about his own Torah, and could not follow a word of it. He was still sitting there, sick with it, when a student asked Akiva where a certain ruling came from and Akiva answered that it was a law given to Moses at Sinai. Moses steadied.

He went back and put it to God directly. "You have a man like that, and You are giving the Torah through me?"

"Be silent. This is what came up in My thought."

"Then show me his reward."

"Go back and look."

He looked, and saw Akiva's flesh being weighed out for sale at a meat market.

"This is Torah, and this is its reward?"

"Be silent. This is what came up in My thought."

Seven Days in the White Robe

When the Tabernacle was finished they held seven days of installation, and Moses ran them. He wore a plain white robe. He slaughtered, he sprinkled, he burned the offerings, he blessed the people, seven days of the highest work there was, and the whole time he understood the priesthood to be his.

Nothing came down. No fire, no Presence, no answer from above the Tent while he served.

On the seventh day he was told. It is not yours. It belongs to your brother Aaron.

On the eighth day Aaron went in wearing the breastplate and the gold, and made the offerings his brother had been making all week, and fire came out from before God and took what was on the altar, and every person in that camp saw it and shouted and dropped face down on the ground.

The tribal princes had learned their own version of that arithmetic. They had held back when the collection for the Tabernacle was called, planning to cover whatever the people failed to bring, and the people brought everything in two mornings and the doors closed on them. They came late with onyx stones and had a letter quietly removed from their title in the record. When the dedication came, they were first in line before dawn.

Seven Days in Adar

Forty years later, in the first week of Adar, an old man began asking again.

He prayed to be let across the river. He prayed the second day and the third. He had spent those forty years listening to that camp complain, and he had watched what complaining got them. When their dough ran out they did not come and say the dough is finished. They came at him shouting that he had hauled them into the desert to starve, and heaven, which had every right to be finished with them, said only that they were behaving according to their nature and He would behave according to His. Tell them bread falls in the morning. They never asked, and it came.

Moses asked for seven days.

On the seventh he got his answer. You will not cross this Jordan.

The thing had been tied to his hem at a burning bush before he ever set foot in Egypt, and he had worn it through every plague, every sea, every war, and every year in the sand, and it came off him at last on a mountain in Moab in sight of the water he was not allowed to touch.