Moses Strikes for Shelomith Then Faces the Serpent

Moses went out to his brethren and did not glance from a distance. He wept at their labor and set his shoulder under each load until the burden became his own. Then he saw an Egyptian striking a Hebrew.

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The Egyptian was a taskmaster over a hundred and twenty men. He roused them at cockcrow and moved freely through their houses. He fixed his eyes on Shelomith daughter of Dibri, beautiful and without blemish, wife of one of his Hebrews. One dawn he led the husband out early, slipped back, and lay with her while she believed her husband had returned. The husband came home and met the Egyptian leaving. "Did he touch you?" "Yes," she said, "and I thought it was you." Found out, the taskmaster turned and beat the husband. That was the blow Moses would not let stand (Exodus 2:11-12).

The Strike in the Sand

Moses looked this way and that, saw no man watching, struck the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand. Growth in that chapter is not the swelling of a body. Beasts grow. Birds grow. Every creature swells to its season. Moses grew by going out into the suffering of his people until he could not watch a rape covered by a whip.

The next day two Hebrews quarreled, and the secret cracked. "Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" Moses fled. The blood in the sand did not end Egypt's cruelty. It marked the first time a prince of the house chose the beaten over the beater, and paid for the choice with exile.

Staff, Serpent, and a Wronged People

At the bush years later he hesitated. "They will not believe me," he said of Israel. "What is that in your hand?" The Master of the world already knew what Moses held. The staff coiled into a serpent because in that moment Moses had taken up the trait of the primordial serpent, the first speaker of an evil report. He cast a shadow of slander on his own people.

Israel did not deserve it. They were believers and children of believers. The people believed when they heard. Abraham believed, and it was counted as righteousness. The mark returned on the speaker. The hand turned leprous, white as snow, measure for a tongue that wronged the faithful (Exodus 4:1-6). Put your hand back in your bosom. The staff became wood again. The mouth that would free Israel first had to unlearn the serpent's way of speaking about Israel.

Pharaoh Harnesses His Own Chariot

When Israel finally left, the report did not come from royal spies. Egyptian escorts had gone out with the people as patrons of the march. For three days the road held. On the fourth, when Israel pressed farther into the wilderness, the escorts blocked the path. "We have no permission to let you go further," they said. Israel rose and struck them. Survivors fled to Pharaoh and poured out the tale.

Pharaoh did not summon a servant. With his own hands he harnessed his chariot. Hatred breaks the ordinary order of dignity. A king who would never stoop to such labor stoops when hate drives him, as Balaam later rose early and saddled his own donkey to go and curse Israel. Love breaks order too: Abraham rose early and saddled his own donkey to do the will of his Maker at the binding of his son (Exodus 14:6).

The same eager hands. Two masters. Pharaoh's leather straps pulled toward the sea of drowning. Abraham's toward a mountain of obedience.

From Sand to Sea

The man who buried a taskmaster for Shelomith's household became the man whose staff must unlearn the serpent's tongue before it can split a sea. The king who harnessed his own wheels chased a people he had already lost. Between the sand grave and the chariot pole runs one pressure: who will put a shoulder under Israel's load, and who will put hands on leather straps to drag them back.

Moses learned the cost of a wrong word about his people. Pharaoh never learned the cost of a right hatred aimed at the wrong nation. The sea would settle that difference without asking either man to explain himself. Shelomith's name stays in the midrash so the first blow is never abstract. A woman was violated. A husband was beaten. A prince of Egypt chose sides in the sand, and the rest of the story follows from that choice.

Shelomith's household never left the first chapter of Moses' public life. The sand that covered the taskmaster covered a crime with a name and a face. Later, when the staff became a serpent, the rebuke was not abstract either. A people who would believe were not to be spoken of as a people who would not. Pharaoh's hands on his own chariot completed the set of concrete choices: one man buries a rapist, one man blackens a nation with his tongue and is whitened for it, one king yokes himself to chase what he can no longer own.