No Enemy Coveted the Land While Israel Climbed to the Temple

The cloud came down at the door of the tent of meeting, outside the camp, and every man in Israel walked to the flap of his own tent and bowed toward it. Nobody organized that. They rose together because the pillar was standing there in plain sight where all of them could see it at once, so there was nothing left to argue about and nobody left to argue with.

Click for full size

Some of the men bending in that field of backs had melted their earrings into gold a few months earlier. They bowed too. Whatever they had been calculating collapsed when the pillar came down, since a column of cloud at a tent door is not the kind of evidence a man talks his way around.

That was the shape the wilderness pressed into them, a whole people turning the same direction in the same moment, each one at his own threshold. In the land the same movement would cost them something.

A Line From Suph to Pherat

The borders were drawn before anyone lived inside them. From the sea of Suph to the sea of the Philistines, from the desert up to the Pherat, with every inhabitant of that span delivered into Israel's hand and driven out ahead of them (Exodus 23:31). It was the widest line the Torah ever drew for them, wide enough that neither David nor Solomon ever walked the whole of it.

But a border only settles who is outside. The enemy that mattered in a hill village was never camped on the far bank of the Euphrates. He was the man on the next ridge, already well inside the line, who had spent three summers looking down at a vineyard that was not his.

The Night Before He Went Up

Three times a year the law emptied the villages. Every man was to go up and appear before the Lord, which was the wilderness movement all over again, a whole people turning the same way at once, except that now the turning took a man four days from his own gate and held him there through the festival.

He counted his vines the evening before he left, because counting them was the last useful thing he could do for them. His wife asked who would sit on the wall. Nobody would sit on the wall. His sons were walking up with him, his brother's household was going, and the lane would be left to three old women and a deaf man, which he knew exactly how to see from the ridge.

He said what his father used to say, that the Holy One had promised no man would covet the land while Israel went up (Exodus 34:24). Spoken out loud in his own courtyard, with the press standing there still dark from last season, it sounded thinner than it had in his head. He went anyway, and he got as far as the turn in the road before he stopped looking back, and after that the dust and the singing took him.

The Man on the Ridge

The neighbor waited two days. Then he climbed the ridge with a cousin on either side of him, because a thing like that goes easier with company, and he stood where he had stood every summer for three years and looked down at it.

The vines were there. The gate hung open on its strap, since the man had not bothered to bar what he could not defend, and the press sat uncovered with its stone lip dark from the last pressing. Everything he had coveted for three summers was lying under him with nobody standing on it.

And he did not want it. He waited up there with his hand flat on a warm rock for the old hunger to come, the way it always came when he looked down that slope, but nothing came up in him at all. The vines were vines. He caught himself thinking instead about a lame donkey he had been meaning to sell before the rains.

One of the cousins asked what they were waiting for. He said the sun was too high, which was not true and did not need to be, and the three of them went back down the way they had come up. By the bottom none of them could have said what they had climbed for.

What He Found When He Came Down

The road home ran slower than the road up, because a man coming back from the house of the Name is in no hurry and his feet hurt. He came over the last rise at evening expecting to read the whole week off the slope before he reached it, the way a farmer reads his own land from a distance, looking for trampled rows and a broken trellis and a gate torn off its strap.

The rows were standing. His wife came out and said nothing about it, because there is nothing to say about seven days in which nothing happened. He walked the length of the trellis anyway, all the way to the end, with one hand on the wood.

Across the wadi the neighbor was up on his roof with his back turned, mending something. Neither man called out to the other. The vines went on standing between them, and inside three days the village was arguing again about water rights and boundary stones, since an appetite lifted for the length of a festival is only lifted for the length of a festival.