Moses Named God to Pharaoh and Pharaoh Checked His Book of Angels

Click for full size

He Went Out to His Brothers

The kilns were downwind of the palace, which is why nobody in the palace ever had to smell them.

Moses was grown when he finally walked down there. He had the Egyptian speech and the Egyptian posture and a household that had raised him on soft floors, and he went out to his brethren and looked at them properly, and what he saw was not a labor problem. He saw the anguish of their souls and the greatness of their toil. The bodies were being used up, which any overseer could have told him. Something underneath the bodies was being used up too.

Then a Mizraite man began beating a Jewish man, one of his brothers, and the beating did not look like discipline. It looked like a killing that had already started.

Moses had no title down in the pits. He did not need one to know whose side his blood was on. He had eyes that had been out of the soft rooms long enough to see, and once a man has seen that, it does not go back in.

The Height of the Glory

Midian gave him sheep and quiet and a long time to stop thinking about it.

Then a bush on the mountain burned and did not turn to ash, and a Voice out of it named itself. I am the God of your father. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.

Moses put his hands over his face.

He was afraid to look at the height of the glory of the Shekhinah (shechinah, the divine presence) of the LORD. Not the light. The height of it. The man who had made himself look at what the brick pits were doing to people could not hold his eyes open in front of this, and he stood on a hillside with his face covered like someone waiting out a sandstorm.

Give Me Something to Say When They Ask

What he said next, from behind his hands, was not theology. It was logistics.

"Look. I will go to the sons of Israel and say to them, the LORD God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they will say to me, what is His Name? What shall I say to them?"

He knew that room. He had stood in it. Men who have been worked past the edge of their strength collect rumors of rescue the way dry ground collects rumors of rain, and they have learned to check the credentials of anyone who arrives with good news, because in Egypt every power that mattered had a name attached to it and a house and a priesthood and a list. A messenger who could not answer the question would be a story that died at the next shift change.

What came back to him was a Name to be remembered in every generation, tied to the fathers, older than the country he was about to walk into. He went down carrying it, along with a staff, a brother, and a mouth he did not trust.

The slaves asked. He answered. They believed him. That was the easy court.

Release My People for a Festival

Moses and Aaron went in to Pharaoh together, and the room smelled of incense, and they used the herald formula that every later prophet in Israel would use after them.

"Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel. Release My people, that they may make Me a festival in the wilderness."

It was a small ask, deliberately. Not freedom. Not the end of the brickwork. A holiday. Three days out in the sand to hold a feast for their God and come back. Two men in travel dust standing in front of a throne and speaking to it as though one sovereign were addressing another, and behind them, implied in every word, a people who belonged to a different King and kept a different calendar.

The Book Had No Entry

Pharaoh did not shout. He searched.

Egypt kept a Book of the Angels, a register of the divine powers the throne recognized by name, and Pharaoh had it and had read it. He came back with an answer that sounded, in that room, entirely reasonable.

"The name of the LORD is not made known to me, that I should receive His word and release Israel. I have not found the name of the LORD written in the Book of the Angels. Of Him I am not afraid, and I will not release Israel."

He had looked. That is the part worth sitting with. He had done the research, run his finger down the list of everything in heaven that could hurt him, and found nothing where Moses was pointing, and the blank made him brave.

One man on that hillside had covered his face rather than measure the glory. One man in this room had measured it, found no entry, and closed the book.

Moses and Aaron walked back out past the incense and the guards, and the Name that was missing from Egypt's register went with them, and in a few days it would begin writing itself across the country in water and blood without asking the librarians for a shelf.