The Prince of Mastema Who Stalked the Exodus to the Sea

The Adversary on the Lodging Road

The road from Midian ran down toward Egypt through scrub and stone, and on it walked a man who had argued with a burning bush and lost. Moses carried a shepherd's staff that was no longer only a staff. His wife rode beside him. His sons rode with her. The empire that had drowned Hebrew infants in the river waited at the end of the road, and he was walking back into it on purpose.

He stopped for the night at a lodging place. That was where the thing came for him.

It came down out of the heavens like a sentence already passed, and it had a name. The Prince of the Mastema. Not a demon scratching at a doorpost. An archangel, high-ranking and ruined, the heavenly court's own prosecutor turned loose against the man God had just commissioned. The name carried its own meaning. Mastema, from the old root for hostility, for enmity, for the cold work of accusation. He had heard the voice at the bush. He understood exactly what a freed Israel would cost the powers of the world, and he moved to cancel the Exodus before it could take its first full breath.

Blood at the Threshold

"The prince of the Mastema stood up against thee," the old reckoning runs, "and sought to cast thee into the hands of Pharaoh." He did not come to debate. He came to kill, and to deliver the corpse to the empire as a gift.

It was a woman who stopped him. While the angel pressed in, Zipporah took a flint and turned to her son. She cut. She touched the blood to the place where it needed to be touched, and the blood spoke louder than the accusation. The covenant sign, written in a child's skin, closed the case. The Prince of the Mastema had no further claim at that threshold. He drew back from the lodging place. Moses lived, and the road to Egypt opened again under his feet.

The adversary withdrew. He did not surrender. He went looking for another front.

The Magicians He Stood Behind

Egypt remembers its sorcerers as men who lost a contest. Staffs became serpents, and the larger serpent ate the rest, and the magicians went quiet. But there was a hand behind their hands. The Prince of the Mastema stood with the Egyptian sorcerers and lent them his strength. "He helped the Egyptian sorcerers," the account says, "and they stood up and wrought before thee." The duel in Pharaoh's hall was never two priests against a shepherd. It was an archangel of accusation propping up an empire's magic against the God who had made the magic possible at all.

God let the contest run, but only so far. The evils the sorcerers could imitate, heaven permitted. The remedies, heaven refused them. They could summon a plague and never lift one. They could blacken the river and never make it sweet again. The boundary held like a wall they could not see and could not cross.

Then the wall closed on them. The Lord struck the magicians with malignant ulcers until they could not stand. Their bodies broke under the very sores they had helped call down. By the end they could not perform a single sign. The hand behind their hands had lifted them up only to watch them fall, ruined, in front of the man they were sent to destroy.

The Prince Who Would Not Be Shamed

A lesser adversary would have stopped there. Plague after plague had answered him. His sorcerers lay covered in ulcers. Egypt's gods had been judged one by one in their own land. And still the Prince of the Mastema took courage.

He did not retreat into the dark and lick the wound. He turned on Egypt itself and drove it forward. He cried out to the Egyptians to pursue, to chase the escaping slaves with everything the empire could put on a road. Chariots. Horses. The massed hosts of all the peoples of Egypt. The same prince who had failed at the lodging place, failed in Pharaoh's hall, failed across every plague, now poured his rage into Pharaoh's army and aimed it at the backs of fleeing men, women, and children. He raced them toward the water.

The Festival Kept With Sand Underfoot

The people he chased were not marching in calm order. They had gone out of Egypt in haste, bread unleavened on their backs because there had been no time to let it rise. They carried that haste with them like a wound that had not closed. And they carried a festival they had not finished.

For the celebration begun in Egypt was not completed in Egypt. They kept it on the move, from the night of leaving until they came into the wilderness of Shur, and there, on the very shore of the sea, they completed it. Freshly unchained, still catching their breath, the Israelites observed the feast of unleavened bread with the sea in front of them and the dust of pursuit behind. No ordered table. A meal kept with sand underfoot and an enemy in sight.

The blood of that first night still held. The lamb's blood on the doorposts in Egypt had marked the houses the destroyer could not enter, and that same blood had drawn a line the Prince of the Mastema could not cross. While Passover held, the accuser was bound. He could push Egypt to the water's edge. He could not push past the protection of the blood. So Egypt's chariots came on, and the sea opened, and the host that the adversary had driven forward went down into the water he had raced them toward. The festival that began in fear ended on a free shore, with the prince of accusation shut out behind the blood, watching an empire sink.