Samael Counted the Idols and God Threw Him Job as Bait

The waters of the Reed Sea stood flat and gray and would not move. Behind Israel, the dust of Pharaoh's chariots climbed the sky. In front of them, nothing but water. And above all of it, in the court where decrees are signed, an angel rose to his feet to make sure the trap stayed shut.

Samael serves the throne as prosecutor. That is his office. When a case comes before the Judge, he is the one who stands and presses the charge, and on that morning he had a charge ready that no defense could touch.

The Accuser Counts the Idols

"Lord of the Universe," Samael said, and he spread the record of Israel open like a ledger. "Look at them. Generation after generation in Egypt, and what did they bow to? Every idol the Egyptians kept, they kept beside them. They are no cleaner than the men chasing them with spears. Two nations bowed to the same gods. You would split a sea for one and drown the other? On what merit do these go free?"

The charge had teeth, and everyone in the court knew it. Israel had sunk low in the brickyards. They had learned the idols of their masters the way slaves learn everything, from the inside, with no choice in it. Heaven went quiet. The kind of quiet that comes before a verdict.

Down at the shore the people screamed at Moses, asking whether Egypt had run out of graves that he had dragged them to die by the water. Moses had no answer for them. The sea did not move. Up in the court, the accuser waited for the silence to harden into law.

God Reaches for Bait

What the Holy One did next was not an argument. It was a maneuver.

There was a man named Job, one of Pharaoh's senior counselors, and of him Scripture itself says that he was perfect and upright, a man who feared God and turned from evil. A clean case. The cleanest in the world. God took that man and set him squarely in the prosecutor's path.

"Behold," God said, "he is in thy hand. Do with him as thou pleasest."

Samael's head turned. A righteous man, handed over, given to him to test and probe and break. No accuser alive can walk past an offer like that. The whole weight of his attention slid off Israel and fastened onto Job, and while it did, while Samael was already counting the man's herds and sons and the skin he would soon cover in sores, the court above the sea stood empty of its prosecutor.

God spoke to Moses. "Speak to the children of Israel, that they go forward." The wind came down hard on the water. The sea split to its floor, and the people walked the dry road between two standing walls, and by the time the accuser looked back from his new game, Israel was across and Egypt was under. Afterward God reached into Samael's grip and pulled Job back out of it. The man's suffering had bought the moment the waters needed, and the Judge did not leave him to pay forever.

The Same Mouth on the Road to Moriah

This was not the first time the accuser had been sent against one righteous man to spare the rest, and Samael remembered the older road.

Years before the sea, an old man and his son climbed toward a mountain, the boy carrying the split wood on his shoulders like one who carries his own gallows. Behind them walked a stranger who had not been invited. Abraham had the fire and the knife in his hand, and the stranger fell into step beside him and began, softly, to work.

"Old man," Samael said, "have you lost your mind? A son given to you at a hundred years, and you mean to cut his throat?"

"For just this purpose," Abraham answered, and kept walking.

"And if He asks more than this of you tomorrow? If He calls you a shedder of blood for the blood you spill today, will you break then?"

"Even more than this," Abraham said, and did not slow.

The Accuser Tries the Son

When the father would not bend, Samael dropped back and came up beside the boy.

"Son of an unhappy mother," he said to Isaac, "do you know where he is taking you? He is going to slaughter you on that hill."

"For just this purpose," Isaac said.

"Then think on this. Those fine garments your mother sewed for you, all of it goes to Ishmael, the hated one of the house, the moment you are dead. You will be ash and he will wear your clothes. Does that touch you at all?"

The barb went in halfway. Isaac turned to his father and said, "My father," and said it again, "my father," twice, so that the old man's heart would fill with mercy and look at him. Then he asked the only question left. "Behold the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"

"May that man who taunts us be rebuked," Abraham said. "God will show Himself the lamb. And if not, then you are the lamb, my son." And the two of them went on together, this one to bind and that one to be bound, this one to slaughter and that one to be slaughtered, and the accuser had nothing left to say.

At the mountain Abraham built the altar and quietly hid a stone, so that no one watching from the brush could throw it at the boy and ruin him before the offering. He knew by then who walked the roads. The accuser strikes where the road turns dangerous, on a mountain or at a shore, wherever one righteous life can be made to stand in for many. And the Judge, who knows His own prosecutor better than the prosecutor knows himself, keeps a clean case in reserve, ready to throw across the path the instant the waters need to move.