Solomon Could Not Unlock the Red Heifer Law

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The Shrouds Solomon Sent Back to Egypt

The workmen arrived from Egypt in good health and Solomon took one look at them and knew every one of them would be dead inside the year.

He had written to Pharaoh Neco asking for skilled hands, at wages, for the building of the Temple. Pharaoh had called in his astrologers instead, and the astrologers had gone through the charts and picked out the men whose year was up, and those were the men who were sent. A crew of walking corpses, hired out at full price.

Solomon had them measured for burial. Then he sent them home with the linen folded under their arms and a note for Pharaoh.

Did you have no shrouds to bury your dead? Here they are, and here is their linen.

Wiser Than Adam, Stopped by a Cow

They said his wisdom was fenced in the way sand fences the sea. Whatever came at him broke on it.

He outran the sages of the east, who could read a star and were clever with birds. He outran Adam, who had stood in front of every animal God led past him and handed out names, horse, lion, camel, ox, eagle, donkey, while the angels who had been given the same test stood there with nothing to say. Adam had named himself too, out of the ground he came from, and then named God as the Lord over everything that lives. He outran Joseph, whose Egyptian masters threw seventy tablets in seventy languages at his feet to prove a slave could not rule them, and who read every one, and then spoke Hebrew at them, which none of them could follow.

Asked why a leper is cleansed with the tallest tree and the smallest bush, he had the answer ready. Raise a man up like a cedar and the disease finds him. Bring him down as low as the hyssop and the hyssop heals him.

Then he opened the section of the red heifer.

A cow without blemish, never yoked, burned whole outside the camp, cedar and hyssop and crimson thrown into the fire with her, the ashes stirred into spring water. Sprinkle it on a man who has touched a corpse and he is clean. Sprinkle it and the priest who does the sprinkling is unclean until evening.

He worked at it and worked at it. He kept coming back to it and expounding it and digging under it, and it did not open.

I said I will be wise, he admitted at last, and it is far from me.

Moses Heard God Quote a Man Not Yet Born

Take unto you a red heifer, God had said to Moses, and the word was unto you. To you I am revealing why. For everyone else it stays a decree.

So Moses had the reason. What he did not have was the rest of it, and he found out about the rest of it by accident.

He was on high, and he heard a voice studying. It was God, sitting over the laws of the heifer, and God was citing a ruling by name. Rabbi Eliezer says: a calf is a year old and a heifer two.

Moses stopped where he stood.

"Master of the worlds, the worlds above and the worlds below are Yours. You sit here and quote a halakhah (Jewish law) in the name of flesh and blood?"

"A righteous man is going to stand up in My world," God said, "and he is going to open the section of the heifer before anyone else does. Rabbi Eliezer says: a calf a year old, a heifer two."

Moses did not ask what the man would teach. He asked for something else entirely.

"Master of the worlds. Let him come out of my own loins."

"By your life," God said. "He will come out of your loins."

Moses had a son already, and the son's name was Eliezer.

The rest of it Moses was not shown at all. Things that were never revealed on Sinai were revealed later to Rabbi Akiva and the men who studied beside him, and Job's line about the eye that saw every precious thing was said of Akiva. The heifer outlasted the man it had been explained to.

Let Your Ears Hear What Your Mouth Says

Generations on, a gentile came at Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai with it, and he did not bother being polite.

"What you people do looks like sorcery. You bring a cow. You slaughter it, you burn it, you grind it up, you keep the ash. Then somebody touches a dead body and you flick two or three drops of the stuff at him and tell him he is clean."

Yochanan asked him whether a restless spirit had ever gotten into him. Never. Had he ever seen it get into somebody else? Yes.

"And what do you do for that man?"

"We bring roots and burn them under him and throw water at it, and the thing runs."

"Let your ears hear what your mouth is saying."

The man had nothing to come back with, and he went out.

What He Told His Students After the Man Left

The students waited until the door shut.

"Rabbi. You pushed him off with a straw. What do you tell us?"

Yochanan looked at them.

"By your lives. The dead body does not defile. The water does not purify. It is a decree. A statute I have engraved, God says, a decree I have decreed, and you have no permission to cross it."

Solomon had gone at that same law with everything he owned. The throne, the three thousand proverbs, the ruling on the cedar and the hyssop, the work crew he sent back to Egypt carrying their own shrouds. A cow burned outside the camp beat all of it.