The Bride God Took Straight Out of the Brickyard
A betrothed girl was owed a year to gather her oils. Israel's forearms were still white with clay when the word came that they were leaving that night.
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Clay dried in the creases of their wrists. The molds were still wet. God did not wait for a clean hour.
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When a man asked for a girl in those days, she was owed twelve months before the wedding. A year for clothes, linens, oils, whatever a household needed. Nobody was married out of a work yard. A king in Persia put each woman through a full year before she was brought in. Six months in oil of myrrh, pressed from boxwood, some said, or from unripe olives that strip the hair and soften the skin. Then six months more in perfumes.
God did none of that. He came for Israel while their hands were still in the mortar. No year. No oils. No linens. They were standing in a brickyard in the delta, and the word arrived that they were going out that night.
The Brick under His Feet
All the years they spent making bricks, there was a brick in heaven.
Under the feet of the God of Israel, where the pavement should have been, there was brickwork of sapphire, and the clear body of the sky above it (Exodus 24:10). It was not decoration. It was the thing they carried all day, kept in the one place it could not be missed. Its shape printed itself on the sky over Egypt. A man who looked up on a bright day could see the mark of a brick above him.
When they came out, it was lifted and put away where a brick is put away. Its basket went with it. Its trowel went with it. After that the sky over them was only sky, clear of cloud, the way it looks when there is nothing in it at all.
Every Man's Sword on His Own Thigh
The lamb was already roasting when Moses came through the camp with the last condition. Nobody uncircumcised eats from this (Exodus 12:48).
Half of them had never been circumcised. Egypt had run out of reasons to allow it, and they had run out of will to insist. There were hours left before the meal.
Every man reached down and took the sword off his own thigh, and did it to himself, standing there.
Then the three of them worked the line. Moses went along cutting. Aaron came behind him and drew the skin back. Joshua came last with water and made each man drink before he was allowed to lie down. Some tell it with Joshua holding the knife and Moses carrying the water. Either way the line moved all evening. Six hundred thousand men over the age of twenty, and six hundred thousand under it, and the smell of blood and roasting meat in the same street.
They ate standing up, with their sandals on.
Black Tents on the Road
What went out of Egypt did not look like a wedding party.
From a distance the camp looked like the tents of Kedar out in the desert, black goatskin gone stiff with smoke, torn along the seams, the kind of tent a traveler rides past without slowing down because there is obviously nothing in it worth stopping for. Inside those tents were gems and pearls.
One of the bundles in that column was a coffin. Joseph had been sold south as freight and had ended holding the deed to the country that bought him. They were carrying his bones home. They walked out upright. No creature on that road frightened them.
The Flint Knives at Gilgal
Forty years later the whole thing had to be done a second time, because the sons born in the wilderness had not been done at all.
Joshua cut flint knives for himself on the plain by Jericho and circumcised the nation again at a rise in the ground east of the camp (Joshua 5:2-3). The place kept the name it earned that day. The Hill of the Foreskins. There are those who say the hill itself was made out of them, that the mound was not there before the morning and was there after.
Then they kept the Passover in the land, and the manna stopped.
Long after that, when the house in Jerusalem had been burned and the people were walking east again, the promise came back around in the same words. When you went down to Babylon, I went with you. When you come back to the chosen house, I am coming with you. As long as Israel is sitting in the ashes, so is he. When it is time he will come up out of them the way a hen stands and shakes the ash out of her wings.
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