The Mystical Dew That Raised the Dead at Sinai

The Voice That Could Not Be Survived

The Israelites at Sinai had been prepared. Three days of purification. Separation from ordinary life. Standing at the base of the mountain in the dawn of the third day, watching the lightning and the cloud and the fire and the smoke, hearing the sound of the shofar grow louder as nothing in nature grows louder, rising past the threshold of what could be borne. They had been told what was coming and they were still not ready for it.

When God spoke the first word of the first commandment, Anochi, I am, it did not arrive the way a voice arrives. It erupted. Thunder and lightning poured from God's mouth. Torches blazed to the right and left. The divine voice rolled outward in all directions, reaching all of Israel simultaneously, crying out to every person at once in a sound that was not sound in any ordinary sense of the word. The people fled twelve miles. Their souls fled with them. They dropped where they stood. By every account in the tradition, they were dead.

Death by Proximity to the Voice

This was no metaphor. The Israelites at Sinai were overwhelmed past the point of survival. The same transmission that was meant to give them life was so concentrated, so absolute, that the human frame could not hold it. This is not the first time the tradition records death by proximity to the divine: the sons of Aaron, who brought strange fire into the Tabernacle; Uzzah, who reached out to steady the Ark and was struck; the men of Beth-Shemesh, who looked inside it. Something about the unmediated presence of God, experienced without adequate preparation or structure, is lethal to human beings.

At Sinai the problem was not inadequate preparation. The people had prepared as fully as human beings can prepare. The problem was that full preparation is not full insulation. The voice of God speaking the first commandment was simply beyond what a prepared human being could survive. The Torah records that they asked Moses, after the first words, to serve as intermediary. "Let Moses speak to us," they said. "Not God directly. Moses." The request was answered immediately. God agreed. But the dead were already on the plain.

The Dew That Came Down

God revived them. Not through Moses, not through an angel, not through any intermediary. God himself sent down the dew of resurrection and restored the dead Israelites to life on the plain of Sinai. The dew fell on the sixty myriads who had died from the voice, and they rose, and the revelation continued with the mediation Moses now provided between the people and the direct force of God's speech.

The dew was not ordinary. The tradition identifies it as the same dew that will one day raise all the dead in the final resurrection. The event at Sinai was not a special case, a one-time miracle created for this emergency. The mechanism God used to revive the Israelites was the same mechanism that has been stored in creation since the beginning, waiting for the day when it will be released over every grave on earth. Sinai was a preview of the world to come, not in its theology but in its physics. The dew of resurrection fell there first.

The Angels Who Brought the Crowns

When the dead rose, they rose crowned. The tradition records that two angels descended with each Israelite at Sinai: one carrying the crown of the Torah's content, the knowledge itself; the other carrying the crown of the commandment's reward. Six hundred thousand people, each attended by two angels, each crowned twice. The crowns were given to mark the acceptance of the covenant. When Israel later made the Golden Calf and broke the covenant, the angels came back and took the crowns. But at Sinai, in the moment of revival and acceptance, every person who had died and been restored stood before God doubly crowned, holding what had killed them and what had brought them back.