Moses Accused Israel Himself and the Destroying Angels Left

Click for full size

A Queen, the Daughter of Kings

They came up out of the water still shaking, and the first thing Israel did on the far bank was boast about her family.

"I am a queen, the daughter of kings. A beloved one, the daughter of beloved ones. A holy one, the daughter of holy ones. A pure one, the daughter of pure ones." A man goes out to betroth a woman, and sometimes he is ashamed of the woman, and sometimes he is ashamed of her relatives. "But I am not so."

She had grounds. She had not walked out of Egypt. She had been carried. An eagle drops onto its nest, spreads its wings underneath the fledglings and lifts them out on its pinions so that nothing below can reach them, and that had been the shape of the whole march. God underneath. The people on top. The desert going by without touching them. At the mountain He said it without a picture at all. I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to Myself.

Forty days after that, they were dancing around a calf.

The Court Was Already Full When He Got There

Moses broke the tablets at the foot of the mountain, ground the calf to powder, and went back up with nothing in his hands.

The angels of destruction were waiting. That is the work they exist for, and there was work here. A nation six weeks out of the greatest rescue in its history, caught bowing to metal it had melted itself. The accusers did not have to invent anything. They only had to stand there and let the facts be counted out.

So Moses spoke first, and what he said was: "Please, this people has sinned a great sin."

He Handed Them the Prosecution

He had accused them himself, out loud, before anyone else in that court could open a mouth.

He had learned the move from men who were already dead. Abraham at Sodom had not opened by asking for the city. He opened at fifty righteous men and came down to ten, taking a little more ground at every step. David confessed one sin and one iniquity, took the pardon for that, and only afterward admitted to the rest of them.

Start small. Hold what you take. Ask for the whole thing from higher up.

The angels of destruction heard Moses call his own people great sinners and stopped where they stood. There is no need for us in this, they said to each other. While that one is doing the accusing, the people will fall by his hand, and afterward the patriarchs cannot come at us and demand to know why we slandered their children.

Then they turned and went, and the field belonged to two.

What Will I Do With Your Torah

"Now, if You will bear their sin," Moses said, and stopped in the middle of the sentence, and left it open in the air.

Then he made the argument he had climbed up there to make. Every word of it had been handed to him and to nobody else. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying. Speak to the children of Israel. Command the children of Israel. Say to the children of Israel. Say it to whom? If they are wiped out, what is he to do with the Torah in his arms?

That was real leverage and he knew it, and it was not enough for him. He finished the broken sentence. "And if not, erase me out of Your book that You have written."

You Commanded Me, Not Them

He was not done. He went after the charge itself.

Why are You angry at them? They did not break a commandment against idols. You never gave them one.

"Did I not say it at Sinai? You shall have no other gods before Me."

"You said it to me." The word was singular. Not all of you standing at the foot of the mountain. You, one man. "You commanded me. So if idols have been worshipped here, erase me out of Your book."

He had pulled the crime of a whole nation onto a single pronoun and offered to be destroyed under it.

God watched a man lay his life down for people who had just danced, and stopped the argument there. "For your sake I am giving them the Torah." Write these matters down for yourself.

Trustworthy in All My House

The ministering angels objected at once, and not about the calf.

"Are You giving Moses leave to write whatever he wants? He will go down and say to Israel: I gave you the Torah. I wrote it and I handed it to you myself."

"Heaven forbid that Moses would do such a thing," God said. "And even if he did, he is trustworthy." Not so My servant Moses. In all My house he is trustworthy.

So he came down the mountain a second time with the words in his own handwriting, into a camp still smelling of burnt gold, carrying them to a woman who had stood dripping on the far side of the sea a few weeks earlier and told heaven she was nobody's embarrassment.