The Earth Bargained Before It Swallowed Egypt

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The Ground Said No

The walls of water had come down and the killing was already finished. Egypt's chariots lay broken along the shallows. Horses tangled in their traces. Officers face down in the wet sand. The whole army of a world power laid out in a line the length of a morning's walk.

Then God told the Earth to open and take them.

The Earth would not do it.

"Master of all worlds," it said. "The waters killed them. Let the waters swallow them."

The sea had done the work. The sea should keep the evidence. Soil that had never touched an Egyptian was being asked to carry the whole host of them in its body forever, and it wanted to know why the stain came to it and not to the thing that made the stain.

God Named Sisera in Advance

God made a trade instead of an order.

Take them this once, He said. Another time there will be men who by every right should die in your hand, and I will throw those into the water instead. He named them out loud, centuries before either of them was born. Sisera and his whole army. Those I will cast into the sea.

The ledger would balance. What the ground took now, the water would take later, and the account would be settled in a valley in the north that did not exist yet, by a river that had not yet been asked to fight.

The Earth still would not open.

Swear It by Your Right Hand

It wanted the promise notarized. It was not going to spend the rest of time with a Pharaoh's cavalry in its throat and then have the burial charged against it.

"Swear it to me by Your right hand," it said, "that You will not claim them back from me."

So God put out His right hand over the water and swore to the ground that He would not come asking for them. "Thou stretchedst out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them" (Exodus 15:12).

Then the ground opened and took them, and closed, and the shoreline was clean. No stacked corpses for scavengers. No Egyptian bones for later kings to count. The sea had killed. The earth had signed. The right hand held the receipt.

Nobody Had to Ask Which One Was God

On the far bank the people were still standing in wet sand, and something had happened to them that never happened to a prophet.

When a king of flesh and blood comes into a province he arrives inside a ring of guards, warriors at his right hand and his left, columns in front of him and columns behind, and everyone lining the road has to turn to a neighbor and ask which one of them is the king. He is made of the same stuff as his bodyguard and looks it.

Nobody at the sea asked. They saw and they knew, all of them at once. A housemaid standing in that crowd with her skirts soaked saw more that morning than Ezekiel ever saw by the river in Babylon with the heavens opening over his head. Ezekiel got guises and likenesses. She got the thing itself. They opened their mouths together and pointed and sang, "This is my God," using the word a person uses for something standing in front of them.

"The Lord is my strength and my song" (Exodus 15:2). Strength, they would later say, is Torah. Strength is kingship. On that morning it was simpler. The One who had just sworn to the dirt was the One they were looking at, and they did not need a courtier to point Him out.

The Kishon Kept the Appointment

Generations later Sisera came down into the valley of Jezreel with nine hundred iron chariots and every fighting man he had, against a people with no smith and no cavalry.

The stars fought him out of their courses. The old river came up over its banks. The wheels sank. The iron that had made him unbeatable held him in place while the water went over him, and the Kishon swept the army off the field. "The river Kishon swept them away, that ancient river" (Judges 5:21).

The ground did not have to drink Sisera. It had been promised that, at a shoreline in the south, on a morning when it was arguing about corpses, before Deborah or Barak or Sisera's mother at her window had been born.

And the news of that first morning had gone everywhere. Every king on the map heard what had happened at the crossing and at the sea. They trembled where they sat. Some of them got up and left their own capitals. The dirt had bargained. The kings ran. Nothing that day behaved the way it was supposed to.