The Sorcerer Who Saw Moses Coming Before Moses Was Born

A Star Rising Over Israel

In Pharaoh's palace there was a sorcerer named Pilti, skilled in reading the Book of Signs. The Book of Signs was an ancient text of celestial omens, and what Pilti read in it terrified him. A star of Israel was rising. A child would be born who would liberate the Israelites from Egypt, and the vision described him in a way that seemed to contradict itself: he would be cast into the water, and yet through him the entire people would cross through water to freedom.

Pilti brought this to Pharaoh. Pharaoh's response was direct: drown every Israelite boy in the Nile before the child could be born or before he could grow old enough to act.

The decree went out. And in a village in Goshen, a man named Amram, head of his generation and trusted enough to have served as Pharaoh's own physician, divorced his wife Jochebed rather than bring a child into a world where Pharaoh would throw it into the river.

The Daughter Who Overruled Her Father

Amram's daughter Miriam was a child when her father made this decision, but she had already begun to receive prophetic visions, and she told him directly: your decision is more severe than Pharaoh's. Pharaoh has decreed death only for the boys. You are decreeing that no children at all will be born. If you divorce your wife, every man in Israel will follow your example. You will end Israel before Pharaoh can.

Amram reversed himself. He remarried Jochebed. A child was conceived. A basket was made from bulrushes, waterproofed with pitch. The child was placed in the Nile.

The paradox Pilti had read in the stars had arrived: the liberator was in the water.

The Man Who Would Part the Sea

Moses grew up in Pharaoh's palace, fled to Midian, spent forty years in the wilderness, and received his commission at the burning bush. When God sent him back to Egypt, what God was doing was pulling the thread of a plan that had been laid into the stars before Moses was born. The sorcerer had seen it. The paradox of water, thrown in and yet the instrument of crossing, was the shape of a life designed from its first moment around the task of liberation.

When Moses stood at the shore of the Reed Sea with the Egyptian army behind him and the water ahead, he knew what he had been told at the bush: God would be with him. What he may not have known is that the Zohar preserves a tradition about what happened in the moment before the sea parted.

God told him: stop praying and raise your staff. The sea is not going to part because you ask for it. It is going to part because you act. Move.

The Temple Made of Fire in the Fourth Heaven

Before Moses parted the sea, or perhaps overlapping with the forty days he would later spend on Sinai, he saw the heavens. The accounts in Legends of the Jews describe his ascent through seven layers of celestial space, each one more extreme than the last. In the fourth heaven he found a Temple. Not a building made of stone and wood, not a structure built by human craftsmen who knew the weight of cedar and the temperature of fire. This Temple was made entirely of fire. Red fire for the pillars. Green fire for the staves. White fire for the thresholds. Gates like carbuncle, pinnacles of ruby.

Inside this Temple of fire, the heavenly liturgy continued. Angels served at altars that no flame could damage because the altars were flame. Sacrifices were offered in a sanctuary that existed before the earthly Tabernacle was conceived, the original of which the wilderness Mishkan would be a dim copy.

The Angels of Anger and Wrath in the Seventh Heaven

In the seventh heaven, Moses met two angels unlike any others. Their names were Af, which means Anger, and Hemah, which means Wrath. Each was five hundred parasangs tall, forged from chains of black and red fire, created at the beginning of time to serve as instruments of divine fury. They had not yet been used for what they were made for. They waited.

Moses, seeing them, lost his footing. The tradition says he nearly fell. God reached out a hand and steadied him. The angels of Anger and Wrath would have their moment later, when they were sent against the enemies of Israel at the sea. But Moses saw them first, in the seventh heaven, before any of it happened. He saw what was waiting to be deployed.

He came back down carrying tablets of fire and the knowledge that the heavens were fully armed.