The Sorcerers Who Tried to Pull the Angels From the Sky

Two Sorcerers in the Drowning Water

The wall of water came down on Egypt, and in the churn of horses and chariot-wheels two men did not flail like the rest. Yochani and Mamre trod the flood as if it were a floor. They had served Pharaoh since before the river turned to blood, and they had no intention of dying among ordinary soldiers.

"If this wonder is the hand of the Holy One, blessed be He," Yochani said, spitting brine, "then we cannot touch it, and we are finished."

Mamre wiped the salt from his eyes and looked up, past the standing cliffs of sea, to the place above the waves where light moved in ranks. "But that," he said, "is not the hand of the Holy One. Those are angels. And angels we can pull down."

So in the last moments of Egypt the two sorcerers turned their backs on their drowning king and began to work.

The Spell That Reached Into Heaven

They did not bargain with the water. They reached over it. The words they spoke were old and crooked, the kind that bend a thing toward you against its will, and they aimed them upward at the shining ranks holding the wonder steady above the sea.

The host of heaven felt the pull. It came at them like a hook set in the back, dragging them down out of their order, down past the tops of the water-walls, down toward the foam where Egypt was dying. The angels who had held the miracle aloft were now being hauled into the very sea they had helped to split.

They cried out as they fell. "Save us, O God, for the waters have come up to the soul!"

The sound of it went up where the spell could not reach.

The Hour Abraham Asked Him to Remember

And the Holy One, blessed be He, stirred.

For a memory rose in Him, older than Egypt, older than the sea. On a mountain called Moriah an old man had once bound his son and stretched out his hand with a knife, and the tears of the father had fallen on the boy, and from the boy onto the wood, and the blade itself had been dipped in weeping until it could not bite. The ministering angels had wept that day too, and their tears had run down upon the iron, and the knife had stood frozen at the throat of Isaac and had no power over his neck.

When his soul came back into him, that old man had lifted his eyes and asked one thing. "Master of the universe, in the hour when my children stand in distress, remember for them this hour that I am standing before You."

Now the children stood in distress, with the water at their souls. And He remembered the knife that had wept on the mountain.

God Comes Down for His Own

He came to the aid of the angels. The hook of the spell tore loose. The shining ranks that Egypt had dragged toward the foam were lifted clear of it, set back into their order above the splitting sea, and the wonder held.

The angels gave thanks for their rescue, every voice of them, while below them the water did to Yochani and Mamre what it was doing to all of Egypt. The sorcerers who had tried to undo the miracle from beneath now learned the miracle from inside it. The sea took them.

But they were not finished, and neither was the war.

Wings Against the Splitting Sea

By the same craft that had reached into heaven, Yochani and Mamre made themselves wings. They rose off the dying water, beat up through the spray, and hung in the high air of the world, two small dark shapes suspended over the corridor of the sea, refusing to drown, refusing to leave the wonder alone.

Gabriel watched them climb. "And in the greatness of Your majesty You overthrow those who rise up against You," he said, and the words were both a verse and a verdict.

At once the Holy One, blessed be He, turned to Michael. "Go and execute judgment upon them."

Michael went. He did not strike from a distance. He came up into the high air where they hung on their borrowed wings, took each of them by the forelock of his head as a man takes a thing he means to break, and brought them down. He dashed them upon the face of the waters. The sea that had been split by strength now broke the heads of the two who had thought themselves above it, and shattered them upon the foam, and closed.

The War Decided Before the Water Closed

So the wonder above the waves was never undone. The angels stood again in their ranks. The walls of sea, held steady by the host that Egypt had tried and failed to steal from heaven, leaned back toward each other over the last of Pharaoh's army.

On the far bank Israel had begun to sing, not knowing that a battle had been fought over their heads while they sang, that a spell had clawed at the angels guarding the miracle, that an old man's prayer from a mountain had answered for them, that two sorcerers had built wings out of the wreck of Egypt and a single archangel had taken them by the hair and ended it.

Then the sea covered them, and they sank like lead in the mighty waters, and the war was over before the water was still.