The Twin Hills That Crushed the Ambush at the Arnon

The Amorites crouched in the dark of the caves and waited for the sound of feet. Above them rose two hills, set so close across the gorge of the Arnon that a man on one slope could call to a man on the other. The rock between them was honeycombed with hollows, and into those hollows the warriors had packed themselves with their spears and their bows, breathing the cold cave air, certain of what the next morning would bring.

They had heard that Israel meant to pass this way. The valley narrowed to a throat here, and a people on the march would have to file through it single by single, the strong and the weak and the children, none of them looking up. "When they come down into the gap," the Amorites told one another, "we fall on them from both sides at once, and not one of them climbs back out."

The Hills That Leaned Toward Each Other

What the men in the caves did not know was that Israel never walked alone. The Ark went before the camp, and the mountains knew it. Wherever the Ark moved, high ground sank and low ground rose, so that the road lay flat under the feet of the people. It had leveled hills before. It was leveling them now, and the two cliffs of the Arnon felt it coming.

The hills stood like two breasts above the valley floor, one rooted in the land of Moab, one reaching back toward the land that had been promised to Israel. And the hill on Israel's side could see what waited in the clefts of the hill across from it. It saw the spears. It saw the men folded into the rock with murder in their hands. It saw the children of Israel about to walk into the throat of the gorge.

A maidservant who spots her mistress's son wandering toward a pit does not stop to ask permission. She runs. So the hill that belonged to the Promised Land lurched across the gap toward the hill of Moab, the way a body throws itself between a child and a falling wall.

The Caves Closed Like a Fist

The two cliffs came together over the gorge. The rock of one slammed into the rock of the other, and every cleft that held a hidden man closed on him at once. There was no battle. There was no warning shout that Israel could hear. The mountains met, the caves sealed, and the Amorite host that had been sure of its ambush was crushed inside the stone before a single arrow left a single string.

Then the hills settled back. The valley reopened. The land lay quiet and flat, and the dust drifted down, and there was nothing on the surface to say that an army had ever been there. Israel came down into the gorge of the Arnon and walked through the gap, file by file, the strong and the weak and the children, and passed out the other side, and went on. Not one of them had felt the ground shift. Not one of them knew how close the spears had been.

The Well That Carried the Dead Into the Light

God did not want the rescue to go unseen. There is an old saying: if you give a child a piece of bread, go and tell its mother, so the kindness is known. The miracle had been done in the dark, inside the rock, where no eye could reach it, and God meant for Israel to know what He had spent on their behalf.

The Well that followed the camp turned aside. This was the well that gave Israel water in the wilderness, that ran out in rivers and curled around the tribes. Now it poured itself into the sealed caves of the Arnon, searched the crushed clefts, washed them out, and came back into the open carrying what it had found. Down the valley the water ran, bright as the moon, and floating on it came the broken bodies of the men who had lain in wait.

Israel stood at the water's edge and stared. They had grumbled and marched and grumbled again, and they had passed the most dangerous mile of the whole road without knowing it. Now the well laid the proof at their feet, and the people understood at last what had been done for them while they walked, unaware, between two hills.

The Lepers Cast Outside the Cloud

There is another telling of how Israel learned of it. Beyond the cloud that covered the people walked two who could not enter, two lepers kept apart by their affliction. The cloud that leveled the road and guarded the tribes had cast them to its edge, and so they were the ones standing where they could look down into the gorge.

They watched the blood of the Amorites come out of the caves, where no clean man inside the cloud could have seen it. The two who had been kept outside ran to the camp with the news, and it was from the mouths of the rejected that Israel first heard how the mountains had closed on the enemy.

The Song They Gave the Well

So Israel sang. Not to the manna, the bread that fell from heaven every morning, for they had complained about the manna too many times, and God would not let them praise now what they had faulted before. They sang to the well. Twelve princes stood over its mouth, and the people lifted their voices to the water that had run around their camp and washed the dead out of the rock and shown them the vengeance worked on their behalf.

"Spring up, O well," they sang into the valley of the Arnon, where the two hills stood quiet again above the flattened road. The water that endures only in low places, the way Torah endures only in those who make themselves low, ran on past them into the gorge it had cleansed, and the people went up out of the wilderness toward the land that had leaned across a valley to save them.