Yochani and Mamre Grew Wings to Drag the Angels Down

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The King Harnessed His Own Horses

No groom touched the straps. Pharaoh came down into the yard before dawn and buckled the harness onto his own horses, and his nobles, seeing the king of Egypt do stable work with his own hands, ran for their bridles rather than be shamed by him.

Six hundred chariots rolled out ahead of the column. Samael had furnished them, and the drivers standing in those cars were not men. Behind that vanguard came the rest of Egypt, three hundred armed soldiers for every Israelite on the road ahead. A chariot team carried two drivers so that one could sleep while the other held the reins. Pharaoh ordered three to a car. The wheels never stopped through the night, and the ground Israel had covered in three days closed up in one.

By the time the dust reached the sea, the water was standing in two walls with dry sand between them, and Israel was already far down that corridor. Egypt drove in after them. While the first chariots were still on the shore, something came out of the air and went into the water ahead of the army. Egypt did not march alone. Every kingdom has a prince standing over it, and God put Egypt's prince into the sea before He touched a single horse.

If Angels Hold the Water We Can Shake Them Loose

Two men in the column watched the angel go down.

Yochani and Mamre had spent their lives on kishufim (כישופים), the spellwork Egypt paid for and feared, and they had not come to the sea to die alongside soldiers. They forced their way up the line to the king's chariot with the walls of water leaning over them, and they made the one distinction their whole craft rested on.

"If this thing is from the hand of the Holy One, blessed be He, then we have nothing," they told Pharaoh. "There is no prevailing against that. But if it is angels holding this water, we can shake them off into the sea."

Nobody in that chariot told them to stop.

The Wings They Cut Out of Nothing

They spoke over their own shoulders. What grew there was not feathered and did not belong on a body, and it lifted them anyway. They went up past the chariot dust, past the crest of the standing water, and they hung in the height of the world with all of Egypt small and roaring underneath.

The angels were up there, holding the walls open.

Yochani and Mamre got their hands into them and pulled the way a man pulls a swimmer under. The corridor shuddered. And heaven's own guard, hauled down toward the water they had been posted to hold, shouted for rescue like drowning men. "Save us, O God, for the waters have come up to the soul."

Michael Took Them by the Forelock

Gabriel's voice came across the sea first, and it was not addressed to the sorcerers at all. "And in the greatness of Your majesty You overthrow those who rise up against You."

Then God turned to Michael. "Go and execute judgment upon them."

Michael went up into that air. He took each man by the forelock, the hair at the front of the skull, the grip a jailer uses on a prisoner who is finished, and dashed them face first onto the surface of the water. Their heads broke open on it like the heads of sea monsters. The wings went out. Yochani and Mamre sank like lead into the mighty waters, and the angels they had clawed at stood back up over the corridor and gave thanks for their lives.

Fifty Days Under the Sea

On the far shore, Israel began to sing.

Pharaoh heard it while the surf was turning him over. He got one finger up toward the sky and shouted into the noise of his own drowning army. "I believe in You, that You are the righteous one, and I and my people are the wicked, and there is no god in the world but You."

Gabriel came down with a chain of iron and closed it around the king's neck before the words were dry. "Wicked one. Yesterday you said, 'Who is the LORD, that I should hearken to His voice?' Today you say the LORD is righteous."

They took him to the floor of the sea and held him there fifty days, and they did not permit him to die. Above him the water would not settle. The sea kept flinging Egyptian bodies onto the sand and the land kept flinging them back into the surf, because the sea was afraid of the day it would be asked to give them up, and the earth remembered what it cost the last time it drank a man's blood, when Abel's blood boiled in the ground and the flat world buckled into mountains. God told the earth not to be afraid. The ground opened its mouth and swallowed them.

The Gate Where He Still Stands

They brought Pharaoh up out of the water, and God set him on the throne of Nineveh.

Long after, a foreigner walked into that city carrying a sentence he did not want to deliver. "Forty days more, and Nineveh is overturned." Jonah got no argument. Shaking took the king where he sat. He came off the throne, pulled sackcloth over himself, sat down in the ashes, and cried out the decree with his own mouth. "Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed, nor drink water." "There is no other god in all the world like Him," the king said, "and all His words are truth."

He is still not dead. He stands at the gate of Gehinnom, and when the kings of the nations are brought down to it, Pharaoh reaches each one before the fire does.

"Fools of the world," he tells them, "why did you not learn knowledge from me? I denied Him, so He sent ten plagues against me. He drowned me in the sea and kept me under it fifty days and brought me up again, and in the end I believed in Him against my will."

The king goes in. Pharaoh turns back toward the gate and waits for the next one.