By Way of the Wilderness

by Gilbert, Morris

  Aaron glanced at Pharaoh and saw that his face was pale, but anger flared in his eyes, and he shouted, “I will have no more tricks! Leave at once!”

  “Come, brother,” Moses said. “We will see Pharaoh later.”

  As soon as they were outside, Aaron looked at the staff of Moses. “The God of Abraham is powerful.”

  “Those magicians are nothing but tricksters. They have no real power,” Moses said.

  “What shall we do now, brother?”

  “We will seek God. That is what we must always do.”

  ****

  Whenever Moses was uncertain about what to do, he would find a quiet place by himself to seek God. After their encounter with Pharaoh he was gone for hours. Aaron waited all day and part of the night. Finally he went to bed, and when he awoke the next morning, Moses was sitting in the doorway. Coming off of his sleeping mat, Aaron rubbed his eyes. “You have been gone all night.”

  “God has been instructing me.”

  “What did He say?”

  “He said that you and I are to go to the River Nile and speak to Pharaoh when he goes for his daily visit there. We must command him to let our people go. He will not do so, however, for God has told me that He will harden Pharaoh’s heart.”

  “Then what will we do?”

  “Then, according to God’s command, I will strike the river with my staff, and the water of the Nile will be changed into blood, and the fish that are in the river will die, and the river will stink, and the Egyptians will not be able to drink its water. Come. Let us go.”

  ****

  Pharaoh rode in his throne chair, carried by his powerful guards, for his morning trip to the river. He was accompanied by an armed guard and his oldest son, who walked before him. A choir sang a hymn of praise to Ra, the god of the sun.

  Just as they reached the river, Pharaoh was startled by a shout. He straightened up in his throne chair and glanced around to see Moses and Aaron. The pharaoh’s brow knitted, and anger touched his eyes. He had no time to speak, however, for Moses immediately cried out, “The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you: Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the desert. But until now you have not listened. This is what the Lord says: By this you will know that I am the Lord: With the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed to blood. The fish in the Nile will die, and the river will stink.”

  Pharaoh cried out in an incoherent rage, and Moses immediately turned to his brother and said, “Aaron, take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt.”

  Aaron did as Moses commanded. He lifted the staff above his head and brought it down forcefully on the water of the Nile, and in the blink of an eye the river began to behave as it never had before. Huge ripples appeared, and the surface of the water was broken by what appeared to be the thrashing of many fish. The color of the water changed to a dull red at first, which became brighter by the second. Fish broke out on the surface, their bodies bloated and swollen as if they had been smashed by a mighty hand. An unbearable odor arose from the river, and Pharaoh, whose eyes were wide with horror, screamed, “Away, away! Take me back to the palace!”

  His guards carried the throne chair as quickly as they could back to the palace, and no sooner were they through the front gate than Pharaoh frantically summoned the magicians. He met them in his throne room and told them what had happened.

  “Be calm, O Mighty One,” Jambres, the head magician, said in his most soothing voice. “There is nothing to fear. We can do the same.” He immediately sent for two clay vessels and water, and taking them, he poured water from one to the other. The water in the second became red, and he held it up to the pharaoh to examine. “Behold.”

  Pharaoh took the vessel, smelled it, and then flung it at Jambres’s head. “It’s nothing but colored water! I tell you the river has turned into actual blood and the fish are dead!” Pharaoh screamed at the magicians, who scattered in disarray. The mighty ruler then flung himself down on his throne and found, to his disgust, that he was trembling. “This cannot be,” he muttered over and over. Then raising his head, he stood to his full height and shook his fist toward the ceiling. “This god of the Hebrews cannot defeat me! I am the son of Ra. I am god!”

  ****

  All that day the Egyptian people wept and cried out to Pharaoh, for the river was filled with rotting fish and no fresh water could be found anywhere in it. They immediately began to dig wells for water, but for seven days the river remained so foul it made the whole land stink.

  Pharaoh paced back and forth in his throne room. What was he to do? His wise men and magicians were useless. He could concede defeat and let the Hebrews go…. No! His insides raged at such thoughts! From that moment Pharaoh saw the struggle against the Hebrews as a struggle for his very life. If this god of the Hebrews should defeat him, the people would see that there was nothing divine in him. They would know that the great Pharaoh Amunhotep II was a mere man—a pretender upon the divine throne of Egypt. Everything that had been said about him would be seen as the lie that it was. He was not going to concede defeat that easily.

  “I will die before I give in! I will defeat him!” Pharaoh panted as he shook his fist toward heaven. “I am the son of Ra, the god of Egypt! I will not let this god of slaves defeat me!”

  ****

  At the end of the week, the Lord spoke to Moses again, telling him to repeat the commandment to Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go, then to say to him, “If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs. The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs.”

  Moses strode into Pharaoh’s throne room and delivered the message. Pharaoh refused point blank, and Moses could feel the pharaoh’s glaring eyes on his back as he left. Before he made it to the outer gate, he saw swarms of frogs pouring into the outer court. The plague had begun. There had always been numerous frogs around the Nile River, but now they appeared to multiply instantly and one could not take a step without landing on one. They were ugly, monstrous things, and they filled the houses of Egypt, invading their food supplies and getting into their beds. The palace was not exempt, becoming a chaos of noisy, smelly amphibians.

  Finally Pharaoh sent for Moses and Aaron. They stood quietly before the ruler, who glared at them while madly shooing frogs off his lap. “All right,” he growled. “Pray to the Lord to take the frogs away from me and my people, and I will let your people go to offer sacrifices to the Lord.”

  Moses calmly said to the pharaoh, “I leave to you the honor of setting the time for me to pray for you and your officials and your people that you and your houses may be rid of the frogs, except for those that remain in the Nile.”

  “Tomorrow,” Pharaoh said.

  “It will be as you say, so that you may know there is no one like the Lord our God. The frogs will leave you and your houses, your officials and your people; they will remain only in the Nile,” Moses replied.

  God did exactly as Moses had promised the pharaoh, and the frogs died by the thousands—in all the houses and villages and out in the fields. The stench from the rotting frogs was unbearable, and the Egyptian taskmasters drove the Hebrew slaves to gather them into heaps and burn them.

  Once the frogs were finally gone, Pharaoh stood at the wide window in his throne room and looked over the land, smiling. His land was clean again! He could see his mighty building projects going on all over the great city, and he thought of his promise to Moses to let the Hebrews go.

  “Never … never will I let them go,” he uttered to himself, the rage in his heart burning at the very thought of losing the workers that were building his city and his great tombs and monuments. While Pharaoh’s heart grew colder and colder the more he thought about it, Moses and Aaron were waiting patiently outside the throne room.

  Aaron had some hope tha
t Pharaoh would keep his word to let the people go, and he said to his brother, “I am optimistic that these two plagues have proven to Pharaoh that he cannot fight the Lord of Creation. I believe today he will set our people free.”

  Moses shook his head sadly, for he had heard the word of the Lord. “No, my brother, as hard as it may be to believe, he will not let them go,” he said to Aaron. “He will harden his heart time and time again, and God will send more plagues, until they destroy the land of Egypt.”

  ****

  Indeed it happened as Moses said. A series of plagues, each more terrible than the last, fell on Egypt, and not a single inhabitant of the land could escape the horror of them. At first the wise men and counselors to Pharaoh insisted they were but natural disasters. They persuaded their king that they would survive, as Egypt had survived for millennia, and that he, Pharaoh Amunhotep II, would prove his divinity and be remembered for all eternity. As each plague occurred, however, the counselors gradually relented, one by one.

  When the third plague—of gnats—struck Egypt, the head magician, Jambres, was already losing his faith in the gods of Egypt. It did not escape his attention that each plague was targeting one of their gods. The very creatures they worshiped in their temples were turning on them one by one. The challenge from this god of the Hebrews could not be any clearer. When the gnats covered Egypt, he gathered his magicians and tried to produce gnats using their secret arts, but they could not make one single gnat. Quietly the magicians told Jambres, “We are afraid! This god has power we cannot duplicate.” And Jambres went to Pharaoh and said, “My Lord, this is the finger of God. You cannot fight this.”

  But Pharaoh’s heart was like granite, and he would not heed Jambres’s pleas. He lied to Moses. Over and over he promised he would let the people go, and over and over he took back his promise. After the gnats came flies, covering the people and animals and leaving open sores on the horses and oxen and livestock of the Egyptians. But in this case, and for the remainder of the plagues, God protected the Hebrews, making the land of Goshen, where they lived, a haven from the effects of the plague. In this way, the Hebrews and Pharaoh both knew that God was singling them out, making a clear distinction between His people and Pharaoh’s people.

  Following the biting flies came a plague on livestock. After that came a plague of boils, and when the magicians attempted to duplicate this, they were stricken by terrible boils themselves. But, still, the pharaoh’s heart remained hard, and he refused to let the people go.

  “Will you let the land be utterly destroyed?” Pharaoh’s chief counselor cried. “Let these slaves go!”

  “No, no, no!” Pharaoh shouted. “I am god, and the god of these worthless slaves will not defeat me!”

  ****

  And so the plagues continued. A terrible hail pounded the land, crushing all the crops and trees in the fields. After the hail came great swarms of locusts, blackening the sky and consuming what crops were left after the hail. The Egyptians’ lives became more and more miserable as it seemed their whole world was covered by these hideous swarms.

  But Pharaoh’s heart remained hard, so God sent a terrifying darkness over the land, a darkness so thick one could almost feel it. As horrible as all the plagues had been to the Egyptians, it was the plague of darkness that frightened them the most. It was a direct challenge to their chief god, Ammon-ra, who, to the Egyptians, was the source of all light. According to their belief, Pharaoh was his son. The darkness was so great that no light at all existed in the land. People groped about like blind men in utter terror that the light might not ever return.

  Even the pharaoh was paralyzed by it, staying in his chambers and holding himself, rocking back and forth like a small child. This son of Ammon-ra was helpless in the face of such total darkness. For three days Egypt remained in darkness until Pharaoh could stand the cries of his people no longer.

  “Go, worship the Lord. Even your women and children may go with you; only leave your flocks and herds behind.”

  “Our livestock too must go with us,” Moses replied. “Not a hoof is to be left behind. Until we get there we will not know what animals are required to worship the Lord.”

  “Get out of my sight!” Pharaoh bellowed at Moses. “Make sure you do not appear before me again! The day you see my face you will die!”

  Moses was silent for a moment, then said in a voice like distant, rumbling thunder, “Just as you say. I will never appear before you again.”

  Then he and Aaron turned and left the pharaoh’s throne room for the last time. As they exited the palace, Aaron turned to look at his brother and saw that Moses’ face was set like flint. “What more dreadful thing can be done, brother?” Aaron asked. “It appears the pharaoh will never relent.”

  Moses looked at Aaron with great sadness in his eyes, but with a smoldering fire behind them that his brother had come to recognize as the Spirit of God in him. Boldly, with no shred of doubt, he declared, “One more plague shall come upon the land, Aaron, and after this last plague, Pharaoh will know that the God of Abraham is the God of all the earth. Then he will let God’s people go!”

  Chapter 12

  While the Egyptians, from the most humble peasant to Pharaoh himself, felt as if they had been buried alive in a tomb of darkness, the Hebrews were enjoying the brightness of the noonday sun in their humble abodes in the land of Goshen. Unable to work during the plague, they enjoyed their first extended time off of their lives. They visited one another, shared meals, and began to believe that their deliverance was finally upon them.

  It was during this period of relaxation that Aaron thought a great deal about the future of his people. He had often thought about the necessity of a priesthood for the Hebrews, a special group of men that would intercede for the people with God, and show them how to live their lives. Now it seemed to him that the day for creating such an institution had finally come.

  Aaron was a pragmatic man—more so than his brother, whose thoughts were so focused on God that he never seemed to consider the practical, everyday needs of people. At least in Aaron’s opinion. So he was troubled by the cost of creating such an institution for such a large number of people, and he wondered how this might be accomplished, as poor as they were. Aaron was familiar with the priesthood of the Egyptians, whose ceremonies, vestments, and temples were filled with gold and silver idols and decorations of all kinds, so he began to ponder. “We have nothing. How could we have a priesthood?”

  A partial answer to his question came when, after the darkness had filled the Egyptians with terror, they began to show a different spirit toward the Hebrews. Where they had once treated them with contempt or, at best, indifference, now they began to transfer their fear of Moses to the entire race of slaves. Aaron seized on this as a door of opportunity. He was well acquainted with the wealth of the Egyptians, and he felt it was time to make provision for the days that were coming. He noticed how the Egyptians were now speaking quite respectfully of the great festival for which the Hebrews were preparing to journey into the wilderness. From this observation came Aaron’s idea. He explained it to no one, but in his own mind his reasoning went something like this: The Egyptians have kept our people slaves. They have reaped all the rewards of our labors for four hundred years. They owe us for our labor. We have created the wealth of Egypt, and now at least part of that wealth belongs to us. Now is the time to take it.

  As Aaron thought on these things, he realized that it would never do to take the wealth of Egypt by force. Instead he began to whisper advice among the people so that the Hebrews themselves began approaching the Egyptians. Aaron led the way by presenting himself to the house of Macu, a wealthy Egyptian with whom he had become friends, and bowed before him. “Oh, master,” he said, “you have heard of the great celebration that our people want to make.”

  Macu began to quake. His gardens and fields and much of his home had been stripped bare by the succession of plagues, and now he greatly feared the Hebrews. “Yes, Aaron, I have he
ard.”

  Aaron spread his hands apart in a futile gesture and shrugged. “But we have nothing to take with us. We are so poor. How shall we celebrate?”

  “Oh, let me help you with that, Aaron,” Macu quickly offered. “What is it you need?”

  Aaron did not hesitate. “We are just slaves and barely have any clothes. Can we worship our God in rags? If we could just borrow some of your rich-looking clothes and perhaps a jewel or two … a ring for my wife’s nose, perhaps. And possibly you could spare some of your cattle for us to sacrifice to our God….”

  “Of course, of course,” Macu said gladly. “I will see to all of it. It is my great privilege.”

  When Aaron arrived at the slave camp later, he drew quite a crowd as he made his way toward home, his arms piled high with rich garments and gifts of gold and leading three fat cows. The news quickly spread all over the land, and the Egyptians found themselves facing the Hebrews, who asked to “borrow” things for the great festival.

  It would never have happened without the encouragement of the plagues, but the Egyptians began plundering their own houses to give the Hebrews their personal possessions—golden rings and ornaments, richly sewn silk, furniture set with ivory, and household goods of all kinds.

  When Moses got wind of what was going on, he was of a mind at first to put a stop to it. But then he considered that there was certainly some justice here. For hundreds of years the slaves had worked for no wages, so he prayed about what to do and received God’s answer. He appeared before the elders and said, “God has spoken to me and here is what you are to tell the people: Let every man gather from the Egyptians articles of silver and gold and clothing.” The Egyptians gave no objections, and the Hebrew slaves found themselves acquiring a portion of the great wealth of Egypt.