Exodus

by Cliff Graham

  Othniel marveled again at how Caleb referred to the Hebrews as “our people.” But he did not press him. More would come in time.

  Soon enough, Caleb said, “I live with the guilt of it, you know.”

  “The guilt of what, Uncle?”

  “I was never a slave. The Egyptians made me a wealthy man. I knew nothing but glory and honor in their courts. What right do I have to lead Yahweh’s people?”

  “Joshua leads the people, Uncle,” Othniel said delicately.

  Caleb seemed relieved to be reminded of this.

  “That is true. The right man leads them.”

  “But you lead us.”

  They watched the battalion struggle for a while longer, and then Othniel prevailed upon Caleb to return to his tent. Caleb reluctantly complied, suddenly seeming his age once more. He gasped as he followed Othniel back to his tent, where he took his time stripping the wet garments from his frame to dry them on the fire rack.

  Caleb reclined on the cushions, his bare torso wrinkled and scarred but still full of muscle. Othniel admired him, silently praying to Yahweh that his own torso would look so good in the decades ahead.

  Caleb went still and silent so quickly that Othniel thought his uncle had fallen asleep. He was about to creep out of the tent when the old man’s voice rang out.

  “You asked me about Moses.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Very well. It is time that he enters the story.”

  12

  The Two Hebrews

  Before we go further, you must know some things about the Egyptian rulers and why Yahweh struck the king in the manner he did.

  The king of Egypt was not known by the title of pharaoh until recent times. The name means Great House, for he is seen as the personification of his kingdom. You must understand: the king is Egypt, and Egypt is the king. His divinity is beyond question to the common people.

  The kings of Egypt in our time are very different from the kings who greeted Abraham and Joseph. In Abraham’s day, the king was kept in a cloud of comfort far away from the people. Nearly all of his subjects never saw him in person, including many who worked in his own palace. It was thought to be far beneath the dignity of the god-man to be seen among us mortals.

  That changed after the Hyksos invaded and their golden kingdom was razed to the sand and their women impregnated with the seed of barbarians. In their long exile from their river paradise, the native Egyptians realized their new dynasties must become warriors and lead their regiments on the battlefield. They must perfect their skills with spear and lance, bow and chariot. They must be master tacticians and be schooled in the fighting arts, as well as the governmental and administrative functions. Incompetence among advisors is intolerable and swiftly dealt with. This is how Moses was raised, and many of his skills from that time delivered us during our hard years in the desert. Mine as well, if I may be so bold.

  Thutmose III, the pharaoh of the events I am telling you about, the king who was once the young ruler I saved from the Amalekites, was of the line descended from Kamose and Ahmose. They were the greatest kings of the age, and Thutmose III spent his entire life trying to live up to them. Perhaps part of his stubbornness during the plagues Yahweh sent us came from his refusal to appear weak in his line.

  I once read the stelae written for Kamose about his exploits. The Egyptians are not known for modesty, but the kernels of truth I picked out were remarkable. He came from the south and attacked the Hyksos armies with astounding valor and tenacity, driving the shepherd kings out of the land and establishing the rule of the Egyptian race once more over their land. Kamose’s son, Ahmose, extended his father’s legacy and succeeded in destroying the Hyksos threat forever. It was this line of kings that Thutmose was well aware of, and why the thought of letting another Semitic people like the Hebrews escape was unthinkable.

  I confess that my heart still aches when I think of him. I know these words could have me stoned by the priests, who see the adversary of Yahweh as all that is evil. They are right, of course. He rots in Sheol and rightfully so.

  But he was a great warrior. His men loved him, as did I when I knew him. He could have been such a noble king. He could have listened to the voice of Yahweh through Moses and allowed the Hebrews to leave in peace, and perhaps his name would be written in our records favorably, much like the pharaoh who appointed Joseph head of his kingdom.

  We shared a chariot together in the ferocity of battle. We slew the Amalekites and the Amorites side by side. I was nothing compared to him in status, but he loved fighting with his men and always treated me with respect. Such experiences cannot be easily forgotten.

  You must remember that I had very little dealings with the Hebrews. They lived in Goshen, far to the north of where I served in Pharaoh’s guards in greater Thebes, where the cities of Luxor and Karnak merged into one colossal, sprawling city. The journey down the Nile by boat to Goshen took seven days with a good captain, ten and the risk of your life with a bad one.

  They slaved in the building of the cities Raamses and Pithon. Egypt was a large kingdom, and the king had many slaves. The Hebrews were kept to the north, where they could not rise up among the Egyptians in the more valuable cities and cause trouble.

  During those later years, after I had been in Egypt for seventeen summers, the king started spending his time in Memphis, which was closer to Goshen than Thebes. He wanted to be centrally located to strike out at Canaan or the western trade routes to the Red Sea if necessary.

  The kings were divine in the eyes of the people and supposedly able to defeat Egypt’s enemies with one prayer to their brother Ra, the sun god, or to Horus, the god of victory and armies and the wind. Horus could conjure up the great khamsin from the west and wipe out any threats.

  It was fortunate for Moses, then, that during the days of pleading the case of our people, he had ready access to Pharaoh in the palace of Memphis and could move between Goshen and Memphis with the ease of a few days’ journey.

  Now to Moses.

  The best place for me to introduce you to Moses is to tell you what was told to me shortly after he arrived back in Egypt after forty years away. My first encounter with him was a memorable one, as it was for all who witnessed the events that were to come, and I will tell it to you soon enough, but first you must hear about the origins of the old dust-covered man who stood before us in the clean alabaster courts of the most powerful king on earth, demanding that his people be released from their bondage.

  As I left the meeting hall where Pharaoh received his audiences, unnerved by what I had witnessed, I pulled aside an elderly eunuch I had befriended named Lanath. He had always been kind to me, and I to him. I brought him back gifts and wares from my campaigns, and he provided me with information about what was happening in the court of the king. I asked Lanath about this man Moses, and why some of the older generation knew of him. Over his favorite wine, this is what Lanath told me.

  Moses grew up the scion of Pharaoh’s daughter and a possible heir to the Divine Throne of Ra. A Hebrew, the lowliest of those in all of Egypt, the heir to the Serpent Flail? It is an impossible tale if I did not know the truth of it.

  They said she found him in the waters of Mother Nile, in a river reed basket sent by the river goddess Hapi. She consulted with the priests of Hapi and Osiris, and it was determined that such a sign could not be ignored. The child was special and had a god’s destiny, that much was certain.

  Not much is known of his life before he fled from Egypt. Moses did not write of it, and I never heard him speak of it. But Lanath said that he grew in stature and favor among the Egyptian royalty. He became skilled as a warrior, as well as in the literary arts. He was popular with the people, and his name became renowned.

  And yet his heart was stirred for his people. The Hebrews were slaves and suffering under hardship like we cannot imagine.

  Moses was gone for forty years. No one knew what had happened to him. Most of those who remembered him were dead or as
old as he was. We know that he was in Midian, of course, and that he had married. You know of the bush that burned, which commanded him to return to Egypt. Moses himself told me about it, but more on that later.

  All of that being said, it began when Moses came to the meeting hall at the palace of Memphis with his brother Aaron, requesting an audience with Pharaoh like the rest of the foreigners who came to pay obeisance or plead their cause. Pharaoh took these meetings frequently; he liked to hear what was happening outside the borders of the kingdom with his own ears. His spies were everywhere, but they could be bought, and he never knew what was trustworthy information.

  They had waited for a month for their audience with Pharaoh. I was posted on duty in the court when Moses entered with Aaron, and what I noticed first was how unkempt they both appeared. Their garments had not been cleaned in many a fortnight and were caked with sand and tattered like those of a shepherd.

  Oddly, he did not open his mouth to speak, but it was his brother who spoke on his behalf. Moses stood silently, his staff in his hand, and watched Pharaoh’s face as Aaron spoke the word he was compelled to deliver. I thought nothing of them when they passed me to go before the king. Just another cluster of rabble from beyond the desert and not worth my attention.

  I had recently been named to the palace guard. It was the highest honor a soldier could have . . . and the dullest. The king seemed to know this and eased the burden by training with us personally in the courtyard and training pitches. To pass the time I continued working on the design of the temple of Horus. Construction still had not begun, even all these years later, because the king had diverted the treasure away from funding the temple into building his army.

  We did not complain. The Red Scorpions were the tip of the blade for Egypt, and the more we conquered the happier we were. We fought, we won, we lived. And now at last the greatest danger many of us faced was whether a viper had slithered into the gilded halls.

  The columns of the palace were decorated with the colorful banners and drapes of the upcoming festival of Osiris. A hundred nobles reclined in the hall on their couches, fanned by slaves. Marble floors, marble statuettes, gold- and silver-plated ornaments. The gods of the pantheon looked down at us from their painted walls. Hippos. Vultures. Hawks. Serpents. The torches made the sculptures appear to coil and writhe. Paintings from the Book of the Dead covered every space, the Egyptian obsession with death prominent. One such image was a heart being torn from the chest of a Hyksos ruler and devoured by Memet the crocodile god.

  It was a room designed to impress its visitors. The decadence and wealth of the kingdom of the ages for all to see.

  Pharaoh himself sat on the golden throne, the red-and-white colors of upper and lower Egypt festooned about it. His crown was the crown of red and white. His flail a red cobra, his scepter a white hawk. Slaves lay at his feet with their faces pressed to the marble, awaiting his desire to stand. These were not common slaves but the former nobles of other kingdoms who were sentenced to be his footstools. He would walk across their backs out of the hall when he decided to depart, with them scrambling around each other to ensure his feet trod upon their flesh like Egypt trod upon its conquered nations.

  Amidst all of this show of wealth and power were the two figures of Moses and Aaron, who stood before the god-king like red ants might stand before a lion.

  And yet they were refusing to prostrate themselves. They did not touch their foreheads to the ground. Did not grovel before him as supplicants, but kept their backs stiffened.

  This was an outrage to us, the ultimate insult. Pharaoh was Egypt itself, the personification of the glory of our people, for by that time I had become fully one of them. I and the other guards screamed at them to pay the proper respect, yet they seemed impervious to the commands.

  I moved up close and reached out to grasp his arm to force him to his knees, and he turned his head to look at me.

  I was frozen. No muscle of mine could move, so enraptured I was in his stare.

  I had patrolled the six regions in a single month. I had hunted crocodiles with my sword to cut my own shield and armor skins. I had slain Bedouin warlords and Amalekite chieftains and drunk wine over their corpses.

  But that stare. I knew even then, and from that moment on, that he had seen . . . something. Something eternal and powerful, something I had never known, and all of this I took in one glance from him.

  The eyes made me think of Seth. I had carved an idol of him once and had found it so lifelike and disturbing that I vowed never to carve another one, so wary I was of bringing that god even into my mind. This man was the living embodiment of that idol, I knew it in an instant. Was he Seth himself?

  I stepped back, stunned to silence.

  Moses glared directly at Pharaoh. Aaron, who appeared to be his mouthpiece, stepped forward. His beard, caked with the fine sand of the desert, quivered as he spoke in the Egyptian tongue.

  “We have come from the wild lands of the east,” Aaron began, “where we have been before Yahweh our God. We wish to sacrifice to him with our people, Israel. Yahweh, the God of Israel, says to Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’”

  It was such an odd statement, and so presumptuous that no one moved or answered for a long moment. The priests, sensing their presence would be requested because a foreign god had been mentioned, edged closer to the throne of Pharaoh.

  We all watched his face, expecting him to respond to this outrageous violation of protocol when addressing him.

  The king himself was now approaching his fiftieth year. His chest was broad and muscled under his garments, a chest that had been filled out by pulling the great gold-plated war bow since his youth.

  He was the mighty Thutmose, the third of that name, conqueror of realms. I had fought with him. I had ridden in his very war chariot as his lancer. For twelve of the seventeen years since he had ascended the Serpent Throne without a regent I had been there alongside him as we slaughtered the barbarians of the west and east and explored up to the third cataract of the Nile. When he chose to speak, it was always with the certain clarity that his words were final and that he was not interested in discussing anything.

  And so I could not have been more shocked at what I witnessed next.

  When Pharaoh was holding court he wore all the elaborate garments and face paints to make him look more like a statue than a man. Behind his painted face, his emotions hidden under the kohl, Pharaoh said, “You are Moses, correct?”

  The gray-haired Hebrew nodded.

  “I have been hearing about you from my overseers in the north. They say you are raising up a rebellion against me.”

  “We raise no rebellion, Pharaoh. This was once the homeland of Moses, as well as yours. Your throne is not in peril. We desire only to lead our people out of it according to the commands that Yahweh has given us,” Aaron said, speaking on behalf of Moses.

  “Does Moses not speak for himself?”

  “I am his mouth, great king. That is the will of our God.”

  Pharaoh inclined his head ever so slightly toward his vizier, who leaned in and whispered something. For a long time no one moved, waiting on this private conversation to conclude.

  Finally, Pharaoh said, “You were banished from this kingdom forty years ago, in the reign of my father. Why do you return now?” His tone was casual, almost as though he merely wanted to have a simple conversation among friends.

  “Pharaoh, as we have said, we have come to bring our people into a desert place so that they may make sacrifices to our God.”

  “That is why you return after forty years? It is a weak reason. I would instead believe that you have come to raise a rebellion. You know our secrets, have studied our arts. You grew up in this very palace. What I say is true, is it not?”

  “What you say is true about his learning, O king. And yes, he did grow to manhood along the Nile and in sight of these walls. But he does not come to raise a rebellion. Yahweh will deliv
er his people from your grasp,” Aaron answered.

  “The Hebrews are one nation among many that serve me as slaves. Why are they important?”

  “They are important to the Lord God, Pharaoh.”

  Pharaoh studied him a moment longer. The corners of his eyes seemed to turn up as if he was smiling slightly under his mask of paint.

  “Who is this god you call Yahweh that I should let the Hebrews go? I do not know him, and I will not let the Hebrews go.”

  The conversation was over. Pharaoh had spoken.

  Moses did not kneel and touch his forehead to the ground before sulking away like a kicked puppy like we all expected him to do.

  Pharaoh was fast to dismiss anyone who did not interest him or who had been given a firm no to their request. But Pharaoh only watched them, unmoving, as though he were challenging them.

  I could not have been more stunned or confused throughout this entire encounter. This filthy Hebrew had come in without bothering to cleanse his beard, which meant he had ignored his appearance after waiting all day outside to be received and carelessly let the west wind buffet him with sand, even though he was about to enter the courts of the divine king.

  He had failed to bow to the ground before Pharaoh when failure to do so meant instant death, and yet Pharaoh had not summoned us to strike him down on the spot. They were sparring in conversation like old acquaintances instead of god and mortal. Most shocking of all, there was talk of this Hebrew having grown of age among the palace walls? Learned the Egyptian arts?

  Aaron said, “You make a mistake, great king, in angering our God. You will know his wrath. For Yahweh, the Lord our God, has said that his hand will be heavy against Egypt until the people of Israel are released.”

  Now there were echoes of laughter all throughout the hall. The nobles and their wives whispered and giggled to one another at the absurdity of the god of a nation of slaves overpowering Great Egypt.