He looked out over
them, a new people, enlivened by a relief so noticeable, it started
to look like hope. Their enemies misinterpreted it as a plague of
madness brought upon them by the sun-god, and where there was
refreshed endurance and docility, they read insolence.
He looked over to
his brother. My brother, he
thought. I have one of those.
That was his own chin he could see in him, the spark of his own eyes,
blood of his blood.
“Speak
what is on you heart brother,” Aaron said. “Tell me what troubles
it?”
“Nothing
ttroubles it,” he said, glancing to the men jostling near him. “The
people the people the people the people look to me now. And a And a
aI am not troubled.” He motioned for his brother to lead on.
He seldom spoke but when he had to. Often his speech more impeded
action and slowed his interlocutors though they patiently awaited the
flooding of his words for the rest of the sentence to break free from
his stammer. He was scared of being thought a fool, of being pitied,
treated as one the gods had cursed, and it was worse when he was
scared. Right now, it was terror.
Aaron reached over
and grasped his arm. “Brother,” he said. When whole courts of
Egyptians looked over him as if he were a foreigner, slow of tongue
and impoverished in common parlance, Aaron knew him. Aaron saw a man
of character betrayed and disguised by his tongue. Aaron saw a
leader. “Brother, do you now doubt? You, whose witness rekindled our faith by its mere report, we who have not seen the
wonders which you know. Can you
now begin to doubt?”
“Ido
not doubt,” he said, squaring his shoulders,“do not doubt that we
weare called. We are called.
Momostly Ido not doubt the nnnobility
of our cause.”
“A
noble death even, is more than any of us dared wish for, brother. We
lived and toiled and died in the mud.”
They
surveyed the working men. Weakened, and limp as string, it seemed
there was nothing more than hope holding them together. Following his
gaze, Aaron's face coloured with grief, every personal anguish and
each person's pain was his own as if it were his own flesh. That
grief, that overwhelming agony was now washed with a stronger
determination. This hope, the hope of redemption, salvation. This hope that he
had brought, this hope of which he was the emissary. The poor herald
who could not speak.
He
had never known these people, not as they would want. He viewed them
with a foreman's eye, and the eye of a foreigner.
When
he spoke, it was gruff, gargled as with great emotion, but the words,
curiously came easily. “These men are weak. They are beaten down.
They cannot wield swords. They have no strength to do anything.”
Aaron's
face changed, a little of that confidence had washed away.
Moses
took a breath, readying himself to meet whatever came. “We are
truly in God's hands now.”
And
he dared not doubt. His God repaid the genocide with genocide, his
God banished their sun-god with darkness, though it came not near the
camp of the Israelites. The sacred all-sustaining river turned to
blood, and the crops, the livestock and the houses of the enemies
were ravaged by plague upon plague, though it did not come near God's
people. And god by god, the enemies were abandoned.
Their own king, their own
incarnate deity among men, was failing them, and every time he
negotiated for the end, refusal to honour the agreement brought ruin
and disaster upon their houses. Their land
was brought to its knees, without one god in their temple to turn to
but the One outside of it.
And
having freed his people, this One remained with them always, teaching
them, instructing them, enduring with them when human leaders failed
them. He carved his ways on stone for them to learn, and on their
hearts (some time after Moses broke both stone tablets at once) for
them to love, so that no one would ever be estranged from him or have
to guess at his goodness.
__
OR
You
could just make a movie where God is a vindictive child, Moses
and his merry men have time (and equipment) to take weeks off their
oppressive slavery schedule to have Egyptian-slaying training camps,
and Moses himself, the circumcised adopted boy is raised in a house
of true-blue racists who never notice his is one of the hated Other.
Oh, and stone rules endure
through the ages, apparently even beyond the (more important) New
Commandment given by God (actually) humanly incarnate. Yeah.
