Story Stew: "Exodus: Gods and Kings"

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.

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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.