S
O THEY’RE ON
the way to Rephidim. What of it?” Satan seemed annoyed that I’d left my post with the Israelites to give him a location update.
“There’s no water there.” I paused to see if he connected with the obvious. Apparently not.
“They must have water. They’re humans; they can’t go three days without it.”
“God will let them die of thirst? Is that your point?”
“No, no. God will lead Moses to find water somewhere, but in the meantime, Moses is tired, and the people are frustrated. They keep complaining to Moses that he should have left them in Egypt instead of leading them into the desert to die. They’re in a weakened condition. If you wanted to, it’s a good time for an attack.”
Satan stopped polishing his claw and looked up at me for the first time. Then looking right past me, he turned to one of the other demons.
“Do we have anybody at Rephidim?”
“Um, Rephidim? Where is that exactly?” The demon stumbled over his answer, having no idea what was going on in the desert. Ever since the desert demons abandoned their posts when God showed up in the wasteland as a burning bush, Satan had never been able to quite get his tight rule back together there.
“The Amalekites are there.” I interrupted the stumbling.
“You’re sure?”
“Near there, anyway, and they hate the Jews. It wouldn’t take much to provoke them to attack. That is, if an attack was part of your plan, Mighty One.”
I didn’t know what Satan had planned and neither did anyone else, maybe because he rarely made any plans. He’s more of a thermometer than a thermostat. Since the Egyptian army drowned, he hadn’t told any of us what his next step might be.
“Make it happen,” he said, looking directly at me.
“Me?” I was suddenly queasy. “Surely, my lord is not suggesting I could provoke the Amalekite army to action? Someone else would be much better.”
“You said it wouldn’t take much to provoke them. Well, you’re not much, so go do it.”
The whole room burst out in guffaws. I didn’t know what to do, so I tried to join in the laughter with them as if it were all some great big joke. As soon as I opened my mouth, everyone else became suddenly silent. I couldn’t guffaw, but I was able to muster up a pretty convincing chuckle.
“You had me going there for a moment, sir.”
“Get him out of here,” Satan ordered one of the guard demons.
The burly demon picked me up by my wing and tail, carried me to the rim, and tossed me out over the expanse between the second heaven and the earth. I tumbled over several times through space before I could right myself and flap my way back to the desert where Moses was camped. I arrived just in time to hear God tell Moses how to get water.
“Go on out ahead of the people; take some of the elders with you. Take the staff you used to strike the Nile. I’m going to be present before you get there on the rock at Horeb. You are to strike the rock. Water will gush out of it, and the people will drink.”
And that’s just what happened. The people were pacified, and Moses was relieved to have quieted their grumblings for the time being.
“That went pretty much like I thought it would,” I said to myself as I went in search of Israel’s enemy as Satan had ordered me to do, although I didn’t know what to do when I found them. How would I provoke King Amalek to attack Moses? Such a thing was way above my pay grade. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. I should have known Satan wasn’t really going to trust me with an act of war. By the time I got near Rephidim, one of the other demons had already arrived and goaded the king to lay siege against Israel.
I don’t know whether Moses heard the horses’ hooves, or whether he saw the cloud of dust rising up over the hill, or whether it was his years of training in the desert, but somehow he knew something wasn’t right. He jumped to his feet, and with one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun, he stared straight ahead toward the hill. Then he ordered a couple of the men to go up to see what was going on. They ran up the embankment, and when they reached the top, they turned and waved their arms to signal trouble was coming.
Moses sighed and then called out for a young man named Joshua.
“Who is he?” I wondered. I couldn’t recall having heard him mentioned before.
Joshua came running to Moses’s side with three other young men whose names I didn’t know either.
“You called for me, sir,” Joshua said as he bowed his head to Moses as a sign of respect. I might not have noticed his reverent tone of voice had it not been for the pervasive tone of gripe and grumble that came from so many of the other people when things weren’t going just right.
“Joshua,” Moses said to him in a subdued voice. “Take some of the men with you—pick the most reliable—go up to the top of the hill. See what is coming, and be prepared to fight.”
“Right away, sir.” He turned to signal to his three comrades.
“Wait,” Moses interrupted his departure. “It may be Amalek. If it’s him, there will be a battle. You must take the front line with your men. I’ll come and stand on top of the hill where I can see the whole field, and I’ll signal you from there.”
Joshua lowered his head again and raised it quickly to show he understood his orders and ran off toward the camp with the others following close behind. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed him before. If Moses was sending him out to lead the battle, he must be important. Note to self: watch Joshua.
“Tomorrow I will take my stand on top of the hill holding God’s staff,” Moses said to Aaron, who had come looking for him to see what was going on. “You and Hur must go up with me.”
Joshua, who seemed to have a natural sense of military maneuvers, did as Moses had instructed him in order to fight Amalek. The next morning Moses, Aaron, and Hur went to the top of the hill. He didn’t show it, but Moses had to be a nervous wreck. This was the first time for the poorly organized Hebrew fighters to go up against an enemy of any kind, much less one skilled in battle like the Amalekites. Three months ago they were slaves; now they were soldiers. You can imagine how chaotic it was in spite of Joshua’s precise orders to the untrained Hebrew army. In fact, the Amalekites should have been able to roll those chariot wheels right over the Hebrews, and at first, it looked like that might be the story, but then something strange happened.
Moses stood at the top of the hill, watching his troops take a beating from the Amalekite army. In a gesture of desperation, Moses raised his arms up over his head—personally, I think he was trying to get God to pay attention to the slaughter about to happen—and Israel seemed to rally. Moses lowered his arms, and the Amalekites advanced; he raised his arms, and Israel took ground. Aaron and Hur exchanged a look. This was looking like a trend.
It turned out that whenever Moses raised his hands, Israel would start winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, Amalek would start winning. It wasn’t long before Moses’s arms got tired. Aaron and Hur, who had definitely figured out what was going on, hurried and got a stone and set it under Moses. He sat down on it, and Aaron and Hur held up his arms, one on each side, and there they remained steady until the sun went down. By the next day, Joshua had defeated the entire Amalekite army.
I hadn’t counted on that. I knew I should get right back to the second heaven to let Satan know what had happened, but I just couldn’t make myself go. Instead, I flew down to the empty battlefield—empty except for the dead Amalekite soldiers—and sat down on a rock, trying to figure out where things went wrong. Not that it mattered. It was still going to be my fault. After all, I was the one who told Satan it would be an easy victory for King Amalek, one of Satan’s best resources to persecute the Jews. The king might even be dead now. Oh, no, I hoped not. That would surely be my fault too.
By the time morning came, I was still sitting on my rock. No one had come to look for me, so maybe Satan had other things on his mind and had temporarily forgotten about Amalek. I decided to make one more pass through Moses’s camp to see if I could find some tidbit of information I could carry back to my evil master that would lessen his ire at the failure of my idea.
By the time I got there, Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law; Zipporah, Moses’s wife; and Moses’s two sons had arrived.
Moses went out to welcome his father-in-law, bowing to him and kissing him. Then they went into the tent, and Moses told his father-in-law the story of all that God had done to Pharaoh and Egypt in helping Israel, all the trouble they had experienced on the journey, and how God had delivered them.
Jethro was impressed. He said, “Blessed be God who has delivered you from the power of Egypt and Pharaoh and the oppression of Egypt. Now I know that your God is greater than all gods because He’s done this to all those who treated Israel arrogantly.”
They stood up, hugged each other, and stepped outside the tent to see more than one hundred of the people arguing among themselves as they lined up for an audience with Moses.
“What is this?” Jethro asked.
Moses sighed. “It’s like this every day. From morning till night they bring their grievances before me and demand I judge between them.”
“No wonder it’s taking you so long to get across the desert. This can’t go on; they’ll wear you out, and at this rate, you’ll die an old man before you reach your destination.”
“Don’t I know it? But what else can I do? They won’t move on until I rule on their petty grievances.”
“You said it yourself. Their grievances are petty. Here’s what you have to do. Are there any elders here you can trust?”
“Yes. Thirty, forty, maybe more.”
“Concentrate on training the elders, and then let them divide the people into groups. Let each of the elders be responsible for settling the minor issues, bringing only the big deals to you.”
So, for the next few days, Moses sat about selecting and training the elders who then trained captains under themselves, and before I knew it, what had been pure chaos settled into the beginnings of organization. Satan was not going to like this. One of the telltale signs that God was in something was when the chaotic morphed into order. That had been the first signal to us long ago when the rampant waters of Lucifer’s flood began to settle and clear from the middle of the sea outward as Ruah Ha Kadosh hovered over the murky seas that covered the earth.
I flew back to the second heaven to deliver my report but changed my mind and went to my perch instead of to Satan’s den. If he wanted me, he could send for me. No need for me to rush over to answer questions he wasn’t yet asking.
S
EVERAL WEEKS HAD
passed uneventfully, so one morning I decided to sleep in. I was standing on my head practicing yoga. I picked it up during one of the rare times when I wasn’t glued to the Hebrews. I was on surveillance duty around the rest of the world when I encountered a strange group of people on the other side of the earth who were practicing a different sort of religious ritual. I’d never heard anyone mention the god of yoga, nor had Satan ever said anything about a rogue demon being on the loose somewhere. It didn’t seem to be the “same old, same old” of a demon pretending to be a god charade I’d seen a million other times. These particular people never claimed yoga was a god, rather that the practice itself put them in touch with a higher power, so I thought I’d give it a try. After all, if there was a mediator in the hierarchy between Satan and God, I wanted to know who it was. Maybe he/it could help me bring my case to the heavenly court. I was chanting about the unfairness of fate when God’s voice rolled through the expanse between the heavens and the earth with such force that I lost my balance and tumbled right onto a hard stone below.
“Speak to the house of Jacob; tell the people of Israel,” He thundered. It was so loud and so clear that for a brief moment I wondered if He might be speaking to me directly—but only for a moment. He was calling to Moses.
“This is what I want you to tell the people of Israel: ‘You have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me. If you will listen obediently to what I say and keep My covenant, out of all peoples you’ll be My special treasure. The whole earth is Mine to choose from, but you’re special, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.’”
I blinked hard to clear the yoga mantras from my brain as I walked over to the rim of the second heaven to take a good look at the Israelites. Granted, I hadn’t been watching as carefully as I should have for a few weeks now, but I’d been terribly depressed about my lot in life and found it hard to leave my perch. I wondered if the people had undergone some remarkable change in a few short weeks to make them special and holy, because they weren’t anything close to that last time I looked. I peered intently at the camp, but I didn’t see any change. They were still the same unruly people as before my sabbatical. I wondered if God might be talking about some other group. No way around it; it was time for me to return to Earth and check the status of the ex-slaves. I got there just as Moses was about to address the people.
Moses called the elders of Israel together and told them all that God had commanded him to say. The people were unanimous in their response.
“Everything God says we will do.”
“Oh, right. Sure you will,” I said under my breath. “Don’t stake your reputation on them,” I wanted to call out to Moses.
Moses, ever the optimist, it seemed, took the people’s unedited answer straight back to God.
Then God said, “Get ready. I’m about to come to you in a thick cloud so that the people can listen in and trust you completely when I speak with you.”
Again Moses reported the people’s affirmation to follow God, which, as far as I was concerned, was no more convincing the second time around.
God continued, “Go to the people. Take two days to get these people ready to meet the holy God, because on the third day I will come down on Mount Sinai and make My presence known to all the people. Post boundaries for the people all around, telling them not to climb the mountain or even touch its edge. Whoever touches the mountain dies a certain death. A long blast from the horn will signal that it’s safe to climb the mountain.”