had to lose our baby Milcah.” Their mother held on tightly to her baby and shuddered. “Well we know that YHWH is faithful in making ways of escape for his people at all times. The story gets better. It was at this time that Moses was born and his mother was able to hide him for three months in his father’s house until she devised a plan to keep her baby safe. She put Moses in a basket into the river Nile where Pharaoh’s daughter was having a bath. The princess heard the baby cry and sent her servants to pick him up. She adopted him as her son and she raised him as her own. Moses was brought up and educated as an Egyptian prince. He learned the art of medicine, literature, art, and architecture. He lived a privileged life while all our people suffered greatly at the hands of the Egyptians.” Mahlah, with a dreamy look on her little face, interrupted her mother wanting to know if Moses’ wife was an Egyptian. She believed that Zipporah was the most beautiful woman that she had ever seen in her young life. “Well Mother, is she an Egyptian?” “No, my sweet lamb. Zipporah is from Midian, though they are all called Cushites. The Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Midianites originated from Cush. And you, my dove, are more beautiful. Now one day when Moses was all grown, he decided to visit Goshen, in Lower Egypt, where the Israelites resided. On his first visit to his people, he met an ugly scene. He saw an Egyptian man beating a helpless Israelite to the point of death. Moses was so enraged at the injustice that he killed the Egyptian and buried him secretly. Of course the news went round and a lot of our people were happy and proud of him for standing up for his true kinsmen, but some of them however did not appreciate Moses. Not too long afterward on another day, Moses came upon two Israelites fighting and tried to reconcile them. But to his surprise, the man who had initiated the fight was horrible to Moses. He pushed him aside, asking who had made him their ruler and judge. He accused Moses of wanting to kill him like he did the Egyptian. When Moses heard that, he was so disappointed and of course was afraid. He feared that the news would get to Pharaoh if people continued to talk about it so publicly, so he fled from Egypt. He had thought the people would accept and appreciate him for being on their side but they did not. So he fled to Midian where he met his wife Zipporah. He settled there as a shepherd working with his father-in-law Jethro and he started his family. Moses was in Midian for forty years, a completely different man from the young Egyptian prince that fled from Egypt. Well one day while he was minding his routine business as a shepherd, YHWH stopped him in his tracks. YHWH sent him back to Egypt to rescue us.” “Imah, is it true that Moses sees YHWH all the time?” Noah the inquisitive one asked. “Oh yes, my lamb. How do you think we made it so far? Moses is a holy man and a great prophet, without him there will be no Israel. . .” Her voice faded as she became emotional at this point. So many things she could not explain to her daughters because of their age. Even for an adult, it was difficult to understand it all. YHWH has revealed himself to them in many ways, yet they really did not know him like Moses did. At Mount Sinai they had come that close to seeing him when he requested to meet with them for the first time. Moses had prepared them and took them to the foot of the mountain. It had been the most terrifying experience. The mountain had trembled so violently when a great fire suddenly descended on it. Moses had announced that as the presence of the Lord, but all they had seen was smoke erupting from a furnace from the top of the mountain. And they had heard a thundering when he spoke to Moses, who had been the only person who had gone closer. He had disappeared into the smoke on top of the mountain. On another occasion, when Moses went to receive the tablets of law, Aaron and his sons with the seventy elders were given another chance to see him. This time they saw only a part of him, underneath his feet. What they have described as a pavement of sapphire stone covered with the most brilliant blue sky. There had been so much brilliant light from it that they could not gaze directly. Only Moses again had seen him close up. No one, including Moses, had been able to describe what he looks like exactly. But one thing had been made clear to them when Moses returned from that meeting, with his face radiating blinding light so that he had to wear a veil for days: no one can behold him because he is covered in blinding light.
Zelophehad’s wife returned from her reverie to conclude her story but was interrupted this time by the sound of a footstep approaching their tent. “I can hear your father approaching. It is time for you girls to settle down and prepare for the evening.” She waived them to their corner of the room. She went behind a curtain to put Milcah, who was fast asleep, in her crib at their corner of the room, which was a good distance from the girls. She looked in the far corner south of their sizeable tent and was pleased to see that her mother-in-law looked settled in for the night. She needed all the privacy tonight to talk with her husband, especially after what had transpired between him and his mother earlier. As she thought of what her mother-in-law must have said to him, she began to wonder if she was not being selfish. Yes, she would rather remain her husband’s only wife, but how about him. How long could he stand the pressure and his mother’s taunting. It was a different thing when the taunting came from outsiders, but when it comes from an insider, how does one escape. Since she had Milcah, there had not been a day gone by that her mother-in-law had not make a reference to their lack of a male child in the house. She could never bring herself to despise her mother-in-law no matter how her acrid comments hurt. She was more concerned about her husband’s state of mind. If he is unhappy, she is miserable. It had always been like that for her since the day she married him.
5
Zelophehad entered his tent still very heavy, weighed down by his own thoughts. After he’d left his farmland he had visited with his brother Baruch not wanting to face his mother too soon. They had taken a walk around the camp and talked. As they walked past the tent of meeting, they had noticed a bevy of activity around the tent. The Levites were standing at different posts, guarding the sacred tent to prevent anybody from coming too close. Inside the courtyard were the council of elders and the priests in a meeting with Moses. There was a palpable air of anxiety all around the camp. As they walked the camp they saw anxious faces, men in groups discussing the same thing—the ongoing meeting. The whole camp was a quadrangle set up in division of threes while the tent of meeting was erected in the center. To the west of the tabernacle were the tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh. To the east were the tribes of Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. To the south were the Reubenites, Simeonites, and the Gaddites. To the north were the camps for the tribes of Dan, Naphtali, and Asher. The tent of meeting was erected in the heart of the camp with carefully measured distances between it and the tents around it. The tent of meeting was a place prohibited to everyone except the spiritual leaders. The Levites were camped around the tabernacle as a protective edge to keep the people away. To the east of the tabernacle, toward the sunrise, were the tents belonging to Moses and those of Aaron and his sons right in front of the tent of meeting. With their increasing numbers they found themselves requiring more and more land space as they travelled from place to place in the wilderness. Since they had embarked on their journey after crossing the Red Sea, they had had the presence of YHWH lead them in the form of a cloud of smoke in the day and in the form of a cloud of fire at night. Whenever and wherever the cloud overhead them stopped, they camped there, and whenever it lifted they moved on. The cloud was currently settled at Paran, south of Canaan, and Zelophehad, like many others, was dying to move again. There had been too many delays. The old amongst them were tired of moving while the young were only too eager to move just as they arrived at a place. Before they embarked on this journey, Moses and men knowledgeable about the geography of the region had studied and predicted that this journey should take them no longer than two months. Since then he had married and produced four children. His wife had been no older than their first daughter, Mahlah, when they had began this journey. It was about the twenty-fifth year now and there was no Canaan in sight. If only they could turn back the hands of time. Disobedience and rebellion has cost them almost three decades on a journey that should have taken them three months. From the talks in the air, the ongoing solemn meeting was about another possible mission to Canaan. Over twenty years ago, shortly after they had entered the Desert of Sinai, Moses had instructed the heads of the tribes to elect one man each from their tribes for a mission to the promised land. The twelve men had been sent as spies into Canaan. Zelophehad had thought it too dangerous and not a wise move then. “Why risk lives and the possibility of being discovered by the Canaanites?” But now he had a different mindset. He was desperate for this journey to end. Should he be picked this time around if that were possible, he would gladly go. At least he would see the land for himself, he thought. He thought of his late cousin Gaddi who was one of the spies that had been sent to Canaan.