Stone Tables

  Orson Scott Card

  © 2000 Shadow Mountain.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Promises

  Chapter 2: Betrayals

  Chapter 3: Triumph

  Chapter 4: Israelite

  Chapter 5: Sand

  Chapter 6: Sheep

  Chapter 7: Words

  Chapter 8: Fire

  Chapter 9: Reunions

  Chapter 10: Blood

  Chapter 11: Water

  Chapter 12: Men and Women

  Chapter 13: Covenants

  Chapter 14: Stone

  Chapter 15: The Promised Land

  Preface

  Years ago, as a Mormon missionary in Brazil, I wrote myself to sleep many nights, composing poems, stories, anything to vent the pent-up English that I wasn’t able to use during the day. I read of an arts contest in the New Era, the LDS Church’s magazine for young people, and on impulse I assembled some of the poems and stories I had written, added a few of my better black-and-white photographs, and entered the contest in just about every category. I think it was more the volume than the quality of my submission that induced them to award me a prize, but I used part of the prize money to buy a copy of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews.

  Soon afterward I was assigned to the mission office in São Paulo as the printer, which meant I spent my days in an office with a Selectric typewriter, a Xerox machine, a printing press, a light table, and a stereo. For a writer, that was like throwing Br’er Rabbit into the briar patch. Please don’t make me stay here! By then I was already a few hundred lines into a verse play about Moses and Aaron, drawing upon some of what I had learned from Josephus, upon other things I had learned (and, sadly, later had to unlearn) from a well-known LDS Old Testament commentator, but mostly upon my own speculation on the convoluted relationship between Moses and Aaron.

  What was it like, I wondered, for the older brother of this God-favored child, who watched his once-doomed younger brother ascend to be prince of Egypt, then fall, then return from exile as a prophet whom Aaron could only serve as a spokesman? Perhaps Aaron was like Hyrum Smith was to the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, an older brother whose love and faith disposed of all possible jealousies. But then how could one explain Aaron’s motivation as he made a golden calf for the Israelites while Moses was up on the mount receiving the covenant from God?

  Rightly or wrongly—for motivations of historical figures can only be guessed at—I thought I detected a pattern of envy, ambition, and hubris running through the life of Aaron and broken only as, shattered by self-recognition, he faced Moses before the ruined shards of stone from the broken tables of the covenant and made his unbelievably lame explanation that when he put the gold into the fire, the calf “came out”—as if his hands had not shaped it. This was no Hyrum Smith! And yet he was made the high priest of Israel, and by the time he died he had clearly become the man the Lord needed him to be.

  Add to this my speculations about Moses—what it must have seemed like to him, raised in a palace and suddenly thrust out into the desert, only to find that God had been guiding his life all along—and I began to realize that out of this story, whose religious purpose is already perfectly fulfilled by the scriptural account, there was an additional purpose that might be fulfilled in the story of the relationship between the chosen man and his seemingly unchosen brother, and of the man who was driven by God until he embraced God’s purpose and became the man of faith who could challenge kings and part waters.

  Exploring these stories, I wrote two acts of a free verse play I called Stone Tables, and then, armed with that IBM Selectric, I typed it up in my free time and sent it off to my mentor in the Brigham Young University Theatre Department, Dr. Charles Whitman, hoping for some reaction—encouragement or criticism. To my astonishment, his letter was not a critique, it was an urgent demand for the rest of the play. He had added it to that year’s winter schedule of the Theatre Department! He was going to direct it on the main stage, but he needed the remaining three acts immediately so he could get the set and costume design under way.

  Did he really think that, if the other three acts had existed, I would not have sent them to him?

  And if that were not astonishing enough, he also told me that Robert Stoddard, who had collaborated with me on the musical Father, Mother, Mother, and Mom before my mission, was hard at work writing the music for the songs in Stone Tables.

  Songs? What songs? I had written in unrhymed, anti-rhythmic verse! These were not singable lyrics—not that I was much good at writing those, either—and Stone Tables wasn’t exactly your normal musical comedy storyline.

  While fulfilling all my duties in the mission office, I used my spare time to rush through to the end of the play. Now, knowing there would be music, I included a few lines that felt singable to me and called them songs (though the best of them came straight from Exodus, in the form of the Song of Moses). Then I continued my mission as letters arrived telling me of how rehearsals were going, how wonderful Robert’s music was, how controversial the play became as people started calling it a “rock musical” (even though neither the music nor the dance in Stone Tables had anything to do with rock and roll; this was 1973, when “rock musical” meant the scandalous Hair or the blasphemous Jesus Christ, Superstar, and evil-hunters were eagerly detecting pro-drug messages in “Puff, the Magic Dragon”), and finally how popular it was with the Mormon theatre-going audience as extra performances were added to accommodate the sold-out houses.

  Through all of this I heard not a note of the music and saw the staging only in my imagination. I knew some of the leading actors because they were fellow students; I could only imagine the brilliant Mark Hopkin making Moses come to life on the stage better than my poor script deserved, and the performances of many other friends of great talent coalescing into a powerful theatrical experience while I typed up handouts for mission conferences and wrote the mission newsletter and printed it all out on an offset printer to the accompaniment of “Horse with No Name” and “If,” Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the office stereo. It seemed weird that at that particular moment, my play was probably doing more missionary work back in Utah than I was doing on my mission assignment in Brazil.

  Years passed, and Robert and I substantially revised the play twice, as our artistic growth made the weaknesses of youth too obvious for us to bear. Yet the heart of the play, and especially of the music, remained true and right for us, until finally we once again began reworking Stone Tables in the winter of 1996 and found support from the visionary Sheri Dew of Shadow Mountain for the idea of a compact disc of the Stone Tables music and a novel of the storyline. With the inestimable help of my younger brother, the composer Arlen Card, as orchestrator and conductor, Robert worked on creating the definitive arrangement and performance of the music while I struggled with shaping and writing the novel that you hold in your hands at this moment.

  I had adapted a novel from a script once before, with James Cameron’s screenplay for the movie The Abyss. This time, though, it should be easier, right? After all, I wrote the play Stone Tables, and so I could change anything I wanted. I only had to please myself!

  But nothing is ever as easy as it looks. In a play, you can skip so much of the setting and background; the audience sees the people onstage before them, and so it takes no effort to make them “real.” With the novel, I actually had to do research; I had to set Moses into a particular time and place in Egypt.

  No one knows exactly what part of Egyptian history the Israelites fit into. Higher critics and unbelievers, of course, are quick to assume that the Israelites don’t fit there at all, that some memory perhaps of the explosion of Thera was transformed into legends of plagues and a fictitious tribal lawgiver named Moses. On the opposite extreme, literalists expect that the exact wording of the King James Version must be force-fit onto history.

  I’m afraid I’m something of a pragmatist. On the one hand, I believe that Moses was a real prophet and that the story of Exodus is substantially true as written, given the vagaries of record-keeping through the centuries and the tendency to round numbers to ten or forty; and that “higher criticism” is generally of such a low level of intellectual integrity that it can excite only pity or amusement in those not predisposed to seize upon its clubhouse consensus as “truth.”

  On the other hand, Exodus is only one of ten thousand possible written records that could have been made of the events, and with Moses as the source or author of the story, much would certainly have been left out if only because of his modesty or his sense of its irrelevance to the spiritual purpose of his writing. Thus Exodus says nothing of Moses’ life and achievements as a prince of Egypt, and barely includes his private life at all (and then almost always in order to teach a lesson). And yet there are no other credible sources to help us. In the years since my mission I have come to see Josephus’s account as the unreliable mishmash of legend and fiction that it is, so that now I use only his account of the taking of Saba, despite all the earmarks of romance, and his names for the priests of Pharaoh, while I ignore
his (or others’) unauthoritative and generally unbelievable elaborations of the life of Moses. Likewise, after the himself-legendary LDS scholar Hugh Nibley set me straight on a few of the more obvious fallacies of the LDS commentator I had once relied on, the material derived from that source was also jettisoned.

  In the meantime, though, I did acquire some useful speculations from the book Return to Sodom and Gomorrah by Charles Pellegrino. Since Pellegrino’s book openly declares itself to be nothing more than decently well-informed speculation, I felt free to pick and choose what I found interesting, plausible, or at least fictionally useful from his brief treatment of Moses. Though his linking of Moses with Hatshepsut derives in part from his faddish desire to link the exodus of Israel with the explosion of Thera, I found a completely different set of reasons. First, Hatshepsut’s story is intrinsically interesting. Second, I was always bothered by the story of the daughter of Pharaoh being able to take a baby out of the water and adopt him as her son. How could such an act be politically possible in a situation where Hebrew boy-children were being killed? As you will see in these pages, the political life of Hatshepsut makes her completely unique—the only “daughter of Pharaoh” who would have had the power, completely on her own, to make such an adoption have force. Also, Hatshepsut’s place as a scion of the family that had ejected the Hyksos rulers gave a very useful link between the story of Joseph and the story of Moses. If Joseph arrived during the Hyksos domination of Egypt, and was preferred by one of those Pharaohs, then after Hatshepsut’s family expelled the Hyksos invaders, wouldn’t their Israelite underlings be a hated and persecuted reminder of Egypt’s decades of shame under foreign rule?

  For my purposes, at least, Hatshepsut was an open door into the novel, and while the play cannot possibly deal with her life in any serious way, in the novel I was able to develop her into a character who delighted me, if not anyone else. Her stepson, successor, and probable murderer, Tuthmose III, was also quite productive as Moses’ hard-hearted adversary during the plagues. Be assured, however, that unlike some scholars, I do not regard my own speculations as if they were somehow proved by how felicitously they fit the few bits of knowledge we have. My purpose is to explore character and story. I would not be at all offended to find out that my linking of Moses to Hatshepsut and Tuthmose III is all wrong, should new evidence become available. At the same time, I also know that no one has at this time any serious evidence to disprove the story that I tell here. And that is all I need, for my speculations are clearly labeled as fiction. My readers are wise enough to know they aren’t reading history.

  My effort is to make sure that those who read this story emerge with an understanding of how good people struggle with each other and with their understanding of God’s will as they try to make some decent use of their years of life. If in the process the book of Exodus is illuminated or enhanced for some readers, I’ll be delighted; and if I have erred (and I’m sure I have) in a few of the alterations I have made, I am comforted by the knowledge that the book of Exodus remains, as always, untouched and unharmed by my effort to explore it fictionally. Not one word of the scripture is erased, and some words may even be highlighted by what I have done in these pages.

  And, of course, my retelling of the story of Moses is shaped in part by Joseph Smith’s revelation of the Book of Moses that appears in the volume of LDS scripture The Pearl of Great Price. Most particularly this shows up in the explicit way characters in my novel refer to their foreknowledge of Christ. This will be surprising to some non-Mormon readers of the story, who are not accustomed to thinking of Old Testament figures as having such a clear understanding of the Messiah; but Stone Tables is written unapologetically within the worldview of the Latter-day Saints.

  I owe a great debt to many people: First to Charles Whitman, who believed in Stone Tables when it was still only half-created, and to whom this book is dedicated. Then to Robert Stoddard, for a collaborative relationship that is surpassed only by his friendship in the grace and joy it has brought to my life. I owe a debt also to the actors and other theatrical workers who have brought several productions of Stone Tables to the stage over the years, and especially to the late Mark Hopkin, who, though I never saw him perform this role, was always such a brilliant and powerful actor and singer that I feel as if my Moses were also partly his.

  In my work on this novel, I must thank Sheri Dew for her patience and guidance; Robert, Arlen, and many singers, musicians, and technicians for the recordings that have inspired me as I write; my wife, Kristine, who, despite the woes of pregnancy at a not-quite-Sarah-like age, has read my chapters and guided me as she always does; Robert’s wife, D’Ann, whose faith in her husband may actually exceed my own; my friend Kathy Kidd for encouragement and for catching some of my more egregious errors in Egyptian history—you’ll be an egyptologist yet, Kathy!; Scott Allen and Kathleen Bellamy, who have lifted many burdens so I am free to write; and to Erin and Phillip Absher, who have loved and cared for my family as if we were of their own blood, thus proving that the spirit of Ruth and Naomi is alive in the world.

  Chapter 1: Promises

  Jochabed felt the first pain late in the afternoon. She didn’t tell anyone then, because it was not a good time to try to sneak the midwife in. Besides, Miriam and Aaron had come slowly, from the first pain to the last. She had plenty of time before this new baby became urgent.

  Plenty of time before she had to face the prospect of the Egyptians coming to throw the baby into the Nile.

  If it was a boy. She reminded herself of that hope. It might be a girl, and if it was, they wouldn’t touch her.

  But Amram said it would be a boy, and surely he knew. Surely God spoke to him.

  Though as long as God was taking so much interest in Jochabed’s new baby, it would be convenient if he’d arrange a way for the baby to survive. Jochabed didn’t know if there was some protocol for such a prayer; if there was, she surely violated it, because fifty times a day, a hundred times a day since she realized she was pregnant, she had prayed the most outrageous prayers. She couldn’t even say them aloud, the way Amram always did, because she was afraid God would strike her dead. Yet she couldn’t stop praying. She prayed again right now, as she thought about prayer, about God.

  Do something! she demanded. Amram always names thee as the cause for everything. In the great wisdom of the Lord, the floodwater is low this year. In the great wisdom of the Lord, the floodwater is high this year. Well, O Lord, this is a bad year for boy babies among the Israelites. Or hast thou not heard, in thy lofty place, wherever it is that thou dwellest? The Egyptians have come to hate us even though we were not part of the conquering Hyksos; they have taken away our place of honor and made us slaves, building their levees and their city walls out of mud bricks. They have forbidden us to sacrifice to thee and they fall upon us and beat us whenever they find one or two of us alone. And now Pharaoh has promised them that he will eradicate us all within a generation. If the Egyptians hear of a boychild born to an Israelite they can seize it and drown it in the river as a sacrifice; and any Israelite who resists is guilty of blasphemy against whatever bestial god it is they serve. Didst thou not know, O Lord, that they were doing this? Didst thou not cause them to hate us, for some great wise purpose of thine own? But tell me now, if thou wantedst us to perish here on the banks of the Nile, why not strike us all dead at once? Drown us in a flood? Cause the earth to swallow us up? Cause the crocodiles to rise up out of the river and devour us all at once? Or . . . perhaps, being merciful, merely let us fall asleep and never awaken? Why must we watch them tear our babies from us and throw them into the river to drown? What is thy great, wise plan?

  By this point in her prayers she was always filled with such resentment, such rage, that she marveled God did not kill her on the spot. And her heart turned, and softened, and she wept (so many tears, all these months of her pregnancy), she wept and in her heart she prayed again and said, O Lord, forgive me, forgive me, don’t punish this baby for the sinful proud wicked heart of the mother. Let me save this child alive. Let his birth not be in vain. Let him live to be a man. I dedicate him to thee, I give him to thee, I willingly say: Let him be raised in another woman’s house, suck from another woman’s breast, call another woman Mother, only let him live, show me a way to keep the boy alive. Keep him out of the river, O God!