Only a few weeks ago, Moses came down this same river. The cheers he heard were full of genuine love and admiration. Someday, so would the cheers for Tuthmose. But one aspect of Moses’ triumph would remain unmatched: There would never be Israelites lining the banks of the river to cheer for Tuthmose III. On the contrary, the Israelites were too useful for any Pharaoh to waste them by letting them have such freedom. They were the enemy that the people could hate, so they would not resist the Pharaoh’s tax collectors; they were the slaves that the people could despise, so they would not resent their own poverty. Any kingdom that did not have Israelites would have to invent them, they were so useful. Hatshepsut had been wasting them, but that, too, would change.

  For now, though, Tuthmose was merely another boy, dependent like every child on whatever he could persuade adults to let him have or do. He might be dressed up in the regalia of Pharaoh and have thousands cheer, but the heat of the sun-god, Amon, still beat down on him as on anyone, and he still had to paint his eyes to prevent damage from the unrelenting brightness of his light. Pharaoh might be a god by title; it would take a little while before the title became the truth.

  * * *

  Moses could never get used to the custom of women and men eating separately. Not that Jethro wasn’t charming company, for he was a man of great wisdom, who knew lore of all the desert tribes and wasn’t wholly ignorant of Egypt, which he had visited several times in his youth. But night after night without the company of women, without the relaxed conversation of the table. Here there wasn’t even the table, and the women ate out by the fire, as they cooked. Though he knew it was bad manners to question the local customs, tonight Moses was especially frustrated by his inability to converse with Zeforah, who still seemed to be avoiding him because of that one foolish joke this afternoon.

  “Why do . . . people of the . . . desert . . . dine separately?” asked Moses.

  Jethro raised an eyebrow. “Why do the people of Egypt shame themselves by eating together? Don’t hold up the customs of Egypt to me as a model, Moses. People there think nothing of traipsing about with no clothes on.”

  “Only the lower . . . classes, and then only in the . . . fields.”

  “Come now, I’ve seen rich women in gowns of linen so diaphanous that you saw their nakedness as clearly as if they stood in a hot bath surrounded by a bit of steam.”

  “Nakedness isn’t an offense to the Egyptians. It’s one of the ways the Israelites . . . make themselves annoying, wearing heavy . . . clothing even during the . . . sweatiest labor.” Moses paused to take another bite. “But this . . . criticism of Egypt seems like a poor . . . substitute for an answer to my . . . question.”

  “You asked a question?”

  “Why don’t women and . . . men dine together?”

  Jethro shrugged. “I did answer. It’s a custom. We grow up this way, so eating together seems about as immodest as if we bathed together.”

  “Now that you mention it . . .”

  “No, please, no more accounts of how easy and natural the Egyptians are.”

  “So if it’s just a . . . custom, Jethro, why couldn’t you change it?”

  “And bathe naked with women? My own daughters? Do you want God to strike me dead?”

  “Who said anything about . . . bathing? I was talking about eating together.”

  “Moses, there’d be no conversation from them because they’d spend the whole time giggling and whispering and being shy and embarrassed or even outraged and offended that you made them do something so crude and ill-mannered. Just because it’s a mere custom doesn’t mean that it has no power. Once you grow up with a custom it’s very hard to change. Even the most reasonable changes can be very disruptive.”

  Moses knew that Jethro was right. “I know,” said Moses. “I’m a . . . stranger in a strange land here, and it’s wrong of me even to wish for the . . . customs here to adapt to me. I’m the one who must adapt.”

  “Oh, but we are adapting to you.”

  “I hope I’m not too much of an inconvenience.”

  “Not at all. Your manners are so refined that even my most ill-mannered children are on their best behavior around you.”

  “Refined!”

  “The way you persist in cleaning yourself all the time. Don’t think I haven’t heard of how you use the trough water to wash your face and hands.”

  “The sheep don’t mind . . . drinking it, so it’s not as if it goes to waste,” said Moses.

  “But now you’ve got my daughters doing it. How did Hamar say it? ‘Moses is prettier than we are.’ How’s that!”

  “Untrue.”

  “So what did you and Zeforah quarrel about?”

  Moses was so surprised he had to laugh. “Quarrel!”

  “You’ve been avoiding each other. You can’t take your eyes off her, but she won’t even look at you. A reversal of the normal situation, I might add.”

  “I offended her. Not . . . meaning to.”

  “Nothing to do with offensive Egyptian customs, I hope.”

  “I thought we were . . . brother and sister. So I tried to . . . tease her as a brother might.”

  “Brother and sister! What a silly thought! Not a one of them wants you for a brother, though I dare say at least six of them will have to.”

  “That’s part of what . . . bothered her,” said Moses. “Your assumption that I’ll . . . marry one of your daughters.”

  “Why not? Somebody’s got to.”

  “Zeforah says she’ll make up her own mind.”

  “Well, that’s the truth,” said Jethro. “Ever since she was a baby, she obeys only because she understands and agrees with the rule. A swat on the behind meant nothing to her. Shaming her, lecturing her, nothing worked. Only persuasion. Like an adult. The time-wasting tedium of it! The man who has an intelligent child is doomed to spend his life justifying every decision he makes.”

  “I can see that you’re . . . proud of her.”

  “I didn’t set out to teach my girls to read, you know. What would be the point? There probably won’t be any scrolls in their husbands’ houses. But . . . Zeforah saw me reading, day after day, and there was nothing for it till I taught her how to read.”

  “She really can? How recently did she learn?”

  “Before she was six. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Six! Six-year-olds are still . . . trying to make up stories from the . . . pictures instead of reading the hieroglyphs as syllables.”

  “Different language, different writing,” said Jethro.

  “You don’t write as the Egyptians do?”

  “I don’t have a lifetime to waste making all those pretty pictures,” said Jethro. “I tried to learn hieroglyphics when I was in Egypt, but my sheep would grow old and die waiting for me to memorize all those characters.”

  “How do you write, then?”

  “Letters.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You just ignore the vowels. Instead of writing different characters for ta, te, ti, to, you just write the ‘tuh’ sound.”

  “But there are plenty of words that would be written exactly alike.”

  “True, but it’s always easy to tell, in the context, which word was intended.”

  “So you have fewer . . . glyphs to memorize.”

  “Letters. And they’re simpler to draw. Not pictures at all. Maybe they once were, but I can’t begin to guess what the original picture was.”

  “You have to show me.”

  Jethro beamed. “I thought you’d never ask. Have you eaten all you want? I won’t have food around my scrolls. I spend my lifetime copying them, then somebody spills wine and there I am, having to start over.”

  “I’m through eating and . . . drinking,” said Moses. “I haven’t read anything the whole . . . time I’ve been here.”

  “You won’t read this right away, either.”

  “Oh, of course not, I know. . . .”

  Within moments the food was cleared away and Jethro had the scrolls stacked up on the carpet in front of Moses. “These are my copies, not the originals. Those are old and precious. Someday they’ll fade completely or rot or something, I know that, but in the meantime, they may very well be the very originals that Abraham wrote with his own hand.”

  “Abraham! Knew this alphabet?”

  “I asked my father if it was Abraham or Lot who made up these letters, and he just laughed and said that the prophets were writing down records of what God said to human beings, right from the beginning of time.”

  “Who made up the letters, then?”

  “Either God or Adam.”

  From the tent door came another voice. “Or Eve.” It was Zeforah. Moses was relieved to see her. While she was talking mostly to Jethro, she included Moses in the conversation. The avoidance was over. It hadn’t really lasted all that long. Either he was forgiven now, or she didn’t want to give Jethro an excuse to say something about how it was good for a man to quarrel with the woman he plans to marry, so he can see if he can bear to live with her sharp tongue.

  “Come in,” said Jethro. “I want Moses to see how well you read.”

  “I don’t want to be the reader,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” said Jethro. “If you didn’t want to read you wouldn’t have come in. Here, the book of Enoch.”

  “Who’s Enoch?” asked Moses.

  “From before the flood. You know about the flood?”

  “There’s one every year.”

  “A flood that swept away the corruption of the children of men.”

  “The Nile does its share of . . . sweeping.”

  “It wasn’t the Nile,” said Jethro. “You really are ignorant, aren’t you?”

  “All I know of Israelite . . . teachings was what my . . . birth mother taught me. A few stories. The idea of one God over all.”

  “Not one God over all the other gods. One God that really exists, while all the other gods are merely imagined beings that never lived.”

  “Yes, well, my . . . brother and sister tried to explain all this to me, but I can’t help but think that it’s a . . . foolish idea. All the . . . prayers going to the same god! And there are a lot of Israelites . . . praying to him—not to mention Midianites like you, and those others. The Edomites, right?”

  Jethro smiled. “Zeforah knows the answer to that prayer question.”

  Zeforah rolled her eyes. “I was a child then. Do you still hold it against me?”

  “Not against you!” Jethro insisted. “For you!”

  “God’s capacity to love his children and hear their prayers is infinite,” said Zeforah. “He listens to us much better than most of us listen to him!”

  “I take it you asked the same . . . question when you were little,” said Moses.

  “I knew that the village children talked of many gods,” said Zeforah, “but at home we talked of only one—a god so sacred no one can even speak his name. So yes, I had to know why we had only one God, invisible, nameless. I thought we were being cheated.” Zeforah smiled ruefully. “If it had been a mortal sin, Father would never dream of bringing it up. But because he thought I was cute, asking all those questions in my lisping child-voice, he doesn’t hide my shame.”

  Jethro scoffed openly. “You weren’t that cute as a baby, I’ll have you know!”

  “I was as darling as they come,” said Zeforah, “or you’d never have been able to persuade Mother to have the other six after me.”

  “We were just trying to get it right,” said Jethro. “We kept coming closer and closer, and finally—Keturah.”

  Moses noticed that neither one said what had to be the truth—that Jethro and his wife were hoping for a son. Not that they didn’t know it. They had spoken of it openly before. But in this game, the teasing didn’t strike at the hard truth, that might have hurt Zeforah’s feelings or shamed Jethro. That’s what I did wrong, Moses realized. The teasing has to take place within safe boundaries. I crossed those bounds.

  “The scrolls,” said Zeforah pointedly.

  Jethro grinned like a foolish boy and carefully unrolled the book of Enoch.

  The letters were strange. Small and meaningless. “This isn’t even writing,” said Moses. “It’s as if you . . . dipped a bird’s feet in ink and made it run in rows.”

  Jethro looked at him in consternation. “Just because you can’t read it, it isn’t writing?”

  “No, I . . . didn’t mean it that way,” said Moses. “It just surprised me that it wasn’t . . . pictures. How can you remember them?”

  “Because there are fewer letters to remember,” said Jethro. “So the shape comes to mean the sound. You look at it and immediately your mind forms the letter.”

  “Is it written in Hebrew?” asked Moses.

  “What use would it be to me if it were not?” asked Jethro.

  “I just never thought of Hebrew as a language that . . . could be written.”

  Jethro shook his head. “Before the Egyptians had stopped running from the crocodiles long enough to scratch pictures on boulders, the servants of God were writing books.”

  Moses couldn’t hide his skepticism.

  “He doesn’t believe you,” said Zeforah.

  “No, he just doesn’t think that anything is older than Egypt,” said Jethro. “Egyptians believe that at the core of their being. But God is older than Egypt, and it wasn’t in Egypt that he first spoke to men.”

  “Where was it?” said Moses.

  “God spoke to the first man and the first woman when they were first sent out into the lone and dreary world,” said Jethro. “And he commanded them to keep a book of remembrance, so their children could learn the words of God, and their children’s children, forever. Writing is as old as the human race.”

  “Then why are there so many . . . people who have no writing?”

  “Adam was a godly man, but the evil one, the enemy fallen from heaven, the one we call Satan, tempted his children and grandchildren, and many of them rebelled. When they rejected Adam, they rejected his book. They refused to learn to read it. But they always remembered the idea of writing. They knew it was something holy men did. They just didn’t know any more which men who claimed to be holy really talked to God. So their false holy men, who didn’t really know anything about the true and living God, came up with silly picture writing just as they came up with silly religions.” Jethro grinned. “You should see the way they write in Chaldea and Assyria. Pressing squared-off sticks in clay. A whole book would be a brick wall! You could build a house out of a scroll!”

  It was Moses’ turn to laugh. “So now who is it who’s making fun of other people just because they do things differently?”

  “Ah, but you were making fun of something that was better. You have to admit that there is no standard of judgment by which those shards of clay are better than writing with ink on scrolls.”

  Moses took the challenge. “A man of Akkad would . . . doubtless tell you that as long as he keeps his writings dry, they’ll last forever and don’t have to be . . . copied out by hand every . . . generation.”

  “True,” said Jethro ruefully. “But then, no one reads a book as carefully as the man who’s writing it out by hand.”

  “I’ve done my share of . . . copying, as a schoolboy,” said Moses. “You just write it down, glyph by glyph.”

  “That’s because Egyptian writing is done with little pictures. So you’re thinking, draw a bird, draw an arrow, without regard for the sense. But with Hebrew, you make the sounds in your mind because the letter doesn’t look like anything but the sound.”

  But Moses had already thought beyond this playful contest. “Jethro, are you telling me that what you have here on this scroll is an exact copy of the book of remembrance written by the first man?”

  Jethro hesitated. “No, not at all. I’d give my life for one look at that book.”

  “But it was written in Hebrew? Hebrew is the oldest language?”

  Again, Jethro hesitated. “I doubt it,” he said. “Who knows what language Adam spoke? No, if that book is still on the earth, and if that language is still spoken, I don’t know who reads the book, I don’t know who speaks that tongue.”

  “And yet you know it once existed?”

  “I do know it,” said Jethro. “Because I know that God still lives.”

  “And how do you know that?” said Moses. “Every . . . priest can point to things that happen in the world around him and say, ‘God did that.’ And what is his . . . proof? Why, the thing happened, didn’t it? Therefore . . . God did it. Therefore . . . God lives!”

  “By that judgment,” said Jethro, “there are no gods at all.”

  “No,” said Moses. “I say only that men have no way of knowing what was done by the . . . gods, or what they meant by it. Does a hawk fall from the sky before a . . . battle? Then the . . . priest will say, Look, Horus shows you how you will fall upon your enemies! Then you lose the . . . battle, and the . . . priest goes home and says, ‘Horus warned us that we would fail, for didn’t we see a hawk leave the sky rather than look upon our defeat?’“

  “An interesting observation,” said Jethro. “If you ever get tired of shepherding, you would no doubt make some chieftain or king a fine omen-reader. As long as you learn to get away before your prediction comes out wrong.”

  “Oh, even that’s easy. You learn to say, ‘Look, a hawk! Horus is watching us!’ And the . . . king says, ‘Is that a . . . good omen?’ And the . . . priest says, ‘If you have been faithful to Horus in your offerings, and have not offended him, then it is . . . good.’”

  Zeforah laughed. “Are kings such fools, then, to believe in priests who say such nonsense?”

  “Why not?” said Moses. “The . . . king is brought up to believe in it from childhood on. Besides, it throws the . . . burden back on him. He has to search his heart and . . . decide if he’s been pure in his devotion to the . . . god.”

  “So if he wins, he was faithful, and if he loses, he was unrighteous?” said Zeforah. “So every battle becomes a judgment of the king.”

  “That’s what it means to be a king,” said Moses. “With or without the . . . priest, everything is a test of the . . . king’s worthiness. Good harvest? Good king. Bad harvest? Wicked king.”