They clapped hands, in the rhythmic music of Egyptian worship. The naked men and women began to dance, and more, before the calf. More and more threw their clothing aside or laid it on the fire so it would burn more hotly. The calf seemed to sweat as much as the dancers from the heat.

  “O God,” cried Aaron, “strike them down now, and me with them. We are all worthy of death.”

  If God heard his cry, he was the only one, for no one else even noticed Aaron in the frenzy of the music and the dance.

  “Here is your god!” cried Harubel. His voice was heard. “Here is your god!” And no one thought for a moment that he meant the Lord God of Israel.

  * * *

  “Mother,” said Gershom. “What’s all that clapping?”

  “I’ve never heard such a sound before,” said Zeforah.

  “Its the way the Egyptians make music when they worship their gods,” said Miriam.

  “But who would be worshiping an Egyptian god?” asked Gershom.

  “People who want to die for their blasphemy against heaven,” said Miriam.

  * * *

  The writing was finished, four columns of it. A fine line appeared all the way around the writing. Two tables of stone, each with two columns of writing, slid down the face of the rock. Moses caught them, gathered them into his arms, and rose to stand straight, ready to bear the stone tables down the mountain. Only then did he see that the tables were written on the reverse side, too—writing that he had not yet read.

  He was about to start reading the back of one table when the voice of the Lord came to him.

  Go, get down the mountain, for the people have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly from the covenant they made with me. They worship a golden calf, and sacrifice to it. Get down, and see how I will destroy them.

  “No, Lord, please!” cried Moses. “Did you bring them out of Egypt to destroy them? Did you make your promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, only to end them here? Destroy those whose fault it is, but not the innocent. There are surely many who are innocent!”

  Go, then, and separate the guilty from the innocent. By your judgment I will be bound. Whomever you condemn on earth, I will condemn in heaven.

  * * *

  Joshua stood on the path, listening to the tumult coming up from the camp. He was torn between his duty to wait for Moses and the urgency of the need to get down the mountain and join with his soldiers.

  Then he heard stones clatter, and Moses came into view, carrying two large tables of stone.

  “Moses,” said Joshua. “There’s a noise of war in the camp!”

  “I don’t hear anyone shouting in triumph, or screaming in terror,” said Moses. “What I hear is the sound of singing.”

  Only then did the voices resolve in Joshua’s ears; only then did he understand what he had been hearing.

  “After all we’ve seen,” said Joshua, “how could they?”

  Moses didn’t answer as he passed Joshua and began the long walk down the mountain.

  “What is the writing engraved on the stone?” asked Joshua.

  “A temple, and a nation perfect before the Lord, with no poor among them, each man a priest and prophet to his family, and Holiness to the Lord written in the door of each house and the windows of every soul. A nation where angels minister to every household, as the angel ministered to you.”

  So he knew. And the Lord meant to give the same gift to all. But now? “What will the Lord do now?”

  “What good will it be to enter the promised land, if we carry Egypt with us?” said Moses. “It will take longer than I thought. For myself, I pray only that I live to see the promised land. When the people are ready to enter it, then my work is done.”

  “If I had been down there,” said Joshua, “my soldiers might have—”

  “No,” said Moses. “The wicked had to have the chance to declare themselves. The lines are drawn. Now help me get down the mountain.”

  Chapter 14: Stone

  Aaron stood beside the judgment seat, looking down at the sea of frenzied bodies demanding pleasure from their god. He wanted to pray for God to strike them all down, but he was sick at heart with the knowledge that when the Lord took his vengeance on these oathbreakers, Aaron himself would be the first to die. So it was not for him to call down punishment on the sinners. It was for him to see what he had done, so when he suffered the torments of hell his sin would be fresh in his mind forever.

  He was aware of someone behind him, climbing up to the judgment seat. He did not look. There was no one whose face he could bear to see.

  Joshua stepped forward to the edge of the outcropping of rock on which the judgment seat rested. He sank to his knees, weeping.

  Moses stepped forward, looking tired, grief-stricken. In his arms were large tables of stone, closely written in Hebrew on both sides. He looked out over the dancers. A few of them noticed him and stopped dancing; a few of the hand-clappers and singers fell silent. Most, however, were oblivious to the judgment standing over them.

  Moses leaned his head back and spoke to heaven. “As they have done to their covenant, do so to them.”

  Handing one table to Joshua, Moses raised the other high above his head. The dancers at the foot of the judgment seat saw the movement, realized what he was doing, and dodged out of the way, shrieking, just as Moses flung down the stone. It hit the ground and shattered into a hundred shards, many of which hit the naked bodies of the revelers, drawing blood, making bruises. Moses took the second stone table, and threw it down after the first.

  Not from the dancers, but from the crowd of angry onlookers, a chant began. “Moses! Moses! Moses!” The faithful began to push their way forward, forcing the dancers together. A few judges climbed up to stand with Moses on the judgment seat, Hur and Caleb among them. Moses turned to them now. “Take that calf,” he said. “Grind it into dust and put it in water.”

  The revelers parted to make way for Caleb and Joshua as they strode to the calf and pulled it down from the platform that had been set up for it. Other judges brought them a mortar and pestle; they hammered the calf into pieces, then ground the pieces down to dust.

  Hur led several young men in filling the melting pot with water, into which the gold fragments were now poured. Around them, dancers searched frantically for any item of clothing they could put on.

  “Give it to them, every one of them, to drink!”

  Sobbing now, frightened of the prophet who had brought such terrible plagues to Egypt, the dancers recoiled. Some tried to flee, but the crowd surrounding them would not let them through.

  “All of you who danced before the calf, all who clapped your hands, all who sang, drink!”

  Weeping or sullen, babbling excuses or silent with shock, the revelers came forward and drank from the basins the judges were filling and refilling with gold-dusted water.

  While they filed to the water, Moses turned to Aaron and spoke quietly. “What did they do to you, Aaron, that you let them sink to such a sin as this?”

  Aaron knew he had done enough to be condemned, but he also could not bear to let Moses think he had consented to the worship of the calf. “Moses, don’t be angry with Israel. You know how these people are, set on mischief. When you’d been gone so long, and no one knew when you’d be coming back, or if you ever would, they demanded a sign, something they could see, to prove God was with them. They promised not to dance, so I took the gold and put it in the fire and they poured it in the mold and the calf . . . came out.”

  Moses looked at him wordlessly for a long moment, then turned his back.

  This was not at all how Aaron had meant to say it. He wanted to start over, to explain that some of the people had lied to him, and some had flattered him, and many had goaded him with their chanting that Moses was dead, that God had forgotten Israel. He wanted to make Moses realize how frightening it had been, to have rioters in the camp, quarreling and fighting. But that would sound like an attempt to excuse himself. Even what he had said sounded like a pitiful attempt to put the blame on someone else. And he wouldn’t do that. God had left him to lead and judge the camp of Israel, and he had failed so spectacularly that he wanted only to die now, for he could never bear to stand before the people again. He sank down to his knees, head bowed, waiting for the end.

  Casting his eyes over the assembled people, Moses flung his arms out. “Who is on the Lord’s side!”

  Hur pointed to a large group of the men of Levi, whose camp was nearest the judgment seat. “There is Levi!” he cried.

  “Put swords in your hands and come to me!” shouted Moses.

  The dancers shrieked and screamed, wept and begged for mercy, but the surrounding crowd held them and let none of them escape. The Levite men who had swords brought them; others took swords out of the hands of the young soldiers. This was not a matter for these young protectors of the people to deal with. This was for men who were fathers and grandfathers, who knew that in this bitter work today they would be saving their children and their children’s children from the destroyer.

  “What is the penalty for idolatry?” Moses demanded. “What is the price of adultery? What happens to the oathbreaker?”

  A complete hush fell over the people.

  “Death,” said Hur.

  “Levites,” said Moses. “Send the idolaters and oathbreakers to face the judgment of God.”

  With sword in hand, Hur leapt down from the judgment seat and struck deeply into the neck of the first dancer he came to. The other Levites plunged into the crowd; the swords rose and fell. They set about the business grimly, methodically, taking no pleasure in it, but sparing no one. Screaming, pleading, shrieking, cursing, many of them denying they had danced or clapped or sung, even some who stood naked and covered with caked-on dust and sweat, they faced the sword and then fell, their blood making a viscous mud out of the dancing ground.

  Elisheba and Miriam came briefly to the judgment seat, their eyes averted from the grisly scene below them, as they raised Aaron to his feet and led him away to his tent. Zeforah arrived with them, but did not leave. Instead she watched her husband as he stood and oversaw the slaughter, his presence keeping the Levites from losing the courage to continue.

  Beside him, Caleb turned to Joshua. “What was written on the stone he broke?” Caleb asked.

  “All that the Lord can give was there,” said Joshua.

  “Can we ever have it back?” asked Caleb.

  Moses heard them, and answered. “The Lord will carve new stone tables, and write upon them, but what we’ll have now is a lesser law, a law for schoolchildren.” A cry of agony tore its way from Moses’ throat. “O Lord!” he shouted. “The sin of your people is great! Forgive them, Lord, or blot my name from your book!”

  The voice of the Lord came into Moses’ heart: I will blot the sinners from the book of life, but those who have chosen me, I choose forever.

  As if she had heard the Lord’s voice, Zeforah came forward then and put her arm around Moses’ waist. He held her there beside him until the killing was done.

  “Let each tribe’s elders come and search for their dead,” Moses told them. “Before the sun goes down, put all these bodies in the ground.” The gold of the calf would be buried with them, scattered among so many graves that no one would ever shape it into anything again.

  As the work of identifying and burying the dead began, Moses finally turned to Zeforah. “Go comfort the children without me,” he said to her. “My brother is the one who needs me now.”

  * * *

  Aaron looked so small, sitting hunched over on the rugs inside his tent. His children were gone, taken by Elisheba to another tent; they did not need to see or hear what would pass between the sons of Jochabed.

  Moses stood at the door, coming no closer to his brother than that.

  Aaron looked up at him. “I have no excuse. I should have been killed with the others.”

  “Did you worship the calf?” asked Moses.

  “I ordered them to bring the gold, to pour it into the mold. I told them the Lord would form it into the shape he wanted. I led them to evil.”

  “Did you know the smith was casting it to be a calf?”

  “I should have known. They only deceived me because I wanted to be deceived.”

  “Why would you want that?”

  “You have to do something, Aaron!” he said, mimicking Harubel. “Are you the leader or not? Can’t you do anything without Moses to tell you what to do?”

  “So you believed him.”

  “I believed his promises. I didn’t understand that the people rioting were the same ones telling me how to stop the riots. But I should have. I should have guessed.”

  “You were alone.”

  Deep, bitter sobs wracked Aaron’s body as he bowed his back over the carpet.

  “You were alone but you didn’t have to be,” said Moses. “Did you consult with the judges?”

  “No two of them gave the same advice,” said Aaron. “They were as frightened and confused as I was, and someone had to act!”

  Moses roared back at him: “No one had to act! There is never a time when it’s better to do something terrible than to do nothing at all!”

  “I know that now,” said Aaron quietly.

  “You can’t govern the people alone,” said Moses. “I always had you and Miriam. Didn’t you ask Miriam?”

  “They mocked me if I listened to women,” said Aaron.

  “Did you pray?”

  “I asked God to form the gold into the shape that he desired.”

  “Did you pray first to know if that was right?”

  “I had to decide then, in that moment, and—”

  “Why not the next moment? Why not the moment after you prayed?”

  “God doesn’t talk to me!” cried Aaron. “I’m not like you, I don’t pray and get answers in the same moment. God gave me a dream—once. Everything else came because I was standing beside you. It all came to you, never to me. So no, I didn’t pray first, because God never speaks to me anyway! He leaves me on my own, and on my own I’m nothing. I’m nothing all the time, I’ve never been anything, you’ve always been the one that God was looking out for. You never should have left me in charge. The people needed a prophet and all they had was me.”

  “You would have been enough,” said Moses. “The Lord gives me what the people need to have. He would have shown you the way.”

  “How do you know that?” demanded Aaron. “You’ve never been me. You’ve never heard that stony silence from heaven!”

  “How do you know what I’ve had from heaven?” said Moses. “How do you know the agony I went through, learning how to pray? The years of patience when I had lost everything in my life and I heard no explanation out of heaven, but I learned to pray and keep the law as best I could, and I studied the scriptures and loved my wife and raised my children. Were you there, so that you can judge me now and say that my life was easy, while yours was hard?”

  “All right, yes, I’m sure that you faced heroic challenges and overcame them all,” said Aaron bitterly. “And the silence of heaven was my own fault. My own unworthiness. But that’s what I had from God—nothing! For you he writes on stone and hands it to you. For me, the stone is always blank and I can’t pry it away from the mountain. But yes, I’m sure it’s my fault! So let me die now. Bury me with the idolaters. I also broke my oath and defiled the law.”

  “You never took an oath not to be stupid,” said Moses.

  Aaron looked up at him with deep anger. “Is that what I am?”

  “It’s what we all are,” said Moses, “until the Lord teaches us.”

  “I’m not stupid now,” said Aaron. “I’m wise enough to see the blood on my hands. The ones who died today—if I had been the leader Israel needed, they all would be alive.”

  “Like a poisoned man needs to vomit, Israel needed to have those idolaters out of their belly and spilled on the ground.”

  “So now you tell me that I did well?” said Aaron nastily.

  “I tell you that the will of God was not thwarted by your mistakes,” said Moses.

  “Because Moses is always there to fix everything. Do you think any of this is comfort?”

  “I’m not here to comfort you!” Moses shouted. “I’m here to wake you up! You take upon yourself guilt that belongs to others, but the guilt that really does belong to you, you refuse to recognize—you put it all on me!”

  “What guilt is that! Name my sin for me! You’re my judge, aren’t you, Moses? Just like with that Egyptian innkeeper you killed—you always know who deserves to live and die, who is worthy and who is not!”

  “That’s the sin, Aaron,” Moses said.

  “What is? Daring to speak impolitely to God’s chosen one?”

  “Listen to yourself! What if it were one of your sons, saying these things to his brother? Wouldn’t you know then what was wrong?”

  “The same thing that was wrong with Cain and Abel,” said Aaron bitterly. “One son was loved by God, and the other son was evil and despised.”

  “One son was broken-hearted and offered his life to the Lord,” said Moses, “while the other son was consumed by envy and nursed the wound of his injured pride until it destroyed him. Is that what you want to be? You see that your brother’s sacrifice is accepted by the Lord, but instead of letting your own heart break, you brood upon your injuries and hate your brother—as if my service to God made yours impossible, as if my meekness before the Lord required you to remain proud!”

  Aaron leapt to his feet and shouted, “I am not proud!”

  “Never prouder than at this moment!” Moses roared back.

  “I heard Israel crying!” Aaron said. “I prayed to God: Let my arm free Israel! But he never heard me.”

  “He heard you. He was waiting for you to say, Make of me whatever you need me to be. You didn’t want to serve the Lord, you wanted him to serve you.”

  “I loved my people and I wanted to lead them to freedom!”

  “Then why didn’t you free yourself so you could lead them?”

  “I couldn’t free myself,” Aaron answered. “It took God to do that.”