God was a bit of a bastard. A bit of a wizard. A bit Oz-like. But Pharoah was even worse.
Too much of anything is a plague. Even frogs. Plastic bags.
Moses knew it. He turned all the dust in Egypt to lice.
He waved his hand and all the rivers turned to blood. All the water in all the vessels. The Egyptians dug holes alongside the river, trying desperately to source drinking water.
The rivers stank, as the fish threw themselves upon the banks and died. Their bloated bodies floated down the foaming red.
And then he brought a plague of frogs and I thought, I wish there were so many frogs they could plague us. But they crawled into Pharaoh’s bedchamber and his hair and everywhere, and I could see (squinting) how this pervasive slick of amphibious bodies might be a plague.
And then he turned all the dust of Egypt into lice. One’s body crawls with the thought.
And then (because this is the rhythm, both of life and the Bible. And then, and then, and then, told in the sobbing voice of a six-year-old.) he rained hail, mixed with fire, down upon the Egyptians and it stripped their trees and killed their crops.
It still wasn’t enough to free his people.
And at this point you begin the see the lengths to which a Pharaoh will go to keep slaves enslaved. You begin to see that even as people suffer, and suffer more, Pharaoh makes his promises – he will free the people, there will be testing, it will be beautiful, it will be better than anywhere – whatever promises a Pharaoh makes – that a Pharaoh can never be trusted. Because a Pharaoh is drunk on fine linens and beautiful serving platters, the nubile bodies of young serving girls, dancing in their thin shifts. Pharaoh is drunk on the labor wrung from an entire people he claims as his own, even as he derides their language and looks and the way they choose to worship.
All they want is to go out in the desert to pray.
But Pharaoh knows that any desire to leave – even for three days – is a desire to leave for good. So Pharaoh lies and lies and lies. He promises them what they want, as long as they stop the plague of flies or frogs or blood in place of sweet water, and as soon as the plague ends, he keeps them at their work. Keep going. (He says.)
Eventually God – the only name he gives is I AM THAT I AM, which is almost a palindrome, which is as baller as Pharaoh, as names go, kills every first born in the land, except for those who mark their doors with blood. And the grief is so great, the deaths so devastating, that he finally lets the slaves go. And immediately changes his mind. And chases them to the banks of the Red Sea, where the waters really do part, just like Charlton Heston said, and they walk through the sea on dry land. And when Pharaoh and his charioteers follow him, the sea rushes in and they are churned up and drowned like so many plastic soldiers in a bathtub.
That’s how it went down.
But what Moses found on the other side was that, even when you’re out of bondage, you’re still in the wilderness, and everybody has an opinion, and a gripe, and you’ve got to make rules out of a handbasket, some twine, a rubberband, a grape leaf. And so, even though I AM THAT I AM himself parted the waters of the Red Sea for you, people’s memories are short, and they get anxious and bored and worried about starving, and they start to hoard toilet paper. And they craft golden calves out of their earrings. And I AM THAT I AM gets pissed again. So pissed that he sets everyone upon everyone, until 3000 men are dead. Slayed. Slew.
I think of Miriam, who danced upon their first freedom. Who led the women to dance.
I think of Moses, mealy-mouthed and unsure of himself, slow-speaking, coached in the magic tricks that might make Pharaoh take him seriously.
I think that even when you’re out of the wilderness, you find yourself back in it, enticed ever onward by the promise of a land of milk and honey that never materializes but that is nonetheless necessary to imagine, necessary to walk towards, though arrival is –
Sarah Bardeen is a writer living in Berkeley.