Shifting Bricks

One of the most peculiar incidents in the Bible occurs in Exodus 5 and 6. In that passage, the Egyptian Pharaoh gets rather irritated at the requests coming from the Israelite side. So he says, "You guys want a break? Lazy, idle, good-for-nothings! Instead, I will give you more work... and make it harder!"

A lot of people question the veracity of the Biblical account of the Israelites in Egypt. They point out that there is no explicit mention of the Israelites in Egyptian records. Well, I think that just as modern Americans don't particularly talk about where in Africa some of them came from, so also the Egyptians didn't particularly care where the slaves came from as long as they did the work.

But what has the ring of truth about it, no matter how displaced in space or time, is the vindictive pressure brought to bear on the Israelites by Pharaoh. He tells them to make as many bricks as they did before, but without the reinforcement of straw. He says that they make noise because they are lazy, and the cure for that is to do more work so that they have no time to make noise. The reasoning is askew, the logic is faulty; these are elements in a grand psychosis.

He is Pharaoh, and he is a God-King. He has no interest in treating them fairly, and takes malicious delight in showing his power over them. It is this very trait, the desire to display power over others, that God uses to set the Israelites free in the end. Pharaoh just cannot let go. Even after he has allowed the Israelites to leave, he will pursue them to the destruction of his own army. And later, he will expunge those records that show his colossal lack of judgement. That is how some people have always done such things.

In Aegyptum

And it came to pass that Wolff, once a knight, made his way to the land of Egypt. He had not been there long when he found to his dismay that stepping into another river may yet bring one strangely almost home. For denial is not just the source of annual floods and wet fertility, and and good pharaohs are hard to find.

While he ponders these truths about rivers and gypsies, he is interrupted by a fellow with a pointy hairdo.

Ho! What are you doing here in the land of the God Of The Burning Gaze, He Who Gives And Takes Away, He Who Has The Divine Spark In His Colon Which Must Be Cleaned By A Special Slave Each Day, Upon Whom The Sun Rises And Sets For He Is The Son And Avatar Of The Sun?

Wolff found all this rather hard to digest. He was about to frame a reply, when the impatient functionary cracked a whip at him and said, Make haste to answer, else the Slayer Of Set will wreak a terrible havoc upon you! Do you wish this to happen?

Nasser! But I am sad at this invasion of my privacy. I am a quiet man, a warrior by training but a teacher by choice.

A warrior! Ha! I will beat and berate and bastinado you, you son of a slave! I will take all bonus, benefit and benevolence from you and leave your tortured corpse for the vultures!

Wolff, now a man of peace, resigned himself to a beating. As the first blows fell, he put his pain into a far place and surrendered to the will of the Highest. And so it was, for a distantly painful while. Then, surprisingly, the blows stopped and there was blood everywhere.

Hello, stranger! I cannot stand for a son of the serpent to be beating fellow Israelites. Unfortunately, I have killed him. I hope you are able to walk?

He was looking at a slim, well-built and slightly choleric fellow. He felt an immediate kinship.

My name is Moses.

A Service, With Lessons

Today I sat in a high place, denying myself the kingdoms of the world in faith. And the reading for today was taken from that tumultuous book of the Torah which is called Shemot. In that book are many stirring words, and none more so than these, which I shall take as a remembrance of Charlton Heston as well as guidance for myself:

Then they said to Moses, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you so dealt with us, to bring us up out of Egypt? Is this not the word that we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness.”

And Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD, which He will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall see again no more forever. The LORD will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.”

And the LORD said to Moses, “Why do you cry to Me? Tell the children of Israel to go forward. But lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it. And the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea. And I indeed will harden the hearts of the Egyptians, and they shall follow them. So I will gain honour over Pharaoh and over all his army, his chariots, and his horsemen. Then the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I have gained honor for Myself over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his horsemen."

And when I came down from that high place of memory, I was left with thought, and then with forgetfulness, but never with regret.

Pharaoh

And this is the story of the second plague which was sent upon the land of Egypt. And after each of these two plagues, first of blood and then of frogs, Pharaoh hardened his heart because he saw that there was an end to each plague.

There is a difference between determination and obduracy. To determine is to define a terminus, to set boundaries or fix conditions, to find the extent of something in exactitude; to show determination is to be definite about something. However 'obduracy' comes from the Latin root dura- which implies hardness as of solid wood: tough, inflexible and unyielding.

Sometimes, some people can be told that their ways lead to disaster. You can tell them about incremental vs revolutionary progress, you can tell them that attempting to hold the same old ground against the advent of chaos is like whistling in the dark. You can watch them fail, and continue to paper the cracks over; you can watch them suffer from lack of vision and purpose, and pretend to have insight and vitality; you can see them decline from fatigue of the imagination, of the will, of the heart; you can see them age, and replace fallen cohorts and legions with mercenary troops.

'Decline and fall' is an old theme. All kinds of institutions, including the Pax Romana and its greater descendant, the Pax Britannica, fall into ruin once they fail to stem the fissures of chaos, and invite the barbarians into the gates. Sometimes, the barbarians have learnt the lessons well, and might even return as teachers and masters. But the empire will not rise again, and although civilisation is never really lost, the vision of a better age turns into the irritatingly-forgotten dream of a bad night.

There are ten more plagues after the plague of frogs. When does Pharaoh learn? The answer never changes, sadly.