His first hint that something was off was the Judean guards at the eastern edge of the camp. Unlike the Gadites back at Adam, they welcomed him not with shouts and arrows into the air but with bows trained on him until they saw Salmon, Achan, Elezar and the Gadites behind him with their banners.
“Has Hamas struck?” Deker asked.
“No,” said a guard. “As soon as the Amorite kings west of the Jordan and all the Canaanite kings along the coast heard how Yahweh had dried up the Jordan before us until we crossed over, their hearts melted in fear and they no longer had the courage to back up Hamas and face us! Yahweh reigns!”
“Then what happened?” Deker demanded. “Where is the rest of the army?”
But the guards preferred instead to report everything to Salmon in clipped words Deker couldn’t understand.
As Deker left them and marched ahead toward the camp, he saw no men, only women with baskets full of grain picked in the Promised Land. Some were dumping their grain into four silos freshly dug into the side of a small hill. On the hill were six distinctive redbud trees, their thick, bent trunks ablaze with pink flowers. Beyond the hill was the rest of the camp: tents, tarps, stables and the distant plumes of smoke and fire.
There before him, in the center of the camp, was the golden Ark of the Covenant, incandescent with the reflection of the surrounding fires, perched atop a pyramid of twelve tribal dolmen stones.
The sight of it took Deker’s breath away.
He stumbled forward toward the altar of stone, both drawn toward the Ark and yet cautious to keep a safe distance. The Levites had erected a perimeter of poles with banners about twenty cubits around the altar, and here he stopped.
Elezar was right behind him, also breathless. “This is only a tenth the distance required when the Ark is in motion during battle. Enjoy the view now with your naked eyes, Deker, because I don’t think we’ll ever see it again in our lives.”
Deker was mesmerized. The chest of shittimwood was smaller than Deker had imagined: not even two meters long, and barely a meter wide and tall. But its gold overlay gave it a jewel-like aura. A crown of gold cropped the top edges of the chest, on top of which stood two golden cherubs, their wings extended to form the mercy seat.
And on top of that mercy seat, according to Jewish tradition, sat the invisible presence of Yahweh.
“Inside this Ark are the tablets Moses smashed, the manna from heaven and the rod of Aaron with a flower bud,” Elezar told him reverentially. “They represent the presence of God, the provision of God and the resurrection power of God.”
But all Deker could think of was the shittim wood beneath the gold of the Ark, and that only made his mind go back to the death grove at Camp Shittim. Had that same horror been repeated here? Where were the soldiers?
He looked around and saw no bodies hanging from trees. But he saw no troops either. Only some commotion farther inside the camp that demanded attention.
31
Beyond the Ark stood the priest Phineas, recounting the crossing of the Jordan to several thousand children spread out as far as Deker’s eyes could see, all the way to the mysterious, natural-gas–like bursts of fire at the south end of the camp.
“So when the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant went ahead of them!” Phineas cried out. “Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet, as soon as the priests who carried the Ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down was completely cut off. So the priests who carried the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord stopped in the middle of the Jordan and stood on dry ground, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground.”
Something like that, Deker thought, and wondered to what extent Phineas’ revisionist history was what Salmon and Achan had heard as children about the parting of the Red Sea. Even the fate of the dolmen stones now under the Ark, which earlier had formed the stone bridge across the Jordan, got a poetic
rendition.
“So the Israelites did as Joshua commanded them. They took twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, as the Lord had told Joshua; and they carried them over with them to their camp, where they put them down. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
The altar of dolmen stones holding up the Ark was assembled like a ziggurat and stood about four meters tall—six dolmens across the bottom, four across the middle and two across the top. The altar was a stone monument unto itself, which was probably the intent as soon as the Ark was lifted up and out by the Levites to carry before the armies of Israel.
Deker looked at the dolmen stones and realized it must have taken a company of men from each tribe to haul each one out of the river and drag it to this place.
But it was all part of the show, and Deker could see Elezar take a seat on the ground in front of a couple of small children and nod his approval to an appreciative Phineas.
As he stared at the remarkable scene, he sensed somebody standing next to him. It was Salmon, who had gone from sullen to exultant.
“Bin-Nun has done it!” he said.
“Done what, Salmon?”
“Honored Yahweh by bringing us here forty years to the day of the Passover in Egypt before the Exodus. Tonight we celebrate the Passover in the Promised Land!”
“That was the hurry to cross the Jordan at flood stage?” Deker asked. “He wanted to hit a date?”
“This is his sign from Yahweh,” Salmon said. “Don’t you see? All of this is the sign the people needed to see.”
“What sign do you see, Salmon? I see no sign.”
“The holiness of Yahweh is before your eyes in the Ark.”
Deker thought back again to his bar mitzvah, and the symbol of the Ark and how he had dropped the Torah. “You mean the 613 laws and purification rituals to show how ungodly we
mortals are.”
Salmon looked at him curiously. “The Torah and Law of Moses do not promise salvation, because keeping them all is impossible. The Law reflects the holiness of Yahweh, to show us our dependence on Yahweh’s grace like Abraham. Without the Law we would know neither justice nor mercy.”
Salmon sounded like Rahab up on her terrace in Jericho. True believers in a world ruled by those who seemed to make up the rules to suit themselves. It was beginning to make sense to Deker now, this notion that the fledgling nation of Israel existed to bear witness to the Law in a lawless world. But not this idea of faith in Yahweh’s mercy. Thus far he had seen little of that from Bin-Nun.
“Bin-Nun has depended on nothing but me so far, Salmon. Phineas too.”
“You will tonight,” Salmon promised. “All the troops will.”
“That’s the problem, Salmon. I don’t see any troops. Where are they?”
“Healing.”
“Healing? From what?”
“Come with me and I’ll show you.”
