Moses: The commandment specifies a fringe of blue. That is my ruling, as I interpret the intentions of the God of Israel.
It did not take at all long for the word to get about that, bald as he had become, the rich Levite, Korah, had made a fool of Moses.
Sisobk the Scryer hears about it centuries before it happened. Remarkable, even though he was there to verify it in person.
The following day Korah turned up with his company again, to request another ruling.
Korah: King Moses, if upon a man’s skin there be a white rising, or a bright spot, white and somewhat reddish, in size no bigger than a bean, is that man clean or unclean?
Moses: He is unclean.
Korah: And if the white rising or bright spot spreads and covers all his skin, is that man clean or unclean?
Moses: He is clean.
Korah: (turning to his company and, forgetting he no longer owns an eyebrow, arching that part of his face where an eyebrow once had been) One wonders whether such irrationality can have its origins in God. But I have another question. This mezuzah, which contains twenty-two lines of the Torah, and which you would have us affix at the entrance to our abodes…
Moses: Not I. It is the Lord God who has said, ‘And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thine house and upon thy gates.’
Korah: It will relieve us all to hear that the Lord God who has brought us out of bondage into this wilderness intends that we should one day live in houses. We had thought sand was become our natural habitat. (From Korah’s company murmurings, mirth, hollow as idols to the ears of Moses.) But be that as it may, tell me, Moses: if this mezuzah is to serve as a symbolic reminder, at our very portals, of His law — a foretaste, so to speak, before we enter — then presumably it is not necessary to have one on the doorposts of a house which already contains the sacred scrolls from which these twenty-two lines have been extracted.
Moses: A mezuzah is to be affixed at the entrance to every dwelling.
Korah: Without exception?
Moses: Without exception.
Korah: What you are saying, then, is that three hundred and seventy-eight portions of the Torah will not suffice to meet God’s prescription, whereas a mere twenty-two lines will do the job perfectly?
Moses: There must be a mezuzah upon the doorposts of every habitation.
Korah: Must?
Moses: Must.
The pungent smell of a rival’s dicomfiture, sweet like the meat offering to the Lord, spiked with stacte and salted just so, reaches Sisobk’s nostrils at the very moment it reaches Korah’s. As a mere reader, Sisobk can enjoy only a sedentary, second-hand exultation; as an actor, albeit one who recites lines written for him by his wife, Korah is able to point a long, jewelled finger at the first expounder of Mosaic law, and cry, ‘I do not hear the word of God in any of these absurdities.’ And to show that he has some idea how a real God thinks and speaks, he thunders now — ‘The Torah that thou dost teach Israel cannot be the Lord’s and therefore must be thine. Thine and thy brother Aaron’s, whom thou dresseth like a bridegroom and calleth High Priest. But he is a High Priest, Moses, in the service of no one but himself and thee!’
And that, for one day, was as far as Korah was prepared to take it. He needed to speak further to his wife, repeat his performance for her, watch the dagger flashing in her glance. He needed to test the resolve of Dathan and Abiram, to say nothing of other grumbling Reubenites camped close by him. And he needed to ponder tactics, to regroup his intellectual, no less than his military, forces.
He could not, without damage to his cause, go on dismantling the Torah, law by law. Moses was capable of inventing new ones quicker than he could ever hope to discredit them. Besides, he did not want his campaign to degenerate into merely rote rejection, gainsaying without discrimination. He knew the limited life of an appeal to the people based on irony and denigration. He was not a rich man for nothing: he understood that the common mind tires quickly of criticism, suspects the motives of those who practise it, and always gives its vote at last to the state of things as it is, to the dead weight of incumbency. Possessed of envy in the ratio of at least a hundred to one above all other emotions, the mass of mankind naturally holds envy to be the mainspring of action, and so lives in awe of that inert power of prior possession which, because it already has everything, cannot be suspected of wanting anything more.
‘If I were a democrat I would despair,’ he told his wife.
‘If you were a democrat,’ she answered him, ‘you would not be my husband.’
He put it to himself that he had no hope of toppling Moses until he could learn to leaven ridicule with sentiment. The people liked sentiment almost as much as they liked authority.
‘What brings a tear most quickly to your eye?’ he asked his wife.
‘Desert wind,’ she told him.
She was the wrong person to try. If it was affectibility he was after, Dathan and Abiram — petty agitators and hoodlums, keepers of low company, confidants of the poor — were his men.
‘Widows,’ Dathan said.
‘And orphans,’ added Abiram.
‘Widows of anyone in particular?’ Korah was curious to hear. ‘Merchants’s widows? Treasurers’ widows?’
‘Just poor widows,’ said Dathan.
‘And hungry orphans,’ added Abiram.
Korah fingered his rings, thanked them, and went away to think. Among the many things he thought about were his shaven body, his wife’s opprobriousness, and the part Moses had played in both.
The next afternoon he was once more outside Moses’s tent. But this time, instead of calling on him and asking for a ruling, he assembled a multitude to whom he related a story which had been told to him, he swore, and not by some filthy dreamer or parabolist either, that very morning. Inapposite as many of his audience would doubtless find the agrarian content of his narrative — cruelly, bitterly inapposite to speak of fields and farming here, amid the scant wells of Kadesh-Barnea — he trusted they would none the less recognise the injustice and the sophistry to which each of them was hourly subjected by Moses and Aaron in the name of their phantasmagorical Torah.
‘There was a destitute widow,’ he began, ‘a pauper’s relict, mother of two starving daughters, orphans…’
V
Sisobk the Scryer, follower of Cain, is already overcome with grief.
5. Cain Expatiates on the Strange Resemblance that Devotion Bears to Envy
Now that my father was occupied modelling effigies out of clay and whistling thunderstorms through his teeth, I was once again thrown back on my own company. This meant that I could resume spying on the progress of my mother’s amours. Her muddy infatuation with my indolent baby brother. And her more stately meeting of minds with the Ethereal.
I was of course lying when I told my father that I had no information to impart relating to this second matter. How could I possibly have been ignorant of what was taking place? What kind of a son would I have been to my mother had I not seized every opportunity to observe her in her finest hour, captor and mistress of her Creator’s heart? Regardless of all other family considerations, I believed that the sight of at least one of us exultant was owing to me. I had named fear in all its shades, shame and shrinking in all their fine gradations; if there was self-congratulation going, I wanted to name that.
As for not being straight with my father, I considered myself above reproach. I had not seen anything that would have satisfied his jealousy. Had I been able to deliver him a foolishly besotted Jehovah, wooing my milk-filled mother with shy looks and flowers, His hair slicked down like a water rat’s, His beard combed and smelling of aloes, I would not have hesitated. Ridicule is the jealous man’s salvation, the breath of all our being; and could I have conjured my poor perplexed father some, I would have. But this was not how the Lord came courting. He knew better than to put in a personal appearance. That is unless one considers the shekinah — His glow, His aura, His glorious refulgence — to be personal.