THE PROMISED WAR Read online

  What the hell is going on? Deker wondered, and then he stopped in his tracks.

  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.”

  32

  Deker followed Salmon to the Tent of Meeting, where a line of Gadites snaked outside with Achan at the end. Salmon and Deker walked past them inside the tent where Deker saw General Bin-Nun in the front with a priest beside him at the altar. The troops were lined up as though they were about to receive Communion, but it was no cup that Bin-Nun held in his hand.

  “It’s a flint knife,” Salmon explained from the back corner of the tent where they stood.

  “I see the knife, Salmon. Who is the priest?”

  “Phineas’ father, Eleazer. His name is almost the same as the good angel.”

  The good angel.

  Deker watched as a soldier dropped his field kilt and knelt before Bin-Nun, his back toward the line, and looked up at his leader. Bin-Nun fixed his gaze on his soldier and brought down his knife. Deker himself tensed at the sound of the blade scraping the stone. There was a pause, and then Bin-Nun used his blade to flick a piece of foreskin to a pile at the end of the altar.

  “Holy God,” he said under his breath. “He’s circumcising them, Salmon. But why? They’re adults.”

  “Our fathers who came out of Egypt were circumcised, but we who were born in the wilderness were not,” Salmon explained. “Today Yahweh has rolled away the reproach of Egypt from us. The sons of Israel can finally take the place of their fathers. That is why General Bin-Nun is calling this place Gilgal.”

  A hot fury quickly succeeded Deker’s revulsion. His efforts to save Bin-Nun’s army when they were most vulnerable, crossing the Jordan in a single day, were all for naught. This stupid mutilation of the troops would set back the attack on Jericho by days if not weeks. Rahab would remain at risk, and Hamas would have an incalculable reprieve to regroup and draw help from neighboring cities. Worse, it left the Israelite
troops at less than half strength. Hamas could attack them at any moment.

  “This is insane,” he said, trying to keep his voice low, but aware that his raspy words and snarling tone had turned several soldiers’ heads. “You can’t sack a city after you chop off the tips of your men’s dicks.”

  Salmon moved closer to Deker, trying to shield his anger from the others. His eyes were still bright with hope, his voice imploring. “But this is the sign of faith in Yahweh from Bin-Nun we’ve been looking for,” Salmon said. “Don’t you see? Bin-Nun has surrendered his war plans to Yahweh and seeks a new directive. Yahweh will lead the way in battle now. Bin-Nun is announcing it was Yahweh and not Moses who led us through the desert for forty years to test our hearts. And it will be by the hand of Yahweh and not the edges of our swords that we take the Promised Land.”

  Deker asked, “How long will the healing take?”

  “They say about fourteen days for the healing to be complete,” Salmon said. “But the men can fight after seven, which is the end of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which begins tomorrow.”

  Seven days!Deker thought. Rahab could be dead by then. She could be dead already if Hamas suspected that she gave the Hebrew spies the intel on his ambush plans. Meanwhile, they were all sitting ducks in this Gilgal place, with troops operating at less than half capacity.

  What Bin-Nun was doing, Deker now concluded, was cleverly securing single-minded devotion from his troops ahead of the impending attack on Jericho. Circumcision and the Feast of Unleavened Bread during the healing would keep the men from feasting on sex with their wives and food from the new land. There would be no repeat of the mistake Moses had allowed when the Israelites first pitched camp at Shittim in Moab.

  Deker knew then and there he had to grab the rest of his explosives from Kane and break for Jericho that very night. He had done Bin-Nun’s dirty work twice now. He could wait no longer.

  “I’m up soon,” Salmon told him stoically. “You’ll stay to watch?”

  Watch? Deker knew Salmon considered this bizarre mutilation of male adults a holy ritual. But Deker had seen enough. “I’ll skip the butcher shop, Salmon. I’m already cut and ready for action.”

  As Deker left the tent, he sensed Bin-Nun’s eyes follow him on his way out. But Deker didn’t look back, only heard the sound of the flint knife strike the stone and the scrape of the blade behind him.

  33

  Waiting until it was completely dark and the Passover meals had begun in the tents throughout Gilgal, Deker quietly made his way to the dramatic fires at the south end of the camp facing Jericho. There he beheld acres and acres of smelting furnaces—hundreds of them—stoked by Kane the Kenite’s army of metalsmiths. The pillars of fire lit up the night.

  Bin-Nun has bred his army, Deker thought. Now he was going to forge his swords.

  But as Deker looked closely at the smelting furnaces on his way to find Kane, he noticed only wood was going in to stoke the fires. Not a single blade or any other metal was being forged.

  These pyrotechnics, he realized, were yet another example of Bin-Nun’s psychological warfare designed to strike the fear of God into the melting hearts of the Reahns huddled behind their walls. He could only imagine how the multiplication of Israel’s pillar of fire into more than three hundred fires looked to Rahab and what must be going through her mind even now.

  At the same time, the firewall proved to be an invaluable defensive move, blocking the ability of the Reahn watchtowers to see behind it. Deker knew from night training how a bright object at night affected the naked eye’s ability to see behind it. A Reahn on the walls who turned his eyes away from the fires might require a half hour for his eyes to readjust. Bin-Nun, meanwhile, could safely maneuver his troops behind the light until he was ready to attack. Deker supposed the same could be true in the daytime with the smoke. Either way, the Reahns were blind.

  “Is anything around here real?” he asked when he saw Kane standing outside his tent, tending to one of his larger furnaces.

  Kane was smoking some stinking, home-fashioned cigar and seemed to have been expecting him. “Only the tin and copper inside the treasury of Jericho.”

  Deker had already begun to suspect as much.

  “So that explains why Bin-Nun is attacking Jericho,” Deker said. “And why he’s going to kill every breathing thing in Jericho, burn all its grain instead of feeding his own people with it and declare a herem ban preventing anyone from picking up even a penny from the blood-puddled streets under penalty of death. He says he needs the metals for the Treasury of Yahweh. But they’re for you, Kane, so you can forge them into the weapons the Israelite war machine will need to fight in the wars beyond Jericho.”

  “The survival of Israel is at stake,” Kane said, pushing his iron poker into the furnace to stoke the fire. “If we prevail against Jericho, we will need all the weapons we can forge if we are to have any hope of going up against the superior armies of the five kingdoms to the south and the even stronger armies to the north. Gilgal here will serve as a station for the rest of the campaign for the Promised Land,” he pointed out. “The troops can pass through anytime for repairs and new weapons.”

  “After they destroy Jericho and everyone inside.”

  “Every breathing thing,” Kane said. “From the river to the Great Sea.”

  Deker stood in the glow of the heat and looked out across the desert toward Jericho. He couldn’t even see it. All their lights were out, like a blackout for an air raid. Deker wouldn’t be surprised if many Reahns, despite the assurances of General Hamas, feared hailstones of fire were about to rain down on them as they had on the Egyptians forty years ago. Such was the cloud of terror General Bin-Nun had successfully blown over their walls. But it was a mirage that would blow over soon enough, and the walls would still be standing when it did unless Deker took action.

  “Give me my explosives,” Deker demanded.

  Kane eyed him up and down. Deker flashed no blade, but Kane seemed to understand Deker didn’t need anything more than his bare hands to kill quickly and quietly. “You want to go to Jericho tonight?”

  “We promised her,” Deker said.

  Kane screwed up his eyes. “Rahab the harlot?”

  Deker nodded.

  “Well, Israel must keep her word,” Kane said. “But you don’t need explosives to protect her. There’s nothing you can do for her right now.”

  “I can bring down the walls.”

  “You’ll do that when we attack.”

  “The attack is at least seven days away, Kane. Rahab and her family could be tortured and killed by then. Hamas must realize somebody told us about his plans to cut us off at the Jordan. And now that we’ve crossed, somebody is going to pay, and it’s probably going to be her or those close to her. We might pass over her treason, but Hamas won’t, and her blood will be on our hands.”

  Kane looked stern. “Bringing down the walls before we attack will only enable and encourage the Reahns to flee their city.”

  “Exactly,” Deker said. “No genocide. I’ve seen the future, Kane. Israel will only make the world hate it by killing everything that breathes. I can change it.”

  “You believe that the nations will hate the Hebrews because of anything the Hebrews do or don’t do?”

  “Yes.”

  “They hated the Hebrews when they were slaves. They hate them now that they’re warriors. Sparing Jericho won’t change that. Neither can you.”

  “I can try.”

  “But if you succeed, the Reahns will take their treasure with them. We won’t have enough weapons.”

  “Maybe if I succeed, Israel won’t need as many.”

  Kane stood looking at Deker for a long moment. Deker couldn’t tell if his eyes held pity or a kind of respect. Finally, Kane turned toward his tent and said, “I have something for you.”

  He left Deker at the furnace and disappeared behind the flap of his tent.

  Deker looked around at the pillars of fire lined up
across the desert. Bin-Nun had erected as much of a wall to keep the Israelites inside Gilgal as he had to keep the Reahns out. And his circumcision of the troops guaranteed no desertions before the attack. Was Gilgad that different at this point than Jericho? Was General Bin-Nun truly as morally superior to General Hamas as Salmon insisted? Or was he only going to destroy a wall of stone in order to replace it with a wall of religion in the name of Yahweh?

  Kane emerged a moment later with Deker’s explosives pack and a small ceremonial washbowl painted red and black. He handed the bowl to Deker delicately.

  “I kept one of your bricks and used it to make this.”

  Deker’s hands trembled as he stared at the bowl. It looked just like the kind he had seen in Rahab’s place, but the shape reminded him of another, more terrible piece of pottery that had claimed Rachel’s life back in the Israel he knew.

  “What’s this for?” Deker said, fighting to keep his voice from shaking.

  “To take with you inside the city when you go back,” Kane told him. “Bin-Nun says you’ve proven yourself. Both with the intelligence about Hamas’ plan to cut us down at the water, and by damming the Jordan at Adam. He never expected you to get this far. None of us did. Now only one thing remains: the walls.”

  Deker took the bowl, wrapped it in sackcloth and put it in his pack and counted fifteen C-4 bricks left from his original cache. It wasn’t as much power as he wanted. He would have to be pinpoint accurate with where he laid the blasts and how he allocated the bricks between them. Assuming he got that far.

  “God is my strength and power,” Kane told him. “He teaches my hands to make war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. But I have not seen such a display of his power in anyone besides Moses—and you.”