Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 305 · November 1
Smote the Rock Twice
“And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.”
We know what it is to do a thing in temper and have it work: the sentence at the table that ended the argument and shortened the evening. Something came out of the rock, so how we hit it never had to be asked.
Kadesh, in the desert of Zin. Miriam has just died and been buried there. There is no water, the congregation gathers against Moses and Aaron, and the two of them fall on their faces at the door of the tabernacle. The instruction that comes back has a rod in it and no blow: speak ye unto the rock before their eyes. What happens instead takes one verse. Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock? And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice.
Four passages account for what went wrong, and they do not land on the same syllable. God, immediately: Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel. Later: ye rebelled against my commandment in the desert of Zin. A psalm looks at his mouth and nothing else: they provoked his spirit, so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips. And Moses himself, retelling it later, puts the weight elsewhere: the LORD was wroth with me for your sakes. Forty years earlier, at a different rock, striking had been the command, and he did the thing that had worked.
Then the part that unsettles anybody reading slowly. The water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also. It worked, while the man performing it was being told he would not go into the land, and nobody in that crowd, drinking, could have said anything was wrong. Results are poor evidence about the state of whoever produced them.
God, the water came, and that is the part we hold on to. We have carried complaining people for years and said things we would not want quoted back. Get to us before our tempers do, and when the tempers get there first, do not let the result talk us out of what happened. You said speak. He struck, and it still ran. Say it to us again, slowly.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 305 is Good to All (Psalm 145:9).