Pearl in the Sand (12 page)

As he raised his eyes, he gasped with shock. A few paces in front of him stood a man with a drawn sword in his hand. The man was tall and muscle-bound, a warrior born and bred by his look. And
his sword was nothing ordinary; it shone like moonlight, jewel-encrusted at its base and sharpened to an impossibly fine edge. Part of Joshua wanted to run in the opposite direction, but he too was a warrior of courage and strength. Who was this man and what was he doing here? Joshua clenched his jaw and stepped forward.

“Are you for us or for our enemies?” Joshua asked, his narrowed eyes searching the man’s expression.

Close up, Joshua could see that the man’s face was stamped with an unearthly peace. It was impossible to guess his age. There were no lines, no sagging skin, no scars. And yet the eyes were set with an ancient wisdom. Joshua could not look away from his unblinking gaze.

“Neither,” he replied.

Joshua raised an eyebrow. Neither friend nor foe?
Who was he then?
The man’s next words wiped every thought from Joshua’s mind.

“I am the commander of the army of the Lord, and as such I have now come.”

Joshua fell facedown on the ground in reverence. This was no ordinary man. The thought of it overwhelmed him so that he could hardly move. Like Abraham, he was being honored by a heavenly visitation. “What message does my Lord have for His servant?” he asked.

“Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.”

Hurriedly, Joshua did so. Around him a heavy silence settled. After a time, Joshua dared to look up only to find that the commander of the host of the Lord had vanished with as little flourish as he had appeared. Slowly, Joshua came to his knees. What did it mean? Why had God sent him this visitation? If God had sent him the commander of His own army, why had He not said that He was on the side of Israel?

Then it dawned on Joshua that God was not on Israel’s side; He beckoned Israel to be on
His
side. Joshua couldn’t claim God for himself
or for his own interests the way the people around them used their idols. Rather the Lord claimed Joshua and His chosen people for Himself.

As Joshua finally rose to his feet another thought occurred to him. He wasn’t military commander to Israel. He did not have the ultimate responsibility for this impossible task. God had assigned the commander of His own armies to fight the battle. Suddenly, Jericho’s walls did not seem so impossible. Not with the army of God coming against them.

J
ericho waited in alarm like a pig sensing its own impending slaughter. Spies brought back petrifying reports of the Jordan parting and the Hebrews walking across the riverbed as if strolling through a field. They reported that their enemies were more numerous than ants. The king ordered the gates of the city sealed. No one went out and no one came in. Rahab wondered what he hoped to accomplish. If the burgeoning river could not hold them back, how would dressed stone?

But the Hebrews did not attack immediately. After crossing the river at flood stage rather than waiting for its waters to abate as any normal nation might have done, they now seemed in no rush to attack. They rested. They feasted. They lounged about. Rahab puzzled over their behavior with the rest of Jericho. The waiting grated on them.

When the Hebrews deigned to come, as if finally they had roused themselves to bother with Jericho, something of an anticlimax accompanied their approach. First came their armed guard, and then what looked to be priests carrying trumpets made of rams’
horns and an ornate box, which they carried with exquisite care. Bringing up the rear came the main force of their fighting men. Their trumpets made an eerie sound hour after hour as they walked around Jericho’s walls in endless procession. At the first sight of them, the watchmen of the wall began raining down arrows. Rahab, keeping vigil at her window held her breath. The arrows fell just short of the Hebrews, as though they had calculated to the cubit the measure of Jericho’s bows. Yet they did not fight back. They merely marched, step after step, cubit after cubit, furlong after furlong. The people of Jericho had never seen anything like this. What were they doing? Showing off their strength? What good would it do them against their stone walls?

The first day they marched around the city once and left. The second day they came again, early, so that babies were roused from sleep by the blowing horns and added their own crying to the din. Rahab’s family came to her house and did not leave after that day. They spoke little. With the rest of Jericho they watched and waited, feeling helpless and on edge.

Rahab learned to talk to the Lord in the silence of her heart, for her minuscule inn was crowded with people and afforded no privacy. She had no idea if He could discern her thoughts. She hoped if He did, that He did not consider her words disrespectful or inadequate. Yet she found that speaking to Him thus soothed her fears. And there was much to fear. For the army of the Hebrews was never far from Jericho.

By the third day, the wall guards began to heckle the marching army. The Hebrews didn’t react. None of them spoke. Staring straight ahead, they just marched on and ignored the soldiers. They couldn’t hear much anyway, Rahab guessed, given the clamor they were making with their horns.

The fourth day they came and the fifth. Tensions mounted and tempers flared in the city. As if having an encroaching war at their gates wasn’t violent enough, the men broke into fistfights over insignificant things and the women screamed at old friends with little
provocation. From her post at the window Rahab overheard the gossip of the soldiers as they discussed the state of affairs in Jericho. She heard that temple sacrifices had increased even more. No one was wasting the blood of rams or bulls, either. Animals were precious commodity during a siege. They were sacrificing humans, more than ever. They made the Hebrews’ work easier for them, Rahab reflected.

Many people hid inside their huts with their hands over their ears, weeping. Others kept heckling from the wall, competing to generate the most admired insults. They were a creative people and amused themselves. None of it seemed to faze the host of the enemy.

On the seventh day the Hebrews changed tactics. Showing up earlier than ever, they didn’t stop with one march. They kept on walking, twice, three times, four times, five times, their horrifying horns blowing and blowing. Even the hecklers fell silent and grew grey with fear. Rahab stood at her window throughout the day and tried to spot Hanani or Ezra, but they were too far away for her to be sure. She kept fingering the scarlet rope to make certain it wasn’t moved. It draped outside her portion of the wall like a thread of hope. On this scarlet cord hung her future and her life, and the lives of those whom she loved. Her future hung in the balance of a rope.
No
, she reminded herself.
My future hangs in the balance of God
.

After the seventh interminable march around the city, the trumpets grew louder, unbearable almost. Then as one, the multitude raised their voices in a shout that made Rahab’s hair stand on end. The force of their voices made the ground shake, and she put her hands over her ears, trying to drown out the noise.

Even through her clutching hands, however, she could hear the noise increasing, and feel the ground literally shaking. She leaned out of the window and saw to her left and right that Jericho’s impregnable walls
were actually falling down!
They were crumbling and collapsing all around them. Without ever an arrow being shot, without fire or battering rams, with nothing more than a shout the Lord had ripped down Jericho’s fortress. Jericho had been defeated.

Rahab’s eyes watered. She felt numb with the shock of what she was seeing. As the dense powder of stone and mortar began to settle, Rahab grasped the extent of the damage. Apart from her own section of the wall, which miraculously stood unharmed, as far as her eyes could see the entire defensive structure had crumbled to the ground. In some areas a small hedge, no taller than Rahab’s knees still clung to its foundation; in others, not even that remained. To her horror, she also noticed limbs sticking out from under large pieces of stone and she knew the carnage of war had begun. For some time words failed her. Then she realized she needed to alert her family, who were clinging to each other in the back of the room away from the window, as to what had befallen their homeland.

“Gather your things together,” Rahab cried with a shaky voice, coming out of her haze. “Get ready. The walls have collapsed and they’ll be coming for us soon.”

“The walls have
collapsed?
Was that the noise we heard? But it cannot be possible!” Joa’s voice was hoarse beyond recognition. “Let me see.”

Rahab moved aside and let him look. His chest shook and a small sound escaped his lips. “No …
no!
How did this happen? They never even came within shooting distance. Was it magic—a powerful incantation of some sort?”

“No.” Rahab recalled Ezra’s brief warning that the Lord disapproved of magic, mediums, and fortune-telling. “It’s the power of God.”

Karem came to stand next to Joa. “Look!” He pointed with a finger. “The rest of the wall has fallen, but this part where we’re hiding is still standing. If this section of wall had failed we would have been crushed like those poor people. This God, it seems, has preserved our lives.”

In the middle of the worst day in the history of her people, Rahab found herself smiling. Not Hanani, not Ezra, not Joshua, not the armies of Israel, not a forced promise, but God Himself had chosen to spare her life. His own hand had sheltered them.

With more confidence, she said, “Come everyone. You have to be ready. There won’t be time for dallying once they come for us. Grab what you can carry as I have told you. Leave behind whatever isn’t essential.”

The children were crying. Rahab’s sister and sisters-in-law were crying. Her mother and father were crying. Her brothers wiped silent tears from their faces and began picking up their bundles as if in a daze. Their whole way of life was over. God had rescued them, but they were too numb and brokenhearted to be grateful yet.

They could hear the Hebrew army moving into Jericho. The sounds of fighting rang out. Running feet. Screams. Weeping. Scuffling. Clashing metal. Then Rahab heard someone running up her stairs. For a moment she froze. What if they didn’t keep their promise? What if they betrayed her? Then she remembered Hanani’s words and knew that he would keep faith.

The door burst open and there was Hanani himself with Ezra behind him. They were covered in dirt and grinning from ear to ear. Seeing them gave her a rush of strength, and she ran toward them laughing and crying at the same time. “You came. You came for us.”

“Didn’t we promise? Joshua, our leader, has sent us to take you out of Jericho. We’ll lead you to a place not far from Israel’s camp. Make sure you bring everything you’ll need. The city will be burned to the ground. We have been commanded to leave nothing standing.” Politely both men ignored the gasps and fresh tears of Rahab’s family members. An awkward moment settled over the room as enemy struggled to become friend.

It was easier for Rahab who had had so much time to adjust. She already had faith in the might of the Lord, in the truth of who He was. “Thank you,” she croaked, but could think of nothing more to say. On impulse, she grabbed the scarlet cord and shoved it in her sack. She would always treasure it in memory of the Lord’s goodness to her. It would serve her as a reminder that He had chosen to save her.

The stairs to her inn remained as solid as ever, impervious to
the destruction that reigned everywhere about them. Hanani went first, then Rahab and her family, with Ezra bringing up the rear. A stench hit Rahab the closer they got to the outside. The smell of burning wood and flesh, of blood, of flying dirt and ashes hit her so hard her throat began to burn. Rahab’s hands were full and she couldn’t cover her nose. She began breathing through her mouth, trying hard not to gag. Just as they were about to emerge from her stairway, Hanani came to a sudden halt, and Rahab, bowed under the weight of two bulging sacks, plowed into him. “Oh! Pardon.”

Hanani shook his head. “Don’t look down,” he said to her. Then raising his chin he addressed everyone. “Don’t look down. And cover the eyes of the children.”

Rahab felt the blood draining from her face. Hanani began to move again, and she followed him, her mouth dry. At the threshold of the downstairs door a body had fallen lifeless and bloody. To move forward, Rahab had to take a wide step over its torso. She tried not to look. Still she saw that its neck came to an abrupt and messy end where a head should have been. A dismayed croak escaped her lips before she managed to silence herself. She turned her face away only to see the head, rolled away near a pink rosebush, eyes staring wide, mouth open more in surprise than agony. She recognized that face. It was Hamish the guard. A fat horsefly flew out of his lifeless mouth, and Rahab bit her lip to keep from retching.

She forced herself forward, pasting her gaze on Hanani’s back, ignoring everything but that small patch of fabric, the muscles underneath it bunching and relaxing with each step. Because she lived in the wall, the carnage they passed was limited. It was more than enough horror to last a lifetime, nonetheless. Whenever she heard the words
war
or
battle
after that day, these were the pictures that her mind would conjure up.