Free Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) by Stant Litore

People and their terrible past, stood the Tent of Meeting, many-colored and stretched over a frame of wooden poles. It was the reason for Shiloh’s existence. Within it, behind a heavy veil, was the
kodesh kodashim
, the Holy of Holies,which held the Ark of the Covenant. Inside that great chest of wood and gold were tablets of stone on which were inscribed the Ten, the words spoken by God to the People at Har Sinai, the words that had initiated the Covenant, the first words of the Law. And above that Ark, in an empty space between the outspread wings of carved golden angels, dwelled the
shekinah
, the heat and presence of their ancient desert God.
    Even in their ancestors’ time when Shiloh had moved often, this Tent had never been raised
within
the camp. It always stood just outside, in hope that the uncleanness of the People would not offend God to wrath. In the outer part of the Tent, in a tiny censer prepared by levite women and placed before the veil, incense was burned at all hours, to sweeten the scent of the camp, so it would be easier for God to live near them. The
kohannim
taught that this God they’d found in the desert was not like the handcrafted gods of wood and stone that the heathen revered, gods who might be housed within your own tent without fear, small gods who were powerless to protect those who honored them from either the spears of the living or the teeth of the dead.
    No, the Hebrews’ God was
el kadosh
. He was a mighty and holy God, and the unclean dead and the unclean living alike would wither if they approached him. At all times he was set apart from the camp, so that if his anger burst into flame, perhaps only a small part of the camp would burn, those tents nearest him. He must be approached with care. His heat could kindle not only against the enemies of the People, living or dead, but against the People themselves. For though the
kohannim
believed this strange God had consented and chosen to dwell among the Hebrews alone out of all the peoples in all the lands beneath the sun, the
kohannim
also remembered that before this God, all peoples, even theirs, were small. If God’s slightest fingertip touched the land, that touch might dry a river or scorch crops. What thenwould happen if, looking about and seeing the evil the People too often did to each other, how the People too often failed to care for the living or confine the dead, what if God in wrath should strike the land with his fist? Would not the very hills smoke?

    Devora passed the Tent of Meeting as she hurried into Shiloh, and she passed the charred earth beside it, that silent memorial to the night of wrath thirty years past. Her heart hardened at the sight of it. That night it had been Canaanites who had brought the unclean death to the camp. The heathen who could not be trusted to place their dead beneath cairns or to keep their camps clean of dead meat or even to wash their own arms up to the elbows before lifting their fingers to their mouths. The heathen who all but
invited
the coming of the unclean dead.
    At the doors of the white tents, the
kohannim
and their wives stood singing, in robes and gowns of white with embroidered hems. The men sang first, deep voices lifted in ululation to greet the Sabbath bride, who came over the hills clothed in the
shekinah
. Even before the men’s voices fell silent, their wives lifted their own, lovely voices calling out their worship of the God who gives and takes away, the God who stirs new life in the womb and closes us each in the womb of the earth when our brief lives have ended.
    The men and women of Shiloh camp inclined their heads respectfully as the
navi
passed, and despite her haste Devora slowed her walk enough that she could pass them with dignity—though her white gown was stained and torn in places from her work in raising the cairn, and her feet were sore within her sandals. The song she heard all about her was a comfort; it eased the anxiety that had choked her after the