Dear Mom,

I know I have not been going to church as regularly as you would like, and because I know you read my newsletters from beginning to end, I thought this might be the appropriate place to formally present my case before you begin adding my name to additional prayer lists amongst your praying and occasionally gossiping friends. I would first like the record to reflect that I am, in fact, reading my Bible. Actually, cough cough, I am doing considerably more than reading my Bible. Some respectable Christians wake up in the morning, read a Psalm over coffee, highlight a verse about peace, whisper a prayer and go peacefully about their day. Your daughter apparently opens 1 Chronicles, becomes suspicious about one obscure woman named Sheerah, pulls up the original Hebrew to make sure the English translators are not getting creative, checks the ancient Greek, wanders into Aramaic translations, consults Jewish commentary and eventually finds herself in the Babylonian Talmud investigating whether the people in Ezekiel’s famous valley of dry bones were Israelites who attempted to leave Egypt before Moses. I am not sure whether this earns me extra credit or confirms your concerns, but I do believe effort should count for something.

This all began because I found a woman named Sheerah, which is exactly what happens when you actually read the chapters of the Bible most of us have quietly agreed to skim. 1 Chronicles 7 is a genealogy, and genealogies require a particular kind of spiritual discipline because eventually everyone is the son of someone who is the son of someone else, and after fifteen verses you begin wondering whether God would really object if you jumped ahead a page. But buried among all those men is one extraordinary sentence: “His daughter was Sheerah, who built Lower and Upper Beth-horon, as well as Uzzen-sheerah.” I read it once, kept going and then backed up because I was certain I had misunderstood. She built what? Not a house. Not a tent. Not an altar. Cities. Three of them. Then the Bible moves along as though it has not just introduced a woman involved in developing three ancient settlements and given us absolutely no additional information about her. No husband. No children. No explanation of where she acquired the resources. No committee minutes. No ancient zoning board asking whether she had completed an environmental impact study. Sheerah built cities. Next verse.

Naturally, this annoyed me enough to investigate her, because apparently what I need in my life is another unpaid research project. And this is where I became particularly insufferable because I wanted to know what the Hebrew actually said. Was “she built” simply the way modern English translators had decided to phrase it? It wasn’t. Sitting right there in the Masoretic Hebrew text is וַתִּבֶן — vattiven — “and she built.” The verb itself is feminine singular. Whoever Sheerah was, the Hebrew text is not coy about who was doing the building. Then I checked the other textual traditions and things became considerably messier. The ancient Greek does not preserve the verse quite the same way, and the Aramaic tradition adds interpretive material of its own. Medieval Jewish commentators still knew her as the builder, and Rashi notes that Uzzen-sheerah was called by her name. Which means somewhere inside this ancient genealogy is a woman whose legacy did not simply survive because a son carried her bloodline. A piece of geography carried hers. I already had enough material to become unbearable at brunch, but then I made the mistake of reading the verses immediately before her again.

Sheerah belongs to the line of Ephraim, the younger son of Joseph, the Joseph with the coat, the pit, Egypt, Pharaoh and enough family dysfunction to sustain several seasons of prestige television. Joseph had two sons in Egypt, Manasseh and Ephraim, and when their grandfather Jacob blessed them, Joseph carefully positioned the older Manasseh for the blessing of the right hand. Jacob crossed his hands and placed the greater blessing on Ephraim instead. Joseph actually tried to correct him as though Jacob had simply become confused about where his hands were, and Jacob essentially responded that he knew exactly what he was doing. Ephraim eventually becomes enormously important in Israel’s history; Joshua emerges from this tribal line, and Ephraim becomes so significant that his name can eventually stand for the northern kingdom itself. This is a family associated with promise, inheritance, territory and the expectation that God is doing something rather important through them.

And then the genealogy suddenly stops being a genealogy and becomes a tragedy. Two descendants of Ephraim, Ezer and Elead, are killed by men of Gath in an incident involving livestock. The biblical wording is concise enough that there is debate about exactly what happened, but the result is clear: the men die, and Ephraim is devastated. Chronicles says he mourns for many days, and his relatives come to comfort him. Eventually his wife conceives again and gives birth to Beriah, whose name the text connects with the disaster that had fallen upon the household. For a book that can move through generations before I finish my coffee, this is remarkably intimate. A father grieves. His family gathers around him. Another child is eventually born. Life begins moving again. And then, only a breath later in the genealogy, we meet Sheerah, and Sheerah builds.

That was originally the story I thought I had found: death, mourning, survival, building. Beautiful. I could have closed my laptop, felt very scholarly about the entire thing and gone to lunch. But something about those dead Ephraimites kept bothering me. Ephraim was born in Egypt. Gath is in Canaan. So what exactly were his descendants doing there, getting killed by men of Gath, while Ephraim was apparently still alive to mourn them? I started looking at how Jewish interpreters had understood this strange little passage, and that is when my perfectly respectable investigation into an ancient female city builder went completely off the rails.

Because there is an ancient Jewish tradition about an Exodus before the Exodus.

Mom, I need you to stay with me because I do not remember anyone telling us this story either.

This is not a lost chapter of Exodus. Before one of your friends emails me, let me be very clear: this comes from later Jewish interpretation as rabbis tried to understand and connect difficult biblical passages. But according to one ancient tradition, descendants of Ephraim knew that God had promised Abraham that his descendants would eventually be delivered from bondage in Egypt. They attempted to calculate when that promised period would end, concluded that the time had arrived and left Egypt early. Later commentary describes their mistake as a thirty-year miscalculation. They believed God’s promise. They simply got the date wrong, and because I would like to remain in my mother’s good graces, I will resist making the extremely convenient Seventh-day Adventist joke sitting right here.

Which means, according to this tradition, they left Egypt without Moses.

Before the burning bush. Before the plagues. Before Passover. Before Pharaoh finally relented. Before the Red Sea. Before the pillar of cloud and fire. Before the rest of Israel.

They had the promise. They had studied the prophecy. They had apparently done the math.

Unfortunately, they had the right idea and the wrong date.

I cannot properly express how much this story delights and terrifies me because it may be the most exquisitely human religious mistake imaginable. God says, “I will deliver you,” and humanity responds, “Wonderful, I have reviewed the prophecy and scheduled deliverance for October 22, 1844.” There is something painfully familiar about having enough faith to believe God’s promise and just enough audacity to assume He might appreciate a beautifully organized itinerary. I understand these people. I love a plan. I love a calendar. I am deeply comforted by a reservation confirmation. I could absolutely see myself standing in ancient Egypt saying, “I realize Moses has not technically appeared yet, but everyone has confirmed, the children are packed, I have already ordered the matching leather travel bags, our accommodations are outside the cancellation window, and I really don’t see why we should lose the deposit simply because God is running a little behind schedule.”

According to the tradition, they proceeded.

And they died.

Now at this point I obviously needed to know where this story came from, which is how I ended up in Sanhedrin 92b, a section of the Babylonian Talmud, an enormous collection of centuries of Jewish law, biblical interpretation, stories and rabbinic debate, instead of doing whatever productive thing I had intended to do that morning. And this is where the rabbit hole became almost offensively good. The rabbis there are discussing Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones and debating whether the event was literal, symbolic or somehow both. Then they ask a wonderfully Jewish question: if these were actual dead people, who exactly were they? Several answers are proposed, but Rav gives one extraordinary answer. These were descendants of Ephraim who had “calculated the end and erred” the people who left Egypt before the appointed time. And to identify them, the discussion points back to the very passage I had just been staring at in 1 Chronicles: the descendants of Ephraim killed by the men of Gath, followed by Ephraim mourning them.

Suddenly the Bible stories I had kept in completely separate mental filing cabinets were sitting together at the same dinner party. 1 Chronicles 7: Ephraim’s dead descendants. Exodus: Israel eventually leaving Egypt under Moses. Ezekiel 37: an entire valley filled with very dry bones. And the rabbis sitting centuries later asking: What if these stories are connected?

I have known Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones my entire life. Most people who grew up around church know it. Ezekiel is carried by the Spirit into a valley filled with bones, and God asks him the astonishing question, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel gives what I consider one of Scripture’s finest answers when God asks you a question that clearly has a trapdoor underneath it: “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.” In other words, I will not be volunteering an opinion on this one. God commands him to prophesy, and the bones begin coming together, bone to bone, tendons, flesh, skin and eventually breath enters them until an enormous multitude stands alive where there had been nothing but death. Ezekiel itself explains the vision as a message of restoration to Israel, a people who believe their hope has been cut off.

But the rabbis keep going. One says Ezekiel literally revived the dead and they later died again. Another says they went to the land of Israel, married and had children. Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira goes so far as to claim that he descended from them, pointing to inherited tefillin as evidence. Another opinion treats the entire thing as a parable. I adore this because we sometimes talk about ancient religious people as though everyone calmly agreed about Scripture until modern people came along and complicated everything. Absolutely not. These people were debating resurrection, symbolism, chronology and genealogy centuries ago, and apparently somebody essentially stood up and said, Actually, my family has receipts.

And somewhere around this point, after the Hebrew, the ancient translations, the failed Exodus, the Talmud, Ezekiel and enough dead people to make me wonder how I had wandered so far from a woman building cities, I remembered Sheerah. She had been sitting quietly back in 1 Chronicles the entire time, and suddenly I read her differently. After all that death and mourning, Sheerah builds. Not metaphorically. She is associated with Lower Beth-horon, Upper Beth-horon and Uzzen-sheerah, settlements along a strategically important corridor that armies would travel, Joshua would fight through and Solomon would later fortify. Whatever “built” meant, founded, expanded, established, fortified, this woman was not selecting backsplash tile. She was building infrastructure.

And one of those places carried her name: Uzzen-sheerah. That may be the detail I love most. We know almost nothing else about her. We do not know whether she married, whether she had children, what she looked like or how she acquired enough authority and resources to build anything. Yet in a genealogy filled with men remembered because another man descended from them, Sheerah steps into one verse and leaves geography behind.

At first I thought the Exodus-before-the-Exodus story was teaching me not to get ahead of God, which, considering I have never encountered a six-month plan I did not believe could be accomplished within a week, is probably a lesson I should not dismiss too quickly. But the longer I sat with the story, the less interested I became in why the Ephraimites failed and the more interested I became in what happened after the failure. The men in the rabbinic story believed the promise, got the timing catastrophically wrong and became remembered as bones. Yet back in Chronicles, after Ephraim mourns what has been lost, the story keeps going and there is Sheerah, building.

Maybe that is what I love about her. Restoration does not always mean getting back exactly what was lost. Sometimes the bones really are dry. Sometimes the original plan fails spectacularly. Sometimes you have mourned something long enough and the question is no longer Why did this happen? but What are we going to build now?

Sheerah gets one verse. No speech. No explanation. Scripture does not even pause to marvel that a woman is building cities. It simply remembers what she did.

After the catastrophe, Sheerah built.

And Mom, after spending an entire morning following her through Hebrew grammar, ancient translations, a failed Exodus and a valley full of dry bones, I finally understood why I had been so drawn to her in the first place.

This is why I build.

Always Have, Always Will ~ Kalie