Member-only story
I’m not a betting person.
I don’t frequent Las Vegas.
I’m sympathetic to the cause of Native Americans, who, like indigenous peoples elsewhere (think Indians in South America; aborigines in Australia; Inuit in Canada; Blacks in South Africa), were disadvantaged by white men, some of whom spoke with forked tongue.
But I don’t visit their casinos, either.
I simply don’t trust myself.
If I did, like the narrator and protagonist of English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long work, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” I would probably rise the next day a sadder but wiser man.
I would have bet that, seemingly between a rock and a hard place — the Charybdis of the Red Sea before them and the Scylla of the pursuing army of pharaoh and his iron chariots behind — the Hebrews, recently released from bondage, were finished.
And the book of Exodus would have been much shorter.
Even though the Hebrews numbered in the hundreds of thousands, they were not fighters. They had been slaves. A lot of them were probably malnourished. And they had no weaponry.
It seemed they would either drown (probably few knew how to swim) or be slaughtered by the swords of the closing Egyptians.
