to be a prophet he would communicate with him in a dream; but there must
always be a wide difference between such a man or woman and Moses with
whom he would "speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark
speeches." And then God demanded irritably, "Wherefore, then, were ye not
afraid to speak against my servant Moses?" "Afterward the cloud,"
according to the Bible, departed and God with it.

Ever since the dawn of time the infliction of or the cure of disease has
been the stronghold of the necromancer, the wise man, the magician, the
saint, the prophet and the priest, and Moses was no exception to the rule,
only hitherto he had had no occasion to display his powers of this kind.
Nevertheless, among the Hebrews of the exodus, the field for this form of
miracle was large. Leprosy was very prevalent, so much so that in Egypt
the Jews were called a nation of lepers. And in the camp the regulations
touching them were strict and numerous. But the Jews were always a dirty
race.

In chapter XIII of Leviticus, elaborate directions are given as to how the
patient shall be brought before Aaron himself, or at least some other of
the priests, who was to examine the sore and, if it proved to be a
probable case of leprosy, the patient was to be excluded from the camp for
a week. At the end of that time the disease, if malignant, was supposed to
show signs of spreading, in which case there was no cure and the patient
was condemned to civil death. On the contrary, if no virulent symptoms
developed during the week, the patient was pronounced clean and returned
to ordinary life.

The miracle in the case of Miriam was this: When the cloud departed from
off the tabernacle, Miriam was found to be "leprous, white as snow," just
as Moses' hand was found to be white with leprosy after his conversation