Ten.
Ten days. Ten weeks. Ten months, Ten wives. No, definitely not. Ten daughters, Ten sons. Joseph slogged through the mud to the end of the drainage ditch he was digging. This was the tenth hour today. He could feel every swing of the pick now.
Ten picks, Ten cubits. Ten, uh, Ten Commandments! There. Something he could occupy his mind with for a while. Thou shalt not have any other gods. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain. Thou shalt not, I mean, Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor.
He didn’t need a command to work, he thought to himself as he swung the pick just a little harder. Just looking into his wife’s face, his richly loved, but poorly dressed wife, was enough to keep him working from dawn until dark every day, well six days. With each passing week, it was a little harder to find work and a little harder to support his new little family of two, soon to become three.
Joseph was waiting. Waiting for the baby to come, waiting to make Mary his wife in every sense, waiting to make the trip back to Nazareth and his business. He had always hated waiting! He had waited for Mary to become old enough to wed, then the midnight visits that had changed both of their lives forever.
One more step forward, one more swing of the pick. He knew how to be a good father. His older sons, left without a mother years before, still relied on him for everything. But how to be a father to someone else’s child? The son of JHWH himself, the Promised One of Israel, the Messiah. Step. Swing. How could he raise and train this son? Wouldn’t he need much more to save Israel than just apprenticeship to a master carpenter?
Step. Swing. He buried the point of the pick deep into the earth and fell to his knees. The light finally fading in the western sky, he lifted his face heavenward. Not my will, but yours be done, he whispered the prayer. He gasped a quick breath as his few words seemed to echo in the stillness. In a moment of strange vision and clarity, he wondered. Would his son say those same words in desperate submission one day? Step. Swing. The pick to his shoulder, he walked slowly toward the stable cave, lost in thought.