Miriam, although a prophetess and a sister of Aaron, was't very angelic, at least the glimpses we catch of her don't impress us with the fact that she was. When the seashore was strewn with the dead, white faces of the drowned Egyptians, and the waves were flecked with their pallor and dashed their helpless arms about, Miriam "took a timbrel in her hand: and all the woman went out after her with timbrels and with dances." And Miriam answered them, "Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea."
Now this may have been natural and all right for the times, only you know it don't look well when compared with the action of our women of to-day, who drop tears and roses on the graves of their enemies.
Further on we find Miriam, womanlike, talking about Moses because he had married an Ethiopian woman, and saying seditiously to Aaron, "Hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he not spoken also by us?"
And the Lord heard it and his anger "was kindled against them," and my lady "became leprous, white as snow."
As she was the one punished for daring to talk rebellion against Moses, God's chosen one, we suppose she was the ringleader and instigator, and Aaron was only the tool in this plot that budded but never bloomed.
"And Aaron looked upon Miriam, and behold, she was leprous," and of course she threw her arms around his neck and with streaming eyes besought his aid, and Aaron turned the smoothly flowing river of his eloquence into resistless words of appeal and said unto Moses, while Miriam knelt at his feet: "Alas, my Lord, I beseech thee, lay not the sin upon us," and "let her not be as one dead;" and Moses, moved, as men have always been moved, by woman's tears, "cried unto the Lord, saying, Heal her now, O, God I beseech thee," and after seven days the curse was removed.