Enter Sigmund Freud
The episode of Yahweh’s
attack against His own prophet and messenger has been rendered by such extremes
as the authors of the Midrash to the likes of Sigmund Freud, which sets up our
journey into the mysteries of this text.
Freud’s least successful book, as judged by those who acknowledge his
indefatigable efforts in defining the bedrock theories of psychoanalysis, in all
the dozens of volumes of writing—done, by the way, at the writing desk and not
at the “couch”—was Moses and Monotheism (1939).
As a Jew, Freud had a love/hate relationship with his
race and its theological, sociological history.
Often referred to as “Godless Jew,” as if there existed redundancy and
hence extreme evil in the term, Freud did not adhere to the faith of his
fathers. For Freud, God and His
inspired religions and their faithful, represented the Oedipal Conflict on a
cosmic scale. However, he became
fascinated—if not obsessed—with this particular episode in Exodus and attempted
to explain it (interestingly, there existed several of these bête noirs
for Freud, such as the belief that Shakespeare had not written “Shakespeare”).
Freud’s “least successful” book, Moses and Monotheism, has been reviled,
misunderstood, and only recently has begun to enjoy a more favorable reading,
even as the reputation of Freud and psychoanalysis in general have suffered
correspondingly by those who maintain Freud’s theories are hopelessly out of
date and irrelevant in light of the “modern” cognitive theories of mind (that’s
admittedly another argument; but one must understand that with which he
disagrees in order to establish the priority of something different; so too,
people tend to forget that Freud always hoped that somatic reasons could be
found for neuroses and psychoses).
But Freud never
intended the charges and critical implications the work received, as a work
concerned with the establishment of the Oedipal Conflict on a grander scale, or
explanation for the nexus of Hebrew/Christian correspondence. That the book saw publication in 1939 lends itself to the
latter view almost by default, especially since Freud had moved abroad by this
time, one step ahead of Hitler’s police.
Freud saw the work as a “Historical Novel”—the qualifying, generic
distinction speaks volumes as to his intentions and the material with which it
deals. But, still, it came from
Freud, and therein lay the explanation of its relevance and intended audience.
What follows then serves as the gist of Freud’s historical novel.
Freud believed that the
passage in question, wherein Yahweh seeks to kill Moses in the desert,
represents a biblical “echo”; that is, the incident should have been deleted,
forgotten by later peoples, and never found its way to oral storytelling, much
less print (if peoples two millennia before Christ could conceive of such).
Freud is not alone in this idea; many aspects of an older, oral tradition exist,
but most have been synthesized into acceptable forms of redaction.
The scholar/writer Robert Graves gives us his well-known work Hebrew
Myths (with Raphael Patain, 1963), which, for instance, focuses on the oral
tradtions of the earliest of writings, such as Genesis 3: the Serpent and its
tempting manner in the Garden, for Graves and other mythologists, stands as an
echo of the Dragon of Chaos, and Adam’s first wife, Lilith, who, as the first
liberated woman, wished for equality.
She saw the act of lovemaking as
typical
male domination and desired other means for intercourse, which caused Adam
considerable problems. Forsaking
her mate, she liberates herself by coupling with the great god of Chaos and
breeds evil spirits, among whom may be found one god of evil who would
distinguish himself as Satan. Thus
the idea of a sanitized and much-changed narrative finds the Serpent showing up
in the Garden, after Yahweh has tamed and created out of Chaos, and seduces the
woman who succumbs to his power, partly because of her dissatisfaction with the
way women are disparaged.
Freud believed that the
echo in question here, with regard to Yahweh attacking Moses in the desert,
represented something that historically took place, a thing so horrible and
traumatic for the people who engaged in it that they had to rewrite the story in
order to live with their guilt. Make no mistake: the story as Freud comes to believe is
certainly part of his Oedipal theory; however, all psychic development in
Freud’s view depends on this (these) traumatic circumstance.
He maintained that the children of Israel killed Moses in the wilderness,
and, suffering great guilt for the death of their father figure, the people had
to “invent” a second Moses, one who delivered them from evil and sent them on
their way to the Promised Land.
Freud’s research led him to believe that the echo of Yahweh seeking to kill
Moses inadvertently remained in the text, clarified as to its Oedipal crisis by
the manner in which Zipporah manages to dissuade God from taking Moses’ life
(circumcision or symbolic castration), and all that follows, with the rash
actions of the Hebrews in the wilderness and the apparent ease with which they
stray, even after a first-hand view of God’s power in the night of the “Passing
Over.”
Freud maintained that
the Israelites retold and rewrote their history so that no death occurred,
merely the threat, and that Moses maintained his grasp over the feckless,
backsliding Israelites. Moreover,
Freud maintains that various concern from the text, such as the inability of the
people to leave the inhospitable wilderness for such a long time—when Abraham
managed a much longer journey in a fraction of the time and braving worse
conditions—could not profitably be explained, except to say that time and its
corresponding confusion were attempts to expiate and muddy the waters as to what
truly happened. As a small token of
revenge in their collective memories, at least Moses does not reach the Promised
Land.
After Christian doctrine
had burst the confines of Judaism, it absorbed constituents from many other
sources, renounced many features of pure monotheism, and adopted in many
particulars the ritual of the other Mediterranean peoples.
It was as if Egypt had come to wreak her vengeance on the heirs of
Ikhnaton [Freud’s spelling for Akenaten].
The way in which the new religion came to terms with the ancient
ambivalences in the father-son relationship is noteworthy.
Its main doctrine, to be sure, was the reconciliation with God the
Father, the expiation of the crime committed against him; but the other side of
the relationship manifested itself in the Son, who had taken the guilt on his
shoulders, becoming god himself beside the Father and in truth in place of the
Father. Originally a Father
religion, Christianity became a Son religion: the fate of having to displace
the Father it could not escape (Freud 175-76).
Freud maintained that
Moses was, in fact, not a Hebrew at all, but the Egyptian pharaoh who ascended
the throne about 1375 B.C.E., named Akhenaten (who took the king name, Amenhotep
IV; like his father, he changed his name—he died in 1358), who believed in only
one god, the Sun, which was heresy for the priests of Egypt and their plethora
of gods and goddesses. This
pharaoh overturned all that was “holy” in the name of heresy, a belief in one
god, and reversed all the most cherished religious practices and beliefs of his
people. These same people rose up,
overthrew the pharaoh, and sent him and his followers into exile in the desert.
There his people grew restless, rose up in agitation over their homelessness and
heretical beliefs, killed Amenhotep, and then suffered the guilt that children
go through in their infancy and before adolescence: the desire of the male child
to wish the father dead in order that he may possess the mother, and, should
some harm actually come to the father, the child suffers throughout his
life with the guilt for having not only desired the death, but somehow
possessing the power in which to effect it.
As a subtext to this idea, note how important women are in the earliest parts of
the narrative; they remain the desired objects of a people, most especially in
the episode of Moses at the well in Midia, for wells are thematically equated in
Scripture to a wife (Proverbs 1:15-16), a prostitute (Proverbs 23:27), or, if
sealed, a virgin (Genesis 29:2-10), and the word may pun between “drink,”
“kiss,” and “lust.”
No historical
documentation exists to suggest that the Moses of Egypt or Israel ever existed.
But that should not deter us, anymore than specific evidence of Jesus
having lived remains “unprovable.”
Akhenaten instituted a monotheistic religion in the fourteenth century, B.C.E.
His established religion was forgotten immediately after his death: Moses
is a figure of memory but not history, while Akhenaten was a figure of history
but not of memory. But when we
speak of religion are we speaking of no more than a distinction between “us” and
“them”? Doesn’t every religion
establish what passes for barbarism and paganism even as it totes what and who
the “divine” and elected are? All
cultures establish this “otherness” in their construction of identity but also
develop the techniques of translation; that is, we must distinguish between the
“real” and the “other,” which always goes to the heart of determining self and
otherness, as well as constructing the Other to such a degree that it is
duplicitous and obviously dangerous, for it remains the shadow of individual
identity.
Polytheistic religions
overcame the primitive ethnocentrism of tribal religions by distinguishing
several deities by name, shape, and function.
The names are, of course, different in different cultures, because the
languages are different. The shapes
of the gods and the forms of worship may also differ significantly.
But the functions are strikingly similar, especially in the case of
cosmic deities; and most deities had a cosmic function.
The sun god of one religion is easily equated to the sun god of another
religion and so forth. Because of
their functional equivalence, deities of different religions can be equated.
The gods were
international because they were cosmic.
The different peoples worshipped different gods, but nobody contested the
reality of foreign gods and the legitimacy of foreign forms of worship. The Mosaic distinction was therefore a radically new
distinction, which considerably
changed
the world in which it was drawn.
The space, which was “severed or cloven” by this distinction, was not simply the
space of religion in general but that of a very specific kind of religion.
We may call this new type of religion “counter-religion” because it
rejects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as
“paganism.” It no longer functioned
as a means of intercultural translation; on the contrary, it functioned as a
means of intercultural estrangement.
All cultural
distinctions need to be remembered in order to render permanent the space, which
they construct. Usually, this
function of remembering the fundamental distinction assumes the form of a “Grand
Narrative,” a master story that underlies and informs innumerable concrete
tellings and retellings of the past.
The Mosaic distinction between true and false in religion finds it
expression in the story of Exodus.
In the space that is constructed by the Mosaic distinction, the worship of
images came to be regarded as the absolute horror, falsehood, an apostasy.
Polytheism and idolatry were seen as the same form of religious error.
The second commandment is a commentary on the first:
-
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
-
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
Images are
automatically “other gods,” because the true god is invisible and cannot
iconically be represented.
Exodus is a symbolical
story, the Law is a symbolical legislation, and Moses is a symbolical figure.
The whole constellation of Israel and Egypt is symbolical and comes to symbolize
all kinds of oppositions.
But the leading one is the distinction between true religion and
idolatry. Some poignant verses in
Deutero-Isaiah and Psalm 115 develop into whole chapters in the apocryphal
Sapientia Salomonis and long sections in Philo’s De Decalogo and
De Legibus Specialibus.
This hatred was mutual
and the “idolaters” did not fail to retaliate.
Understandably enough most of them were Egyptians.
For example, the Egyptian priest Manetho, who wrote an Egyptian history
under Ptolemy II, represented Moses as a rebellious Egyptian priest who made
himself the leader of a colony of lepers.
Whereas the Jews depicted idolatry as a kind of mental aberration, of madness,
the Egyptians associated iconoclasm with the idea of highly contagious and
bodily disfiguring epidemic. The
language of illness continues to typify the debate on the Mosaic distinction
down to the days of Sigmund Freud.
This story about the lepers originally referred not to Moses, but Akhenaten, who
was the first to establish a monotheistic counter-religion and to draw the
distinction between true and false.
But after this death, his religion was abolished, and his name fell into
complete oblivion. The traumatic
memories of his revolution were encrypted and dislocated; eventually they came
to be fixed on the Jews.
When Sigmund Freud felt
the rising tide of German anti-Semitism outgrowing the traditional dimensions of
persecution and oppression and turning into a murderous attack, he—remarkably
enough—did not ask the obvious question of “how the Germans came to murder the
Jews”; instead he asked, how “the Jew came to attract this undying hatred.”
He embarked on a project very different from his normal work.
This “historical novel,” as he first called it, was a rather private
undertaking, a kind of “day-dreaming,” which underwent many transformations
before it was finally published as a book.
His quest for origins
took him as far back as Akhenaten and his monotheistic revolution.
In making Moses an Egyptian and in tracing monotheism back to ancient
Egypt, Freud attempted to deconstruct the murderous distinction.
It is the same method of deconstruction by historical reduction that
Nietzsche had used in his Genealogy of Morals.
But to understand properly what we’re saying here means understanding
that Egypt and Israel, both North and South, were neighbors, sharing both
political, ideological, commercial, and complex associations.
Thus, for one of the these countries, along with several others, to break
the relationship by not evolving but breaking—revolution as opposed to
evolution—that bond obviously meant trouble.
We seem to think that
monotheism represents progression and “modern” views in contrast to polytheism;
it does not. Monotheism always
appeared as counter-religion to the status quo or the conservative,
traditional way. Imagine, if you
will, the difficulty that anyone would have today in establishing a new thought
that ran counter to that most of us accepted, and, most especially, the middle
road of conservatism in our nation.
America is and has always been a very conservative nation, so that
we even shy away from the thought of a Roman Catholic occupying the White House,
to say nothing of a Jew or African-American.
What we call “liberalism” in America is the middle way to most European
nations, and even represents conservativism in many.
Anything that changed the conservative nature of our religious beliefs
would be attacked in America, but how much more so by the well-known,
well-connected most conservative of Christians, such as Pat Robertson or Jerry
Falwell? How could one possibly
stand against their onslaught of money, influence, television time and
opportunity?
So, in order for us to assimilate
these terms and ideas, it becomes necessary to repeat some of them, if briefly,
in order clearly to establish the concept so that we may move on to the later
significances. The Exodus
represents a story of migration and conversion, of something radical, of
something that separates the old from the new: Egypt represents the old, while
Israel represents the new. In terms
of cultural memory, this becomes the “memory of conversion.”
And in this new way of thinking, the old ways, the ways of memory for a
people say that idolatry is forgetting and regression, but monotheism means
remembering and progression. The
term for cultural memory as a people who can and do go back to some pertinent
event in their history, which represents more than an act but designates who and
what they are, has come to be termed “Mnemohistory” (Mnemosyne was the mother of
the nine
muses; the name suggests “memory” and the totality of cultural activities).
While not the opposite of history, the term means a branch, whether social or
intellectual or even cultural that leaves aside the synchronic events of what is
happening or is investigated; it focuses on the products of history or
memory, a recourse to the past that can only become clear when we have read,
participated, or become influenced in many areas of our history.
In other words, history is no longer transmitting and receiving: we
become haunted by our past as it encroaches on everything we do.
Memories easily change,
as we’re coming to learn and which, even as I write this, have been distorted,
falsified, invented, and implanted.
Just recently a researcher demonstrated this by implanting the idea of
memories within people who had visited one of the Disney theme-parks, suggesting
that they had visited with “Bugs Bunny” while there and had pleasant memories
associated with what they did and what their children saw, etc., when Bugs
approached them. They recalled it
vividly, enough to swear it happened, only to learn that Bugs Bunny is a Warner
Brothers character, not one of the Disney stock.
Memory is only a valid, historical source if checked by “objective”
evidence. But for historical
researchers, history lives only if it made an impression on the
collective memory, and if it makes no impression it is easily forgotten.
And so, for the
historicist, the task remains to separate historical facts from mythical
elements, and then to distinguish those elements of the past as they shape or
impinge upon the present. However,
for the mnemohistoricist, the truth exists in analyzing the mythical elements of
the past and attempting to understand their hidden agenda.
In this instance, the problem is not was Moses aware of and trained in
the life of Egypt, but rather why his Egyptian life and ways is not
presented in the book of Exodus—and, moreover, why is not in the Hebrew text of
Exodus but is in the Christian text of Acts 7:22?
This is somewhat akin to forgetting that Paul was a conservative Jew, who
comes to bridge the gap between Jews and Christians in our thinking, but in
terms of his time he was as much different from today’s Christians as one
can imagine, an ambivalent figure in Jewish messianism.
This counter-memory goes even further, stating that “you remember it this
way, but I remember it differently…because I recall what you have forgotten.
We forget that the line between history and myth is one of continuous movement:
history turns into myth as soon as it is remembered, narrated, and used in such
a way as to be woven into the fabric of our present.
The question that now
must be addressed is what is the cultural memory of the Jews and Egypt,
what is it or how does this cultural memory differ from historical events
in terms of objective portrayal or evidence passed onto the Jews, and by way of
the Jews to Christians in their time (when they first differentiated
themselves from Jewish thought and belief) and our own?
One must first go back to the Renaissance (originally an art history term
of the nineteenth century, designating the “new birth” of classical thought that
transpired in the late fourteenth century in Southern Europe and later, in the
early sixteenth century, in the North).
This was the “golden age” of the Egyptophilia.
The second wave occurred in the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt, when
hieroglyphic script was first deciphered, in the next century.
The interest in all things Egyptian was such that the nineteenth century
firmly believed that the nation was the “origin of all cults.”
Where are we headed?
The answer to that remains far easier than the explanation.
Moses was an Egyptian—the question, however, is still one of who Moses
was: Akhenaten, perhaps? Akhenaten,
or Pharaoh Amenophis IV, became erased shortly after his death from all the
king-lists, monuments, inscriptions, and anything that bore his name—this from a
people who were scrupulous in their
historical
lists (from which much biblical historicity is gathered, given that the Bible
may be the only evidence for the existence of many people).
It was not until that great age of the Nineteenth Century that he became
known once again. The difficulty
here is that Akhenaten existed, but there is no memory of him, while Moses has
been recalled in memory, but no physical, historical evidence survives to prove
his existence.
Whoever Moses was, he
destroyed and abolished all cults and idols of Eyptian polytheists and
established a purely monotheistic religion—for Akhenaten, that meant the god of
light, whom he called Aton.
Scholars of Eyptology and the Moses connection look, for instance, at Psalm 104
and ask if this is not a hymn to the Egyptian god translated into Hebrew.
Moreover, they ask if Aton and the Hebrew Adonai (“Lord”) are not the
same and from the root noun. This
pharaoh is the one that Freud argued in his “historical novel” was really Moses.
But because he saw the resurrection, so to speak, of a second Moses once they
had killed the first as a continuation of their need for a hero, a leader, and
one they could look back upon with fond memory and to establish who and what
they were, many mistook the Oedipal associations of a people acting in concert
and collectively the way that Freud had argued for the individual’s struggle
with selfhood and maturation as the raison d’être of the work.
While it fit perfectly with Freud’s schema, the book was not intended as
psychoanalytic theory but conjecture, and that with considerable license, as
with all fiction.
What, you may ask, has
all this to do with a leader who lived in the mid-fourteenth century B.C.E., and
ruled for a brief seventeen years?
Because, this is the same time as our biblical Moses.
And one can go back further for several more centuries to remembered
events in this part of the world that would influence its people: the Hyksos
invasion of Palestinian invaders who lived and ruled Egypt for one hundred
years. They, however, lived and
conformed to the polytheistic way of the people whom they conquered, but they
were driven out in such a way that those retelling the stories of Akhenaten and
trying to explain his “evil ways” could impart a different cultural memory.
Is what the people suffered through their traumatic recollection (and
traumas cause memories—to such an extant that people sometimes forget them but
carry their influences in the lack of speech, sleep, terrible episodes brought
about by seemingly irrelevant events or triggers, and the like, so that traumas
are bad enough that our entire being attempts to erase them as best as possible)
part of their displeasure and upheaval over the first monotheist converting
through power the nation into monotheism? One argument for the idea of
trauma comes to us from this age, referred to as the Armana age, when the
Hittite Empire raided an Egyptian garrison and brought with them plague, one
that raged for as long as twenty years.
The feasts in ancient
Egypt were the only occasion when the gods left their temples and appeared to
the people at large; otherwise, they dwelt entirely in darkness inside the
sanctuaries of their temples, inaccessible to all but the most select of
priests. All feasts took the form
of processions, when the gods appeared outside the city walls; thus the city is
where people wanted to be, to be buried, to find their gods, to associate with
the priesthood: the more important the god or procession, the more
important the city and vice versa.
Can one imagine a period of time when disease spreads by the contact of
individuals within the city? To
stop this and to deprive the people of their feasts and associations with their
gods must have caused enormous turmoil and trauma.
Conjoin this with the idea of the trauma of one bringing a new religion, one
different than all of their past, and one can understand how cultural memory
wishes to link the two and recall them as one.
The Asiatic illness—leprosy?—soon finds itself in association with the Hyksos’
god Baal, who is associated with the Egyptian god Seth.
It is at this time that the Egyptian god Seth begins to become a god of
“otherness,” of characteristics of a devil and Asiatic foreigner.
To try and recast this
explanation into summarized form, we find that the Armana period, that which saw
the pharaoh break with all tradition and to institute a religion of but one god,
not many, retrospectively shapes a collective memory of the Hyksos occupation,
of disease and foreignness, so that for the Egyptian memory is associated with
all that represents this “otherness,” which finds its way to projection upon
Jews. Jews remember the experience
one way, Egypt another. Ancient
historians, such as Josephus, write of the terrible period as being brought
about by the Jews: as Egypt remembers the events, they cast out the unclean,
disease bearing and ungodly Jews; as Hebrew memory has it, a leader rose up and
released them from the bondage of living among pagans, visiting upon them
numerous dire and plague-filled wonders from their god.
The Egyptians remember the savage Hyksos, Palestinians, while the Jews
remember Pharaoh and his “strengthened heart.”
The argument for this
cultural memory and what has changed or how it has been remembered is,
admittedly, poorly rendered here, and I would urge the reader to consult Jan
Assmann’s work, Moses the Egyptian, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism,
the work of anthropologist and sociologist Mary Douglas, or a host of other
sources in the study of both religion and Egyptology. But the most important principle here, especially in terms of
literature, is to remember that all is fiction. And by that we do not denigrate biblical narratives; we
merely remind the reader that all events, whether purported to be fiction or
fact, render perspective and recall events and their selective memories as
biased points of view. Such a
perspective does not render something “untrue,” but it goes back to the concept
discussed in another essay that “truth” exists by correspondence or
coherence—one may judge the “rightness” of something by how it corresponds
to know facts, those we feel comfortable with and have come to accept without
question, or one may see events by their totality and how they cohere to a
larger idea, since some of the parts may be symbolic, metaphoric, or used for
illustration.
Note, however, that
polytheism is not ignorance or immaturity with regard to a culture; on the
contrary, it represents a much more sophisticated form of interaction between
peoples. Two entirely different
races may call their gods by different names but they agree on the existence of
the god and the power exhibited.
Many of the gods of monotheism, in fact, derive from a single source,
acknowledged by the believers, which attribute not to gods, but God (this God is
called by many names but answers to the “true name,” distinguishing its rightful
source.
I invoke you as do the Egyptians:
As do the Jews: Adonaie Sabaoth
As do the Greeks: king, ruling as monarch over all,
As do the high priests: hidden one, invisible one, who looks upon all,
As do the Parthians: OYERTO almighty.
(Papyrus Leiden I, 384)
Or,
The sons of Ogyges call me Bacchus,
Egyptians think me Osiris,
Mysians name me Phanaces,
Indians regard me as Dionysus,
Roman rites make me Liber,
The Arab race thinks me Adoneus,
Lucaniacus the Universal God.
(Epigram 48 of Ausonius)
The crime that
Akhenaten committed was to dismiss all power into but one source, the Sun.
Priests would tell the people that this caused the plague, disease,
death, and that the only way to regain favor with “the” Deity was to expel those
who brought the contagion. In fact,
the story of Moses circulated among many different peoples, in many cultures,
and in many narratives (including one of the First Century B.C.E., where the
leaders of the people are named Joseph and Moses, much like a later rendering of
two different people at two vastly different times having to do with the
Egyptians and escape).
The point here is that
one religion may give way, and often does, to a counter religion that
attempts to revile the former and in everyway appear as different.
In the study of literature, for instance, it is commonplace to accept and
to identify the fact that every age disparages the previous; it attempts to move
as far away as possible. And yet,
by its very insistence upon difference, it points up all the more its
similarities—the idea of Gertrude stating in Hamlet that “the lady doth protest
too much.” In other words, Gertrude
notes that the Player Queen makes too much out of denial and therefore points to
her own guilt (much as Claudius does in the play, Hamlet). The argument that the literature concerning Moses reveals
“protestation” by the people who adhere to its tenets rests in everything that
the revealed religion demanded: monotheism is the counter-religion; no zooistic
or animal-like powers and deities may be demonstrated; dietary laws are
essential; the people are separated from their gods due to impurity, and so the
gods cannot come out to visit them from the city, and the people were not
expelled—they revolted and left of their own accord, having first struck the
land with a plague.
Here
are a few questions
and observations for the reader to consider with regard to the
Exodus and Moses narratives:
Note how little we know
about the early Moses, his confrontations that lead to his self-imposed exile
(must he flee?), the lack of control in all of this (is God directing Moses or
is this pure providence?—and what does that mean?); the restraint he shows when
dealing with the invaders at the well—only scaring them off as opposed to
killing them.
Moreover, Moses
demonstrates progressively restrained tendency from the first killing of the
Eyptian taskmaster. After the encounter at the well in Midian, he has the
opportunity to meet the seven
daughters of Reuel. Note that the well or spring was, as it is now, life
to the Bedouins. But there’s more:
the spring or well is a female symbol: a wife (Proverbs 1:15-16); a prostitute
(Proverbs 23:27), or, if sealed, a virgin (Genesis 29:2-10; Cant. 4:12; and
Cant. 1:2 (which develops a pun between drink, kiss, and lust [p. 175]).
The bond is greater
between Reuel (sometimes referred to as Jethro) than between Moses and Zipporah—why?
Does he look rich? But they
would have feared and loathed the Egyptians.
Does the narrative smack of the testing of Isaac and Rebekah—also, Reuel
has nothing but daughters. Then
again, this isn’t romantic, but political and religious as opposed to
patriarchal and matriarchal.
Note the bond between
Israel and Midian: Gen. 4:1-16
paints these people as murderers; they kidnap Joseph; P won’t deal with them in
his narrative—who omits Moses sojourn among them, that his wife came from Midia.
P would have nothing to do with them; only the older texts of J and E come
through with this information.
Exodus 2:23-25: “And
Deity remembered his covenant.” J
and E give us suspense, where we believe that the God behind this must make
Himself known; however, the redactor detached this from 6:2, from P; as it
stands here, it demonstrates Yahweh’s universal scope, even interrupting a
pastoral description that Israel’s suffering continues.
But the most striking feature of this passage is that Elohim is repeated
five times. This signals the lack
of detachment from His place in the world—no more behind the scenes, but now
actively taking part.
Moses claims to be
heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue—he attempts to dissuade Yahweh: Chapter 4,
verse 14: “then Yahweh’s nose grew angry at Moses…”
Notice the mix of senses.
Yahweh points out that Aaron approaches, his fellow Levite. Yahweh tells him that He will “strengthen his heart” that
Pharaoh won’t believe.” Also, Moses
gathers his woman and his possessions and saddles his ass—does this seem like
the Christian Scriptures?
Verse 24-25 is the
troublesome passage of Zipporah saving Moses from death.
Verse 26: “A bridegroom/son-in-law of bloodiness by circumcision.”
Then Yahweh speaks to Aaron: “Go to meet Moses to the wilderness.”
What happens here? Is this belated punishment for having killed a man in
the heat of anger? Or is there other significances to Moses' being saved
by his wife?
Verse 29: “And Moses
and Aaron went and assembled all of the elders of Israel’s Sons, (30) and Aaron
spoke all the words that Yahweh had spoken to Moses, and he did the signs before
the people’s eyes. (31) And the
people trusted, and they heard that Yahweh acknowledged Israel’s Sons and that
he beheld their oppression. And
they knelt and bowed down. Is this an indication of the Priestly writer, a
way to work the importance of the line of priests from Aaron into this important
narrative?
Exodus 3-4 offers the
best evidence for the Documentary Hypothesis, most especially J and E.
Distinguishing from P is much easier here—but that between J and E is the
problem. E calls Moses’
father-in-law Jethro, rather than Hobab or Reuel, as well as referring to the
Deities mountain as Horeb. As well,
E gives us Aaron as Moses’ interpreter.
Many echoes of Genesis, where the E writer is easy to spot are here in evidence
as well: “moreover, see: him coming out to meet you” is repeated in Gen. 32:7
and Exodus 4:14. Does E give us the Aaron importance because of the
division of the kingdom when he wrote, where North and South are separate, but
the Priests coming from the North?
Exodus 3:7 & 9
represent doublets. Later, specific
mentions of “hiding his face,” or removing his sandals” are both evidence of J
and E—never P. The strange sequence
of events here seems to be the work of the Redactor: Aaron’s mission seems often
misplaced in the narrative, where he receives his call, where Moses meets him,
to say nothing of the bridegroom of blood incident.
The most momentous
change wrought by the combination of J and E involves the divine name.
In E. the scene at Horeb is the climactic moment when God first reveals
his proper name to Moses, Israel and the world.
In JE, the meaning of the scene is entirely changed.
Since the name “Yahweh” was already known to the Patriarchs (e.g., Gen
15:2[J]), Moses’ request for God’s true name (3:13[E]) implies either that Moses
is testing the bush (cf. Deut 18:20-22; Judg 13:17) or that the name of the
ancestral god had been forgotten by Israel, or at lest never been taught to
Moses. If Moses himself never
learned the name, he is presumably preparing himself for interrogation by a
skeptical people (Jacob 1992: 65-62; and Comment, pp. 223-224).
One may find in various newer
biblical translations that Moses and the Hebrews do not have the Red Sea part
for them by God; rather it is the Reed Sea. This would have been the case
in terms of their journey out of Egypt--and the reeds that were used in so much
of their writing (papyrus) and building materials, such as bricks, grow only in
fresh, not salt water. A translator's error has been compounded throughout
the years (centuries) incorrectly translating Red for Reed, so that with more
modern translations that have gone back to older, more reliable translations
(for remember that all biblical material is translation, from translation, from
translation), the substitution of Reed for Red is natural. Older, more
venerated translations, such as the King James Version, hold onto the incorrect
"Red Sea" for the departure out of Egypt.
Finally, we must
observe several contributions of the Redactor: he is probably responsible for
4:21b, “But I, I will strengthen his heart, and he will not release the people.”
We have already been advised that Pharaoh will be uncooperative (3:19 [E]); now
we are assured that this is God’s plan.
Had the Redactor inserted his comment between vv 23 and 24, he would have
destroyed Redactor’s association of Pharaoh’s son with Moses’s son.
Instead, he set his interjection between references to the coming
“wonders” (i.e., the Plagues) and the slaying of the firstborn.
Exodus 4:21b later becomes the refrain of the Plagues cycle (7:13, 22;
8;11, 15; 9:12, 35; 10:20, 27; 11:10-11).
The Redactor’s work also created new implications and associations.
“Aaron your brother [i.e. “fellow”] Levite” (4:14[E]; becomes Moses’ full
brother 6:20 [R]. The valuables
taken from the Egyptians (3:22; 11:2-3; 12:35-36[J?] are no longer mere booty.
In the composite Torah, they are presumably used for building the Tabernacle
(chaps. 25-31, 35-40 [P]).
