 | | And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses
[Num. 12:1]: This teaches that both of them spoke against him but Miriam initiated it, for Miriam was not accustomed to speaking in the presence of Aaron, except for an immediate need.
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The midrashic text is a response to an anomaly in the biblical text, namely that while the verb has two subjects, one male and one female, the verb-form is feminine singular.
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The midrash interprets this to mean that it was on Miriam's initiative that the slander or complaint against Moses took place. The midrash continues to explicate the story:
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| | And Miriam and Aaron spoke with regard to the Ethiopian woman:
And indeed, how did Miriam know that Moses had withdrawn from sexual intercourse?
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She saw that Tzipporah no longer adorned herself with women's ornaments. She said to her, "What is the matter with you? Why do you not adorn yourself with women's ornaments?" She said, "Your brother does not care about the matter." And this is how Miriam knew. And she spoke to her brother [Aaron], and the two of them spoke against him.
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| | Rabbi Nathan said Miriam was at the side of Tzipporah, at the time, when it says "And the youth ran . . . and said Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp" [Num. 11:28]. When Tzipporah heard, she
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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| | "for he had married an Ethiopian woman"? There are women who are comely in their beauty but not in their deeds, in their deeds but not in their beauty, as it says, "like a gold ring in the nose of a pig is a beautiful woman without wisdom" [Prov. 11:22]. But this one was comely in her beauty and in her deeds, therefore it says, "for he had married an Ethiopian woman."
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| | Since it is impossible to suppose that Tzipporah fits the normal denotative meaning of "Ethiopian," the term is taken as a metaphor for distinctiveness, for being somehow unusual, a fairly common midrashic move. The midrash goes out of its way to read the attribution as positive, praising Tzipporah as both attractive and righteous, thus emphasizing all the more the injustice done to her by Moses's overzealous piety. As the Talmud remarks in another context, "Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said, 'Anyone whose wife is a fearer of Heaven and he does not sleep with her is called a sinner, as it says, And you shall know that your tent is at peace' [Job 5:25]" (Yevamot 62b).
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| | 42. To be sure, modern grammatical analysis of Hebrew does not recognize this as an anomaly, arguing that in Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, when a verb appears before two coordinated subjects, it agrees with the first of them. However, as I have argued in my book (Boyarin 1990c), midrashic exegesis must be understood on the basis of the Rabbis' perceptions of Hebrew grammar and not ours, and the fact is that wherever this construction appears, it is treated by the midrash as having special meaning. Furthermore, the continuation of the story suggests strongly that the rabbinic reading that Miriam was the instigator of this event is not over-reading.
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