 | | said, "Woe to the wives of these!"
44
And this is how Miriam knew. And she spoke to Aaron, and the two of them spoke against him.
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In contrast to other early interpretative traditions that understand that Miriam and Aaron were complaining
against
the wife of Moses, the midrash understands it to be a complaint on her behalf. The midrashic rewriting of the story is, as is usually the case at least in these early midrashim, a response to a gap in the biblical text that demands interpretation. The story begins with Miriam complaining "with regard to the Ethiopian woman," but in the elaboration, the complaint of Miriam and Aaron is entirely different, "Did God only speak with Moses; He indeed spoke with us as well?" Rather than being a charge having to do with whom Moses had married, it seems to be a challenge to some power or privilege of his. Moreover, God's defense of Moses cum punishment of Miriam seemingly has nothing to do with his wife, being merely a statement of Moses's special holiness. There is accordingly an inner contradiction in the story: was the complaint because Moses had married inappropriately or because Miriam was jealous of his status? The midrashic story fills this gap by connecting the two complaints as one; she complained on behalf of the wife, arguing that he had behaved toward her in a way that was arrogant and overbearing. Did she and her elder brother not share his status, and yet they do not behave so toward their spouses? The midrash, moreover, knows precisely what the complaint of the wife was, and as plausible a resolution of the contradiction as this is, it is not a straightforward account of the "meaning" of the biblical text. As is typical for midrash, the interpretation seems to involve a synergy of two factors: it both addresses a genuine interpretative difficulty and serves an ideological investment.
45
Accordingly, the midrash doubly ventriloquizes the voice of the woman and her complaint, first by making Miriam the initiator of the action and the speaker here, and then also by reporting, in her name, what she had heard from Tzipporah that had made her aware of the wife's distress.
46
The text communicates two forms of the woman's
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| | 44. I.e., upon hearing that the two men were prophesying, she commiserated with their wives, thinking that now the men would stop sleeping with them, as Moses had stopped sleeping with her.
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| | 45. I am aware, of course, that my statement here of the hermeneutics of midrash is highly oversimplified. It is dependent on my theory of midrash, as worked out in Boyarin 1990c.
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| | 46. The use of the term "ventriloquy" indicates that one should
not
understand that there is an
expression
here of women's subjectivity; there is, however, a
representation
of an imagined women's subjectivity, an effort at empathy with women and an
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(footnote continued on the next page)
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