Authors: Thomas Cahill
The exasperated god-king takes a further step into irrationality and orders that henceforth all newborn Hebrew males be thrown into the Nile. Thus it is that we are introduced to a Hebrew mother, a woman who
became pregnant and bore a son.
When she saw him—that he was goodly, she hid him, for three months.
And when she was no longer able to hide him,
she took for him a little-ark of papyrus,
she loamed it with loam and with pitch,
placed the child in it,and placed it in the reeds by the shore of the Nile.
Now his sister stationed herself far off, to know what would be done to him.
This lovely passage, full of care and cherishing—how seldom the narrator allows himself to rest in such humble details as loam and pitch—presents us with a loving mother and a loving sister, who also exhibit the characteristic resourcefulness we have come to expect of the Children of Abraham. The rest of the episode is so well known that I need only summarize it: Pharaoh’s daughter, one of the long line of biblical figures who See, spots the little-ark among the bull-rushes while bathing in the Nile, sees the child, and takes pity on him, though she knows perfectly well that he is “one of the Hebrews’ children.” The baby’s sister suddenly materializes and helpfully volunteers to find for the princess a nursemaid “from the Hebrews”—a nursemaid who turns out to be the baby’s mother. Thus is the child rescued from certain death by a silent conspiracy of women on the side of life, so that he can grow up as an Egyptian prince with a secret Jewish
3
mother, a man who will understand the world of power and connections, but a man who has also been nursed at the breasts of kindness and love—the best of both worlds. The princess gives him the name Moshe (or Moses), He-Who-Pulls-Out.
This is all we need to know about Moshe’s childhood—and in the next scene Moshe, the grown man, does exactly what we would expect of him: “he went out to his brothers and saw their burdens.” The lovingly nurtured prince identifies with the underdog; and seeing an Egyptian repeatedly strike one of his brothers, he kills the Egyptian and buries him in the sand. The following day, in a scene that foreshadows the great anguish of Moshe’s future life—the carping opposition of his own “stiffnecked” people—he breaks up a scuffle between two Hebrews, only to have the guilty party taunt him:
“Who made you prince and judge over us?
Do you mean to kill me
as you killed the Egyptian?”
So “the matter is known”; and hard on the heels of this gossip, Pharaoh seeks to execute Moshe for his crime, leaving Moshe no alternative but flight.
Moshe finds refuge in the land of Midian, where he is given shelter and a shepherd’s occupation by Jethro, whose daughter Tzippora Moshe marries. Their first child Moshe names Gershom, aptly meaning Sojourner There, “for he said,” as the King James has it, “I have been a stranger in a strange land.” And this strange land is about to yield up to this stranger the strangest experience ever known.
Moshe, shepherding Jethro’s flock, leads the sheep “behind the wilderness” to a mountain called Horeb, another
name for Sinai. The text signals to us that something extraordinary is about to happen by calling this place “the mountain of God,” but there is no reason to suspect that Moshe is anticipating anything more than another energy-sapping day with the flock. Moshe sees, out of the corner of his eye, “the flame of a fire out of the midst of a bush.” He stops to take in this unusual sight, for in the desert any movement stands out as phenomenal, and observes that “the bush is burning with fire, and the bush is not consumed!” Even though the dehydrating desert heat is a constant warning to nomadic herders against making any but the most necessary exertions, Moshe resolves to “turn aside that I may see this great sight—why the bush does not burn up!”
As Moshe makes his way toward the fire, God calls “out of the midst of the bush,” twice speaking Moshe’s name, as he once did to Avraham on the Mountain of Seeing:
“Moshe! Moshe!”
He said:
“Here I am.”
—the very words Avraham used.
He said:
“Do not come near to here,
put off your sandal from your foot [just as the Arabs still do on holy ground],
for the place on which you stand—it is holy ground!”
And he said:“I am the God of your father,
the God of Avraham,
the God of Yitzhak,
and the God of Yaakov.”
In the midst of this breaking of the silence of hundreds of years—this completely unexpected manifestation of continuity—Moshe, the Egyptian prince who could hardly have been less prepared for such a moment, acts with a terror the patriarchs seldom exhibited:
Moshe concealed his face,
for he was afraid to gaze upon God.
But God reveals that, despite appearances (or lack thereof), he has not been absent:
“I have seen, yes, seen the affliction of my people that is in Egypt,
their cry have I heard in the face of their slave-drivers;
indeed I have known their sufferings!
So I have come down
to rescue it from the hand of Egypt,
to bring it up from that land,
to a land, goodly and spacious,
to a land flowing with milk and honey.…
So now, go,
for I send you to Pharaoh—bring my people, the Children of Israel, out of Egypt!”
Here is Moshe, on his face in the intense desert heat, made even fiercer by the fire before him, listening to a Voice that no one has heard since the days of Yaakov, a Voice that orders him off on an impossible mission to the very people he has been hiding from. Like Avraham, he never doubts the information of his senses—that this is really happening—only God’s lack of realism:
“Who am I
that I should go to Pharaoh,
that I should bring the Children of Israel out of Egypt?”
God’s answer ignores completely Moshe’s opinion of himself. For this mission will not be dependent on Moshe’s abilities but on God’s:
“Indeed, I will be-there with you,
and this is the sign for you that I myself have sent you:
when you have brought the people out of Egypt,
you will (all) serve God by this mountain.”
Moshe now offers one objection after another in the vain hope of forestalling God. He imagines confronting the Children of Israel with the news that “the God of your fathers has sent me,” only to receive their skeptical response: “They
will say to me: ‘What is his name?’ ” Moshe, the clean-shaven ward of Pharaoh with the style and bearing of an Egyptian, will hardly seem a credible messenger of God in the eyes of the dusty slaves, and they will quiz him mercilessly till they call his bluff.
God’s reply is probably the greatest mystery of the Bible. He tells Moshe his name, all right:
“Y
HWH.”
What does it mean? Ancient
Hebrew was written without vowels; and by the time vowel subscripts were added to the consonants in the Middle Ages, the Name of God had become so sacred that it was never uttered. Even in classical times, as early as the Second Temple period, only the high priest could pronounce the Name of God—and only once a year in the prayer of the Day of Atonement. Once the Temple was destroyed in
A.D
. 70, no Jew ever uttered the Name again. From that time to this, the devout have avoided this word in the text of their Bible, reading
“Adonai”
(“the Lord”) when they come to the word
Y
HWH
.
Many Orthodox go a step further, refusing even to say “
Adonai”
and substituting
“ha-Shem”
(“the Name”). So, after such a great passage of time, we have lost the certain knowledge of how to pronounce the word that is represented by these consonants. And, without the pronunciation, we are less than certain of its meaning, since precise meaning in Hebrew is often dependent on knowing how to pronounce the vowels, especially
in the case of verbs—and Y
HWH
is definitely a verb form.
We can take comfort in the certain knowledge that God is a verb, not a noun or adjective. His self-description is not static but active, appropriate to the God of Journeys. Y
HWH
is an archaic form of the verb
to be;
and when all the commentaries are taken into account, there remain but three outstanding possibilities of interpretation, none of them mutually exclusive. First,
I am who am:
this is the interpretation of the
Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which because of its age and its links to the ancients bears great authority. It was this translation that
Thomas Aquinas used in the thirteenth century to build his theology of God as the only being whose essence is Existence, all other beings being contingent on God, who is Being (or Is-ness) itself. A more precise translation of this idea could be: “I am he who causes (things) to be”—that is, “I am the Creator.” Second,
I am who I am
—in other words, “None of your business” or “You cannot control me by invoking my name (and therefore my essence) as if I were one of your household gods.” Third,
I will be-there with you:
this is Fox’s translation, following
Martin Buber and
Franz Rosenzweig, which emphasizes God’s continuing presence in his creation, his being-there with us.
How should we pronounce the Name when we come upon it? One may, of course, substitute “the Lord” for the tetragrammaton Y
HWH
. Others will boldly attempt a pronunciation,
“Yahweh”
(as English speakers usually say it) or
“Yahvé”
(after the French and Germans) or even “Jehovah”
(a mispronunciation, much in evidence in Protestant hymnody and based on an inadequate understanding of the conventions of medieval manuscripts). But for me, when I attempt to say the consonants without resort to vowels, I find myself just breathing in, then out, with emphasis, in which case God becomes the breath of life. This God of the fathers, now manifested as Y
HWH
in the bush that burns but is not consumed, is more awesome than in any of his previous manifestations—not only because of the fireworks, but because of the symbolic nature of this epiphany, which suggests that this God, as dangerous, tempering, and purifying as fire, can burn in us without consuming.
God explains to Moshe how things will go before Pharaoh, who “will not give you leave to go” until God strikes Egypt “with all my wonders”; and he arms Moshe with a few wonders of his own for dazzling the multitude. But then, Moshe raises his most serious objection:
“Please, my Lord,
no man of words am I …
for heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue am I!”
Y
HWH
said to him:“Who placed a mouth in human beings …?
So now, go!
I myself will instruct you as to what you are to speak.”
Moshe continues to drag his feet, so that “Y
HWH’S
anger flared up against Moshe”—and not for the last time. At last,
God offers the tongue-tied shepherd-prince his brother Aharon (or Aaron) to be Moshe’s spokesman: “he shall be for you a mouth, and you, you shall be for him a god.” And then “Moshe went.” In this long procession of God’s delegates through the ages, the pattern established by Avraham holds: they may object vigorously, but then, when all’s said and done, they
go
. They remain faithful—full of faith.
But Moshe is still the uncut Egyptian prince, not yet a convenanted son of Israel, so on the journey back to Egypt “Y
HWH
encountered him and sought to make him die”—“to kill him” being the usual translation. Tzippora, in the long tradition of practical wives, intuits immediately what is wrong. “Tzippora took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, she touched it to” Moshe’s—“feet” or “legs” we would normally translate the next word of the text. But once again, ancient Hebrew literature is reticent when it comes to designating genitals, especially male genitals. Tzippora touches her son’s foreskin to Moshe’s penis and screams: “Indeed, a bridegroom of blood are you to me!”
What a scene this must have been—little Gershom the Sojourner screaming in one corner; blood dripping from Gershom, running down Tzippora’s forearms, smeared on Moshe’s foreskin; Tzippora’s unhinged, triumphant exclamation; the abrupt withdrawal of God’s wrath. This is but another story by which all, even those who had taken on the mores of alien societies, could come to understand: the cove-blood
is serious business. And in this ancient religious milieu, still harking back to old ideas of correspondence and the power of blood, to have one’s foreskin washed in the blood of one’s son’s foreskin was to have been circumcised.