The stories of the patriarchs do not come to their close with the story of Yaakov/Israel. Israel eventually has—by his two wives and two concubines—twelve sons, who are slated to turn into the Twelve Tribes of Israel.1 His favorite wife, Rachel, gives him his favorite son, Joseph, the last of the patriarchal figures and the one by whom events are set in motion that bring the Israelites not to permanent settlement in the Promised Land, as might have been expected, but to seemingly permanent slavery in Egypt.
Joseph’s brothers, who are wildly jealous of their father’s attentions to their youngest half-brother, contrive to sell Joseph to a caravan of slave traders who are passing through Canaan and who take him off to Egypt, where he is bound to a householder named Potiphar. By resisting the sexual attentions of Potiphar’s wife, Joseph lands himself in prison, where he gains a reputation for being able to read dreams among the prisoners, one of whom is Pharaoh’s cupbearer. When the cupbearer is reprieved and regains his status in Pharaoh’s house, he is able to recommend Joseph as an infallible interpreter of dreams to his master, who has been troubled in his sleep. Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams (which, according to Joseph, predict seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine) so impress Pharaoh as to win Joseph the most extraordinary status—vizier and second-in-command of all Egypt.
In his new position, Joseph sets about to prepare Pharaoh’s kingdom for the day of famine by storing much of the grain of plenty. By the time famine strikes, Joseph’s stock with Pharaoh and his reputation throughout Egypt could hardly be higher; and it is at this point that Joseph’s brothers arrive, impelled by the famine, which has become universal. The Joseph story—a great short story, especially for any reader who has ever been stalked by sibling rivalry—ends with the most satisfying irony: Joseph’s brothers are reconciled to him, but not before they have been thoroughly humiliated and made to see that he is their unchallengeable superior; father Yaakov resettles with his family in Egypt, where, surrounded by many grandchildren, he dies happy, extending a special blessing to Joseph’s Egyptian children.
Joseph nevers hears the Voice of God, as did his progenitors, the first three patriarchs. But as with the narrative of Rivka’s trickery, we are given to understand that all is taking place according to God’s will. Just as Yitzhak’s torment over giving his blessing to the “wrong” son was a necessary suffering (because it ensured God’s will for Avraham’s line, which ordinary human thinking would have thwarted), Joseph’s suffering at the hands of his brothers and his subsequent slavery were necessary to the eventual survival of the Children of Avraham in famine times. “It was to save life,” Joseph explains to his brothers, “that God sent me on before you.” This God can make use of human beings, whether they mean to do his will or not.
The Bible now falls silent in its recounting of the story of the generations of Avraham. By the time it picks up the narrative—in Exodus, the second book—centuries have elapsed.2 The Children of Israel “bore fruit, they swarmed, they became many, they grew mighty (in number)—exceedingly, yes, exceedingly; the land filled up with them.” And then “a new king arose over Egypt,” who in the chilling phrase of the King James version “knew not Joseph”—the third pharaoh we encounter in the biblical narrative.
The first pharaoh was a fool—the stationary god-king whom Avram ran circles around. The second, Joseph’s pharaoh, is given fairly high marks for a pharaoh: he was smart enough to put Joseph in charge. It is all too likely that this pharaoh was an interloper and a Semite, one of the Hyksos, who ruled Egypt from the time of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B.C. to the middle of the fourteenth century of the same era, at which time the old royal lines of Egypt reasserted themselves. One of these post-Hyksos pharaohs was Akhnaton, who for a brief period decreed that only one god, Aton the Solar Disc, could be worshiped publicly in Egypt. But this singular reform was carried out in the teeth of vested interests (the priests and votaries of all the other gods) and was soon rescinded by a subsequent pharaoh, the mighty Tutankhamon, and erased from public memory. The pharaoh who “knew not Joseph” was most probably Seti I, who reached the throne of Egypt thirty-four years after Tutankhamon and more than a half-century after Akhnaton.
This pharaoh (he is never given a proper name in the Bible, as if the writer would not give him even that much dignity) is beset by a fear so great we would call it paranoia: he fears that there are now so many “Children of Israel” that they may even be “many-more and mightier (in number) than we”—a sure sign of paranoia, since the Israelites could hardly have become that numerous—and that “if war should occur,” this people may also “be added to our enemies and make war upon us or go away from the land!” His solution: to impress the Israelites into forced labor to build his great storage cities of Pitom and Rameses.
Still fearing their numbers, he attempts to enlist their midwives in a feeble attempt at genocide—the first but hardly the last that the Children of Israel will endure. He summons two women who are termed “the midwives of the Hebrews.” In contrast to his impersonal treatment of Pharaoh, the god-king of all Egypt, the narrator records the names of these humble women: Shifra and Pua. Their very names seem to call them up from the distant past; and we can almost see them standing before Pharaoh, the young, beautiful one with the young, beautiful name, the old, plain one with the old, plain name, listening to him rave:
“When you help the Hebrew women give birth, look at the two stones:
if it is a boy, kill him;
but if a girl, let her live.”
It has been objected that this scene could not possibly be historical: if you want to kill off a people, you must assassinate their women, their baby factories, not their men. What Pharaoh urges is irrational on two levels: he is trying to destroy his own labor force—and he is going about it inefficiently. Nor could two midwives do the whole job if Israel had become so numerous.
But what about those “two stones”? They could (as some commentators have thought) be something on the order of medieval birthing stools, but why more than one? The Bible often employs euphemism in describing sexual (especially male) anatomy. To me, the meaning leaps out: the minute the midwife sees that the newborn has testicles, she is to smother him.
And why must we think of Pharaoh as rational? Have we not already been given the evidence that he is irrational—that he thinks the Children of Israel are “many-more and mightier” than the Egyptians? Is it perhaps only in Pharaoh’s eyes that the Children of Israel “swarm,” as if they were breeding insects? Is this a weak, fantasy-beset god-king who fears the potency of the Israelites, much as enervated plantaowners of the American South feared the potency of their black slaves, especially those slaves who had “two stones”? Would the Nazi attempt to destroy the Children of Israel be any more rational than this (less efficient) one? I do not doubt that what we have here is the portrayal—in a few deft strokes—of an insecure Egyptian madman, an all-powerful god-king who fears that someone else could be more powerful than he.
“But,” continues the narrator in his usual economic fashion,
the midwives held God in awe,
and they did not do as the king of Egypt had spoken to them,
they let the children live.
Such beautiful, simple words. Because they bowed down before real power, they were not tempted to bow down before empty show, and so they did the right thing. It is less than clear that these “midwives of the Hebrews” were themselves Children of the Promise; they may have been pagans who bore the true God in their hearts, they may have been, like Hagar, Egyptians who could See. But in their exquisite moral discernment (“they let the children live”) they are people of stature—real individuals who are worthy of names, unlike the little god-king. Nor should we forget that they are women, who in their sharp insight into the deep truth of things have taken a giant evolutionary step beyond Sara the pawn, beyond Avraham himself, who was willing to sacrifice his wife to save his own neck.
The next turn
of the screw is even more satisfying. When Pharaoh learns that the midwives have disobeyed him, he summons them once more with a petulant “Why have you done this thing?”
The midwives said to Pharaoh:
“Indeed, not like the Egyptian (women) are the Hebrew (women),
indeed they are lively:
before the midwife comes to them, they have given birth!”
Once again, we are back on that southern plantation, where well-brought-up “ladies” need potions and medical assistance just to keep from fainting on a hot day, but slave women are so full of life that they drop their young with as little ado as barnyard animals—and the oppressed subvert the overlord with seeming guilelessness.
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 Jewish3 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:
“YHWH.”
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 YHWH. 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 YHWH 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. YHWH 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.