How should we pronounce the Name when we come upon it? One may, of course, substitute “the Lord” for the tetragrammaton YHWH. 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 YHWH 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!”
YHWH 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 “YHWH’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 “YHWH 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.
This God is obviously not a member of any known “twelve-step program.” He is far from “supportive” and “inclusive,” to use the jargon of our day—and he is certainly not cuddly. Perhaps he is not a God for an age such as ours but for a more vigorous one, such as the Jacobean, that did not blanch so easily. “Batter my heart,” prayed John Donne to this alien God,
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.…
Take me to You, imprison me, for I
Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.
Following this bloody episode, Moshe, exuding a newfound confidence and with Aharon as his spokesman, succeeds in winning the confidence of “all the elders of the Children of Israel.” He then makes his approach to the dread Pharaoh—a new pharaoh, probably Seti’s son Rameses II, since the Bible tells us that the pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites had died by the time of Moshe’s encounter at the burning bush.
———
“Who is YHWH?” inquires Pharaoh,
“that I should hearken to his voice to send Israel free?
I do not know YHWH,
moreover, Israel I will not send free!”
These are the first words the new god-king speaks on his first appearance in the Book of Exodus. The words of this question, like the notes of an identifying musical phrase in grand opera, give us the principal “notes” of Pharaoh’s character. The question is the key that opens up Pharaoh’s soul to public view. But more than this, it is a leitmotif not only for Exodus, but for many of the books that make up the library that we call the Bible—to such an extent that it could almost be said to be the central question posed by these scriptures.
Who is YHWH? However we interpret it, the Name of God means ultimate dominion: He-Whom-There-Is-No-Escaping. This idea must have been implicit in even the earliest form of this narrative concerning the intervention of the Israelite God in human affairs—and it was an idea to which the Israelites, in different ways at different times, became accustomed. So much so that Pharaoh’s question must have had for the first audiences to hear the story a satisfyingly ironic ring, even a savagely comical ring, especially satisfying in that its irony was unperceived by this pretentious pipsqueak. Who is YHWH? Pharaoh is about to find out. He is about to have his ears boxed—and only he is unaware of it. So to the audiences who first heard this story told, the phrase “Who is YHWH?” sounded the ominous notes of Pharaoh’s doom—just as the famous five-note phrase in Bizet’s Carmen foreshadows Carmen’s violent end.
The narrative of the ten plagues, each plague brought on the Egyptians by Pharaoh’s pigheaded refusal to heed YHWH’S demand and let the Israelites leave his dominion, is too well known to recount in detail. Each time Moshe and his brother Aharon approach Pharaoh with YHWH’S demand, Pharaoh refuses. Though he begins to offer unacceptable, minor concessions, plague follows plague: the Nile reeking with blood, a swarm of frogs (who die and lie in festering heaps), fleas “on man and beast,” an infestation of insects, a pestilence that kills livestock, boils, hail, locusts, “darkness over the land,” and, last of all, the one that breaks Pharaoh’s spirit, the death of the firstborn of Egypt—from “the firstborn of Pharaoh” and of every Egyptian household to “every firstborn of beast.”
Why is Pharaoh so obstinate? God predicted he would be (“I am well aware that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless he is compelled by a mighty hand”) and even claimed responsibility for Pharaoh’s attitude (“but I myself will make him obstinate, and he will not let the people go”). Are we, therefore, to conclude that Pharaoh is just another pawn with no will of his own? Rather, I think, the text suggests strongly that Pharaoh is acting in character—as would any great monarch divinely appointed.
In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh was god-on-earth, the visible manifestation of the presence of Ra, chief god of the Egyptians. But ra’a also means “evil” in Hebrew; and if the pharaoh was Rameses II, his name—a combination of ra and moses—would have sounded to a Hebrew ear like “he who brings forth evil,” the evil counterpart of Moses. In the parlance of the ancient world, moreover, the phrase “the hand of god X” was virtually an idiom used to describe a plague, so that we may interpret the phrase “the hand of YHWH,” which is repeated throughout the plague narrative, as belonging to this attributional tradition. If plagues were commonly considered divine in origin within Egyptian society, what we have here is an account of a cosmic tug-of-war between two gods—Ra and YHWH—played out on earth between their designated stand-ins—Pharaoh and Moshe. Within this interpretation, YHWH’S promise to Moshe “I will make you as a god to Pharaoh” may have even deeper implications than at first appear.
Howev
er that may be, Pharaoh’s consciousness of his role as the Sun god incarnate, whose epithets include “Son of Ra” and “Good God,” would have made him obstinate: his whole worldview is at stake. If he gives in to this upstart YHWH, the consequences are too terrible to contemplate, for these consequences include losing control over the natural order. Pharaoh, as the Son of Ra, is responsible for the orderly functioning of the Nile and the fertility of the land. In the ancient world, chaos, especially chaos in nature, especially the drying up of fertility, was always greatly to be feared—much more feared than it is by us who seem, from our technological point of view, far better protected from such chaos. So when God tells Moshe that he will “make [Pharaoh] obstinate,” he is referring to the very nature of things: this is the way things are; they can be no other way. God understands the nature of things (and of individual human beings) as does no other, for he has created all nature, as he stresses repeatedly in his encounters with his creatures:
“Who placed a mouth in human beings
or who (is it that) makes one mute or deaf
or open-eyed or blind?
Is it not I, YHWH?”
God knows who Pharaoh is and therefore foresees the inevitability of his obstinacy.
But there is deeper human and theological business at work in this story than the theme of the inevitability of Pharaoh’s behavior. God the Creator has ultimate dominion over all he has created; earthly dominion is given to men only in a subsidiary sense—only insofar as they conform their actions to God’s will. Pharaoh must fail because he is not so conformed. The god whose representative he is, is powerless before YHWH; he is as nothing, so much so that he never even makes an appearance in the narrative: his residual presence is like the faintest scent, discoverable only by an inquiry into linguistic roots.
The comedy of the narrative lies in ironic juxtaposition: Pharaoh, supposedly all-powerful, understands nothing. It would not be too much to say that this narrative asserts that power (because it is a feckless attempt to usurp God’s dominion) makes you stupid, blinding you to your true situation—and absolute power makes you absolutely stupid. The simple audience of semi-nomadic herdsmen to whom this story was first told understood that they were wiser than Pharaoh: they, certainly, unlike the great Ra-Moses, now with frogs jumping all over him, now covered in horseflies, would not have required the cumulative impact of ten plagues to change course! And this audience would also have appreciated the paradox that they were also more powerful than Pharaoh, because God is on the side of the little people, the people who have no worldly power. This is a lesson that will be repeated again and again in the story of Israel.
It is precisely Pharaoh’s pretense to a dominion that he does not own—the very motivation of his actions throughout the plague narrative—that is mocked in Exodus, that gives the narrative its satirical edge. The lesson is so cunningly shaped as drama—ten separate plagues, any one of which might have convinced a more ordinary mortal to give in—that it burns itself into the memory like a brand: when a human being arrogates to himself the role of God, he must fail miserably.
The implications of this lesson were radical in their time, since there was no political edifice that did not claim to be founded by a god. In one fell swoop, this subversive narrative delegitimizes all political structures claiming a god as their author—delegitimizes, in fact, all the political structures of the ancient world. And Pharaoh, who claimed to know nothing of YHWH, has come to know him all too well, “and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there is not a house in which there is not a dead man.”
Like Avram before them, the Children of Israel are sent forth from Egypt richer than they arrived, with “objects of silver and objects of gold, and clothing” that the Egyptians press upon them to encourage them to leave. “So,” concludes the narrator compactly, “did they strip Egypt.” They also transport with them the “bones of Joseph,” the mummy of the forefather. They do not take the obvious route to Canaan—by way of the coast, now occupied by the warrior “sea people,” the Philistines—“lest the people regret it, when they see war, and return to Egypt!” God is apparently afraid that this people he has decided to champion have little fortitude and may use any calamity as an excuse to return to the security of their previous servitude.
Their route—by way of the wilderness at the Sea of Reeds (not the “Red Sea,” a mistranslation)—is unrecoverable and the source of myriad scholarly disputes. But we should probably imagine this “sea” as more a marsh than a large body of water; and when Pharaoh, in a change of heart, charges after them with all his chariots and charioteers, we should probably imagine the miracle that we know is coming on a somewhat less heroic scale than its usual dramatizations would have it.
As the forces of Egypt march toward them, the Children of Israel turn on Moshe (it doesn’t take them long to lose heart), crying:
“Is it because there are no graves in Egypt
that you have taken us out to die in the wilderness?
What is this that you have done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?
Is this not the very word that we spoke to you in Egypt,
saying: ‘Let us alone, that we may serve Egypt!’
Indeed, better for us serving Egypt
than our dying in the wilderness!”
Thus, in a trice, do they reward Moshe’s steadfastness in his long tug-of-war with the god-king and his courage in overcoming his own inadequacies. But Moshe keeps his head and his heart, using God’s own injunction:
“Do not be afraid!
Stand fast and see
YHWH’S deliverance which he will work for you today,
for as you see Egypt today, you will never see it again for the ages!”
Moshe, the true leader, obeying God’s directive, leads the Children of Israel through the “sea,” probably a marsh at low tide. When Pharaoh and his forces follow, they are beset by the rising tide, their wheels get stuck in the mud, and they find themselves in danger of drowning. It would all be remembered most gloriously by later generations as a miraculous victory:
But the Children of Israel had gone upon dry-land, through the midst of the sea,
the waters a wall for them on their right and on their left.
So YHWH delivered Israel on that day from the hand of Egypt;
Israel saw Egypt dead by the shore of the sea,
and Israel saw the great hand that YHWH had wrought against Egypt,
the people held YHWH in awe,
they trusted in YHWH and in Moshe his servant.
That something extraordinary happened here we should not doubt—and that it happened quickly and to the permanent astonishment of all. Israel, a ragbag of runaway slaves led by a tongue-tied prince, has triumphed over all the might of Egypt. But how many were involved—how many dead, how many saved—and what was the exact disturbance that created the unexpected victory? These are matters that will probably be argued till the end of time.
The text contains a lengthy song, supposedly sung by Moshe and the Children of Israel, that reads like an antiphony of praise from an ancient liturgy. In it, YHWH is depicted as a warrior god and the greatest of all the gods (“Who is like you among the gods, O YHWH!”); and Israel is depicted as “your people redeemed” whom “you led in your faithfulness.” This incredible surprise, this permanent victory wrested from the very jaws of expected disaster and predictable defeat, left a profound impression on the imagination of the whole people—now no longer merely the Children of Avraham or of Israel but the People of YHWH—as had no earlier encounter between God and any of his chosen interlocutors. This was their God, the God of Surprises, and they were his People.
There is also another song, a brief one with which this scene of triumph closes. On the far shore, beyond the grasp of the devastated Egyptians, a barefoot woman with a timbrel begins to dance, and all the women after her “with timbrels and with dancing.” It is Miryam, once the young girl who peered through the bullrushes in the hope of guarding her baby
brother, now grown to full womanhood and known to her people as “Miryam the prophetess.” Her song is simple and pointed, its Hebrew so archaic that it may well come down to us from the very shore on which she danced, the original formulary from which the song of Moshe and all the accompanying narrative would one day be drawn:
“Sing ye to the LORD,
for he hath triumphed gloriously;
the horse and his rider he hath flung into the sea!”
This story of deliverance is the central event of the Hebrew scriptures. In retrospect, we can see that all the wanderings of the forefathers and foremothers and their growing intimacy with God have led up to this moment; and looking down the ages from this shore, we can see that everything that happens subsequently will be referred back to this moment of astonished triumph. In the next chapter we will take up the vexed question of the Bible’s historicity—its reliability as a historical document. But for now it is enough to affirm that in this moment Avraham’s descendants, this raggle-taggle collection of Dusty Ones, received an identity they have maintained to this day and to remember this barefoot woman, her dark hair having escaped all confinement, singing and dancing on the far shore with prehistoric exuberance.