The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (13 page)

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,

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.

———

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 Y
HWH
? 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 Y
HWH
? 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 Y
HWH
?” 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 Y
HWH’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 Y
HWH’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 Y
HWH
,” 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 Y
HWH
—played out on earth between their designated stand-ins—Pharaoh and Moshe. Within this interpretation, Y
HWH’S
promise to Moshe “I will make you as a god to Pharaoh” may have even deeper implications than at first appear.

However 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 Y
HWH
, 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:

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 Y
HWH
; 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 Y
HWH
, 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:

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:

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:

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, Y
HWH
is depicted as a warrior god and the greatest of all the gods (“Who is like you among the gods, O Y
HWH
!”); 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 Y
HWH
—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.