The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (15 page)

This marvelous new sense of time did not descend upon the Israelites all at once. What began as the call of Avraham to leave his place and people and set out for an unknown destiny blossomed into the vocation of Moshe to lead his enslaved people out of the god-haunted ambience of cyclical Egypt, where everything that would be had already been and all important questions had been answered, already set in stone like the staring, immobile statues of Pharaoh. In these two journeys we have gone from the personal (the destiny of Avraham) to the corporate (the destiny of the People of Israel). We have gone from a patronal god, a household god that one carries along for good luck, to Y
HWH
, the God of
gods, whose power is mightier even than the mightiest power earth can summon. Taken together, these two great escapes give us an entirely new sense of past and future—the past as constitutive of the present, the future as truly unknown.

But what of the present? Is it just a moment, glinting briefly between past and future, hardly worth elaborating on? No, it is to be the pulsing, white-hot center of all the subsequent narrative, the unlikely intersection of time and eternity, the moment where God is always to be found. This completion of the Jewish religious vision will claim the virtue and intelligence of all the priests, prophets, and kings who will fill the rest of the story of Israel. For it will take all the skill and devotion of this people through all their history to revere the past without adoring it, to bow before the opaque mystery of the future without offering it the fear that is reserved to God alone, and to stand neither in the storied past nor the imagined (or dreaded) future but in the present moment.

T
his motley band of escaped slaves, revering its memories of distant ancestors who also trudged through the desert, now makes its way from its victorious escape at the seashore to the harsh realities of desert existence. The desert is Sinai, the wedge-shaped peninsula that lies between Egypt and Canaan—and one of our planet’s most desolate places. It would be hard to conjure up a landscape more likely to lead to death—a land bereft of all comfort, an earth of so few
trees and plants that one may walk for hours without seeing a wisp of green, a place so dry that the uninitiated may die in no time, consumed by what feels like preternatural dehydration. By contrast, the gentler Judean desert of John the Baptist seems almost an oasis.

But this desert brings not death but epiphany, the wildest, most exhausting, most terrifying epiphany of the whole Bible. As the people pass through the wretchedly barren Wilderness of Syn, they grumble repeatedly. They can’t find potable water, they are running out of food, now there is no water at all. Each of these complaints God answers to their satisfaction: by making the unpotable water sweet; by giving the people quails and a starch they term
“mahn-hu”;
¹
by instructing Moshe to strike a rock to bring forth a spring. But despite these miraculous answers to their incessant whining, the people keep regressing, wishing even that they had died in their captivity and longing (in the Bible’s memorable phrase) for the fleshpots of Egypt.

Moshe needs God’s promptings, because on his own he possesses little political acumen. Even Moshe’s father-in-law, Jethro, who shows up at this point, is chagrined by Moshe’s sorry lack of organization when he observes him sitting alone, settling every dispute, “while the entire people stations itself around you from daybreak until sunset.” Moshe explains that it’s up to him to keep the peace, to “judge between a man and his fellow.”

But, exclaims Jethro sensibly,

As the world’s first business consultant, Jethro advises Moshe that he needs a middle-management team so that he can concentrate on priorities:

Even Jethro’s cameo appearance at this point is providential, for the caravans of Israel are now approaching the Mountain, the place where God first spoke to Moshe and promised to do so again. And during the course of this new encounter, during Moshe’s absence on the Mountain, we can easily imagine how impossibly chaotic the grumbling people would have become without Moshe’s newly appointed middle managers. As we shall see, even with them the people do not show themselves to advantage.

Before Moshe ascends the terrible Mountain, God imparts to him messages of comfort for this fickle people, the reminders they are so constantly in need of:

As will be noted by the early rabbis in their midrash (or commentary), the great God Y
HWH
, who alone has dominion over all, here adopts the posture of a suitor, one who woos a demanding woman, patiently explaining how highly he values her and how exalted he foresees their life together. The people are being prepared for something more than they have already experienced. Moshe knows he must climb the Mountain alone, but God tells him that though he will come to Moshe “in a thick cloud,” the people will “hear when I speak to you.”

By the time all preparations have been completed—the people purified and instructed not even to touch the Mountain—the trembling Mountain is enveloped in smoke and fire, an active volcano; and it is this sputtering, pulsing apparition that Moshe must approach, the only man worthy to face Y
HWH
. He ascends into the fiery fog. Then, out of nowhere and with no previous hint of what is to come, these words break forth, the great theophany that rings not only down the Mountain to the Chosen People assembled at the
base but down the ages, finding its reverberations in the hearts of billions of men and women:

The people cry up to Moshe:

And he cries down to them:

But the people keep their distance, as Moshe on the heights is swallowed by the storm.

This is the first presentation of the Ten Commandments in the Bible, but because there is a variant—in Deuteronomy 5:6–22—there is no reason to assume that the words quoted here were intended to constitute an exact record of what God said. By submitting these sentences to careful linguistic and textual analysis and comparing them with the variant presentation (which is not
substantially
different), most scholars have come to the conclusion that the original sentences were all bluntly brief in the manner of “You are not to murder”—so brief in fact that each one may have been but one word, that is, a verb in the imperative form preceded by a negative prefix of one syllable. In this way, the originals may actually have been Ten Words—utterly primitive, basic injunctions on the order of “No-kill,” “No-steal,” “No-lie.” These Ten Words (which is the term the Bible uses, not “Commandments”) would have been memorizable by even the simplest nomad, his ten fingers a constant reminder of their centrality in his life. So contemporary readers who are repelled by God’s vengefulness—his need to punish not only the perpetrator but children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—are welcome to take such warnings as the glosses of scribes of a later age.

The exact
numbering of the commandments has been a conundrum for aeons. In Jewish medieval tradition, they tended to be broken into five for God (the commandments that mention God’s Name) and five for men.
Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century of our era divided them into
three for God (by combining the first sentence, God’s self-description and not technically a command, with the commandment against idol worship) and seven for men (by breaking the last commandment into two: one for “your neighbor’s wife,” who appears first in the Deuteronomy list, and a second for “your neighbor’s goods”). Augustine’s numbering has been followed by the Latin church and by Lutherans and Anglicans. The Greek and other Eastern churches, however, have generally followed what appears to be the most reasonable numbering: four for God (through the Sabbath commandment) and six for men. Since this numbering has been followed by the Reformed churches as well, it is the numbering one is most likely to encounter in the United States.

But this attention to minutiae (which of the words are original? how should we divide the text to achieve ten?) can, like so many scholarly considerations, deflect us all too easily from appreciating what is happening here. There is no document in all the literatures of the world that is like the Ten Commandments. Of course, there are ethical guidelines from other cultures. But these are always offered in a legal framework (if you do that, then this will be the consequence) or as worldly-wise advice (if you want to lead a happy life, you will be sure to do such-and-such and avoid so-and-so). Here for the first—and, I think, the last—time, human beings are offered a code without justification. Because this is God’s code, no justification is required and (except for the few poor phrases of scribal commentary) no
elaboration. Who but God can speak ten words—“Thoushalt” and “Thou-shalt-not”—with such authority that no further words are needed?