GOD AND OTHER LITERARY CHARACTERS : Part II – God and Moses

Yaakov Malkin

In the premiere issue of Contemplate we were privileged to begin publishing the English-language translation of God and other Literary Characters by Yaakov Malkin, founder and academic director of Meitar College of Judaism as Culture in Jerusalem. Professor Malkin’s writing is critical of Jews to understand the significance of reading the Bible as literature. In the second issue of Contemplate, we are pleased to present this continuing discussion, which delves into the relationship between Yahweh and Moses, and explores the development of the God Yahweh as a literary protagonist with a unique human personality. Future issues of Contemplate will bring you successive chapters of this important and engaging work.

God and Moses – Literary Protagonists That Became Historical Figures

In collective Jewish and western memory, God and Moses function as influential symbols and figures in the history of spirituality and the monotheistic religions, in liberation movements throughout the ages, in formulating the principles of national constitutions as social contracts based on universal moral values, and according to Spinoza – in aspiring toward democracy, as evidenced by the fact that Moses: a) Presented himself neither as ruler nor founder of a dynasty of rulers, but as a messenger and constitutional framer on behalf of the divine sovereign; b) Presented the law and moral principles embodied in the commandments as being above any ruler; c) Established the principle of separation of powers; d) Based the constitution upon a social contract – a covenant accepted by the people; and e) Barred the priestly class from owning land, making them dependent upon public expenditure (see E. Schweid, “Spinoza,” Free Judaism 25, Spring 2002).

Moses, among all of the biblical protagonists, thus gained singular importance, becoming a historical figure, affecting religion, thought, literature and art in western and Jewish culture.

Moses is also credited with the conceptual revolution in the perception of God as an abstract entity constituting all that is, and with all of the religious precepts Jews have observed throughout history, so that even in their everyday lives, religious Jews have remembered Moses. Their scholars and judges have relied upon him as the founding figure and authority behind their rulings and the rules governing their lives.

Moses and Yahweh were created by the Biblical historical novel recounting the life of Moses, as political leaders involved in affairs of state and war aimed at achieving the national objective of resettlement in the land in which the nation’s forefathers had resided. As political leaders, they had to contend with ten insurrections by Israelites disaffected with their policies and achievements, when they realized that the price of freedom and independence included promises without guarantees, hunger and thirst, as well as constant attacks by the peoples of the desert.

The authors developed the unique personalities of these two literary figures – Yahweh and Moses – through the turning points and clashes in relations between the two, culminating tragically in Moses’ realization that Yahweh will not allow him to enter the Promised Land, that he must die on the verge of fulfilling his lifelong ambition, as recounted in the various accounts that constitute the story of the Life of Moses, including the autobiographical monologue in which Moses, about to die before reaching his goal, takes his leave.

Developing the Character of Moses as a Living and Unique Literary Figure

In four of the five books of the Pentateuch (the first part of the Old Testament anthology), the figures and personalities of Moses and Yahweh are developed through narratives that give them their unique characteristics, establishing their presence as living figures in human imagination.

The story of the Life of Moses begins with his birth into a family of Hebrew slaves, on the banks of the great river of Egypt, and ends with his death at an unknown location, on a mountain on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, which God did not allow him to cross.

In the story of Moses’ life we observe the complex relations he has with God, his wives, his brother and sister, the Egyptian king, and the leaders of the Israelite clans who challenge his authority.

Moses was raised in the royal court as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter – one of the 59 daughters of Ramses II, according to Josephus. As an adult, the author recounts, Moses met his God “face to face,” although according to another biblical author Moses believed his God to be a shapeless, faceless entity, like fire and cloud that dissipate as they form.

The crucial turning point in Moses’ life was his first flight from Egypt, after having murdered an Egyptian man in a fit of rage, without trial, for having beaten an Israelite. Moses fled to the desert, a fugitive from a royal death sentence, like the Egyptian leader described in the papyruses, who fled to the desert and joined a tribe of nomads.

Moses helps Zipporah, daughter of Jethro – leader of one of these desert peoples – water her sheep, wins her hand, and tends his father-in-law’s flocks.

Later in the story, Moses’ father-in-law will play an important role in guiding the new leader of the Israelite tribes, in organizing his people’s legal system, and in preparing them for the wars they will have to fight against the desert peoples, who saw the Israelites as trespassers in their territory.

In the stories of the wars and alliances that won the Israelites safe passage and enabled them to continue their journey toward their final destination (in return for detailed commitments to pay even for the water they will drink from the wells of Edom, for example), Moses is portrayed as the military and political leader of the people, as well as its liberator and framer of its constitution. In the early stages of his life story however, Moses appears as a lone shepherd wandering the desert with his flock, as if having forgotten his past – the child of Hebrew slaves raised in the royal court and forced to flee his country after having killed an Egyptian in a fit of rage, for having beaten one of his brethren.

The story of Moses’ life becomes a formative chapter in the historical legacy of the ancient Israelites, and of the Judaism taking shape within it, from the moment the lone shepherd encounters the new and unprecedented god calling himself “I AM THAT I AM.”

Narrative Style – Recounting Events That Make Up Jewish History

The stories of the Bible are written in a realistic style, reporting events at the time and place of their occurrence. The authors write as eyewitnesses, party to the thoughts, encounters and actions of their characters, even when they appear to be alone.

Moses is portrayed by the authors of his story as the first Jewish writer – the first man to write on tablets of stone, as the ancient Egyptians did in their wall paintings/carvings.

The literary work we see before us comprises a number of versions of the same story, concluding with an autobiographical monologue (in the book of Deuteronomy), in which the literary character Moses presents his version of events.

The appearance of numerous versions of the story throughout the four books dedicated to Moses, strengthens their credibility as historical accounts, since reports of actual events tend to differ from one another in the details they present, and wins the readers’ confidence as the similarities between them outweigh the differences. Most of the stories about Moses, together constituting a realistic novel, ring true even to the modern reader, although the text we possess is at least 2,500 years old.

The Moses stories include accounts of a number of miracles – displays of supernatural occurrences. These accounts do not alter the character of the work as a whole, since some of them (such as the encounters between Moses and God) take place in the presence of a single witness – like many extraordinary events that occur in dreams, visions or hallucinations – and not as public events we would consider real, were we to find the numerous testimonies to their veracity convincing.

Many fictional works (from Homer to Kafka), portray events that defy natural explanation, without affecting their ability to depict human reality in a credible fashion, perhaps because it is in man’s nature to live simultaneously in two worlds: the world of public reality, and that of private dream and vision.

Although not necessarily convinced by the historical (i.e. verifiable) truth of the events portrayed, the reader is won over by their poetic truth as "a credible composite of events that might have occurred."

Works that succeed in convincing us of their human and poetic truth are usually representative of historical reality, inasmuch as they represent the social, cultural and spiritual environment in which the author lived.

In this sense, works of fiction can be counted among the historical documents pertaining to a given period. The greater the correlation between the content of fictional works, documents and archaeological findings from the same period, the greater their value as historical documents – as has happened over the past two centuries with regard to many ancient myths, such as Gilgamesh, the Iliad, or the Moses stories.

As with other ancient epics, we do not relate to the events in the Moses stories as authentic accounts of real occurrences, exactly as they are described, but as evidence of the spiritual response elicited by the historical reality we know from research and archaeological findings.

Moses’ Perception of the Divine as Precursor to that of the Philosophers and Atheists

According to the author of the burning bush story, it is in this encounter with Moses that God first appeared as Yahweh. According to other Biblical accounts, God is already known as Yahweh in the time of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the book of Genesis. Even the Israelite taskmasters in Egypt, who rebuke Moses for speaking to Pharaoh in their name, thus undermining their relationship with the sovereign, know that their God is Yahweh.

From the perspective of the story itself, it is possible that Moses was the only one who did not know God as Yahweh, since he had lived in the Egyptian and Midianite cultures, unfamiliar with Yahweh. In any event it is clear that the author of the burning bush story attempts, inter alia, to explain this unusual name born by the Israelite God, a name unlike that of any other god, a single word that is an incomplete Hebrew sentence: “He will cause to be ….”

The uniqueness of Moses’ discovery, as described by the author of the burning bush story, lies in the new definition of God’s essence, as expressed in his enigmatic name. Moses’ need to define his God by name begins with the practical consideration of his chances of persuading the people he wishes to free from slavery that he has indeed been sent by the God of their fathers:

“And Moses said unto God, Behold when I come unto the Israelites, and shall say to them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the Israelites, I AM hath sent me unto you.” The author thus explains for the first time, the meaning of the word ‘Yahweh’, since God calls himself by the same name, but in the first person: I will be (Ahweh) all that is, and that is why others call me (in the third person, future): ‘Yehweh’ (He will be).

This all-important utterance ascribed by the author to God, was the beginning of a series of profound revolutions in both religious and atheistic thought.

Already in ancient times, many understood it as an expression of faith in God’s being the potential of all existence (termed “the one thing which encompasses us all” by first century author Strabo, in his Geography).

The God of Moses cannot be conceived by sensual experience, nor can any other experience be imagined, whereby he might be conceived. Maimonides therefore claimed that “presence” cannot be ascribed to God, in the sense that we ascribe presence to every other existing thing, thus laying the foundation for every doubt or negation of God’s existence.

We therefore cannot ascribe to God, figure or shape, or resemblance to man or any other thing – animate or inanimate – in the universe. Divinity that consists entirely of that which will be, cannot even have a present.

“I will be” (‘Ehyeh’), or in the third person future tense, ‘Yehweh’, is either an ancient form of pi’el (according to Albright), or an ironic statement (following Edouard Dohrm), simply meaning: I am what I am and I shall be what I shall be, and no one can know what I am in myself, just as no one can know any thing in itself (as asserted by Kant).

Since God, according to this approach, does not exist in the world of natural events, he cannot be conceived in terms of the events that occur within the reality in which we live, and everything that is said of him, as possessing an “arm,” or being full of “vengeance and wrath,” or having a “mouth” that speaks and commands – is merely a parable or a metaphor (according to Maimonides 12th century Guide for the Perplexed), a symbol that serves to explain God to human beings who are incapable of grasping the essence of his divinity. In Maimonides’ opinion, even the greatest Talmudic scholars cannot enter the palace of the “King” – whose presence is beyond human conception.

“I AM THAT I AM” as a name for a God that cannot be known, but in whose existence in the world of ‘things in themselves’ one can believe, forms the basis of the new monotheistic religion, fundamentally different from the monotheism of Amenhotep IV (the Egyptian Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who lived in Amarna in the 14th century BCE), who believed in a universal sun-god and his own divinity.

The author of the burning bush story thus provided an abstract conception of God as “being that brings into being,” which served as a point of departure for future changes in rational western thought. Medieval philosophers, influenced by Aristotle and Arab philosophers, perceived divinity as imperceptible to man, as the ‘primum mobile’ of eternal existence, wisdom above human comprehension, self-enlightening mind, with which wise men can only aspire to converge and conjoin – for that is the only significance of the afterlife according to this approach.

The perception of God as First Cause, or in the words of Moses according to Strabo “the one thing which encompasses us all,” led to the pantheism of Spinoza, which perceived divinity as a characteristic of nature, or to agnosticism – which believes only in the certainty of doubt and rejects all belief in the existence of a supernatural being, or to deism – which recognizes the existence of a supreme being, distinct and detached from humanity and the world (a new variation on gnosticism, which distinguished between a divine being isolated from the world, and a creative, satanic ‘demiurge,’ involved in its affairs).

Under the influence of these processes, there developed in the West, in the age of enlightenment – beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries – the atheistic belief in man as the creator of God and morality, committed to his humanity and to that of his fellow man, recognizing his commitment to the society that sustains his humanity and to its laws, guided by moral principles, without recourse to divine authority.

Such belief is in many ways heir to the spirit of atheism espoused by the Greek philosophers – before and after Socrates – atheistic Hellenistic poets and authors, and their clandestine successors among the medieval European intelligentsia.

The atheistic beliefs that developed under the above influences in the West (as described in Georges Minois’ Histoire de L’atheisme) differ from the prevailing atheistic belief in ancient Buddhism from the middle of the first millennium BCE, but like it, perceive a world without gods.

The God of Moses: Abstract Concept and Personified Literary Protagonist

Moses created a god without figure or shape who may therefore never be represented in idol form, nor may an idol be regarded as a god. In the only public event at which Moses introduced the people to its God, Mount Sinai was enveloped in smoke and fire, accompanied ominous blasts upon the shofar – the greatest sound and light show in all of literature (staged perhaps by Moses’ friends the Kenites, who were smiths and experts with fire).

The crowd that witnessed the display was frightened by it, and asked Moses to act as a go-between with the terrible deity that had revealed itself to them within a screen of noise, wind and flame.

Moses acceded, becoming the first mediator between the Israelite nation and their God, dictating in his name, the first national social charter based on moral principles (as Rousseau termed Moses’ constitution – by virtue of which, he asserts, the liberated masses became a free people). In form, the covenant between God and his people resembles a treaty between an emperor and one of his vassals (the treaty between the Hittite empire and the Phoenician kingdom, for example).

In content, the document presented in the story of Moses includes the commandments – precepts and statutes that express moral values such as the sanctity of human life, property rights, marital fidelity, safeguarding human dignity even in old age, loyalty to a single god, the imperative that one speak the truth when bearing witness. These precepts and statutes together form the nation’s founding charter, expressing the moral principles the prophets would later come to see as the essence of the Jewish faith, and to which priests, rabbis and halakhists of all future generations would add ritual precepts and innumerable “fences” – requirements of the religion they were developing, wholly absent from the original charter.

According to the authors, Moses uttered and recorded every word of the covenant directly from the “mouth” of the incorporeal and invisible deity, revealed to Moses alone.

The very same authors however, develop the character of the God Yahweh as a literary protagonist with a unique human personality, albeit devoid of any physical description.

From the very first encounter at the burning bush, Moses met with his God in private – whether atop the mountain or in the Tent of Meeting Moses erected outside the camp following the brief civil war he waged in response to the worship of the golden calf.

The philosophy and ideas that developed among the Israelites, are presented in the Pentateuch and Prophets sections of the Bible, primarily in the form of narratives and orations. In the Writings (Hagiographa) ideas are also presented in treatise, poetry and drama form. In the burning bush story, for the first time, the idea of freedom from slavery is expressed, along with an unprecedented conception of the nature of God. The ideas are presented within the story of a shepherd surprised to see a fire in a bush that was not burned. When he approached to see the marvel, he heard a bodiless voice, as if emanating from the fire itself. The voice, for the first time, expresses the two central ideas of the Mosaic faith: freedom from slavery, and an incorporeal deity as “being that brings into being.”

Moses learns from the voice that the God of his fathers and his people, his own God, who had done nothing to bring succor to the enslaved Hebrews for four hundred years, had suddenly remembered that they must be freed.

The voice within the fire introduces itself as a new god lacking a personal designation like all the other gods, described rather by a Hebrew phrase, “I AM THAT I AM,” intimating its identity as “being that brings all things into being” – an explanation of the name Yahweh, by which the Israelite God had been known from the time of the Patriarchs up to Moses’ own time, without being understood by those who had used it, according to the voice in the fire.

Yahweh once again becomes an active character in the historical novel of the Life of Moses. His human personality is gradually revealed in his actions, reactions, conversations with Moses, disappointments, curses, promises and regrets.

The story of the Life of Moses is interrupted from time to time – throughout the four books of the Bible over which it is told – with laws and religious precepts. Despite these interruptions, the story of Moses’ life, from infancy to adulthood in Egypt to old age and death on the threshold of the Promised Land, unfolds before the reader.

Setting the laws within the narrative of Moses’ life afforded them unique authority and sanctity, as an integral part of the story in which the characters of Yahweh and Moses, the conflicts between them, and the conflicts that arose between them and the Israelites, were formed.

Yahweh: Source of Morality and Violator of its Principles, Liberator and Would-be Destroyer of His People

Yahweh possesses rhetorical abilities, expresses strong emotions, is able to write on stone tablets, and when these are broken by Moses, dictates them once again, stressing his demand that the faithful worship Yahweh alone, and ignore other gods and their idols.

God sends Moses to free the Israelites from slavery, but when wandering in the desert, they complain of hunger and thirst, Yahweh is offended by their ingratitude. This approach is apparent from the very outset. When they reach the shores of the Red Sea and the Egyptian army is fast approaching, the author has the people pose the following sarcastic question: Does Moses not think that there are enough graves in Egypt, that he has brought us to die in this place?

As the complaints and protests concerning conditions in the desert increased – even after the splitting of the sea that had enabled the Israelites to pass through safely and drowned the Egyptian army – Yahweh’s disappointment grew. Being quick of temper and action, he suggested to Moses that he would destroy the People of Israel, replacing them with another people, consisting entirely of Moses’ descendants, and equally obedient.

Moses was so close to Yahweh that, according to the author, he was the only one to have seen not only the face of God, but his back as well. Upon hearing Yahweh’s diabolical proposal, Moses attempted to convince him that destroying the People of Israel at that point would only harm his good name. “What will they say in Egypt?” he asks Yahweh. “Will they not say that you took this people out of Egypt only to destroy them in the desert?”

God is convinced by this threat to his reputation in the eyes of the nations, and changes his mind regarding the second final solution mentioned in the Bible (the first was devised by Pharaoh, who decreed that all sons born to Hebrew women be killed).

The Israelites were given a new lease on life, to wander and complain and rebel. God has no choice but to come to terms with all of this. Yahweh’s lack of consistency contributes to his human image. Like all great literary figures – representing living human beings – Yahweh is also fickle by nature.

Unlike other gods, who “specialize” in a given area – fertility, the sun, rain, death, love, etc. – Yahweh has no specific role, being God of all things. The author also incorporates him in historical and political events.

When Moses asks Pharaoh to allow his people to go out into the desert to celebrate the sacrificial feast (apparently much more ancient than the feast of the paschal sacrifice), Yahweh torments Pharaoh, causes him to refuse all of Moses’ requests, and for each refusal (caused by Yahweh himself), strikes the Egyptian people with a plague or horrifying natural disaster: all of the water in Egypt turns to blood, light disappears from its skies leaving a cloak of darkness so thick that it could be “felt,” locusts and an assortment of wild beasts attack its towns and villages.

Despite being the source of the universal principle “thou shalt not kill” according to these stories, Yahweh kills all of the Egyptian firstborn children, after having struck Egypt with nine chilling plagues. (In keeping with the tradition that apparently preserved in popular memory the series of disasters that befell Egypt at the end of the third millennium BCE, according to modern historical research).

The author offsets these immoral acts with the great human achievement of liberation of an enslaved people. Like all revolutions for national or other liberation however, it entailed tragedies and horrifying acts of violence.

The liberation of the people of slaves – Israelites and a mixed multitude from other nations that joined them (without conversion) in their flight from Egypt – became one of the symbols of the desire for freedom in all western cultures, as described by Michael Walzer in his book, Exodus and Revolution. Leaders and poets of the African-American liberation movement have drawn upon the story of Moses as if it had been part of their own historical heritage, and its echoes can be heard in the works of Jewish songwriters such as the Gershwin brothers, while figures such as Calvin and Cromwell and the leaders of the American Revolutionary War saw Moses and the Exodus from Egypt as a model and symbol for their revolutions.

The chapter God and Moses will continue in the next issue of Contemplate.

Long at the forefront of secular Jewish education, Yaakov Malkin is the founder and academic director of Meitar, the College of Judaism as Culture in Jerusalem, and co-dean of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, which trains and ordains its Humanistic rabbis. He is Editor of Free Judaism, a quarterly published in Jerusalem. Professor of Aesthetics and Rhetoric at Tel Aviv University, he has also taught literature and literature of theater and cinema during a distinguished academic career spanning more than four decades.

This chapter of God and Other Literary Characters was published in Contemplate Issue Two/2003 by the Center for Cultural Judaism and is reprinted with permission of the author.

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