Torah Posting: שמות
There is always a part of me that feels like Sefer Bereishit is a complete Tanakh in microcosm — just as whole Torah is — and that we could just start over again now. The whole of the practice is in there, the moral of the story (selling ourselves into slavery to save our lives) is the same as the moral of the Torah (only our descendants get to see the Promised Land) is the same as the moral of the whole Tanakh (every Holy Temple falls to corruption eventually). Okay. We get it.
But that’s not how Doing the Work works. The story is cyclical on every scale, and the details keep unfolding. Each repetition teaches us something new about life because we’ve changed each time. But also, each generation must learn about life for itself; we can’t just inherit our ancestors’ experiences and coast along on them.
So, we keep going.
And these are the names of the sons of Yisra’el who came to Mitzrayim — that’s Ya’akov, to clarify — each coming with his household. Reuvein, Shim’on, Levi, Yehudah, Yisaschar, Zvulun, Binyamin, Dan, Naftali, Gad, and Asher. Plus Yosef, who was already there governing the whole country, having gotten out of jail with magic and skill. That makes 12.
The first generation of B’nei Yisra’el — Hebrews, outsiders — in Mitzrayim numbered 70. They flourished there, filling the land after the deaths of that first generation.
And then arose a new king over Mitzrayim who did not know Yosef.
Yosef had done well by his people because Pharaoh trusted him. When the famine got really bad, and Yosef told his people to sell themselves into servitude in order to survive, they did, because they trusted Yosef, because Pharaoh trusted Yosef.
The problem with a society that has a god-king is that even god-kings die, and new god-kings come along. And this new one has no reason to trust these outsiders flourishing in his territory. He fears their numbers. He also fears invasion from hostile powers, and he fears the children of Yisra’el will join his enemies’ side. So he appoints taskmasters over his indentured servants and relocates them to work camps. Pharaoh puts the Hebrew slaves to work in the fields and constructing the brick edifices of his kingdom.
Then he institutes a signature order that will echo through his land for the rest of this book. He orders all male Hebrew babies to be killed on the birthing stool.
He delivers this order to Hebrew midwives, Shifrah and Pu’ah, believing his power to be so absolute that they will obey him, but they do not. The text says it’s because they fear God that they refuse. He summons them and demands to know why they disobeyed. They give him a story: Hebrew women are stronger than Egyptian women. They deliver their babies before the midwives even arrive.
For this, God rewards the midwives and the mothers, and the Hebrews continue to increase.
Pharaoh escalates his order, giving it to all his people: Throw every Hebrew baby boy into the Nile. The girls may live.
That’s chapter 1 of Shemot.
Once upon a time in Mitzrayim, two Hebrews from the tribe of Levi marry and have a son. The baby is so beautiful to the mother that she hides him for three months rather than comply with Pharaoh’s execution order. When she can hide him no longer, she caulks a wicker basket, places him in it, and sets it afloat on the river Nile. The baby’s sister watches from afar to see what will happen to him.
None other than Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the river to bathe, and she spies the basket. She sends a slave girl to fetch it. When she sees the crying boy inside, she realizes it must be a Hebrew child, but she takes pity on him.
The sister approaches her cleverly and asks if she would like her to get a Hebrew nurse to suckle the child, and Pharaoh’s daughters agrees. The girl gets her mother — the baby’s own mother — and Pharaoh’s daughter hires her to nurse him.
When the child is grown, his mother brings him back to Pharaoh’s daughter, surely part of the arrangement. He becomes a prince of Egypt, and Pharaoh’s daughter names him Mosheh, a word resonant in both the Egyptian and Hebrew languages with his origins being drawn out of the river as a baby.
One day, the Hebrew prince is wandering around the work sites where his kinfolk are slaving away, and he sees an Egyptian taskmaster beating a slave. He looks around to see if anyone is watching, and seeing no one, he kills the Egyptian and hides him in the sand.
The next day, he sees two Hebrews fighting each other and intervenes. The guy who started it says to him, “What are you gonna do, kill me like you killed the Egyptian?” and now Mosheh knows the truth is out.
Pharaoh learns what happened and orders Mosheh killed, so Mosheh flees to the land of Midyan.
There are a lot of places in the Torah where I wish we still had the context more ancient readers may have had about referenced peoples and places and what their deals were. I don’t know how to contextualize the Midyanites here, and I wouldn’t want to entangle the Torah with contemporary values or narratives that don’t belong. But when I read this part, I feel like the people of Midyan are kindred spirits to the Hebrews, a smaller people, closer to the land than the imperial Egyptians, but more rooted in their place than the uprooted Hebrews, and this gives them some wisdom that the lineage of Yisra’el needs to internalize.
The first thing we learn about Midyan is that they have a priest. He has seven daughters. They come to draw water for their father’s flock at the well where Mosheh is resting after his flight. Shepherds come and try to drive the daughters away to keep the water for themselves, but Mosheh intervenes, and then he does the daughters a solid and waters their flocks for them.
They return to their father, the priest, whose name we now learn is Re’uel — “Behold! God!” That’s a pretty heavy name. He asks his daughters why they’re back so soon, and they explain that an Egyptian rescued them from marauding shepherds and watered their flocks for them. “Well, bring him back to party with us!” their father responds. One sentence later, Re’uel gives Mosheh his daughter, Tziporah (“Bird”), as a wife. One sentence after that, they have a son, and Mosheh names him Gershom, which means “A Stranger There.”
Meanwhile, back in Mitzrayim, the Pharaoh dies, but conditions continue to get worse for the children of Yisra’el. Their cries reach God’s ear, and God remembers the covenant with Avraham, Yitzhak, and Ya’akov. It is nearly time for the Divine to put a stop to this.
Mosheh settles into this rustic Midyanite life. Tending the flocks is just the way his people are supposed to live. One day, he’s out in the middle of nowhere with the flocks of his now father-in-law, who is suddenly called Yitro rather than Re’uel, and he arrives at Horeb, the Mountain of God. Presumably he doesn’t know that’s where he is at first, but that will change shortly.
A malakh — a messenger of יהוה — appears to him in a blazing bush. He stares, and he sees the bush burning, but it is not consumed. This is some different kind of fire.
Mosheh is overwhelmed and averts his eyes, so יהוה has to call out to him: “Mosheh! Mosheh!” And just like his holy ancestors did, Mosheh responds, “הנני” — “Here I am.”
“Do not come closer,” God says. “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is אדמת–קדש, holy earth.” Adamah. Like the earth from which the first earthling was formed.
Then God makes the customary lineage introduction, explaining that Mosheh is speaking to his ancestral God, and Mosheh hides his face, afraid to look.
God, unperturbed, goes on. God has taken heed of the plight of God’s people and has “come down” to rescue them, to carry them out to a good place, a land flowing with milk and honey, which God then explains is populated by some six other peoples who can surely be dealt with in due time.
Mosheh, God explains, must go to Pharaoh and free the children of Yisra’el from Egypt.
“Who am I to do that?” Mosheh responds, which is frankly kind of a weak response given that he is a rogue prince and not some random shmuck, but hey, God speaking from a burning bush, kinda scary, I get it.
God remains unperturbed, saying God will be with Mosheh and provide the necessary signs, and God adds that once the people are free, Mosheh needs to bring them all back to this exact mountain for some serious God-worshipping.
Mosheh then asks an interesting question: “When I go to the people and say, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is that God’s name,’ what shall I say to them?”
God responds in a pretty wild way. “אהיה אשר אהיה,” God says — “I will be what I will be” — and tells Mosheh to tell the people that “אהיה” sent him.
This is one of the clues the Torah gives us about the meaning of the holy name יהוה. It’s like a form of the verb “to be” that cannot be conjugated, and so God unpacks it here in a sort of riddle given mainly in the future tense. This God is not some knowable entity who can be pinned down. God will always continue to unfold.
God makes the instructions more specific, telling Mosheh to gather the elders of Yisra’el; they’ll understand. Then he and the elders are to go to Pharaoh together and, in the name of יהוה, request dispensation to take the people three days’ travel into the wilderness to make offerings.
Then God foretells that Pharaoh will not grant this request without a יד חזקה, a “strong hand,” so God will stretch out God’s hand and strike Mitzrayim with all kinds of scary things, and that ought to work. And for good measure, God will make the Egyptian people favor the Hebrews — I guess they must not like these new pharaohs too much — and so they will give the Hebrews ample provisions for their journey out of the land (and whatever sorts of lavish adornments their new priests of יהוה might require).
Mosheh, behaving a bit stubbornly at this point, continues to protest, asking what he should do if the people don’t believe God appeared to him. God then has to physically demonstrate God’s ability to turn staves into snakes and back, cause and remove gnarly skin diseases, and turn Nile water into blood — all of which will come in handy later — in order to convince Mosheh that this is going to be a compelling case.
Then Mosheh begins to beg. He says he is not a man of words, that he is slow of speech and slow of tongue. God reminds Mosheh that God gives humans both the capacity to speak and the capacity to hear, so it’s going to be fine.
At that point, Mosheh just has a tantrum and asks God to pick someone else.
Finally, God gets angry and, realizing this guy is going to be a pain in the Divine Ass, God reveals to Mosheh that he has a brother, a biological Yisra’elite brother, named Aharon, and God is already aware of his way with words. In fact, he’s already on the way to meet Mosheh. God explains that Mosheh will tell Aharon what God says to say, and Aharon will say it. At last, Mosheh starts to go, and God says, “Hey, don’t forget your magic staff I just showed you.”
Mosheh asks Yitro to let him go back to see how his kinsfolk in Mitzrayim are doing, and Yitro dismisses him. God informs Mosheh that all the royal agents who wanted to kill him for killing that Egyptian taskmaster are dead, so he’ll be safe. Mosheh saddles up and goes back to Mitzrayim with his wife, his sons, and his magic staff.
God prepares Mosheh for the fact that this plan isn’t going to work very well. In fact, God says that God will intentionally harden Pharaoh’s heart, so that he won’t let the people go despite all the horrors God will inflict. Mosheh has to work his way through the whole series, culminating in a rather horrible one. Remember how the previous Pharaoh ordered all the Hebrew boys killed at birth? God tells Mosheh to tell Pharaoh that Yisra’el is God’s firstborn son, and since Pharaoh won’t let “him” go, God will slay Pharaoh’s firstborn son in return.
This is all very scary stuff, and it actually gets about a million times scarier for a second here. At night, while they’re camped on the way, something kind of ambiguous happens, but it sounds like God seeks to kill Mosheh’s son? Either that or Mosheh himself. It seems that they forgot to circumcise their son — which as we know from the Avraham years is very important — and so Tziporah, perhaps using Midyanite-priest’s-daughter magic, circumcises the boy and performs some kind of advanced bris/wedding on him, like an emergency covenant-forming bloodletting ritual. It works.
God speaks directly to Aharon, sending him to meet his brother, Mosheh, they meet at the mountain and embrace. This is clearly kind of out of order, because Mosheh already left the mountain. The ambiguous pronouns in the scary circumcision episode lead to a sense that something has been spliced in here. I haven’t done enough of a PhD in Biblical Studies or whatever to state authoritatively what happened — I doubt anyone has — but I feel like what we’re getting here is a bit of a priestly edit to make sure the ancestral stories conform to the upcoming priestly religious requirements. Something like that.
Anyway, Mosheh explains the plan to Aharon, then the brothers go assemble the elders of Yisra’el, and Aharon does the explaining to them. They are convinced. When they hear that יהוה is ready to intervene and save them, they bow low to the ground.
Let the games begin. Mosheh and Aharon appear before Pharaoh and say, “God says, ‘Let My people go to hold a festival for Me in the wilderness.’” This seems like as good a place as any to remind anyone who is unaware that the word for “wilderness,” מדבר, has the same root as לדבר, “to speak,” and so it sort of means “the speaking place,” and also דבר means “thing,” showing the way that reality and language are sort of the same thing from God’s perspective.
Pharaoh receives this request incredulously. He doesn’t know this “God,” and he won’t let the people go.
The brothers restate their request, this time trying the angle that God will punish them with various plagues if they don’t make these offerings, figuring that sort of thing will impress Pharaoh. It does the opposite; Pharaoh is like, “Guys, you’re distracting the slaves from their labor. Get a grip.” In fact, he immediately instructs the taskmasters to make the slaves’ labor harder, imposing collective punishment for Mosheh and Aharon’s impudence.
Pharaoh then punishes the overseers when the slaves can’t complete their extra work; that’s how mad he is. The overseers run into Mosheh and Aharon on their way out of the palace, and they curse the brothers in the name of יהוה for putting them in this position.
This drives Mosheh to complain to God again. “Why did You bring this harm upon these people? Why did You send me? It’s only made things worse!”
God responds, “You’ll see.”
Neither Pharaoh nor Mosheh is ready yet for the trial ahead.
🧱
