Michael Zank

We don’t know whether there was a historical Moses. As Jan Assmann wrote in his Moses the Egyptian, Pharaoh Amenophis IV “Akhenaten” was a figure of history but not of memory, while Moses is a figure of memory but perhaps not of history.

And yet, Moses, as a figure of memory, has exerted considerable historical “influence,” or better, the Moses figure has been vigorously received by multiple civilizations that based their worldviews on biblical figures, symbols, and motifs. Moses and the various Mosaic projects derived from or built upon Mosaic precedent and justified by Mosaic and ultimately divine authority are of fundamental importance to Jewish, Christian and Muslim conceptions of divine revelation, law, politics, liturgy, and even philosophical beliefs. Secular heirs to the Moses tradition as well have found meaning in the story of Moses and the Exodus. One of the most astounding modern works on Moses, Freud’s Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion went as far as casting Moses as an Egyptian, coming full circle, back to the biblical text and its possible implications.

In fact, Freud split the biblical figure of Moses into two distinct individuals, one Egyptian and one Midianite, neither one Jewish in an ethnic sense. The historical speculation at play in Freud’s writing is secondary to his primary impulse, which is to unveil the psycho-dramatic underpinnings of the great figure of Moses who represents the conflict Freud is interested in, that is, the great psycho-physiological conflict of filial love-hate, incestuous desire, and the repression of primal urges that, according to Freud, provide the psychic energy needed to produce civilized behavior. In that reading, our great myths and stories are veiled references to hidden and repressed desires rooted in physiological constants of our species: illusions that are products of displaced infantile wish fulfillment, the greatest such illusion being religion.

What do I mean by Moses as a “figure.” According to Erich Auerbach, the “figural structure” refers to a pattern of interpretation that is especially familiar from Christian readings that see important moments in the lives of Christ and the saints as prefigured in personages, moments and events from the Old Testament. I am using “figure” in a slightly less specific sense. For one, I use it to suggest that the biblical Moses is never simply the character in a story that can be understood solely from the details of its canonical telling or that is entirely coherent or compelling from within the literary framework of that story. Moses always points beyond himself and outside of the story in which he appears, if Exodus and the rest of the Torah constitute a story at all. By echoing the lives of other great heroes of the ancient world, Moses points to what is familiar from, and prefigured by, other heroes and therefore invites comparison and recognition of a known genre of heroic biographies that, in this case, include the story of the rise of Sargon of Agade and the tale of Sinuhe the Egyptian. But by virtue of Moses’ reception and retelling in light of other “great man” traditions, Moses also fails to remain completely embedded in the story of his life as contained in the Torah. Moses belongs as much to those who supply additional detail and interpretation and who rearrange his life in light of new interests and sensitivities, who remake Moses into a character without necessarily abandoning his significance as a great figure. More cipher than defined personality, Moses comes to embody different qualities to different adopters of the biblical tale of this prophet extraordinaire. Freud’s reading is only a recent example in this long history of extracting new meaning from Moses.

We need not make up our minds in advance whether Moses existed or not. The Moses we have is the Moses of Scripture, of the Bible, especially of the Five Books of Moses. This starting point is not a simple one. It is doubled by the fact that Moses appears as a figure in a book attributed to Moses: Moses the actor and Moses the author. And even if we don’t follow tradition in ascribing the Torah to Mosaic authorship, there is still the suggestion, in the Torah, that Moses wrote, perhaps not the entire Torah as we have it, but perhaps parts of it: the laws deposited with the Ark of the Covenant and the Song he composed and sang toward the end of his life, at the fields of Moab, in the hearing of the Israelites, at the time when he passed his authority as their leader to Joshua as his successor. In the biblical book that bears the name of the latter, Joshua is said to have committed himself to following the instructions of Moses (torah asher tsivah Mosheh avdi) as well as to study this book of instructions (sefer torah ha-zeh) day and night so as to do everything that is written in it, etc. This brings us to the important question of how Moses and the Book of Instruction (sefer torah) appear across the canonical and deutero-canonical writings outside the Torah, a curious subject in its own right.

Moses is mentioned outside the Torah, but not as frequently or consistently as one might expect. The canonical order of books suggests that the Torah of Moses was there first, that it preceded and authorized the conquest of Canaan, that it was known to the tribes and their judges before the rise of kingship in Israel, that it was deposited in Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem generations. It is the divine law that always should have been followed. But the first time that we hear of a sefer torah (literally “a scroll of instructions”) in the Book of Kings is late in the kingdom of Judah, when Josiah of Judah, upon reaching adulthood, orders repairs to the royal temple in Jerusalem (2 K 22). Prior to this inventio (accidental coming upon a sacred place or object), the scroll that emerged during these repairs and that the king has authenticated by court prophetess Hulda was utterly unknown, its content does not correspond to the Torah of Moses as we have it, and Moses is not directly associated with it. Moses was known in Judah, and he is mentioned in Judahite prophetic books, including once in Micah, once in Jeremiah, and twice in Trito-Isaiah, where he is remembered as the “shepherd of his flock” and associated with the miracle of the parting of the sea (see Isa 63:11-12). In Micah 6:4, Moses appears alongside Aaron and Miriam in a reminder of the Exodus tradition. In Jeremiah 15:1 he appears as an intercessor like Samuel. On the other hand, the 8^th-century Israelite prophet Hosea speaks of the Exodus from Egypt (Hosea 11:1 “From Egypt I have called you my son”) without mentioning Moses, much as in the rabbinic Passover where Moses is completely eclipsed. While Moses is therefore part of Judahite tradition, he remains marginal until he is associated with writing, specifically the writing of Torah.[1] In pre-exilic Judah, Moses was remembered not as the author of a book but as the fashioner of a powerful bronze object that served to avert the plague. (See 2 K 18:4 and cf. Num 21:4-9).

Only later, when Jerusalem is reestablished under Persian rule and Ezra, priest and scribe, assembles the Jews at the rebuilt temple do we hear of a public reading of Torah that moves the people to tears. The Torah as we have it, as Julius Wellhausen argued more than a century ago, seems more like the result of the long history of Israel described in the above brief summary rather than its precondition. In other words, to get a historical handle on Moses we mustn’t be fooled by the canonical order of books. The figure of Moses who leads the Israelites out of Egypt, the House of Slavery, to the cusp of the Promised Land, is a figure of Torah, a book of laws and instructions received in the desert but meant to be studied, day and night, and diligently hearkened so as to do it, so as to merit the land YHWH has promised to the forefathers of the nation. Remaining in that land inherited once before, a long time ago, is contingent on the observance of Torah, of living by a law that, as it says in Deuteronomy, is so very good that it will be the envy of your neighbors. Life-enabling laws that provide the foundation of a successful society but that will be a witness against you should you ignore it. The relevance of this narrative for the community of returning exiles cannot be overestimated. In so many ways, exile and return, Torah and the persistence of the Jews, have remained the most important source and characteristic of the Jewish experience. The figure of Moses, by whose mediation the Torah was received as a book that henceforth accompanied the Jews on their migration through history, pales in comparison with the divine lawgiver and the covenant made at Sinai between YHWH and Israel. As a result, Moses’ absence in much of Scripture is not very noticeable. The voice of the prophets stands in for him, though he was the chief of the prophets and there was none like him. The glaring absence of Moses from most of the canon barely matters. The rabbis crafted a liturgy of the Passover festival, which celebrates the Exodus from Egypt and that, in lieu of a temple to which a Jew could make pilgrimage, is to be chanted in the house at night around a table set with symbolic foods. In the traditional Haggadah or story of Passover, Moses is never mentioned. Not even once. We can only speculate why. Suffice it to say at this point that this was not an inevitable choice. Samaritans who celebrate the Passover until today as instructed in the Torah by slaughtering, boiling, and consuming lambs at night on the mountain of Garizim, their ancestral sanctuary near the West Bank town of Nablus, regard Moses as the greatest manifestation of divine power (hela rabba).

Not so the Rabbis. Rabbinic Judaism developed a different Moses, one who has more affinity with the rabbis themselves as students of Torah. The Moses of the Rabbis varies. In some stories he is shown heaven and hell, in others he sits in the back of Rabbi Akiva’s classroom like an ignoramus who has no idea what this genius is talking about. When he is told by his neighbor that he is interpreting the Torah of Moses he is satisfied. When he is shown the martyrdom of Akiva, he is abhorred. Moses, the clueless. The rabbis, as Susan Handelman famously put it, were “slayers of Moses.” Freud was neither the first nor the last Jewish reader fascinated with Moses and obsessed with making sense of his life story. Conversely, it is by way of Moses that Freud found a way of expressing his own Jewishness. Without Moses, no Judaism.

Moses, the sometimes obscured and sometimes venerated, is more than Judaism, more and other than what Jews and Samaritans made of him. This is one of the most curious facts in the history of civilization. Without the sting of the law, no Pauline or Protestant anomism. Without Moses, neither Jesus nor Muhammad. How did Moses turn from the figure of Exodus, Sinai, and forty years of wanderings in the desert into the paradigmatic lawgiver and model for offices and personages in the Christian and Muslim faiths? It has been pointed out that such appropriations significantly misread the biblical text and its original intentions, but the same can be said of Jewish appropriations as well. Everyone misreads Moses. And only by misreading Moses can one make sense of Moses. The question is rather why would they try to make sense of Moses rather than of other great figures of the past. The Mosaic revelation was strikingly successful. Though rebranded in a number of important ways, sometimes reduced to a preliminary or intermediate stage in the history of divine salvation and sometimes surpassed by further acts of divine revelation, Moses remained the touchstone and measure by which those surpassings were judged. Only by being more than Moses could Jesus be Jesus. Only by being different in comparison with Moses could Muhammad be the seal of the prophets.

[1] I am ignoring here those stereotypical mentions in the Book of Kings that suggest that the law of Moses was known to the early good kings of Judah (David in 1 K 2:3, Solomon in 1 K 8) and to the later good kings, incl. Amaziah/Uzziah (2 K 14:6), Hezekiah (2 K 18:6), indications why Israel was carried into exile (2 K 18:12), why Josiah excelled as he did (2 K 23:25), and the like. Most of these passages can safely be attributed to exilic or post-exilic authorships. The great exemption from this rule is 2 K 18:4 where Hezekiah is said to have removed nehushtan (“bronzey”) from the temple as an idolatrous object fashioned by Moses.