Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
things we have heard and known,
that our ancestors have told us.
We will not hide them from their children;
we will tell to the coming generation
and the wonders that he has done.
(Psalm 78:1-4)
Introduction
When Man believed in God, Man could talk with God, “a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of events, in the intertwining of its forms” (Calasso 6). Among the most famous to speak with God is Moses, or Mosheh, the ancient Hebrew shepherd compelled by theophany to liberate the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. For thousands of years, the Exodus narrative of freedom and union with God has inspired Man and endowed special meaning to life. That being so, my purpose is twofold. First, I will apply the prevailing methods of analyzing the mythic hero archetype to the life of Moses. Then, since a good story has endless possibilities of interpretation, I offer a metaphorical reading of Exodus for a time when God and imagination are in exile, and our contemporary civilization is excessively absurd, oppressive and exploitative.
First Focus: Moses and the Mythic Hero Archetype
Moving beyond contemporary definitions of hero as an altruistic public servant, the mythic hero follows a prescribed life pattern centered on a crucial event that unlocks the flow of life in the world and renews society. “An individual is named the ‘hero’ of a particular incident, which means that he or she had intervened in some critical situation in an extraordinary fashion, acting outside, above, or in disregard to normal patterns of behavior, especially in putting his or her life at risk” (Miller 1). In this respect, the lowly Moses, aided by otherworldly power, vexes the Pharaoh of Egypt with plagues, disasters and murder until the Jewish slaves are released from bondage. Moreover, “[t]he hero is the one who, while still alive, knows and represents the claims of the superconsciousness which throughout creation is more or less unconscious. The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination...” (Campbell 259). True to form, after following God’s command to liberate the Jewish people in Egypt, Moses alone speaks to God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11) and receives “tablets of stone, written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18)—the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, and the 613 “divers laws and ordinances” intended to govern, according to divine principles, the new life in the promised land of Canaan.
The mythic hero archetype is typically separated from normal patterns of family life. “[T]he makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world’s great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned with such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found...the tendency has always been to endow the hero with extraordinary powers from the moment of birth, or even the moment of conception” (Campbell 319). While Moses lacks the immaculate conception of Jesus or the colorful legends of Muhammad’s childhood, the Jewish hero is spared a drowning death in the Nile River, as commanded by the Pharaoh of all Hebrew firstborn males, when his mother hides him in a papyrus basket discovered by none other than the Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopts him. This leads inevitably to antagonism between the mythic hero and the stand-in father. When Moses sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, he empathizes with the suffering of his kinfolk, kills the Egyptian and conceals the corpse in the desert sand. Under threat of murder by Pharaoh, Moses flees Egypt in the first of two pilgrimages.
The adventure of the mythic hero adheres to a fixed outline. “A hero ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (Campbell 30). Following this prescription, Moses settles in the faraway land of Midian, where he defends the daughters of a shepherd from wandering thugs and takes up residence near Mount Horeb, which becomes “a transitional or liminal topos between the human, profane world and a supernatural zone or Otherworld; and one of [the] obsession[s] of the hero, to find and penetrate into threatening or unknown places and terrains, with the near certainty of encountering alterity in the form either of hostile human, animal or supernatural forces, is absolutely a key feature in his biography” (Miller 147-48). During his time living in the foreign land, he is summoned by God in the guise of a burning bush to bring the Israelites out of Egypt into “a land flowing with milk and honey...” (Exodus 3:8).
Miller describes the adventure pattern of separation-initiation-return as, simply, “Someone extraordinary/Goes or is sent/To search for and retrieve/Something important” (Miller 162). Following the solitary pilgrimage, Moses is sent to liberate the Hebrews from bondage—a second pilgrimage by all the Jewish people “from the evil land where Pharaoh reigns through the desert to the holy mountain where the God of Sinai reigns” (Coogan 83). Upon hearing the command, a reluctant Moses says “O My Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10) and begs God to “please send someone else” (Exodus 4:13). The protests anger God, and Moses submits.
“For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure...who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass” (Campbell 69). Moses encounters two protective figures as he returns to Egypt. God traditionally requires Israel to offer foreskin as sacrifice, and the wife of Moses, Zipporah, circumcises their son and touches the bloody flesh to Moses’ genitals to win God’s protection. Finally, “[t]he conclusion of the childhood cycle is the return or recognition of the hero, when, after the long period of obscurity, his true character is revealed” (Campbell 329). God appoints Moses’ brother Aaron as his travel companion and directs Moses to his destiny. “You shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth; and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you what you shall do. He indeed shall speak for you to the people; he shall serve as a mouth for you, and you shall serve as God for him” (Exodus 4:15-16).
“From obscurity the hero emerges, but the enemy is the great and conspicuous seat of power” (Campbell 337). The king is damned in the eyes of the mythic hero as the man who misuses the seat of power and “directs or manages a social order from which the hero is self-excluded or which he follows only on his own terms” (Miller 181). Specifically, the king of Egypt, the incarnation of the sun god, built cities with the forced labor of the Hebrews “and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them” (Exodus 1:14). Moses appears with Aaron and tells Pharaoh, “The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, ‘Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness’” (Exodus 7:16). Pharaoh is unmoved by the command of the God of slaves and Moses’ show of magic. Thus begins the ten plagues, beginning with the source of life and fertility for Egypt, the Nile River, turning to blood; swarms of frogs, mosquitoes and flies; a deadly livestock epidemic; boils—inflamed pus-filled swelling on the skin of the Egyptians; a hail and fire storm that destroys the flax and barley crop; a swarm of locusts that devours the wheat, spelt and fruit of the trees. Finally, darkness covers the land, and in an “eye-for-an-eye” revenge punishment reminiscent of Babylonian law, God strikes down the firstborn of all the Egyptians; the Jews are protected by a smear of blood on their doorposts. The Pharaoh relents.
The Hebrews depart Egypt with God’s protection. But, wandering the wilderness and pursued by Pharaoh and his soldiers, they cry out to Moses, “What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness” (Exodus 14:11-12). But Moses stands firm. “The hero is devoted to combat and confrontation: he must be prepared to seek out, or at least never avoid, those aspects of the quest involving ‘blocking’ strategies, threats and finally violence” (Miller 163). With divine assistance, Moses divides the sea so the Hebrews may pass upon dry land, but when the Egyptian chariots are stuck in the mud between the walls of the sea, Moses stretches out his hand so that the waters return and drown the Egyptian army.
Three days into the wilderness, God said “If you will listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God, and do what is right in his sight, and give heed to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians; for I am the LORD who heals you” (Exodus 15:26). Accordingly, God rains bread upon the Hebrews, who call it manna, likely the “carbohydrate-rich excretion of two scale-insects that feed on twigs of the tamarisk tree” (Coogan 106). “[I]t was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31). Quails descend upon the camp in the evenings. Moses purifies bitter water with a piece of wood and strikes water from a rock. Furthermore, in the forty years of wilderness travel, “[t]he clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell...” (Deuteronomy 8:4)
Three months into the wilderness, Moses and the Hebrew people camped in the shadow of the sacred mountain of Horeb, known also as Mount Sinai. God descended upon the mountain in a cloud of smoke and fire, and God summoned Moses alone to receive teaching: “Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back—not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other—is the talent of the master” (Campbell 229). In other words, the mythic hero alone can cross freely between the sacred world and the world of Man. With stone tablets that were “the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets” (Exodus 32:16), Moses returns after forty days to discover the impatient Hebrew people are anxious, rebellious and perversely worshipping a calf sculpted from their gold jewelry. “The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life” (Campbell 218). When he saw the dancing and the idol, Moses was furious. “[H]e threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 32:19). God demands Moses carve another set of tablets so God may rewrite the commandments. “As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God” (Exodus 34:29). Moses covered his face with a veil, which he removes when speaking with God.
“Precisely because the hero is easily detached from the societal matrix, he is often as dangerous to the social fabric as he is useful in defending it” (Miller 164). God is furious at the transgression of the Hebrew people and is poised to destroy them. Moses intercedes and says, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people” (Exodus 31:11-12). The appeal of Moses to the reputation of God is a success, and Moses delivers the commandments intended to govern life in the promised land:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house...nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.
If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury...
Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil...
Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another.
Ye shall not therefore oppress one another...
The land shall not be sold for ever...
Exodus is the story of liberation from slavery in Egypt, but the people become servants of a different lord—the LORD God. In the wilderness, after receiving the commandments intended to regenerate society, the struggle of the Hebrews turns to emigrating to the promised land of Canaan. But, during the journey, the people bitterly whine and show little faith. “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘How long will this people despise me? And how long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them? I will strike them with pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they” (Numbers 14:11-12). As before, Moses appeals to God’s reputation: “Now if you kill this people all at one time, then the nations who have heard about you will say, ‘It is because the LORD was not able to bring this people into the land he swore to give them that he has slaughtered them in the wilderness’” (Numbers 14:15-16).
God is not as easily convinced after complaints and mutiny: “I do forgive, just as you have asked; nevertheless—as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD—none of the people who have seen my glory and the signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness...shall see the land that I swore to give to their ancestors; none of those who despised me shall see it” (Numbers 14:20-23). “And the LORD’s anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness for forty years, until all the generation that had done evil in the sight of the LORD had disappeared” (Numbers 32:13).
Finally, Moses—and his companion Aaron—“with whom the welfare of the tribe or nation is identified, must die to atone for the people’s sins and restore the land to fruitfulness” (Guerin 166). Early in the wilderness journey, when there was no water for the people, God directs Moses and Aaron to command water from a rock. Moses strikes the rock twice, and God reprimands him for his error: “Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land I have given them” (Numbers 20:12). Aaron dies alone on a mountaintop in the fortieth year of the wandering. Moses is shown the promised land but is forbidden to cross the River Jordan. He is one-hundred-twenty years-old when he dies, and he is buried in an unmarked grave.
Second Focus: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Exodus
Voltaire writes, “Was there really a Moses? If a man who gave orders to the whole of nature had really existed among the Egyptians, would not such prodigious events have played a leading part in the history of Egypt? Would not Sanchoniathon, Manetho, Measthenes, Herodotus have spoken of him? The historian Josephus collected all possible evidence in favour of the Jews. He dared not say that any of the authors whom he cited had said a single word about the miracles of Moses!” (Voltaire 317) Truly, as Voltaire argued in 1764, there is no evidence the Hebrew people lived in Egypt as slaves—so then, why do the ancient stories tell of it?
“[W]hen a civilization has passed from a mythological to a secular point of view, the older images are no longer felt or quite approved” (Campbell 248). Thousands of years ago, people did not speak of social stratification, functionalist theory, conflict theory or symbolic interactionism to describe the relationships, inequality and dangers of civilization. “[T]he development of the scientific method of research, have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed” (Campbell 387). Ancient Man was not a positivist but a poet. “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky” (Campbell 249).
Whereas modern Man relies on observable, measurable, predictable facts to describe reality, ancient Man relied on imagination and myth. “[M]yth can be described as an independent, closed, symbolically rich narrative about some archetypal character whose story, which takes place in the primeval time of the beginning, represents some universal aspect of the origins or nature of humanity in its relation to the sacred or the divine...[M]yth, by narrating a ‘sacred history,’ stabilizes and orders, or regenerates and gives meaning to, what is seen as the chaos of human, or secular and profane, existence” (Moye 578-579). Modern Man, with a withered imagination, a bored apathy amidst material clutter, and a compulsion for fact, is apt to overlook—or worse, dismiss—the truth and wisdom hidden in ancient metaphor. “But remember this, the sun that shines today is the sun that shone when thy father was born, and will still be shining when thy last grandchild shall pass into the darkness” (Clason 25). In other words, though our props may be different, our human nature remains the same. “The present convergence of crises was written into the future thousands of years ago. It is the inevitable culmination of the separation that began in the deep past, and that once initiated, could do no other than to build upon itself. From the very moment we began to see ourselves as apart from nature, our doom was sealed...[T]hroughout history perceptive individuals have seen...the inevitable destination toward which our conception of self and world propels us. Long ago they saw the first stirrings of a gathering calamity written into who we are, and they couched their insights in the language of myth and metaphor” (Eisenstein 437).
The ancient myths are more than stories about particular men, but truth about Man and the inevitable fate created by the nature of Man. “[T]here have always been visionaries who have seen where our separation from self, nature, and other would inevitably lead. Centuries ago, millennia ago, they pointed us urgently in the other direction, even as they recognized the inevitability of the still-ripening catastrophe. All of them did their best to leave us messages, clues and hints that a different way is possible, not so much to stem the tide of history but to teach us how to proceed after the crash of our unsustainable story of self. Their messages are about transcendence, transcending the limited, limiting, and delusory Separated self of our present science, religion, economics, medicine, and psychology. They spoke their messages in different ways, by whatever means expedient to transmit them through the ages....Some communicated with the future by creating myths and legends, poems and songs, dances and rituals for receptive people to decode or, more often, that plant a seed in the unconscious mind of the listener or performer” (Eisenstein 545). Perhaps no myth has been more enduring, or controversial, in the history of Man than the Bible, the repository of the knowledge and wisdom of our ancient ancestors.
“The books of the Bible are not separate units, but a series of scrolls telling a continuous story” (Carroll 330). In the context of the Hebrew Bible, the story of Exodus and the entrance to the promised land of Canaan comes as the conclusion to a narrative arc that generally follows Campbell's adventure pattern of separation-initiation-return. “[T]he story of the Pentateuch as a whole is preeminently the story of the fall, or the exile, of humanity from the harmony of paradise and the perfect balance and order of God’s creation into the disordered realm of human history and the subsequent desire for a reunion with the divine, a reunion that is accomplished not by a return to a mythical Eden but by the manifestation of the divine on earth and within history and by the return to a human and historical version of Eden, the promised land given to the chosen people by God” (Moye 598). In other words, the story of the Pentateuch begins with Man’s separation from God and the Paradise of nature, followed by a period when Man builds a dysfunctional, hellish life based on the assumptions of separation; then, unable to sustain the separation, Man returns to God and the wilderness.
“Thus, we move, in the...creation story and in the story of the fall, from the initial harmony...of Eden to the man’s recognition of his difference and otherness to the full separation of the human from the divine and exile eastward from Eden” (Moye 585-586). Separated from paradise, Adam further escalates the divide by manipulating and exploiting nature when he is “sent forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.” (Genesis 3:23) The destructiveness of Man multiplies across the generations: the murder of the nomad shepherd Abel by his civilized farmer brother Cain, Sarai’s contempt for the slave-girl Hagar, the discourteous men of Sodom, Jacob’s treachery against his brother Esau, Rachel’s rebellion against her father, Joseph thrown into a pit and sold as a slave by his envious brothers. “The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD” (Genesis 6:5-7). “[T]he exclusion of Noah from the rest of humanity transforms the theme of separation from God...to the dominant theme of God’s selection of the Patriarchs, separation for God” (Moye 586).
The destructive patterns intensify in the generations leading up to the separation of Moses from the crowd, when Man, in grand hubris, erects the Tower of Babel, “a story of the transgression of human limits in seeking integration with the divine and immortality” (Moye, 587). “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves...” The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will no be impossible for them” (Genesis 11:4-6). Such is the condition in Egypt, where by the twisting of the Nile River, Man fabricates a garden paradise in the desert. But the artificial realm of human life cannot be sustained without both an inequitable social stratification that subordinates, or enslaves, a large swath of the population to the goals of the controlling few and an exaggerated, delusional and dangerous separation from nature.
“Who could have guessed, when the first granary was built in prehistoric Mesopotamia and the first forest cut down in Sumer...where it would all lead?” (Eisenstein 545). Ancient Man suspected the dangers of a civilization founded on separation, and nowhere was the tragedy more apparent than in Egypt, which undoubtedly became the metaphor of the Hebrew people for an unsustainable society. In this interpretation, Moses—at the end of the narrative arc of the Hebrew Bible—leads God’s People from imprisonment in a volatile civilization to a most unadorned living in the wilderness, where Man learns how to construct a new way of life based on principles of justice, simplicity and harmony. In this interpretation, the people of God are the builders of the split existence that afflicts them, wherever and whenever that may be, subject to a Man elevated to the status of God. Ancient wise-guys warned of the consequences of living apart from God and nature, and the plagues of Egypt metaphorically represent the crumbling of precarious control: nature intrudes into the imagined separateness of civilized Man, and, worse, destroys the meticulously cultivated food supply and sickens the animals; the health of the people fail. Failing to heed the lessons of the past, Man elevated to a God is humbled. “[I]n a pattern that has repeated itself from ancient Sumer to Rome and now to the American Empire, the society collapses under the weight of the structure it has erected” (Eisenstein 30).
At the dawn of the twenty-first century of the Christian era, ignorant of the wisdom of the centuries, Man has constructed a wobbling Tower of Babylon and submitted to the oppression of Egypt: “For people immersed in the study of any of the crises that afflict our planet, it becomes abundantly obvious that we are doomed. Politics, finance, energy, education, health care, and most importantly the ecosystem are headed toward near-certain collapse...” (Eisenstein 431). But an ending is truly a beginning in disguise, as demonstrated by the Pentateuch. When the present way of life fails, as it most certainly will, from a state of simplicity emerges the possibility of recreating the world from the lessons of civilization. “When we awaken to the enormity of our crisis and the magnitude of our loss, often the first response is a crushing despair...Yet on the other side of despair is fullness and an urgency to live life beautifully. We can choose a different world—the ‘more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible’...—but to choose it we must be familiar with what we are choosing. We must be fully cognizant of the world we have chosen up until now” (Eisenstein 353).
A new civilization is the proposal of Ancient Man in the wilderness of Sinai, who foresaw an amplifying pattern of destruction and suggested an alternative to catastrophe. “The modern hero, the modern individual who dares heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding...It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.” (Campbell 391). In opposing corrupt society, the hero offers a boon that renews that society; in the story of Moses, the people are rescued from slavery and led to a new beginning. They cannot imagine any other way of life and do not trust the wisdom from the mountaintop, so they recreate their previous conditions in a new place. To reform a society in danger of extinction, we must overcome the hypnosis of Egypt. Our City is not separate from the wilderness, but built in the wilderness; mankind is not separate from the Source of all Creation, but sustained through reconciliation and harmony with the Absolute Spirit which is his true nature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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