The Exodus

by Richard Elliott Friedman

  In Chapter 2, I gave a brief introduction to the various texts that editors put together to make up the Bible’s first five books. Aside from everything else that we think about the Bible’s source texts, I just wanted to underscore there, and now here, that we can trace some of the texts to Levite authors and some to non-Levite authors. Now, in the oldest Levite prose text that we have, which is the text called E, Midian periodically emerges in the story. When we separate out the E story and read it, here is what we get involving Midian:

  In the book of Genesis, all of the sources say that Abraham, the patriarch of Western religion, has a wife named Sarah and a concubine named Hagar. Sarah gives birth to a son, Isaac. Hagar, too, gives birth to a son, Ishmael. But the E source adds something that you will not find in the other sources. E says that Abraham takes another wife (or concubine), named Keturah, in addition to Sarah and Hagar.6 Abraham and Keturah have six sons in E, and one of those sons is Midian.7 So the author of the E text wanted us to know that the Midianites (descended from Keturah), like the Israelites (descended from Sarah) and the Ishmaelites (descended from Hagar), are of the lineage of Abraham. Later, in the story of Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph in Genesis, in the E version of the story Midianites are prominent. Joseph’s brothers have left him to die in a pit, but the Midianites save him by stealing him away and sell him as a slave in Egypt. Apparently unwittingly, they thus end up saving his life and setting in motion the chain of events that lead to the exodus.8

  But most striking of all: the first time that Moses appears in this Levite E story, he is in Midian—not in Egypt!

  I want to make this as visible as possible, so I have translated this first E episode about Moses in its context among the other sources in the first chapters of Exodus. It appears in Appendix A at the end of this book.9

  In the Levite author’s E story at the start of the book of Exodus, we read: a new king came to the throne, he oppressed the Israelites, and he tried to reduce Israel’s growing numbers by infanticide, but two midwives thwarted his tactic. Then suddenly, the very first time that we hear about Moses, we read:

  And Moses had been shepherding the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, priest of Midian.

  (Exodus 3:1)

  If we had nothing but this source, we would understand Moses to be a Midianite, not an Israelite! Never a slave, never a baby in a basket, never a prince, never in Egypt, his life before this moment would be unknown. It is possible, of course, that some biblical editor excluded a piece of the original E text that came before this. Maybe Moses had started out in Egypt and somehow made his way to Midian. In favor of this possibility, Moses later tells his father-in-law, “Let me go back to my brothers who are in Egypt.”10 “Go back” implies that he has been there before. And still later in E we read that he had named his son Gershom (which is taken to mean “Alien There”) because he said, “I was an alien in a foreign land.”11 This too implies that he came to Midian from some other place where he was not a native. So, as honest detectives, let us not rule that possibility out. But we read on. God calls to Moses from inside a bush on a mountain and says: “I’ve seen the oppression that Egypt is causing them. And now go, and I’ll send you to Pharaoh, and you shall bring out my people, the children of Israel, from Egypt.” To which Moses responds: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring out the children of Israel from Egypt?”

  That is a fair question for a man in Midian: What does this have to do with me?! We have usually read Moses’ words here (“Who am I . . .”) to express humility (or fear). That makes sense when we read the full Bible in its present united context because this E story has the two other stories wound around it. That combination provides a whole life for Moses back in Egypt before this—born a slave, a baby in a basket, raised as a prince, killing an Egyptian, fleeing Egypt—so naturally we understand that Moses could be afraid to go back to a land that he left. But if we read just the Levite E story, we do not need to imagine psychological reasons for Moses’ reluctance to go save people in Egypt. On the face of it, his reluctance is as natural as can be: “Egypt? Who am I that I should go there? Why me?! I’m a Midianite!” And the deity’s answer makes sense as well: because you are going to bring the people from Egypt to serve me here, on this mountain, in this land. As my teacher Frank Moore Cross affirms, “This text presumes that the mountain is in Midianite territory.” If the divine plan is to bring the people to a mountain in Midian, send a Midianite!12 And as the deity informs Moses: He is not just the God of Abraham and Midian. He is also the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The oppressed people in Egypt are Moses’ kin, from whom the Midianite clan had separated. That might also explain why Moses would say, “Let me go back to my brothers who are in Egypt.” It need not denote “go back to Egypt.” It can denote “go back to my brothers.”

  Also, in this source Moses will then go on to protest that he cannot go to Egypt because he is “heavy of tongue.”13 Readers have often assumed this expression to mean that Moses has some sort of speech defect. But the first step when encountering an expression for the first time in the Bible is to see if it occurs anywhere else in the book. This idiom occurs in one other place. It is in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. God tells Ezekiel that He is not sending him to nations who are “deep of lip and heavy of tongue,” whose words Ezekiel cannot understand. God says that those “heavy of tongue” people would listen but that, ironically, Ezekiel’s own people, Israel, will not.14 “Heavy of tongue” there means people who speak foreign languages. So back in Exodus, Moses’ protest would be understood to mean that he cannot go on the mission to which God is directing him because he does not speak the language. What language? Our first thought would naturally be that he does not speak Egyptian. But the text before this rather says that God tells Moses to gather and speak to the elders of Israel.15 And the text after this says that God gives Moses an interpreter, Aaron, and God says, “He will speak for you to the people.”16 The problem is not that Moses does not speak the language of the Egyptians. It is that he does not speak the language of the people whom he is being sent to save. Moses, the shepherd in Midian, does not speak Hebrew, the language of the people in Egypt.

  And, after all, as we said in Chapter 2, why would anyone make up that Moses was married to a Midianite? And why make up that his father-in-law was a Midianite priest? Why would the author of E place him in Midian if Moses did not in fact have some connection back to Midian? The archaeologist and biblical scholar Carol Meyers of Duke University writes, “These highly unusual and positive features of the Midianite connection, especially in light of the genealogical connection between Israel and Midian (Gen 25:1–4), suggest a note of validity for a formative Midianite role in Israel’s past.”17 And we can now add to this the fact that those earliest archaeological references to Yahweh locate Him in or near this region as well.

  Moses and Midian in the J Source

  Now let us go back and see those other texts that are wrapped in between this E text. From around the same period as the E story’s composition, we have the author of the J story. We are already familiar with part of this story from Chapter 2, the part about the baby in the basket. This story largely involves women: Moses’ mother, his sister, the Pharaoh’s daughter, her girls, her maid, Moses’ wife Zipporah, and Zipporah’s six sisters. The prominence of women in the J text was one of the reasons that first led me to propose that its author might have been female herself.18 In this version, Moses is from Egypt, not Midian. But—and this is very important—this author still recognized the importance of Midian. Midian had to be in the story. This author had a different name for Moses’ father-in-law: Reuel (the E author had called the father-in-law Jethro), but this J author still identified that father-in-law as priest of Midian. The J text thus affirms the importance of Midian and its priest, and it affirms that Moses was there, and not in Egypt, when he received the divine call. This author made sure we knew that Moses was an Israelite, born among the slaves in Egypt, but the autho
r also needed to get Moses to Midian. So the J author gave a background that we do not find in E: Moses grew up in the royal house of Egypt, he killed an Egyptian, he went to Midian because he was a fugitive from Egypt, he settled and married in Midian, then God summoned him to go back to Egypt to save the people, his people, the people from whom his father and mother came. The point is that the J and E versions of the story are different in many ways, but one element of the story was necessary to both: the link to Midian, and especially to a priest there.

  Moses and Midian in the P Source

  And then comes the third of the sources, the Priestly source, P. It is the strangest—and in some ways the most revealing—of all. It has nothing about Moses’ birth or early life. Nothing about being a prince of Egypt. And absolutely nothing about his ever having been in Midian. Nothing about a Midianite wife (or any wife). Nothing about a priest father-in-law. Nothing about his having any children. No shepherding. No bush. In the P context as we have it, in the first encounter between God and Moses, Moses is in Egypt! (Exodus 6:2ff .)19

  Now again we might say that perhaps the Priestly story had something about Moses in Midian and that an editor removed it. But in fact we have reason to believe that the explanation is rather that the Priestly author deliberately painted the Midianite connection very differently. Moses’ starting location in Egypt does not mean that Midian has no place in the P story. Midian does occur in P, but it is not until years later in the story, and not until two books later in the Bible, in the book of Numbers.

  In Numbers 25 a Midianite woman has an apparent sexual encounter with an Israelite man. The text indicates that they pass right before the eyes of Moses and the whole community and are intimately close in the inner part of the Tabernacle, the most sacred place. This initiates a deadly plague.20 In one of the most blood-curdling sexual depictions in literature, Phinehas, the future high priest, goes in and drives a spear through the man and into the woman. The plague is stopped but only after twenty-four thousand people have died. I mentioned this episode of Phinehas in Chapter 2, but I did not tell there what comes next in the story. Yahweh then commands Moses to strike the Midianites. And strike them he does. Six chapters later, Moses orders the people to avenge what Midian has done. Here the story becomes more horrific. The Israelite army kills all of the men of Midian. But then Moses arrives and is irate that they did not kill all the women as well. He orders that they kill all women who have had sex with a male, but not virgins. So in this P source, Midianites are bad, and Midianite women are particularly bad. And Moses himself gives the order to kill the Midianite women. And this source does not include the little fact that Moses has a wife who happens to be a Midianite woman.

  This P version may be more telling than the other two. P doth protest too much. It would be one thing if P were merely silent about Midian. But P is hostile to Midian. Its author tells a story of a complete massacre of the Midianites. He wants no Midianites around. And he especially wants no Midianite women around. This author buried the Moses-Midian connection.21 We can know why he did this. Practically all critical scholars ascribe this Priestly work to the established priesthood at Jerusalem. For most of the biblical period, that priesthood traced its ancestry to Aaron, the first high priest. It was a priesthood of Levites, but not the same Levites who gave us the E text. Some, including me, ascribe the E text to Levites who traced their ancestry to Moses. These two Levite priestly houses, the Aaronids and the Mushites, were engaged in struggles for leadership and in polemic against each other.22 The E (Mushite) source took pains, as we have seen, to connect Moses’ Midianite family back to Abraham. That is understandable. E was justifying the Mushite Levites’ line in Israel’s history. And it is equally understandable why their opponents, the Aaronids, cast aspersions on any Midianite background. That put a cloud over any Levites, or any text, that claimed a Midianite genealogy. We all could easily think of parallel examples in politics and religion in history and in our day.

  Midian Was Important

  So this much can be clear: one of our main sources has Moses first appear in Midian, one has him move to Midian, and one buries any connection between him and Midian by treating Midian horribly. Together they say: Midian must have been important. Midian could not be ignored. Yahweh, Moses, and Midian were linked in too intimate a way for anyone to disregard. Indeed, all three of the sources, whatever their view of Moses’ origins and his marriage, have this much in common in their stories: after the exodus, Moses and the people do not go directly to the promised land (Canaan/Israel/Judah). They go to a mountain called Horeb or Sinai, which was somewhere in proximity to Midian. The fourth source (D) never mentions Midian, but it also has them go to Mount Horeb and also says in its very first verses that this mountain is adjacent to Edom (Mount Seir, which is in the region of Midian).23 That is, our sources all have the entire people, not just Moses, spending time in the vicinity of Midian.

  As we asked in Chapter 2, why would anybody make this up? George Mendenhall, of the University of Michigan, wrote:

  The connections between Moses and the Midianites are manifold, detailed, and remarkable (Exodus 2–4; 18; Numbers 25; 31) and can hardly be explained on any basis other than historical fact.24

  The English scholar Graham Davies wrote:

  The Midianite connections of Moses are scarcely likely to have been invented, and the association of Yahweh with a mountain to the south of Canaan is both strongly supported and unlikely to have arisen from a population that was solely derived from the Canaanite city-states.25

  And the French scholar Thomas Römer wrote:

  In sum, what we know about Moses and Midian confirms the evidence provided by the biblical texts that suggest a provenance of Yhwh from the south, and possibly a connection with the Shasu, the group of semi-nomadic tribes that may include the Midianites and Kenites.

  It is more difficult to know what degree of historical plausibility we should attribute to the narratives about Moses and Midian. Moses was perhaps the leader of a group of ‘apiru who, when they had left Egypt, encountered Yhwh in Midian and passed on the knowledge of him to other tribes in the south.26

  And so, as I said above, many scholars have arrived at various formulations of the Midianite hypothesis.27 Almost all of them cite the passages in the Bible that say outright that Yahweh came from that region where Edom and Midian lay, from Seir, a mountain associated with Edom. The old Song of Deborah says:

  Yahweh, in your coming out from Seir

  In your marching from a field of Edom

  (Judges 5:4)

  And the old song called the Blessing of Moses begins:

  Yahweh came from Sinai

  And rose from Seir for them.

  (Deuteronomy 33:2)

  The Song of Deborah and the Blessing of Moses are two of those oldest poems in the Bible that we cited earlier. What starts in those lines continues in the prose and poetry texts for centuries that followed.28 Yahweh came by way of the south: Sinai, Seir, Edom, Midian.29

  Moses the Midianite: Two Questions

  Still, I see two problems with the idea of a Midianite origin of Moses. (1) Why then does he have an Egyptian name?! And (2) if he is a Midianite, how did he come to be in Egypt at the head of a group of people leaving there?

  We might simply answer that people sometimes have names that derive from foreign languages. Or maybe his original Midianite name was something other than Moses, but he was merged in the story with a hero who led the people to Midian from Egypt. Or maybe his name was Reuel, and the name Jethro belonged to his father-in-law the priest, or vice versa, and that is how we came to have a confusion of two different names for the father-in-law in two different sources. Maybe he was a Midianite who made a trip to Egypt and encountered an oppressed group of aliens who were distant, Semite, kin of his. He sees their oppression in Egypt and rallies them to follow him to freedom. Coming from Egypt, they call him by an Egyptian name: Moses. But these are speculations—interesting, intriguing, tantalizing—but not ev
idence. So for now let us just take note of the Midianite possibility. Other possibilities exist, and they are tantalizing as well.

  2. MOSES THE EGYPTIAN

  Why does he have an Egyptian name? We recognized that the name Moses is Egyptian practically at the very beginning of the trail that we have been following. Egyptologists and Bible scholars have been aware of this for a long time. Its most famous, exciting treatment, though, did not come from a Bible scholar or an Egyptologist. It is Sigmund Freud’s. It was the subject of his last book before he died, Moses and Monotheism.30 Scholars of past generations in my field, including William Foxwell Albright, treated Freud’s work with disdain. They saw it as coming from a man from another field, who had no sense of how to do history. Albright wrote that Freud’s book “is totally devoid of serious historical method and deals with historical data even more cavalierly than with the data of introspective and experimental psychology.”31 (It was ironic that, while Albright criticized Freud for venturing into a field in which he was not trained, Albright felt himself to be qualified to so “cavalierly” add judgments about Freud’s work in psychology.32) But intellectual pendulums swing back and forth. Lately, a number of my colleagues have begun to take Freud seriously, including Propp, Ronald Hendel, and Jan Assman. Some parts persuade them, some parts they reject as mistaken. But, unlike the generation of our academic grandparents, we do not simply dismiss it. We address it.

  Freud questioned the fact that, though everyone seemed to know that the name Moses was Egyptian, no one had raised the natural, logical explanation of this fact: namely, that Moses was Egyptian. Freud:

  Now, we should have expected that one of the many people who have recognized that “Moses” is an Egyptian name would also have drawn the conclusion or would at least have considered the possibility that the person who bore this Egyptian name may himself have been an Egyptian. . . . Nevertheless, so far as I know, no historian has drawn this conclusion in the case of Moses.33