Dark History of the Bible

by Michael Kerrigan

  MOST POTENT RODS

  SO ACCUSTOMED ARE we to the idea of Moses as the embodiment of a certain sort of authority – insistently, intimidatingly masculine – that it is a surprise to see how completely out of his depth he feels at first. His immediate response to God’s call to patriarchal duty is to feel an overwhelming sense of impotence. So strong are his feelings of inadequacy, indeed, that he’s paradoxically almost defiant in his diffidence, repeatedly disputing God’s insistence that the Jews will accept his authority.

  It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to see the significance of Moses’ anxiety – or his rod. ‘And the Lord said unto him,’ (4, 2): ‘What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground’:

  And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand.

  A little oddly, it might be thought, the Exodus text makes its first mention of Moses’ elder brother Aaron at this point. When Moses expresses anxiety about his lack of the eloquence he’ll need to persuade his people, God reminds him that he can always call on Aaron’s assistance (4, 14). Aaron (who, we are subsequently to learn, has his own wonder-working rod) is himself a sort of staff or rod in human form. His brother’s support and spokesman, ‘shall be to thee instead of a mouth’ (4, 16), God says, ‘And thou shalt take this rod in thine hand, wherewith thou shalt do signs.’

  Moses recoils in fear as his staff is transformed into a twisting serpent. God gave him this early version of the ‘magic wand’ to enable Moses to ‘do signs’ – often little more than miraculous stunts to impress his followers and enemies.

  Moses, overwhelmed and overawed, was not convinced that his Jewish brethren would accept his authority – let alone that Egypt’s Pharaoh would meekly accept the removal of his slaves. God gave him his promise that the Jews would ‘hearken’ to his voice, adding that he would, with Moses’ assistance, bring his people out of their affliction ‘unto a land flowing with milk and honey’ (3, 17). As for Pharaoh, what Moses said was true, said God: ‘I am sure that the king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not by a mighty hand’ (3, 19). For this reason, he said, he would ‘smite Egypt with all my wonders’ (3, 20).

  An Unfavourable Pharaoh

  Making his way with his family into the land of Egypt, Moses was surprised to meet Aaron in the wilderness. God had ordered him to await his brother there (4, 27). The two went together to the Pharaoh’s palace and, undaunted now, addressed the Egyptian ruler (5, 1):

  A NEGLECTFUL FATHER?

  ONE OF THE stranger, more unaccountable incidents in this early part of the Bible occurs when Moses and Zipporah are making their way to Egypt with their son Gershom and put up at an inn. There, we are told (4, 24), the Lord met Moses, ‘and sought to kill him’. No direct explanation is given for this assault by God on his own chosen representative, although Zipporah’s prompt action presumably holds the answer. She, we are told (4, 25), ‘took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son’. Casting it at Moses’ feet, she said, ‘Surely a bloody husband art thou to me.’

  It isn’t clear whether Moses’ is literally bloody, caught in the spray from his son’s crude circumcision, or ‘bloody’ in some other, more metaphorical way. It had of course been a condition of God’s covenant with Abraham that he should not only be circumcised himself but that ‘he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations’. The interest Moses had maintained in his mother’s people as he grew up should surely have meant that he understood the importance of this custom – although if God had been that angry at his neglect, why had he chosen him as his representative in the first place?

  Moses, Zipporah and Gershom sit with Jethro in a tableau of togetherness without a hint of the drama to come. Zipporah’s act in circumcising her son to save her ‘bloody husband’ showed the importance of the ritual for the Jews.

  Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness. And Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go. And they said, The God of the Hebrews hath met with us; let us go, we pray thee, three days’ journey into the desert and sacrifice unto the Lord our God.

  Pharaoh did not see why he should release the Jews from their ‘burdens’ for this long. On the contrary, irritated by these demands, he ordered his overseers to work their charges harder. Descending into pettiness, he told his ‘taskmasters’ to take away the straw the slaves needed in their work to make mud bricks bind properly together: they would either have to go out and gather more straw on their own time or do without.

  Inevitably, the order caused confrontations between the frustrated workforce and their overseers. The slaves downed tools and were beaten for their pains. As inevitably (and as, surely, the Pharaoh had anticipated), it was Moses and Aaron who ended up being blamed.

  Since I came to Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he hath done evil to this people; neither hast thou delivered thy people at all?

  The Egyptians well understood the potent symbolism of the serpent – hence the uraeus: the rearing cobra on the Pharaoh’s crown. The transformation of Aaron’s rod was not just a frightening trick but an audacious defiance of Egyptian power.

  Promises and Plagues

  ‘Now’, said the Lord (6, 1), ‘shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh.’ And so they did, starting with a divine attack on the water supplies on which Egypt so depended. On God’s instructions, Moses told Aaron to hold out his rod ‘upon the waters of Egypt, upon their streams, upon their rivers, and upon their ponds’ (7, 19). Aaron carried out his brother’s bidding and, immediately, ‘in the sight of Pharaoh, and in the sight of his servants’:

  The apocalypse comes early for Pharaonic Egypt, in a scene imagined by the English artist John Martin (1789–1854): people rush about in panic at the sight of the River Nile running red with blood.

  All the waters that were in the river were turned to blood. And the fish that was in the river died; and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink of the water of the river; and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt (7, 21).

  Far from being intimidated, however, the ‘Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, neither did he hearken unto them; as the Lord had said’ (7, 22). Egypt spent a profoundly uncomfortable week without water, but there was no sign whatsoever of any easing in the sufferings of Israel.

  Next, then, the Lord told Moses he must threaten Pharaoh with another plague. ‘The river shall bring forth frogs abundantly,’ he should warn him (8, 3): which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneading troughs…

  Frogs don’t seem so threatening compared with some of the other Plagues of Egypt. But this engraving – created by Matthäus Merian for his Illustrated Bible (c. 1627) – points up the peculiarly personal repugnance of seeing them everywhere.

  Frogs everywhere, in other words. And so it proved. At the command of Moses, Aaron again stretched out his rod over the rivers, streams and ponds: this time, though, the water remained unchanged. It was what emerged from it that seemed so shocking: frogs in their millions – till the whole country was carpeted in their green, gold, wriggling, hopping forms.

  Enough was enough, the Pharaoh decided: calling for Moses and Aaron he asked them to get their God to take the frogs away – and I will let the people go’ (8, 8). This concession won, God kept his side of the bargain:

  And the frogs died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields. And they gathered them together upon heaps; and the land stank.

  However, when the Pharaoh saw that the plague had gone, he started to wonder why he’d made concessions. Instead, he ‘hardened his heart and harkened not unto them’ (8, 15).

  One Thing After Anot
her

  Next it was the turn of the lice. At God’s commandment, Aaron struck the dust with his rod, ‘and it became lice in man, and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt’. Still loath to concede, the Pharaoh called upon his sorcerers to rid him of this new plague, but for all their formidable powers they could not. ‘This’, they told their master, was ‘the finger of God’, and by no means effectively to be resisted, but the Pharaoh was in no mood to hear reason – even from magicians.

  While all Egypt itched and scratched, then, the Pharaoh remained utterly obdurate – even when a fourth plague, this one of flies, ensued. Perhaps the most unpleasant yet, it afflicted not just the royal palace but every dwelling in the country: all were abuzz with swarms of busy flies. Every surface became coated with a heaving, milling mass; they clustered around every item of food and flew into people’s eyes, up their noses and even into their mouths.

  ‘And the frogs died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields.’

  EXODUS 8, 13

  The Hebrew ‘arob (‘swarm’) in Exodus posed problems from the start. Whilst Christian interpreters tended to assume that the Fourth Plague of Egypt was of flies, earlier Jewish scholars imagined vaguer but more exotic ‘noxious beasts’.

  Once more, after apparently faltering and offering concessions, Pharaoh reneged as soon as the plague had abated. This time, then, God sent down a ‘very grievous murrain’ (9, 3) – some unspecified cattle disease – upon the country’s herds. The news that the livestock of the Jews had been left untouched was a shock to the Pharaoh. Yet again, though, the consequence was merely that his heart was hardened, and that ‘he did not let the people go’.

  ‘The hail smote throughout all the land of Egypt all that was in the field, both man and beast; and the hail smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field’ (9, 25).

  From Lesions to Locusts

  And so, God said to Moses and Aaron (9, 8):

  Take to you handfuls of ashes of the furnace, and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven in the sight of Pharaoh. And it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast, throughout all the land of Egypt.

  This proved the most potent plague so far: the Pharaoh called his sorcerers to see off the affliction, but they were completely helpless (9, 11): ‘The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils; for the boil was upon the magicians, and upon all the Egyptians.’

  Like a puppetmaster, God directs the actions of his mortal representative, Moses, as he unleashes the Plague of Locusts on Egypt’s green and fertile land. A coloured woodcut from the fifteenth-century Nuremberg Bible.

  After the boils came ‘a very grievous hail’ (9, 18), the like of which had never before been seen in Egypt. But this was not the worst of it, for ‘fire mingled with the hail’: the crops were flattened; the trees snapped and the livestock killed in the fields by the violence of its impact.

  Once again, the Pharaoh folded: ‘I have sinned this time: the Lord is righteous,’ he acknowledged:

  and I and my people are wicked. Intreat the Lord (for it is enough) that there be no more mighty thunderings and hail and I will let you go.

  As previously, however, his penitence didn’t outlast the passing of the plague. As soon as the storms had ceased, he changed his mind again.

  Now, then, God sent locusts – their unimaginable swarming darkening the sky still more completely than the stormclouds of the previous plague.

  ‘They covered the face of the whole earth,’ we’re told (10, 15):

  so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt.

  Again, the Pharaoh begged forgiveness and promised Moses that he would immediately free his people if he’d only lift this affliction – and yet again he immediately went back on his word. A plague of three days’ total darkness didn’t convince him to issue anything more than his now-familiar empty show of compliance with God’s will, so at last the Lord was provoked to bring down upon the Pharaoh and his Egyptian people a plague of a much more cruel kind.

  Materially the most trivial of the Plagues, perhaps, but psychologically terrifying, three days of darkness disorientated the Egyptians completely; gave them the sense that the normal order of their days, their lives, had been abandoned.

  Punishment and Passover

  Sending Moses off to warn his people to get together, beg or borrow all the jewellery and valuables they could find, and prepare for an abrupt departure, he promised to unleash a chastisement Pharaoh wouldn’t have the heart to fight. ‘About midnight,’ he told Moses (11, 4):

  will I go out into the midst of Egypt: And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more. But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast; that ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.

  ‘There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt’ (11, 6). With the Tenth Plague, God at last hit the Pharaoh where he really hurt. The Smiting of the Firstborn finally precipitated the Israelites’ departure.

  On God’s instructions, the Jewish families had marked their doors with lamb’s blood. That way he (or his avenging angel: the scripture isn’t clear) knew to ‘pass over’ their houses and leave them safe. In other Egyptian homes, however, it was a different story (12, 29):

  And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

  Amid all this confusion, God told Moses and Aaron to call their people together, telling them to take their flocks and herds and make their getaway. The ordinary Egyptians saw what they were doing, but – far from attempting to stop them – they were ‘urgent upon’ them to be ‘out of the land in haste’ (12, 33), for if the Israelites stayed, they reasoned, ‘We be all dead men.’

  A NEW TRADITION

  THE SLAUGHTER OF the Egyptians’ firstborn and – more to the point – the sparing of the Children of Israel’s children was, God told Moses, to be a sort of fresh start for the Jewish people (12, 2). ‘This month shall be unto you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you.’

  On its tenth day, they should gather together in their houses, families and neighbours, to make a feast of a chosen lamb – ‘without blemish, a male of the first year’ (12, 5). They should keep this alive until the evening of the fourteenth day, at which point it should be killed before the assembled company, some of its blood being used to mark ‘the two side posts and … the upper door post of the houses, wherein they shall eat it’ (12, 7). That very night, the lamb should be roasted in the fire before being eaten with unleavened bread and ‘bitter herbs’ (12, 8). No leftovers were to be put by, and that of the animal that did remain uneaten the next morning should be destroyed by burning in the fire.

  They were to eat as if they were about to set out on a journey – as indeed they were. They should eat it:

  with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the Lord’s passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord.

  The lamb’s blood on their doo
rposts would be a ‘token’ or a signal to the Lord (12, 13): ‘When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.’

  Thenceforth, God said, he wished them to keep this day as a ‘memorial … ye shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generations.’

  A father marks the door of his home with the blood of the sacrificial lamb, saving his family from God’s anger. It would also initiate a ritual tradition lasting centuries: Passover remains one of the most important Jewish festivals.

  Into the Wilderness

  So, the children of Israel set out, ‘about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children … and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle’ (12, 37). Such was the haste with which they left that, for food on the march, ‘they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt’ (12, 39): there simply hadn’t been time to use yeast and allow the dough to rise. With God to guide them, though, they made good speed (13, 21): ‘The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light.’

  Their hurry was all too justified. It wasn’t long before the Pharaoh realized what had happened and regretted the passivity with which he’d let Moses and his people leave. And, we’re told (14, 6):

  he made ready his chariot, and took his people with him. And he took six hundred chosen chariots, and all the chariots of Egypt, and captains over every one of them.