APPENDIX
The Book of Exodus reminds one of the Iliad and other great epic poems. But Iliad and Odyssey chanted of much later events [1] . I am ready to believe, with Cassuto, that "one of the principal sources - possibly the principal source - was... an ancient epic poem, an epos dating back to earliest times, that told at length the story of the Egyptian bondage, of the liberation and of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness." [2] It has numerous lyric passages still, also word and sound play, and formulas and fixed numbers to help remember its verses.
V. Cassuto points out various sacred literary harmonies through the text: the play upon threes, sevens, and seventies, for example; the repetition of words for emphasis; the use of expressions of salvation and deliverance in the 3rd episode of Moses in Midian, and so forth [3] .
There was a major difference, however, between the Exodus and other epic accounts. The Exodus began in writing, under the authorship and direction of Moses, then was carried by epic tradition in oral form, and then was revived in written form in the tenth century at which time there was no Homer to reassemble it. So it came together afterwards piece by piece for five hundred years, as sacred history and in writing. In inception and conception, the Exodus was modern; it was to be a sacred written history.
Luckily for students of ancient events, the Exodus was from its beginnings a sacred happening so that no despot, no matter how powerful, could afterwards rewrite it with impunity. Apart from the theological miracles that the Books of Moses describe (which we translate into historical and scientific miracles), the book in itself represents a set of historical miracles. First there was Moses who believed in historiography. Then there was Moses' Yahweh whose imprimatur on the mosaic word made tampering sacrilegious. Afterwards, there was spawned by the new nation a priesthood, Aaronites, Levites, and popular priests and prophets that oscillated between centralized and decentralized federationism. These men were compelled to recite historical truths even when the truth hurt their interests; they could never erase it; they could only accent their own position in the process of history, swearing continuously that they were only repeating what had been historically said. The divisiveness of the Jews let this process go on for many centuries.
Then, in exile in Babylon and fortunately deprived of their own secular leadership, the priests crystallized their Torah, and upon their return to Jerusalem, decided once and for all that they possessed the sacred truthful history that must hereafter only be discussed, never changed. Thenceforth, no matter where they might be, those who claimed descent from the Exodus preserved with very little change the writings, while the Christians, who might have rewritten them, were from their own beginnings somehow persuaded that the Books of Moses were reconcilable with the teachings of Jesus and therefore sacred and untouchable. Thus happened the miracle of the Torah, that unique book.
As a result, we have found much history in the Books of Moses, and we shall find much more. But perhaps the moment has arrived to explain how this adventure in historical discovery is engineered. What logic and techniques am I trying to employ? I shall explain my procedures now, hoping that the reader has reached "the point of no return."
First of all, we need some agreement on the composition of the Pentateuch. Who wrote or pronounced what in Exodus? Who says that they did so? When did they say so? And we begin by asserting that Moses himself kept the log of Exodus; he wrote, too, of his talks with Yahweh; he recorded as well the laws that he promulgated. We have already learned of his passion for the written word, which is integral to his character, and became part of the Jewish national character. The log is reported in the Book of Numbers: "Moses recorded their starting points in writing whenever they broke camp on Yahweh's orders." [4] We recall, too, that Yahweh refers to Moses' book and tells him what to write in it as well as helping him write the Decalogue.
Probably most scholars will agree that writing was indeed occurring in the wilderness. The major problems occurred subsequently. The writings were entirely lost. The period between the events, which in great part, no doubt, were not even originally recorded by Moses, but in vital parts were, and the canonization of the experience and its discussion consists of some eight or nine hundred years. "The final redaction and canonization of the Torah book... most likely took place during the Babylonian Exile (6th-5th century B. C. E.)." [5]
Hence the attempt to establish the authenticity of Biblical passages has depended largely upon linguistic analysis, and, to a lesser degree, upon internal consistency, comparative history and archaeology - all supervised by logical and anthropological speculation. Linguistic analysis allows an expert to criticize and perhaps rearrange passages in accord with what is known of the progress of the Hebrew language and of the style used by different individuals whose accounts have come down to the present.
Linguistic analysis is inadequate often not only because of the uncertainty of its data and of its premises, but also because it cannot discover the career of oral traditions. We know from general anthropology and ancient literature that an exact rendition of a large body of verse and prose (such as Homer's Iliad and other epic works) can be transmitted over generations and centuries. The same exactitude can be expected of a sacred written work which is committed to collective memory, then lost in written form. Even though the style and other minor changes may be introduced when the oral version of the original written version is written down, the substance of the account may be exact. In both cases, in the period of oral transmission, trained speakers can memorize and reproduce exactly thousands of lines heard from the lips of a teacher. All along the line, a sacred duty to repeat the original faithfully encounters social interests to whose advantage certain changes might be made. In the case of the Bible, much effort must go into locating such interests, whether by internal analysis or by matching the known later political and natural environments with the suspected changes in the text over time.
We have to take it for granted that those who had the last word to say on the Old Testament said it the way they wanted it. Nobody knows the name of these gentlemen, but they were a group of Jewish scholar-priests living 800 years after Moses. We can assume that they were a corporate group and, therefore, the "very last word" would have been that of a "research director," namely a qualified priest with political and social engagements and contacts, more attuned to the mission of the Old Testament as he saw it than to the literal nuances of the text.
We know, too, that the period in which the last important editing was done was without general physical upheavals. Hence, the editing would lack the first-hand experience with catastrophe that marks the age of Moses and the age of the prophets and would not be conversant with strong references of the words, as compared to alternative weak references. Lacking direct comprehension, they would be tending toward using the name of Yahweh ever more promiscuously as a shorthand substitution for natural explanations or references. They would be uniformitarian (" conditions were the same then as now") and metaphorical (" what a fine analogy is implied in this language about angels.") Pari passu, the translations that are generally used now exhibit both tendencies of the text editors to a marked degree.
The editing, moreover, occurred in a parochial and depressed period of Jewish history, the period of the Babylonian exile from which only some fraction was freed by the Persians and wanted to return to the Jerusalem area. The priest-scholars would be intent upon preserving their small ethnic and linguistic group, and would be without hope of expanding their realms, as contrasted, for example, with Jesus and Paul, working with the protection of and with the model of the seemingly universal Roman Empire before their eyes. The unwritten directive that would guide their minds and hands would then be:
1) The "Chosen people" are a "select and exclusive people," and should preserve their religious heritage against any infiltration, expansion, or assimilation.
2) Establish the continuity of Yahweh with Elohim, i. e., between the gods of Genesis and Exodus.
3) Eliminate realistic and natural explanations of events in favor of the indefinite, all-explaining "hand of god."
4) Provide a maximum of ritual so that the priests must be involved in all personal actions: "Whatever is not forbidden, must be prescribed."
5) Let it be clear that all that Moses did he did under strict orders from above, and further that he was the last man to be under such direct divine guidance.
6) Stress the undeserving character of the people; build up their guilt; establish, as the only route for the expiation of this guilt, renewed obedience to the Torah (the Law) and to the Priests and Levites who administer it.
7) Evade the secular, the political, and the contemporary environment of Judaism.
Then, of course, the last word to the people of Israel would carry a meaning like: "now you have your inalterable sacred text. It is your first and last resort on all life's issues. And you have the priests to answer any questions. Lucky, undeserving people under Yahweh that you are!"
I would argue that something like this revisionary process actually occurred and needs to be watched for in educing history from the Torah. Nevertheless, one must not take the naive cynical view that anybody who handled Biblical material in the course of a thousand years could shape it to his whims and fancies. On the contrary, the great scandal of the Bible is its uncompromising confrontation of real human behavior which in modern "scientific" society is confessed to psychiatrists or kept secret at all costs.
The Revolt of the Golden Call offers a case in point. Frederick Winnett flatly declares that the story of the Golden Calf (incident, affair, revolt, revolution - one names it out of prejudice often, just as modern scholars quarrel over whether the Korean or Vietnam conflict was a "war") was a product of the southern penmen of Judah after the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed in 722 B. C. and its inhabitants lost to Judaism [6] . The Northern Kingdom, reports the Bible, had two major places where images of golden calves were worshipped. Hence, southern blame-mongers had inserted the Golden Calf of the Holy Mountain into the story of Exodus to prove just how blasphemous and deserving of destruction were the idol-worshipping northerners. This intervention would have occurred shortly after 715 B. C.
However, as we have already evidenced earlier, we here take the Golden Calf revolt seriously, and fit it neatly into our total theory of Moses' character, of Yahweh, and of how the people really felt about religion.
Are we now to erase our theory and loosen one of the stones of our edifice? I think that the answer must be negative, for several reasons. The weakest of these reasons is that practically all biblical scholars accept and discuss the Golden Calf revolt in its place in Exodus. This is an appeal to authority; but it is the authority of linguistic analysis in which we ourselves are weak and impressionable.
The next reason, concerning which we feel stronger, treats of the minds of the vindictive writers of the Southern Kingdom. These men, scholars themselves, are caught in a bind. Just as rulers nowadays almost invariably reject rational advice to assassinate their political enemies, the priestly writers cannot violate the rules of the Bible, including that what goes into it must be sacred and true, and, further, must not violate a widespread appreciation of what the book ought to contain. Tampering with Moses was like playing with dynamite.
A third reason is a question: Are we certain that Jeroboam did indeed cause two golden calves or bulls to be erected at two principle sites of his Northern Kingdom of Israel? Or is this one the concocted story? Or were these images only rumored to be "golden calves," and were something else; or were they metaphors for the very word "images"? They might be arks, even the ark seized by Dan.
A fourth reason for maintaining the credibility of the Golden Calf Revolt is that, after the return from the exile in Babylon, a priestly group had occasion to make revisions in the Hezekiah recension that, says Winnett, had produced the story. They had good reason to remove the story if it were not true, because the Southern Kingdom itself had also been destroyed shortly after the Northern Kingdom and therefore the redactors may have felt less triumphant and scornful and more subdued. They let the story stand.
A fifth reason is that the Torah did not then and does not now include accounts of all that happened during the Exodus. The oral tradition was rich and exact. It is likely that the scholars who wrote down the story found as their basis something closely matching the act of elevating the image of the Golden Calf to worship among numerous stories of Moses' struggle to maintain an imageless Yahweh. With malice aforethought, they wrote up this story and inserted it at a most logical place, if it were not indeed the proper place. What more likely occasion for this act to occur than after a prolonged absence of Moses on the Mountain? Winnett advances this possibility when he writes that "the story was present… in the form of the [mosaic] tradition that reached D [the redactor], and, of all the incidents related in the tradition, that of Aaron's making an image of Yahweh in the form of a bull seems to have made the greatest impression on his mind." [7]
At this point, it may be proper to argue a scenario: the great revolt at Sinai (Horeb) happened; among the gods raised up was the golden young bull; Moses put down the revolt harshly; the people never could quite believe Yahweh was fully competent when invisible or that the whole outside world of bull-worshippers was wrong; the bull theme reappeared many times, usually tied loyally to Yahweh, and in the days of Jeroboam, images, including the bull, were well-received, just as Zeus, not a bull, could be represented as such on occasion, as when he kidnapped Europa.
Without question, the written Books of Moses expanded with time, as in this case, and usually, where a major affair is concerned, an oral historical tradition and a structure of truth are present. So it goes with the Moral Decalogue, the plagues, the confusing infancy of Moses, and other important elements; the written increments, uncovered by linguistic analysis, are founded upon ancient and authentic oral accounts and lost fragments. I think that more barriers to understanding the Bible have been erected by poor sociological and philosophical theorizing than by the more commonly criticized exegetes.
Theodor Gaster's book of Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament is a compendium of analogous actions performed by characters in a number of different cultures. His typical procedure is to take an act or practice from a passage in the Bible and to show that similar behavior is discoverable in several other tribal or folk cultures here and there in the world. Explanations are rarely afforded. As an example, he writes of the taboo on touching the Ark of the Lord [8] . As we have already told it, the unlucky Uzzah tries to steady the Ark when an ox drawing it on a wagon stumbles; he is struck dead. Gaster gives two parallels. One is from Troy, where Ilus tried to rescue the Palladium of Athene from the flames and was blinded. In the second, Metellus rescues the same type of object from the temple of Vesta and is also blinded. Both have their sight restored. Gaster then ends the discussion.
This procedure is purely descriptive and primitivist anthropology, even less sophisticated than that of Frazer on whose nineteenth century work Gaster's is founded. Human behavior must of course be analogous everywhere. People talk, eat, produce, have sexual relations, fight with weapons, and symbolize their actions, in basically similar ways everywhere. The resemblances of the three actions that he cites seem to be superficial. His implication here, as throughout his book, is that these are not events; they have no causes nor consequences; they are simply cartoon sketches coming off the brushes of long-gone legend creators. But our book is dedicated in part to showing that each and every legendary episode has a lesser or greater accumulation of characteristic symbolization centered around a core of historical reality; it is like the trillions of manganese lumps on the deep ocean bottoms that have accumulated around cores of shark teeth and other bones and stones; they are all alike but have a unique happening as a seed.
By way of contrast to Gaster, U. Cassuto's Commentary on the Book of Exodus (1951, 1959) uncovers a string of three stories of wells, with Abraham, Jacob, and Moses as the heroes, each obtaining a bride thereby [9] . In this case, however, the fact that wells were universally employed for meetings and rendezvous is made significant by a close parallelism of Jacob's story with that of Moses. The two plots, involving other shepherds and the damsels Rachel and Zipporah, suggest a deliberate embellishment to tie Moses to his ancestor Jacob. Nonetheless Cassuto explicitly denies that his book aims at establishing historicity.
In 1957, Greta Hort published two articles on "The Plague of Egypt," [10] there tying together skillfully much scientific knowledge pointing towards the actuality and sequence of the plagues. Briefly she argues that an unprecedented rainfall in Ethiopia eroded the red soil basin of Lake Tana and the banks of the Blue Nile and sent red floodwaters causing down the some 2000 miles of river, carrying with them a red micro-animal Euglena sanguinea as well. This polluted flood killed the fish of the Lower Nile and drove the frogs ashore, where insects infected them with an anthrax. Infestations of mosquitoes and flies followed. Independently a fierce hailstorm from the North blew up the Nile Valley. Fire is not mentioned. Weather conditions were propitious afterwards for a massive locust invasion. The dried-out land gave up its coating of red powdered dust to the first khamsin or sandstorm of the year, bringing days of darkness. She advances plausible reasons why the Hebrews should have been spared, in their partial isolation, some of the plagues.
The plague upon the first-born is reduced to a ruination of the first fruits of the harvest that were ordinarily consumed in spring. The Israelites left then partly out of fear of being robbed of their harvests by the less fortunate Egyptians. Pharaoh was hard-hearted about letting them go; although prayer expeditions to the desert were not unknown, he would not chance the Hebrews leaving, because their god might answer their prayers and discountenance his god, and because sedition might be served with such moving about of people.
I cannot do justice to Hort's ingenious scenario here. By way of negative criticism, I would allude to the enormous distance the red dust and flagellates would need to descend. Also, the lack of repetition of the plagues in earlier or later times makes the Exodus still unique. Critical connections are missing between the other plagues and the hailstorms and locusts. The first-born killing is laid aside. The magic wand contest is evaded. So is the climactic movement of waters in the passage out of Egypt. Nor are the negotiations or the human movements incorporated precisely into her scenario.
The actuality of biblical events is, of course, a provocative issue in scientific quarters. A few rears later, Dorothy Vitaliano, in Legends of the Earth [11] stresses again a geological approach in attempting to restrain popular faith in ancient and folk accounts of unusual natural events. Vitaliano confronts causation directly, like Hort and unlike Gaster. She offers to explain the plagues as natural events, giving as much credence to the Bible as she can admit.
But she is operating with a weak instrument, the uniformitarian law that the same natural conditions of today have prevailed over millions of years. Consequently, there is not enough energy in the ordinary, terrestrial, natural forces she employs to deliver the quick succession of shattering blows to the Egyptian Empire. Nor are the forces integrated by a single, sufficient cause. Her a priori refusal to consider an extra-terrestrial force cuts short the explanation at an unsatisfactory point. The major concession that she makes to the literalness of the Bible is the connection (which earlier I have adversely criticized) between the explosion of Thera-Santorini and the tidal waters sweeping in upon the Egyptian army [12] .
A much greater freeing of the intellect is required before the Exodus events can be understood. It is notable that upon the conclusion of her heavily researched studies, Hort qualifies the results by reference to research by Professor Bodenheimer "on the connection between solar activity and pests" and the hope for an ultimate explanation by "cosmic and terrestrial" connections [13] .
The combination of uniformitarianism and disbelief in legend leads, as with Buber and Daiches and Gaster, to a general distortion of the Bible by reductionism. The result is a sugar-coating of reality by a questionable commonsense. Shrinking from the realities of Exodus, not one but most editors and scholars have painted its human and natural background, the wanderings, and the struggles, as a quaint nineteenth century romance. Martin Buber was one of the best of biblical scholars and a hero of resistance to the Nazis; but little of the madness that he experienced under Nazism ruffles his calm book on the life of Moses.
He is a rationalist - wrongly regarded as an existentialist - who ever so subtly deflates the rhetoric and propositions of the Bible, following a principle of maximal reductionism; at the same time, he is trying to keep his people, the Jews, bound together in a community, with the Bible as its glue. Perhaps the double task is impossible, or perhaps he is more an expert than a theorist; for his book is littered with disconnected, uncontrolled, and fallacious surmises. At one moment he may be Machiavellian. Thus he thinks that Moses had no clear mission in Egypt but, when rejected by the Hebrews, got himself accredited as the representative of the Hebrew god at the Pharaoh's court [14] . Machiavelli himself might have approved this notion; he regarded Moses as a model prince, perhaps even better than Caesar Borgia: Moses formed a nation and led it forth to survival.
Then again Buber stretches time with an uncontrolled imagination; Moses is a kind of spook who haunted Pharaoh's court for years while the plagues went on at large intervals [15] . Buber analyzes the passover feast as an old shepherd festival of spring [16] . (Why each family should stay in its own home during a fiesta is rather strange.)
His scenario of Moses talking with Yahweh is a fine example of reductionism, himself, quite unbelieving, yet letting his reader believe:
In our vision, we see this man Moses at times, following some new and wearing experience with his people, entering the leader's tent, sitting down on the ground and for a long time weighing in his soul whatever may have befallen; until at length the new comprehension rises to the surface and the new word oppresses his throat; till it finally darts across into the muscles of his hand, permitting a new utterance of the Zealous God to come into being on the scroll [17] .
This is practically all that passes for psychiatry in the book. Is Moses, or is he not, talking with Yahweh?
Of all that is said and done in the Crossing of the Sea, Buber concludes: "It is irrelevant whether 'much' or 'little', unusual things or usual, tremendous or trifling events happened; what is vital is only that what happened was experienced, while it happened, as the act of God." [18] Here is your second greatest episode in Jewish history! (If the handing down of the Decalogue is the greatest.) "Miracle, he says, is "nothing but an abiding astonishment." But he cannot escape the urge to trivialize events: "It may be assumed that the frontier guards set out in pursuit of the fugitives." [19] As for the greatest episode, at Mt. Sinai, "every attempt to penetrate to some factual process which is concealed behind the awe-inspiring picture is quite - in vain." [20]
The principle of uniformitarianism leaks out now and then: "We must maintain the conclusion that, for times about which we have nothing more than reports impregnated with material of an obviously legendary character, it is necessary to assume the same fundamental forms of historical behavior as we know in periods which have found more sober chroniclers." This, regarding the Passover! Things were then as they are now, legend-analysis is futile! (Notwithstanding that in the aftermath of catastrophe, legend, rather than purely factual history, is more likely to be written and to survive.)
Gripped by philosophical confusion, he speaks of natural forces at the crossing from Egypt: "Here there is no Nature in the Greek, the Chinese or the modern Occidental sense. What is shown us of Nature is stamped by History." [21] And the history is stamped by wonder, he says, which produces cosmic exaggerations. "The defeated Egyptian 'dragon' grows into a symbol as vast as the world in the drama of rescue which serves as prelude to the revelation…" From what unconscious source did Buber conjure up the Egyptian 'dragon'? It can be none other than Typhon, the great monster whom Zeus struck down with thunderbolts at the time of Exodus, and the name of the first Hyksos king of Egypt whose forces were invading the country at the moment of Exodus.
If this be sheer conjecture about Buber's mind, let it pass as such. But let me nevertheless conjecture about a similar effect in the mind of David Daiches, for he, like Buber, dismisses any psychological approach to Moses. In the Epiloque to his learned and beautiful "coffee-table" book on the life of Moses, Daiches writes "For generations schoolboys have asked each other: 'Where was Moses when the light went out? ' and replied, 'Under the bed, looking for the matches. ' Thus he moved easily from the sublime to the ridiculous, a fate shared by many great names." [22] Perhaps Freud, master of the theory of wit, a biographer of Moses to whom Buber gave only one demeaning sentence and Daiches gave two, quoting Buber approvingly, would have noted this remark. Also, that the remark is in the last paragraph of the book.
Why should schoolboys "for generations" (I remember well the joke) associate Moses with the light going out and why was he "under the bed looking for the matches"? Moses was the great leader of the times when darkness befell the world. Under the grim pall (pallet?) was it not he who was finding matches to make light?
I play this game only to show that it is serious. Humor is an escape from fear. When legendary characters or historical characters or identifiable substitutes for them are involved, not alone Freud, but also anthropologists generally nowadays suspect that a clue to something that happened in history is contained in the joke. That Daiches should choose these words to be among his last of the book, which tackles an awesome subject, is nothing more, I suppose, than a little giggle of unconscious self-depreciation. It confesses that he has not solved the problem of Moses and has hardly dared to address it.
Many scholars specialize in analyzing legends, but I do not know of a manual of their techniques. Whoever has not worked with legends is prone to believe that their analysis is a waste of time, baseless, or even fakery, like persons often believe who have not worked with the analysis of dreams, handwriting, or propaganda, or with the authentication of documents and paintings. On the other hand, some of those who have done so believe that rules of analysis are impossible to formulate and an informed intuition is the only resort. Nevertheless, I feel an obligation to announce what rules I try to follow, and to accept the critical consequences. Actually the rules are simple enough and can be practiced generally with fair success. We can take as a first rule what was to some degree done earlier in this chapter: Locate and dissolve the editorial screen imposed later upon a legend by well-wishing, malicious, power-seeking, or unbelieving translators, reporters, or scholars. An extra brief example is the word "Noga" translated "great light" from Isaiah, without regard for the fact that the word has another meaning "the planet Venus." Now I think that the reader will wish to analyze my own book here in this way.
Read god-names as words performing specific functions. The fire referred to in the Pentateuch is of several varieties, and it is possible, although I have not studied the matter, that in a significantly high proportion of cases, the possessive "Yahweh" is appended to instances of fire other than ordinary combustion. The same may be true of natural phenomena other than fire, as for example, it was "Yahweh's wind," not simply a heavy wind, that brought down a massive flight of quail. It is ordinarily believed, in instances such as these, that the taking of the Lord's name is either to indicate that all things are caused by Yahweh, or else that any benefaction (or punishing act) is the work of Yahweh. That is, the grammar is to be read as, for instance, we might say that interference with radio reception is caused by the Van Allen belts, meaning a special kind of belt, not that Van Allen caused the belts.
In the Books of Moses, the name Yahweh, when it occurs, can have six additional functions besides this first, which is a shorthand substitute for the cause of a variety of natural events or a confession of ignorance of such causes. "Yahweh" is a battle-cry; the Israelites attack or rally with the calling of a name, as in the old American song "Rally around the flag, boys!"
Yahweh is a collective, abstract fiction of authority, objectified in the minds of community members, giving binding force and security to their transactions. Yahweh is who is obeyed when obedience is demanded.
Yahweh is a label or designation of what is collectively sacred. A secular (slightly sacred) example is the label "Property of the U. S. Government." It joins hundreds and thousands of things, actions, persons in a commonalty. Yahweh is an attribution to a delusionary universal being of responsibility, accountability, or blame by people who wish to evade or avoid or are ignorant of such. "My son died by the will of Yahweh."
Perhaps the most important function of the word is the dynamic for activating Moses and hence Israel. Yahweh is the inner necessity of Moses to objectify and reify his conscience and to spread his inner dialogue upon the official public record. "Yahweh says 'Do this' lest you die." Finally Yahweh is the inner necessity of other Israelites to objectify and reify their consciences in a privatized dialogue or collective sanctioned discourse, as limited by authority, sacred labels, and Moses' priority. They are discouraged save on rare occasions to place any hallucinations or delusions upon the public record or to discuss them in public.
Different Israelites, as I have explained elsewhere, would have various Yahwehs. No two Yahwehs are the same. Yahweh is a somewhat different component in each Israelite's mind, character, and behavior. No doubt many of the people neither perceived Yahweh nor believed in other people's perceptions, such as Moses'.
A corollary of this general rule about god-names is: If you accept an authoritative voice speaking for god, or talk with him yourself, then there is no point in your analyzing a legend; it is done for you, you are in a different kind of ball game.
A third rule is to treat every legend as a confused and bothersome collective memory containing some truth and therapy for those telling it. Yahweh's wind blew a great flight of quail down around the Hebrews when they were starving for meat. Thus he answered their need upon hearing of it from Moses. But then, because they had complained of him, he caused many to die of eating the meat. We expect and know of the destruction of the biosphere occurring in catastrophe. Violent atmospheric turbulence with heavy radioactivity would both bring the feast and poison the feasters. A legend says that the wind that downed the quail was terrible enough to destroy the whole world. Tornados, it is now demonstrable, have plucked chickens [23] . The bird was probably coturnix coturnix, the common quail of Europe, Asia and Africa and the only migratory gallinaceous bird.
If long ages have said so, respect a legend's claim to history. Persistent discussions of infanticide or cannibalism under extreme conditions merit belief. More broadly the intense conviction that the Exodus happened is some proof of it. But what of the intense conviction of Yahweh? The belief that Yahweh happened is true in relation to all the qualities that make him an historical god, and make many other divinities also "historical gods." He is a unique god, and says so himself, therefore historical, with a highly touted, historical mission as well.
Do not be arrogant about how scientific our age is, and about how much is known today that used to be unknown. One thinks of perfumes, mummification, herbal medicine, etc. The evidence of this book shows that, partly because of hyper-electrical activity in nature, Moses' generation knew more about electrostatics than did the modern world until perhaps 1850. I speak not alone of natural history but in some cases of pure science and applied science. Where not lapsing into oblivion, a great deal of material, and the literary evidence of it, has been destroyed. It is hard to believe that the many thorough and even brilliant scholars who have dug and delved into the Old Testament setting could otherwise have believed that the wandering and desolated peoples were ignorant primitives. But they have been seduced into following the excursions of anthropologists into primitive cultures. Robert Temple has recently shown how advanced is some astronomical knowledge of the Dogon tribe of Mali; they have known since time immemorial of the invisible dwarf white star, Sirius B, and it is important to them. Obviously they have held onto sound remnants of a lost scientific corpus [24] .
Harken, also, to new scientific knowledge that may require old analyses of legends to be revised. Radioactivity was unknown or quite misunderstood until recently. The possibility of explosive meteoric "chemical factories" was ignored until recently and hence the manufacture of great quantities of manna in the atmosphere by natural means was not considered. Another area of recent scientific progress has been psychiatry. Even a century ago there did not exist the systematic, empirically tested categories of mental aberrations such as we here apply to Moses. Or, in the field of geography, it has been established that three large rivers once flowed west to east across the whole width of Arabia, and that there was a great lake, now dead, in Northern Arabia, and that, too, immense areas of blasting and burning are discoverable [25] .
Bear in mind that, within broad limits of individuality and broad limits of culture, human nature and behavior do not change. People hallucinate today and hallucinated then, under similar conditions. By torture, starvation, a volcanic eruption, and fear, a great many people are compelled to hallucinate. "Angels" may be hallucinations but sometimes only in the limited sense of reifying incredible natural operations and events occurring in the atmosphere.
Neither believe nor disbelieve an event on the first reading of it. This rule applies to very many cases in the present work. The problem arises mostly, or course, in relation to disbelief, regarding the quail, the manna, the rod of Moses, etc. I first disbelieved the story of over three million souls joining the Exodus. Continually nagging the passages, I finally theorized that many people could have left Goshen, for various reasons, and only a small fraction accomplished the Exodus.
Judge a possible truth both by itself and by its context. The story of Miriam's rebellion against Moses and her punishment by leprosy is rendered believable in the context of many cases of leprosy that do not conform to medical definition today. Knowing what the Inner Sanctum contained and the Meaning of the ominous cloud allows one to deem the story credible.
Transform the words of a legend to behavior. Words too are a form of behavior. Visualize them as real operations. Just out of Egypt, Moses holds up his rod all the long dark day in battle with the Amalekites, but needs to be propped upon a stone and helped by Aaron and Hur. Why doesn't Yahweh hold it up or give Moses the strength? The "self-reliance" imposed upon Moses lends an air of factuality; further inquiry leads me to regard the story as true. The darkness makes light a heavy morale factor.
Translate the legend into a story-form and a language that you read in the newspapers or watch in films or use in your ordinary work and days. I could not understand Pharaoh's actions until I displaced him into the setting of a contemporary head of state, interposed all I had come to know about the goings-on in, say, the U. S. Presidency, and then carried them back again to the Middle Bronze Age in Egypt.
Accept the possibility that two legends may be talking about the same event in a different way. Did Moses really spend two forty day-night periods on Mount Sinai, or was there so much material coming out of one episode that it was made into two? Nothing vital is at stake in either case. The first prolonged period has to stand, in order to make the Golden Calf Revolt and other matters plausible. The second does not. It may have been a brief return following the suppression of the revolt for prayer, supplication, and redemption of the wicked people, whereupon the halo and the message. It would also let people test themselves in Moses' absence and redeem themselves by passing the "faith and patience test." Another case, already discussed, is that of the Greek Phaeton and Typhon legends, both evidently dealing with the cometary events of the Exodus.
Ask what elements are missing from the legend that should be there, and why so? By any ordinary standards, twelve springs of water are insufficient to draw water for 20,000, much less two million people. But so the Bible says, a few days out of Egypt, at Elim, this happened [26] . Until 1930, Tehran, Iran, with 200,000 people gathered all of its water supply from twelve wells above the town which discharged 800 liters (212 gallons) per second [27] . What is available now at Elim is not binding upon our judgement. The behavior of giant bodies of water in catastrophes is an encyclopaedia of the amazing; the Mississippi River reversed itself for several hours in the New Madrid (U. S. A., Missouri) earthquakes of 1811-2 [28] . A single verse on the volume of flow of the springs would have helped, but then who would accept the Bible generally and doubt this fact?
Grant the legend a generous quota of exaggerations, time lapses, and contradictions. I have addressed the problem of the numbers in the Exodus in this spirit. The problem of the great ages of Moses and others by modern standards continues to baffle one. One possibility is some electrical and/ or atmospheric effect upon life duration. Another possibility is the calculation of ages by a different calendar, perhaps one of 260 days such as obtained in earliest times among the Mayans and other Meso-Americans and persisted as a sacred calendar after they knew and practiced a contemporary calendar. Then at 120 years of age, Moses would have lived 31,200 days. Measured on the year base of 365 days, he would be 85 years old. I prefer this solution.
There is much rhetorical exaggeration in the Bible, which is in part a panegyric for the Jews. Still I doubt whether the promise of Yahweh to multiply his chosen people to the number of stars and sands of the seashore exceeds in optimism the promises contained in the typical annual State of the Union Address of the President to the American people. Nor does it exceed the optimism with which the President views the heights achieved in the American standard of living, inviting now a comparison, too, with Moses' haranguing the Jews on their fine diet of quail (poisoned) and manna bread (wormy). Nor should one forego comparison between an American speaker describing the history of the U. S. A. on the Fourth of July and Moses in Deuteronomy, reciting the history of Israel since the Exodus.
Another rule is to seek particular truths in a legend which is false as a whole, and seek truth as a whole in a legend which contains false particulars. Thus, by rule number two of this list, we do not see a real Yahweh addressing Moses in the episode of the Burning bush. But the electrical environment and effects, and the reactions of Moses' character are such as to make the event believable and significant. In converse, the Plagues of Egypt are convincing as a whole set of interconnected events that should not be dismissed because of perplexities in connection with the death of the Egyptian first-born, and because of repeated statements that the Hebrews in Goshen were exempted from them. Wishful thinking usually exaggerates the pains of one's antagonists and would create out of a quantitative difference between the sufferings of Goshen and Memphis a qualitative difference,
An explanation of all events should be attempted, within the limits of time and space available. It is not only irritating, but also and more importantly unscientific, to interpret only those events for which plausible explanations are available, while avoiding others more obscure and contradictory. One should not explain manna without conjecture upon the strange dew that fell with it. Further, a Bible critic cannot be both an historian and a faithful believer. He cannot pick and choose, preserving his reputation as now one and then again the other.
One may not say, as has Daiches, that normal natural conditions prevailed at Sinai during the handing down of the Ten Commandments, and that perhaps "the Kenites, who were desert smiths and would therefore carry fire about with them and whom the biblical story associates closely with Moses, were able to produce smoke and fire which came to be looked on and remembered as some kind of divine sign." [29] For then, after this incredible reductionism, he blandly finishes his book on Moses without twanging the nerves of even a moderate believer by tucking in a few 'words where he "concludes" that it would be "too crude" to say that Moses thought that he might get people to obey him by getting them to believe in Yahweh [30] ." Too crude , but he will let it slip off his tongue anyhow. The most significant actions are denied to Yahweh, but he will not address the question of whether Yahweh exists only through Moses or even whether Moses manipulates Yahweh.
Sigmund Freud's paraphernalia of psychiatry is simply abandoned when he writes about Moses as a person. Velikovsky evades arguments that may antagonize, whether nationalistically or religiously, Jews or fundamentalist Christians. Eliade, while including all other religions within his generalizations of historical cyclism, finds that Christianity is donated a particular linear course of history, leaving us with the uneasy question whether he is postulating an indefinitely long, perhaps eternal, course for Christianity; at any rate, it is made an exception to various generalizations by this method.
It is helpful to check out the common psychological mechanisms in legends to see how they are operative: wishful thinking (Freud's omnipotence of thought and James' will to believe); the fear of loss of control of the self and the world; hierocentrism, ethnocentrism, and self-centrism; reification of nature and objects; and the projection of feelings of guilt, blame and punishment onto the legendary characters and actions. Whose wish for what control over what fear is evident in what animated beings, and in the plot of their behavior?
Nor are the rules of historiographical criticism to be overlooked. One needs to look for signs of repeated confirmations of an event, of the implied presences of eyewitnesses, and even of expert witnesses, and of chronological sequences making logical sense. The Bible is heavily historical in its approach to events; the chains of interconnections among events are many and strong. Unlike practically all legendary material, it carries details of chronology.
With the later help of Christians and Moslems, the Jews were able to assert the authenticity of the Old Testament and benefit from a general approbation of its contents. The pagan world was not so benevolent, lacking the same spiritual investment, whereupon it occurs to us to check whether pagan sources provide some contrary renditions of our subject and supply an alternative theory. We find in the negative.
The opinions of the pagan writers of the Hellenistic and early Christian periods about Moses and the Jews are generally stereotyped. Almost none are in depth, whether friendly or unfriendly. On the basis of John Gager's research [31] , the pagan stereotype can be depicted in an understandable form: Moses was an Egyptian, possibly a Heliopolitan scientist, said Apion; Moses led "numerous reasonable men" out of Egypt (Strabo). Moses and Yahweh, his god, brought plagues upon Egypt. The plagues "disfigured bodies", said Tacitus (radiation diseases?) The Jews were carriers of the plagues. They were expelled because they were lepers and forever resented their treatment. They were iconoclasts and destroyed all gods wherever they went; they were atheists, in this sense. The Jews were aloof, aversive to contacts with other peoples, suspicious and misanthropic. "Having been appointed leader of the exiles, he [Moses] secretly took the holy objects of the Egyptians. In trying to recover these objects with force, the Egyptians were forced by storms to return home" (Pompeius Trogus, 1st century A. D.).
It is remarkable that this caricature, assembled from numerous fragments, can be applied to the scenario of the book here. Every element in it, no matter how distorted, can be associated with corresponding realities of Moses and the Exodus. Like an elaborate rumor, it has a certain probative value, in that its parts can be traced to reality, while it contains no fundamental contradictions of it. However, without full historical understanding, the stereotype leads directly down the road to anti-semitism.
It is useful also to apply certain rules about rumormongering to legendary materials directly. This is to disassemble artificial conglomerations and reveal the underlying reality. In solving for the original event, one recognizes a heavy simplification occurring initially over time: single causes eject multiple causality; a leader replaces a group of leaders; one reason is given for a complex of reasons. The simplifying process lends an air of stupidity to legends; however, it is a way of buying temporal endurance at the cost of realism.
There is also an invariable stereotyping, such as we have found in historiography as well. Again the Bible as legend veers towards history because of its frequent insistence upon the uniqueness of events and personalities. Aaron is, like Moses, authentic psychologically and yet not stereotyped. Even Miriam is not, though less is said of her. Joshua, of whom almost no characterization is given, can be put together into a convincing personage.
Events, too. When it is said of the plague of frogs that the animals came onto the beds and into the ovens, this actually happens in local situations. And when there comes the "very heavy hail such as had never been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation," [32] the superlative is precise amid a context of precision, and is validated by this, and within the natural realm of events, and within the context of the total set of disasters. We know what pride the ancient Egyptians possessed in their knowledge of their own history; Plato tells of how Solon of Athens was lectured by the Egyptian seers on this point. The usage is stereotyped; the validity of the fact conveyed is not.
One watches, too, on all sides for the inevitable distortions that accompany the memory of events, bearing in mind, when observing the distortions, the inevitable hints of their cause which they contain. The repeated references to the Egyptian people as complaisant in lending and giving their valuables to the departing Hebrews hardly succeed in covering up the spontaneous and systematic looting that occurred in the disorganized and chaotic situation. The need to preserve for racist Yahweh a pure race of his chosen people is a continual source of distortion in the verses dealing with the character and conduct of the Hebrews in Egypt and their mingling and merging with tribes during the wanderings and in the Promised Land.
There is, too, as with rumor-mongering generally, a vulgarization in the account of events. What Moses does is reduced typically to the level of understanding and gullibility of the common man (though much of this may be the work of the priests and editors.) Legend lives by speaking to the common denominator of people; they must hear it, like it, be moved by it, and demand that it be passed on for generations without end. History reduced to miracles is the best insurance that it will live, somehow, for a long time. The Torah strives mightily to preserve history in the face of the competitive temptations and advantages of legend.
Finally, I should like to mention the pitfalls of a simplistic anthropological approach to the Old Testament, a matter that has arisen already on occasion in the chapters of this book. German scholars, following James Fraser, were especially impressed by the possibilities of reducing the peculiarities of the Biblical text to the commonality of comparative primitive cultural anthropology.
The bedouin primitivist school of Old Testament interpretation is well expressed in America by Julian Morgenstern who in 1929 wrote of the origins of the ark and continued in 1945 with studies of the ark, ephod, and tent [33] . Briefly summarized, he finds numerous Arab and pre-Arab mobile boxed and tented litters, carrying god images and sacred stones (or bethyls), usually on camels. These performed ark-like functions of pointing out routes, rallying tribesmen in battle, and transporting and exhibiting the deity. He concludes that the Ark of the Covenant was of this ilk and not much more - even less, since it would not, at least later on, have carried the image of Yahweh. Further, he claims that to the Ephraimites' tribe belonged the first ark, which then diffused among the confederation.
Against this line of arguments two major thrusts can be directed. One, represented by Roland de Vaux, is historical. The Ark and the Tent, says this authority, were present and together from the very beginning of the wanderings [34] . Lacking here the justification and space for an extended comparative analysis of the two propositions, of which I favor that of de Vaux, I can move to a second mode of rebuttal, which is logical and provides at the least a stalemate.
In the history of artifacts and institutions, there frequently occurs that these possibilities exist: that the historical actuality, form, and function of the central concept evolves, stagnates, or devolves. Thus "an ark" at any point of time, say between 2000 B. C. and 2000 A. D., may exist, but its form and functions may be significantly different. One might find among the bedouins of North Africa, following World War II, artillery shell cases of 105 mm. caliber. Judging by their form and function, carrying nuts or valuables on camels, they are of the species of mobile storage jars. In a brief prior period they carried high explosives and were associated with a complex propelling machine and military organization. They have devolved, or evolved, depending on the "ideal" function assigned them. This is an extreme example of what occurs with all artifacts and institutions over time.
Another example is to be found in the Ark of the Torah, the standard chest that contains the Law in Jewish temples. Its design was traced by Joseph Jacobs. Its original was clearly a Roman desk constructed to hold scrolls [35] .
Whatever arks and ephods and tenting may have been before and since the Ark of the Covenant and Tabernacle, and even elsewhere at the same time, the problem of the particular Ark of Moses remains. Logically not only can it be all that we said it is (and for our purposes the Biblical description is as justifiable as any other design), but also it is to be expected that the Ark, like all inventions, was built upon prior artifacts and institutions and was part of the inheritance of subsequent peoples who changed its form and function, keeping its "spiritual" functions, say, and depressing its physical construction, and forgetting (partly because of changed meteorological and social circumstances) its illuminating divine occupancy.
If thus, historically and logically, we can substantiate our position respecting the actuality and functions of the ark, we may proceed to a third point, a counter-allegation. This is directed against bedouin primitivist thinking in general, which is a learned and potent kind of reductionism of the Bible. Once the catastrophic setting of Exodus is dismissed as exaggeration and falsehood, and most that we know of Moses is regarded as merely a fanciful hero's tale, then the door is opened wide to a new history of the Jews as an escaped slave remnant finding haven among an undisturbed nomadic tribe, and, in gratitude or by necessity, adopting their local volcano-god. But once the natural conditions of Exodus and the character of Moses and his cohorts are established, there can be assigned to bedouin primitivism only the limited role that I have already granted it in this book.
5. "Biblical Literature," 2 EB 882.
9. Tr. Israel Abrahams (1959), Hebrew U., Jerusalem, 26-7.
10. 69 Zeitschrift fur Alttestament. Wiss. (1957), 84-103 and 70 ZAW (1958), 48-59.
23. J. G. Galway and J. T. Schaefer, "Fowl Play," 32 Weatherwise (1979) 116-8.
24. The Sirius Mystery. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1976.
28. James Perrick, Jr., The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812, (1976)
31. Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972.
33. The Ark, the Ephod, and the "Tent of Meeting," Cincinnati: Hebrew Union CP, 1945.
34. The Bible and the Ancient Near East, New York: Doubleday, 1967, ch. 8, 136-51.
35. "Earliest Representation of the Ark of the Law," 14 JQR (1902), 737-9.