God is often directly quoted. In the Bible, he is often speaking to Moses. Many chapters of the Book of Exodus begin, “Then the Lord said unto Moses.” In the Koran,3 God often speaks to the believer directly, saying either “We” or “I.” The Koran and some Jewish prayers insert “Praised be he” or “praise be unto him” when mentioning someone whose Word is God’s. The mysterious name of God—“I am who am”—in the Bible is also a way to turn the third person into a first person. The Omnipotent Subject cannot be an object of speech.
The Koran makes a point of celebrating God, not Moses, or even Mohammed. It takes very seriously its monotheistic strictures and condemns as polytheistic Christianity for divinizing Christ. Its name for the other of Islam is “idolatry.” It explains that God the creator has only to say “be,” and something is brought into being, whereas idols are not makers but made things. God creates by willing; he does not beget: unlike his creatures he has no need for sexual reproduction. God is that to which man should worshipfully submit. An “idol” is not just a forbidden “graven image” but a hated version of the polytheism that is being left behind. Unquestioning faith earns one a pleasant afterlife, while unbelievers will burn in hell. Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus are alike in being mere prophets, to whom God reveals his Scriptures, the Torah, the Gospel, and the Koran. They coexist and complement each other, and the Koran repeatedly mentions with respect the lineage it wants to emphasize: Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Noah, Lot, Jacob, Jonah, Moses, Jesus, David, and Solomon. The emphasis on Noah is interesting: not only does it show God’s impulse to destroy his creation, but the saving ark he tells Noah to build is the only other place in the Bible where the word for baby Moses’ aquatic vehicle of escape is used. God shows his holiness through “signs” like the magic of the staff turning into a serpent or the parting of the sea. The Koran emphasizes the opposition between Moses and Pharaoh, but not Moses as the lawgiver, and equates with divinity the magic that Judaism is embarrassed by. For Islam, then, what is rejected is “form,” and the observance of the second commandment is tantamount to avoiding idolatry per se. Koranic “monotheism” is anti-idolatry, like Judaism, but not anti-magic, and it is even more strict than Judaism in equating sin with form. Writing and Revelation are a communication from God, not man, and God shows repeatedly the Paradise reserved for believers, and the eternal Fire that awaits the evildoers on the Day of Judgment. Islam is like Christianity in its belief in the afterlife and the resurrection of the body; it is like Judaism in its respect for laws.
For all Islam’s respect for “the book,” however, it repeatedly refers to the Koran as “recited,” and thus the vehicle of God’s truth is a voice, not a scripture. Therefore, it is very fitting that the story of Moses, as told in the Koran, begins with God’s voice speaking out of the burning bush. When Moses tries to go around the bush in order to detect why it burns without being consumed, God stops him and tells him to take off his shoes in awe. What sets Moses on his mission is a voice.
The bush that burns without being consumed reminds me of the most memorable use of a terminal adverb in the English language. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, there are three metaphors for approaching death: autumn, evening, and a dying fire. The end of the sight of almost-extinguished embers is “consumed with that which it was nourished by.” But precisely, this fire is neither nourished nor consumed. God tells Moses that he is no longer in the domain of scientific explanation and mortality but in the domain of the holy, the eternal.
As one might expect, by far the largest number of books that attempt to retell the story of Moses are in the Jewish tradition, and unabashedly rely exclusively on the Bible. Their effort is not at all to showcase the tale’s multiplicity but to transmit pedagogically the “real meaning” of the first five books of the Bible (the Books of Moses)—to make sense of Judaism itself (no small task!).
A book by the great authority in matters religious and philosophical, Martin Buber, is called Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant,4 a title that indicates where the author’s emphasis lies. On the one hand, he tries to get at what can be learned about God; on the other, what is expected of God’s “chosen people.” The story of Balaam told in Numbers gives a good picture of the kind of soothsayer Moses was not. Yahweh was a new kind of god, and Moses was a new kind of messenger, neither priest nor prophet. The person of Moses has much less interest for Buber than the nature of God’s relation to Israel. His preoccupation with that leads him to explore seminomadic tribal behavior and the exact function of a portable holy Tabernacle, which can become fixed if the tribe reaches its destination (and is destroyed when that place is destroyed). Although he is not in search of a “historical Moses,” he does often call something “the oldest layer” and uses his knowledge of Hebrew, literary forms, and the rest of the Bible to make his points. The book consists of many little chapters that zoom in on subsidiary details, to which he brings immense and sometimes sententious erudition: “And at an unknown hour they pass out of our ken. The Word alone endures” (140). Impatient with biblical scholarship (“It may be enough to mention at this point that I regard the prevailing view of the Biblical text, namely as largely composed of ‘source materials’ [‘Yahwist’, ‘Elohist’, etc.] as incorrect” [8]), he dispenses unargued intuitions from the height of his authority, so that his Moses reads like a series of random thoughts from a master teacher.
Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution studies the ways in which the Moses story has functioned as an inspiration for social change all over the world.5 But his main politico-religious analysis is reserved for the way in which the Bible cools the optimism of the initial liberation and depicts the inevitable “backsliding,” “chiding,” and “murmuring” of a people liberated from external—but not internal—oppression. His analysis of internalized second-class citizenship (the longing to return to “the fleshpots of Egypt”) plus his remarks about the renewal of the Covenant turn his “revolution” into a much tamer kind of social contract, the father’s murder into an agreement among brothers. The paternal principle is no longer the defeated Pharaoh or Old Regime but the Lord of the fathers of Israel who continues to guide and promise. In other words, the theory of government in Exodus is not at all opposed to there being a father, as long as he is both omnipotent and infallible. Moses, too, has to learn to submit to the might of this jealous god, but Moses does not become a founding “father.” He has a role to play as God’s intermediary, but the people worship the God of Gods. Walzer ends up theorizing a very active “consent of the governed”—really a “participation of the governed.” His summary of Exodus politics runs as follows:
First, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
Second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
And third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.”6 There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.7
The best-selling American novel by Leon Uris, Exodus,8 makes use of the melodramatic aspects already in the story. Against a backdrop of human pettiness versus a great cause, he foregrounds human complexity and heroism, using just enough characters to tell the outlines of history through individuals. He sets up and counts on erotic tensions that declare themselves in the end while making his novel a tragedy in which every character ends up suffering a great loss. There are many delays in the Scriptures that can easily be transformed into suspense, and he knows how to use suspense: the ten plagues, the Ten Commandments, the murmurings in the wilderness, the night of the Passover when the children of Israel waited to leave with their shoes on, the impatience of the people when Moses tarried on the mountain, which led them to make a golden calf. . . . At the same time, there is no doubt as to where his sympathies lie. The Arabs surrounding Israel are often depicted as greedy, lazy, and cowardly: “The leader of the dreaded El Husseinis was the most vile, underhanded schemer in a part of the world known for vile, underhanded schemers” (253). Arabs, “with murder, rape, and plunder in their hearts” (466), “wantonly violated every concept of honor” (516). When the novel was first published in 1958, the founding of the state of Israel was still a miracle,
