Shalom everyone,
The question in this article’s title may seem like a bland and uninteresting one, but if you follow my line of reasoning, it will ultimately reveal to us what God thought about the Ten Plagues, and therefore something of YHVH’s personality.
When we read the story of the Exodus, we will come to a point where Moses is speaking to God at the burning bush (Ex 3:1 – 4:17). Towards the end, God says, “Isn’t Aaron the Levite your brother?” It has always puzzled me why God needed to specify, ‘the Levite’ at all. Why didn’t God simply say, “Isn’t Aaron your brother?” and leave out ‘the Levite’?
I recently watched a whole series of videos on the Exodus story by Rabbi David Foreman. In the series, he proposed an excellent reason why. What follows is based on what he said, with my own take on it, along with a few additional points of my own.
Because we already know the whole Exodus story, and all the intimate details of the story from start to finish, there are some points that we miss – subtext that we would otherwise notice if we were hearing everything for the first time. Like, the point at which God mentions Aaron to Moses at the burning bush. We forget that up until this point, Moses had never actually met Aaron. Aaron more than likely had grown up being aware that Moses, this man who was treated like an Egyptian prince, was his brother, but they had never met each other.
There must have come a point where the Pharoah’s daughter – who had raised Moses as if she had been his mother – told him that, “You’re not really an Egyptian. You’re a Hebrew, and those slaves out there are your people, your brothers and sisters.”
This must have been the trigger that prompted him to go out to see the Hebrew slaves, his kinsfolk (Ex 2:11). In Hebrew, the idiomatic way of saying, ‘your kinsfolk’ is literally, ‘your brothers’:
“Now it so happened after many years, when Mosheh had grown up, that he went out to his brothers the Israelites, and he saw them in their heavy toil. Then he noticed an Egyptian man brutally beating a Hebrew man, one of his brothers.”
After the murder of the Egyptian, Moses leaves Egypt, but he has still not actually met any of his immediate family – not his mother or his father, his sister Miriam, and certainly not Aaron his brother. He only encountered anonymous Hebrew slaves, his ‘brothers’ as the text calls them.
So maybe the reason why God specifies ‘Aaron the Levite’ is to distinguish him from his other ‘Israelite brothers’. But there’s more – factors that are pertinent to why Moses is the ideal man to lead the struggle against the Egyptians, a struggle which reflects God’s own struggle in this whole story.
At the burning bush, God told Moses that he was to lead the Israelites out of Egypt by going up against the Pharoah:
“I am sending you to the Pharaoh to lead My people the Israelites out of Egypt.” (Ex 3:10)
Immediately after this, Moses begins giving excuses. He says to God, ‘Who am I to do this?’ and, ‘But I don’t know Your Name?’ After this, God mentions that God will be sending all God’s might against the Pharoah and the Egyptians, and Moses begins to panic. He says that he is not good at speaking, and eventually plainly tells God, ‘Send anyone, just not me’.
At this point, most translations say something like, ‘Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against Moses’. But then God says something gentle and kind to Moses, and suggests that Aaron his brother will help him. The two reactions don’t fit together; in my humble opinion, I think there’s something wrong with the translation.
The biblical Hebrew idiom, charah af (literally, ‘to kindle the nose’) can certainly mean, ‘to become very angry’. However, there are other instances where it means, ‘to become exceedingly sorrowful’, for example, out of pity for someone (see Gesenius’s Hebrew Lexicon, page 303b, lines 4-8).
For example, Jonah 4:9 is usually translated as,
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die!”
But can you really ever be angry enough to want to die? This is one of the instances where the idiom means, ‘to be exceedingly sorrowful’. So the verse in Jonah should read,
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be so upset over the plant?” And he said, “Yes, upset enough to die!”
Similarly, YHVH was not angry at Moses for giving all these excuses; YHVH felt pity for Moses. I think that Ex 4:14 should therefore be translated as,
At this, YHVH felt altogether sorry for Mosheh, so God said, “Is not Aharon the Levite your brother? I know that he speaks most fluently. And what’s more, at this very moment, he is setting out to meet you himself; when he sees you, he will be most glad in his heart.
While God is speaking to Moses, at the very same time, God tells Aaron to set out to meet Moses (YHVH is able to multi-task)!
However, we still haven’t come to the crux of the matter – why Moses was giving all his excuses, and why God felt pity for Moses for doing so. It is because God understood the real reason why Moses didn’t want to go. This reason, is the same as why God had to specify his brother as, ‘the Levite’.
In Isa 19:25, God uses the phrase, “Blessed be Egypt my people”. All nations, without exception, are God’s people, God’s children, even ones that are oppressing another one of God’s children. In order to free the Hebrews, God will have to inflict terrible adversities against another one of God’s children, whom God loves. Atheists are eager to point out how cruel God was to send plagues against the Egyptians, but the thing is, YHVH did not like having to do it at all. As a parent, how far are you willing to go to save the life of your child who is being tortured and beaten? What would you be willing to do in order to rescue your child?
But if the one doing the torturing was also one of your children, you wouldn’t like what you had to do to free your other child at all – not one bit.
YHVH felt pity towards Moses, because YHVH understood the reason why Moses didn’t want to go, and it was the same reason why God felt sorry for Moses.
As a parent, sometimes when one of your kids gives excuse after excuse for not wanting to do something, and most of them are weak excuses, you realise that they are not giving you the real reason for not wanting to do what you have asked of them.
Think about it. You are raised with an Egyptian identity. You grow up as an Egyptian prince. So, as a child brought up in the Egyptian royal family, who is your brother?
Your brother is the Egyptian Pharoah – the very man you have just been asked to go up against, the very man who is going to have the full force of God’s might sent against him and his people.
“Send anyone You want – just not me.”
God had to specify ‘Aaron your Levite brother,’ to distinguish him from ‘Pharoah your Egyptian brother’.
Moses is so conflicted, that this is the real reason why he doesn’t want to go. Similarly, God is conflicted, because Egypt is also God’s people. YHVH therefore feels sorry for Moses, because God understands how Moses feels – God and Moses are in the same position.
And this is also the reason why, in God’s view, Moses is the right man to send. Sending someone who doesn’t know the Pharoah, and who has no affection for the people of Egypt, would mean that such a person would hate Pharoah and all his people, and would revel in the suffering of the Egyptians during the plagues. But Moses’s familiarity with both the Pharoah and with Egypt would keep him grounded. Moses would never take any pleasure in the suffering of the Egyptian people.
This is one of the many reasons why we do not rejoice at hearing the plagues. We are most definitely awed at the might and power of YHVH – that’s the purpose of telling the story – but it is a sobering, level-headed reverence. Moses took no pleasure in the plagues, and more importantly, neither did God.
I pray you enjoy an inspiring and insightful Passover seder. Hag sameach!
Your brother as always,
Shmuliq