Interpreting Dialogue I:
Moshe Resists His Mission
And the man Moshe was very humble, more than any other person on the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:3)
Of all the reluctant prophets whose stories the Tanakh records, Moshe is perhaps the one who balks the most. God must go to a great deal of trouble to persuade Moshe to take on the role of leader of the Jewish people, from orchestrating the spectacle of the burning bush to arguing with him at length about the details of his mission.
Exodus Chapters 3–4 tells the story of Moshe’s initiation and records the dialogue between God and the doubtful Moshe in unusual detail. After God explains the mission He wishes Moshe to undertake (Exodus 3:6–10), Moshe answers briefly, “Who am I, that I should go to Par’oh, and that I should take the children of Israel out of Egypt?”1Please read Exodus 3:1–13 for a better grasp of the midrashic discussion. (verse 11).
The Interpretive Problem
Moshe’s answer is a relevant reply in the context of the exchange that is taking place, and there is no obvious peculiarity or grammatical irregularity in his words. Nonetheless, while God obviously understands precisely what Moshe means by his rhetorical question, the reader is somewhat at a loss because the verse is opaque; Moshe’s reply to God may be understood in one of several ways. What exactly does Moshe mean by “Who am I…” and why does he expect these words to be an effective refusal of the assignment God has designed for him?
The midrashic commentary from Exodus Rabba (3:4) quoted below, offers three possible readings of the verse.2One further explanation is cited in this section of Exodus Rabba, but I have not included it because it is homiletical rather than interpretive. As we will see, each reading assumes a different understanding of the context of Moshe’s answer, and each reading interprets – and thus punctuates – the verse differently.
The Midrashic Commentary
And Moshe said to the Lord, “Who am I?” (Mi anokhi?)
(1) R. Yehoshua ben Levi said, “This may be compared to a king who gave his daughter in marriage
(2) and promised to give her a province and a shifha matronit,3A genteel servant, something like a lady-in-waiting or a lady’s maid.
(3) and [instead] gave her a shifha kushit.4A common slave.
(4) His son-in-law said to him, ‘Didn’t you promise me a shifha matronit?’
(5) Thus, Moshe said before the Holy One blessed be He,
(6) “Master of the universe, when Yaakov went down to Egypt, didn’t you say thus to him,
(8) And now you say to me, ‘Go and I will send you to Par’oh.’
(9) I (anokhi) am not the one [about whom] you said to him, ‘And I (anokhi) will surely bring you up.’”
(10) Another explanation:
(11) ‘Mi anokhi’: R. Nehorai says, “Moshe said before the Holy One blessed be He,
(12) ‘You say to me, “Go, and take out Israel.”
(13) Where will I shelter them in the summer from the sun, and in the winter from the cold?
(14) Where will I get sufficient food and drink [for them]?
(15) How many women in confinement5Women who are in the process of giving birth or those who have recently given birth. are there among them?
(16) How many pregnant women are there among them?
(17) How many infants are among them?
(18) How many types of food have you prepared for the women in confinement among them?
(19) How many types of delicate dishes have you prepared for the pregnant women?
(20) How much parched grain and nuts have you prepared for the children?’
(21) And where is the explanation of this thing?
(23) The Holy One blessed be He said to him,
(24) ‘A kind of cake will come out with them from Egypt6I.e., matza. [that will] suffice for them thirty days; [from this] you will know how I will lead them in the future.’”
(25) Another explanation:
(26) “Mi anokhi”: [Moshe] said before Him,
(27) “Master of the universe, how can I enter a place of robbers, and a place of murderers”; that is, “Who am I to go to Par’oh?”
(28) “and that I should take Israel out” – “What merit do they have in their hands that I should be able to take them out?”
(29) The Holy One blessed be He said to him, “Because I will be with you.”
(30) One doesn’t say “I will be with you” except to someone who is afraid.”
(31) “And this will be the sign to you that I have sent you…” – “and in this thing it will be recognized that you are my messenger,
(32) because I will be with you, and everything that you want, I will do.”
(33) “When you take the people out of Egypt, you will serve the Lord on this mountain.” – “That which you said to me, ‘In what merit will I take them out of Egypt?’ you should know that in the merit of the Torah that they will receive in the future, by your hand, on this mountain, they are going out of there.”
Hazal’s Understanding of Biblical Dialogue
Even a cursory reading of these three interpretations highlights the assumption they share about the nature of dialogue in the Tanakh: biblical dialogue is not a verbatim report of whole conversations, but a stylized synopsis of more elaborate exchanges which are only partially recorded in the text. This assumption is not unique to the three authorities cited here. We may gather from the widespread use of narrative expansion throughout the Talmud and midrash that Hazal viewed the dialogue – and indeed, other parts of the biblical narrative – in this way.7This is not to say that Hazal saw either biblical dialogue or other details of biblical narrative as a fabrication. Rather, they viewed the biblical text as a deliberately incomplete recording of the factual. Such a view of biblical dialogue both authorizes Hazal to interpret the text and even requires them to do so, since simply reading the words on the page is not enough to reach a proper understanding of their meaning.
R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s Interpretation
R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s reading of Moshe’s reply to God (lines 1–9) takes the form of a mashal (lines 1–3) whose nimshal (lines 4–9) is a narrative expansion. Following the methodology we have outlined in the first section of this book for analyzing a mashal,8See Chapter 2 we will first look at the mashal story as a narrative in its own right.
The mashal describes a king who has married off a daughter. In the marriage agreement, the king has promised to give his daughter a province and a shifha matronit, i.e., a well-born, highly trained servant. (We may reasonably assume that a servant of this type is expensive, and perhaps not so easily obtained. We may also assume that a king’s daughter would require a servant of this kind. If her father does not provide her with one, her husband will have to do so.) In any event, the king does not supply the promised servant for his daughter. Instead, he gives her a common slave. Not surprisingly, the king’s son-in-law objects, and protests to the king over his failure to fulfill the terms of the agreement.
Read in isolation, without reference to the nimshal, the mashal story seems fairly straightforward. That the king has not fulfilled his part of the agreement is not, in principle, a problem with the story since it is not all that unusual for people to fail to meet their obligations. More important for our purposes, within the admittedly narrow framework of the story, there is nothing illogical or particularly puzzling, and there are no internal inconsistencies. The key to this midrash is not, then, likely to be found here.
Isolating the Elements of the Mashal
Our next step is to isolate the elements of the mashal as follows:
a king
the king’s daughter
the king’s promise
a province
a shifha matronit
a shifha kushit
the king’s son-in-law
the son-in-law’s objection
Matching the Elements
Next, we need to draw correspondences between the elements of the mashal and the nimshal:
a king / the Holy One blessed be He
the king’s daughter / Yaakov/ the children of Israel
the king’s promise / ‘And I (anokhi) will surely bring you up’
a province / -----
a shifha matronit / God
a shifha kushit / Moshe as God’s messenger
the king’s son-in-law / Moshe
the son-in-law’s objection / ‘Who am I? (Mi anokhi?)’
A Doubling of Roles
When we line up the elements this way, we notice that the principal characters in the nimshal – God and Moshe – play more than one role each in the mashal. Thus, God is both the king of the mashal and the shifha matronit; Moshe is both the son-in-law and the common slave. Quite apart from the startling comparison of God to a servant, to which we will return, we need to ask why the mashal is structured this way. We should also note that while God and Moshe play more than one role each in the mashal, the king’s daughter has two referents in the nimshal, i.e., Yaakov, and the children of Israel.
The gap in the nimshal is fairly easily filled; the “province” of the mashal is almost certainly Eretz Yisrael, and is in any event not critical to our understanding of the mashal.
Time Frames
Returning to the doubling of roles, it becomes clear that this feature is a function of the time frame of the nimshal relative to the mashal. The mashal story takes place within one continuous time frame, while the nimshal spans two separate periods of Jewish history. The original promise God (the king) made to Yaakov (the king’s daughter, within the earlier time frame), “I (anokhi) will go down with you to Egypt, and I (anokhi) will surely bring you up” (Genesis 46:4), has reached its time of fulfillment, four generations later. When God tells Moshe to go redeem the children of Israel (the king’s daughter, within the later time frame), Moshe (the son-in-law) protests; he assumes that God has changed the terms of the agreement. If God Himself (the shifha matronit) accompanies the children of Israel, the agreement is fulfilled; if Moshe (the shifha kushit) goes as God’s messenger, the agreement has been breached.
Understanding the Significance of the Mashal
What does the mashal add to our understanding of this verse as R. Yehoshua ben Levi presents it? First, R. Yehoshua ben Levi has Moshe make a strong claim about the nature of God’s obligation to Yaakov and, by extension, to his descendents. The promise made to Yaakov, “…and I (anokhi) will surely bring you up,” places God in the position of “shifha matronit” relative to Israel at the time of the exodus from Egypt. This is a radical notion, and a powerful one. If we had only the narrative expansion of the nimshal, we would remain with the idea that God has an obligation to the children of Israel based on the promise made to Yaakov. The mashal, however, drives home the force of Moshe’s claim on behalf of the Jewish people, a force that requires a reply from God. Furthermore, the mashal framework enables R. Yehoshua ben Levi to sustain two contradictory views of God simultaneously: God is both king/father in his relationship to Yaakov and the children of Israel, and “shifha matronit,” bound by His obligation to them. The two images accurately reflect the complexity of the bond between God and the Jewish people.9This bond is particularly complicated when we look at the central problem of the exile of the children of Israel to Egypt and their exodus – God is at one and the same time their Redeemer, and also the One Who sent them down to Egypt in the first place.
The mashal framework also adds rhetorical force to the portrayal of Moshe as advocate and defender of the Jewish people in his very refusal to take on the task that God wants him to perform. The irony is striking – Moshe, the son-in-law of the mashal story, is “wed” to the children of Israel even as he tries to evade that role.
If we read the verse in keeping with R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s interpretation, we have to alter our translation. R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s reading punctuates the words thus: “Mi ‘anokhi’?” This is most accurately rendered in translation as: “Who is ‘anokhi’? [certainly not me, Moshe!]” or “Who is the ‘I’ of the promise made to Yaakov, You [God] or me [Moshe]?”
Context and Connotation as Factors in Interpretation
Before we dismiss this reading as dissonant with the plain sense of the text, let us consider what might have caused R. Yehoshua ben Levi to read the verse this way.10Reconstructing another person’s thought process – especially that of a great talmudic sage – is always a highly speculative enterprise, and it would be the height of hubris to make any sort of definitive claim to have successfully done so. Nonetheless, taking R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s interpretation seriously requires us to try and make a good case for his position. The first possible clue that the verse should not be translated simply as “Who am I…?” is the use of the word anokhi rather than ani, the more common Hebrew word for “I.” Anokhi has a connotation of formality, and is more likely than ani to be used in speech with a poetic tone or a higher social register.11Note that in this chapter, in identifying Himself to Moshe, God uses anokhi and not ani (verse 6). If Moshe is merely voicing a humble refusal, one might expect him to phrase it as “Mi ani,” not “Mi anokhi.” Using ani rather than anokhi would accord with the description a few verses earlier of Moshe hiding his face when he realizes that he is speaking to the Lord (verse 6).12Later, Moshe will be described as “very humble, more than any person on the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3). Perhaps, then, the word anokhi is not being used by Moshe to refer to himself, but is an allusion to someone else. Since the word is most appropriately used by God, it is not unreasonable to assume that Moshe is quoting God to Himself.
Broadening the Context
What might Moshe be quoting? To answer this question, we must examine the notion of context that governs our reading of biblical texts. When most of us study Tanakh, we think of context in rather narrow terms. What generally concerns us in determining the meaning of a word, a phrase, or a verse is its immediate, or local, context, i.e., the verse in which the element occurs, or some of the surrounding verses. Sometimes it becomes obvious that we must look further afield to understand a given problem, to the context of the topic or the chapter. For R. Yehoshua ben Levi, however, context is a far broader, more global notion.13This conception of context is not unique to R. Yehoshua ben Levi, by any means. It is highly characteristic of midrash in general. The context of a biblical verse can be the entire Tanakh. According to R. Yehoshua ben Levi, in order to understand the dialogue between God and Moshe, one must read it in the context of what preceded it, namely the last few chapters of Genesis and the promise made to Yaakov there.
Looking at only the local context of the phrase “Mi anokhi,” the verse itself, we cannot possibly read as R. Yehoshua ben Levi does. Even within a slightly expanded framework, such as the immediately surrounding verses, or the entire chapter, it is hard to see what R. Yehoshua ben Levi is getting at. But the phrase resonates differently for R. Yehoshua ben Levi than it initially does for us because of the sensitivity with which he reads the text (picking up the difference in nuance between anokhi and ani), and because he reads within a more global context.
Reading the Interpretation Back Into the Text
Interestingly, once we have assimilated R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s interpretation, we are able to see God’s answer to Moshe in verse 12 as perfectly in keeping with this understanding of verse 11. According to R. Yehoshua ben Levi, Moshe has asked, “Who is ‘anokhi’?” implying that it is not he, Moshe, who is required to save the Jewish people, but God Himself. In verse 12, God sidesteps that objection by telling Moshe, “Because I will be with you…” which can plausibly be understood to mean that God Himself intends to redeem Israel, but that He wants Moshe’s participation as well. R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s interpretation thus stands the test of being read back into the biblical context and providing a plausible possible interpretation of Moshe’s answer to God.
R. Nehorai’s Interpretation
The next interpretation offered in this section of Exodus Rabba, presented by R. Nehorai (lines 10–24), is a true narrative expansion. Unlike R. Yehoshua ben Levi, who uses the device of a mashal to clarify his interpretation, R. Nehorai explains Moshe’s words by expanding one short sentence into an extended speech whose meaning is laid out very elaborately. In R. Nehorai’s reading, “Mi anokhi” might be best punctuated as “Mi? Anokhi?!” (“Who? Me?!”). As portrayed in this narrative expansion, Moshe is overwhelmed by the thought of the logistical difficulties he would face were he to take on the task of leading Israel out of Egypt. R. Nehorai lists these in detail: the problem of providing shelter for a large population in harsh weather (line 13), the impossibility of providing enough food for so many people (line 14), and the many special needs of the population Moshe is meant to lead, due to the high proportion of vulnerable women and children (lines 15–20). This interpretation presents Moshe as saying, in effect, “How can I, one single human being, possibly take on such a huge responsibility?”
This reading of verse 11 seems at first glance closer to our conception of the plain sense of the text, perhaps because it does not require us to add a great deal of background information to the verse in order to understand it. This interpretation is also both psychologically plausible and relatively easy to identify with. After all, few of us can imagine criticizing God to His face, but most of us can conceive of how daunted we would feel if faced with a near impossible job. Nonetheless, it is worth asking why R. Nehorai reads Moshe’s words in this way and not, for example, as a conventional expression of humility.
Reconstructing R. Nehorai’s Reading
A closer examination of Moshe’s speech shows us that R. Nehorai takes the first two chapters of Exodus as the context for his reading of the verse. Chapter 1 of Exodus describes a population explosion of enormous proportions and Par’oh’s attempts to contain it by a series of vicious decrees. Chapter 2, which describes the birth of Moshe, also shows the effect of these decrees on the daily life of the Jewish people. In R. Nehorai’s version of Moshe’s reply to God, the needs of the many pregnant and child-bearing women and their small children feature prominently as reasons why Moshe feels that he cannot take on the mission of leading the children of Israel out of Egypt (lines 15–20). Reading the verse in this context makes it plausible that Mi anokhi is a cry of alarmed refusal triggered by the overwhelming nature of the task facing Moshe.
R. Nehorai offers a prooftext for his reading of Mi anokhi, a verse from the Song of Songs (lines 21–22).14Hazal generally interpret the Song of Songs as an allegorical representation of the relationship between God and the Jewish people. Among the particular episodes of Jewish history that feature prominently in their interpretations are the periods of exile and exodus from Egypt, and the giving of the Torah. Please read Song of Songs 1:1–8 for the full quotation of the verse and for context. R. Nehorai quotes Song of Songs 1:7 as an allegorized version of Moshe’s complaint to God. In this verse as represented by R. Nehorai, the beloved (Moshe) is addressing King Shlomo (God) and talking about the care of her flocks (the children of Israel): “Tell me, one whom my soul loves, where will you feed, where will you give rest [to your flocks] at noon; for why should I be [like] a mourner by the flocks of your friends.”15See Rashi’s interpretation of the verse.
Biblical Quotation as a Factor in Interpretation
The quotation from the Song of Songs, set in the context of R. Nehorai’s narrative expansion, does indeed resonate as he intends it to. In fact, Moshe’s speech may be said to be almost an extended paraphrase of the verse in the Song of Songs; both specifically mention the feeding and the sheltering of those who have been assigned to the care of a protector. This raises the question of what comes first: does R. Nehorai’s understanding of the Song of Songs motivate his reading of the verse in Exodus, or does the verse in Exodus cause him to interpret Song of Songs 1:7 as he does?
Interpretation as an Unconscious Act
One answer may be that the relationship between the two verses as they appear in this midrash is more complex than a simple causal connection. In order to determine what that relationship is we need to ask ourselves what happens when we read, and how we arrive at our interpretations of texts. The act of interpretation is not ordinarily the act of consciously weighing options. For most of us, the meaning of what we read seems self-evident. Asked to defend our interpretation of a given text, we can usually offer an argument in its favor, but in doing so we are engaged in the conscious reconstruction of a largely unconscious process. While reading, we don’t think about the reasons for our interpretations – we simply understand what we are reading.
To reconstruct R. Nehorai’s interpretation of the verse in Exodus, we could reasonably assume he understands Mi anokhi as he does due to the reasons outlined above: the difficulty of the task God assigns Moshe, and the placement of the verse (Exodus 3:11) in the textual context of Exodus 1 and 2. Reading Mi anokhi this way sheds new light on the verse in the Song of Songs for R. Nehorai, recasting it as an allegorical representation of Moshe’s complaint. Understood in this new light, Song of Songs 1:7 becomes in turn a piece of supporting evidence for R. Nehorai’s reading of Mi anokhi, and may also influence the form R. Nehorai’s interpretation takes. So while Exodus 3:11 helps R. Nehorai understand Song of Songs 1:7 as he does, Song of Songs 1:7 both supports his reading of Exodus 3:11, and shapes the story with which he communicates this reading to his listeners. The relationship between the verses and the way in which R. Nehorai uses them is thus more circular than linear.
Reading the Interpretation Back into the Text
Returning to the content of R. Nehorai’s interpretation of Mi anokhi, our next question must be, does it mesh with the biblical text? Reading the first few words of verse 12, we can assume that it does, since God answers Moshe, “Because I will be with you…” which we can take to mean that Moshe will not be expected to accomplish his mission, with all its difficulties, himself. It is interesting to note, however, that R. Nehorai appears somewhat troubled by the relationship between Moshe’s question and God’s answer. We see this in his alteration of God’s answer from its form in the biblical text. Without actually quoting verse 12, he expands it, making it an explicit response to Moshe’s worries: “The Holy One blessed be He said to him, ‘A kind of cake will come out with them from Egypt [that will] suffice for them thirty days; [from this] you will know how I will lead them in the future’” (lines 23–24).
A Problem for R. Nehorai’s Interpretation
Why does R. Nehorai add words to verse 12? At first glance, the verse appears to stand on its own quite well, but under closer examination we notice that, taken as a whole, it poses a problem for R. Nehorai’s interpretation. The verse reads as follows: “And He said, ‘Because I will be with you; and this will be for you the sign that I have sent you; when you take the people out of Egypt, you will serve the Lord on this mountain.’” (Exodus 3:12). The central difficulty is the phrase, ‘and this will be the sign for you that I have sent you.’ What does ‘this’ refer to? What is the sign that God has sent Moshe? Furthermore, while the first part of the verse (‘Because I will be with you’) fits nicely as an answer to Moshe’s speech, as we have noted above, the second part of the verse seems almost a non sequitur if we follow R. Nehorai’s interpretation.
Contrasting Interpretations
In comparing R. Nehorai’s approach to the problem with R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s, we notice that R. Yehoshua ben Levi does not quote God’s answer to Moshe in verse 12 or make reference to it at all, unlike R. Nehorai who partially rewrites it. R. Yehoshua ben Levi thus avoids the problem that verse 12 poses for his interpretation of Mi anokhi.
It may be that R. Yehoshua ben Levi sees no need to deal with the unclear referent in verse 12 because he understands only the first part of the verse as God’s answer to Moshe, and the second part as unrelated to it. An attempt to reconstruct R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s understanding of verse 12 might look something like this: “And [God] said [in answer to Moshe’s ‘Mi anokhi’], ‘Because I will be with you. And [now, Moshe, moving on to the next topic], this will be the sign for you that I have sent you; when you take the people out of Egypt, you will serve the Lord on this mountain.’”
R. Nehorai, in contrast, appears to read the whole of verse 12 in relation to Mi anokhi and, not surprisingly, runs into difficulties. How does his narrative expansion of verse 12 resolve the problem? According to R. Nehorai, God’s answer to Moshe is, ‘A kind of cake will come out with them from Egypt [that will] suffice for them thirty days; [from this] you will know how I will lead them in the future’ (line 24). These words cannot be read as a paraphrase of the first part of the verse, “Because I will be with you,” since the first part of the verse needs no elaboration or explanation in order to serve as an answer to Moshe’s question as R. Nehorai understands it. Nor can these words be read as a paraphrase of the last part of the verse, “when you take the people out of Egypt, you will serve the Lord on this mountain,” because they bear no relation to it at all. Line 24 must therefore be R. Nehorai’s missing referent for the unspecified ‘this’ of verse 12. According to R. Nehorai, Moshe will know that God is with him and has sent him when he sees that the matza the Jewish people took with them when they came out of Egypt will suffice to feed them for a full month.
R. Nehorai’s gloss of verses 11–12 thus reads as follows: Moshe’s cry in verse 11, “Mi anokhi…?” expresses his fear that he cannot possibly fulfill the mission given to him by God. God’s answer to Moshe in verse 12 is, “Because I will be with you [and so you won’t have to meet all the people’s needs yourself], and [because ‘a kind of cake will come out with them from Egypt that will suffice for them for thirty days] this will be the sign for you that I have sent you [and that I am with you]. And [now, Moshe, to move on to the next topic], when you take the people out of Egypt, you will serve the Lord on this mountain.”
The Third Interpretation
The third interpretation offered in Exodus Rabba (lines 26–33) differs radically from the previous two. For one thing, this opinion focuses on the verse as a whole, rather than on the phrase Mi anokhi. For another, as we will see, this opinion operates from a much more local view of context than the preceding opinions.
According to this opinion, Moshe is actually asking two questions in verse 11. The first, “Who am I that I should go to Par’oh?” (Mi anokhi ki elekh el Par’oh) is an expression of Moshe’s fear for his physical safety (line 27). The second, “and that I should take Israel out,” is a question about the worthiness of Israel to be redeemed (line 28).
At first encounter, this reading may seem forced because it places the emphasis on the phrase “that I should go to Par’oh” (ki elekh el Par’oh) rather than on Mi anokhi, and it requires us to divide what appears to be one question into two. For this reading to be intelligible, words must also be added to the text. What, then, motivates this interpretation?
As opposed to the previous two readings of the verse, this interpretation is offered with an explicit statement of at least part of the reasoning behind it: “One doesn’t say ‘I will be with you’ except to someone who is afraid” (line 30). It seems, therefore, that this reading is based exclusively upon local context, i.e., God’s answer to Moshe in verse 12.
In fact, if we re-examine verse 12 from the perspective of this reading, we see that a strong case can be made for this position.16Rashi evidently maintains this position as well. See his commentary on Exodus 3:11–12. It is certainly plausible to read the first part of the verse as this commentator suggests: When Moshe says Mi anokhi he means that he is afraid and God’s reply to him proves this. (“The Holy One blessed be He said to him, “Because I will be with you.” One doesn’t say “I will be with you” except to someone who is afraid” lines 29–30). And, although this reading does not seem to be contingent on the story of Moshe’s flight from Egypt after killing an overseer (Exodus 2:11–15), it is consistent with it. Moshe has fled Egypt in fear for his life and now, understandably, is unwilling to return to “a place of robbers, and a place of murderers” (line 27).
More compelling, though, is the fact that this reading offers the most complete solution to the interpretive difficulties posed by the rest of verse 12: “and this will be for you the sign that I have sent you; when you take the people out of Egypt, you will serve the Lord on this mountain.” The two problems, as we noted, are the unclear referent of “this will be for you the sign that I have sent you,” and the seeming irrelevance of the end of the verse (“when you take the people out of Egypt…”) to Moshe’s question Mi anokhi. This interpretation solves the first problem by reading “this” as a reference to the first part of the verse (“Because I will be with you”): the sign that God has sent Moshe is that He will be with him which means “everything that you [Moshe] want, I will do” (lines 31–32).
The second problem can be solved by abandoning the assumption that verse 11 contains one question, an assumption this reading does not share. In this interpretation of verse 11, the last part of verse 12 (“when you take the people out of Egypt, you will serve the Lord on this mountain”) is not the answer to Mi anokhi; it is the answer to Moshe’s question about the worthiness of Israel to be redeemed. If this is the case, the last part of verse 12 is far from being a non sequitur: “That which you said to me, ‘In what merit will I take them out of Egypt?’ you should know that in the merit of the Torah that they will receive in the future, by your hand, on this mountain, they are going out of there’” (line 33).
Redaction as Commentary
Of all the possible readings of Mi anokhi that we can imagine, the editors of Exodus Rabba select these three and choose to arrange them in the order that we see here. Of course, we can only speculate about the reasons for this selection and arrangement but it is worth noting that each of the opinions cited here addresses a different textual difficulty from a different angle.
When we re-read verses 11 and 12 from the widely ranging perspectives of these three interpretations, we become aware that these verses are far more complicated than we have assumed them to be on a first reading. For one thing, each interpretation must add words or background information so that the verses can be read coherently. Because each interpretation deals with only some of the difficulties of these two verses but not all of them, the editors of Exodus Rabba may have included all three opinions to give us the benefit of a well-rounded picture.
Beyond that, however, the arrangement of these midrashim may be significant in itself as an indication of how the redactors of Exodus Rabba wanted us to understand their relative weight or meaning. One possibility is that they want to draw our attention to the methodological differences between these three interpretations. Of the three, R. Yehoshua ben Levi uses the most global context to understand verse 11, and leaves verse 12 largely alone. R. Nehorai, whose use of context is narrower, attempts to account for some of the difficulties with verse 12, but his primary focus is verse 11. The final opinion, that of the unnamed commentator, operates from the most local context, constructing the meaning of verse 11 through the prism of verse 12. The arrangement by the editors of Exodus Rabba may reflect the movement from global to local perspective.17In footnote 2, I noted that the editors of Exodus Rabba offer yet another reading in this section, which I have not included because it is not interpretive in nature. The reading I have omitted uses the resonance of the word anokhi to link the first exile and redemption to the ultimate redemption. The editors of Exodus Rabba may have included this homiletical interpretation at the end of this section to remind us that while verses 11 and 12 can be understood from either more global or more local perspectives, these verses may themselves also provide a context for the understanding of other verses in the Tanakh, or even the events of Jewish history.
Who is Moshe?
Of greater consequence, though, is that the readings reflect different pictures of the character of Moshe at the beginning of his leadership. In keeping with the plain sense of the biblical text, all of them recognize Moshe’s reluctance to take on the mission God wishes to impose on him, but their perspectives on Moshe’s motivation are different.
R. Yehoshua ben Levi sees Moshe as defender and advocate of the Jewish people even before he is willing to take on that position. Moshe’s reminder to God of His promise to Yaakov is in large part a maneuver for avoiding a task he does not wish to take on. Nonetheless, in effect, Moshe is demanding with no small degree of audacity that God fulfill his obligations to the Jewish people. It is a role Moshe will play repeatedly throughout the forty years of his leadership. R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s image of Moshe is thus a familiar one. The qualities we see here are ones we will see later as well.
R. Nehorai presents Moshe as a person overwhelmed by the enormity of the task he faces precisely because he knows all too well what it will entail. This view of Moshe reminds us that even before he becomes a leader, Moshe has been a shepherd – a person concerned with caring for a flock.18This is also the image in the verse R. Nehorai cites from Song of Songs. The leap from a flock of sheep to a human flock is enormously intimidating to Moshe and he tries with all his might to evade this task. R. Nehorai’s view of Moshe is as familiar as R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s, although it differs in focus. As we see Moshe here, worrying about the special needs of his vulnerable charges, we will see him repeatedly worrying for the safety, provisioning, and shelter of his people in the desert.
The third interpretation presents a very different Moshe, someone who is afraid for himself, and highly skeptical of the claims of the Jewish people to redemption. This picture of Moshe, paradoxically, is perhaps the most moving, because it shows us a man with real, human frailties. In this reading, Moshe seems fearful, focused on himself and not particularly enamored of the Jewish people. His refusal of the mission is not founded on the desire for God to fulfill His promise, nor is he thinking about the logistics of caring for a downtrodden nation of slaves. He simply does not want to go. And yet, this all too human Moshe will evolve into the strong, loving, father figure willing to lay down his life for his people.