This week we start the book of Exodus and are introduced to the setup for the rest of the Torah. A Pharaoh who does not know Joseph arises and appealing to national security, has the Israelites enslaved. Things get worse. Pharaoh has the midwives try to kill all the newborn boys but they do not heed him. In response Pharaoh then decides to kill all male Israelite newborns by drowning, though one baby escapes this by being sent down the river, ending up living in the palace, until this now grown man murders an Egyptian task master. The slave who this guy saves rewards him by ratting him out. To escape Pharaoh’s anger, this man flees to Midian where he finds a bride, becomes a shepherd and has a rather interesting conversation with a burning bush. This man is of course Moses. And this week is really his story. We read of his upbringing:
10. And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses; and she said, Because I drew him out of the water. 11. And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out to his brothers, and looked on their burdens; and he spied an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brothers. (Ex. 2 10-11)
Midrash very often tries to resolve the contradictions, extraneous elements, and missing gaps in the text of Torah. In the story of Exodus 2, there are plenty. One of most known Midrash is not rabbinic however, but 1950’s American Christianity: Cecil B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments. A good amount of movie time is midrash of what happened between Exodus 2:10 and 2:11. There is no rabbinic text which really describes Moses being Ramses’ best buddy growing up, nor the implications of sibling rivalry over both women and power. But like most midrash, once written, it tends to stick. So when the animated version The Prince of Egypt came out, this midrash was still a critical part of the story, though this time with a plotline with shades of the Shoah, the issue which Moses links his heritage with. This movie midrash primarily answers one question: how much of his heritage did Moses know? For Demille and Dreamworks, the answer was none at all.
But was that the case in the rabbinic mind? Is it how an audience fifty years after DeMille’s movies should read this story? Oddly enough, at first glance, the Midrash and other commentaries do not seem to think there is much to add between verses 10 and 11. The only story is found in Exodus Rabbah I:26 about Moses as a young boy loving to put Pharaoh’s crown on his own head. Pharaoh’s advisors think this might be the child who the prophecies say will usurp Pharaoh’s power, so devise a test of putting a chunk of gold and a burning coal in front of the infant. If he reaches for the gold, they’ll kill him, if he reaches for the coal, then he’s just an imbecile. Moses reaches for the gold, but at the last minute the angel Gabriel pushes his hand onto the coal. Moses then reacts by jerking the live coal into his mouth, burning his tongue, and thus his speech impediment mentioned in Ex. 4:10.
Reading this story in the English seems to indicate that this is the story of a little baby. If that is the case, the story of Moses not knowing his heritage also makes sense. One assumption of Midrash however, is that every word is significant since in the mind of the rabbis every word of Torah was given by God, and thus has meaning. Like the name of another movie, we may have here a case of meaning lost in translation.
The phrase for “and the boy grew up” in Hebrew is ויגדל הילד vayigdal hayeled. In Biblical Hebrew, coming from the same root as gadol “big,” this is the verb for growing up. Yeled is the Hebrew for young child, and has the same root as the verb to give birth. This phrase shows up in two other places in Tanach. The first is in Genesis 21:8, speaking of Isaac:
When the child grew and was weaned, then Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned.
From a parallel analogy between the Exodus and the Genesis verse, it appears that grow in Moses’ case means that the child is weaned. Of course we read in Exodus 2: 8-9
8. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go. And the girl went and called the child’s mother. 9. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it.
This would seem to confirm that growing means to an age where nursing is no longer required. If this is true, then Moses was so young, that indeed he could have never known his birth family. Conversely, the second use of vayigdal hayeled is found in II Kings 4:18, speaking of a child promised to the Shunnamite by the prophet Elisha, who after his birth and growing up Elisha will have to now resurrect from the dead.
18 When the child was grown, he fell one day, when he went out to his father to the reapers. 19. And he said to his father, My head, my head. And he said to a lad, Carry him to his mother. 20. And when he had taken him, and brought him to his mother, he sat on her knees till noon, and then died.
Here the boy grows up to the point that he can walk out to a field to his father, and even speak. He certainly is not an infant or toddler, but much older. After the phrase, when referred to as a child he is not a yeled, but a na’ar (נער), best translated as a “lad” or “youth.” The age of a na’ar is problematic. Ephraim and Manasseh were somewhere in their twenties when blessed by Jacob, yet were both called na’ar (Gen 48:16) Moses then might have been much older than an age where he would not know his birth family.
The rabbis, when looking at phrases, would find that the more words that match in the two different passages would mean they have more significance with each other. In Exodus we have “the boy grew up” and then “he went out to his brothers” In II Kings we have “the boy grew up” and then “he went out to his father.” Thus there would be a stronger association between the Exodus and II Kings passages.
Interestingly, when referring to Moses in Exodus Rabbah I:26, he is several times called a na’ar, never a Yeled. For the rabbis, Moses may have been much older, and did understand to some degree his heritage. Exodus 2:11 does say he went out to his brothers, and saw their burdens. He had to have known who his brothers were. DeMille and Dreamworks have his identity revealed to him through others before he does that.
While each of these explanations is valid, I believe Moses knew who he was. There’s a phrase I’ve played with found at the beginning of this discussed Exodus Rabbah passage, that the Socino translation reads as Moses grew abnormally, literally it reads, “He did not grow up as the way of all the earth.” The phrase “way of the earth” (דרך הארץ) usually means manner or custom, or even good manners. The Ethics of the Fathers (M. Avot) 3:17 reads with this phrase,
R. Eleazar b. Azariah said: where there is no Torah there is no good manners; where there is no good manners there is no Torah.
Yet, all indicates the customary practices of all people, hence it means human practice or custom. Such a term is used for sex in Genesis 19:31 in terms of Lots Daughters thinking they will never have normal husbands since all men except their father are dead. It meaning as abnormal growth could also work. Yet another explanation is Moses was not raised with general practices of all humans, but with particular Jewish ethics and manners, the ones that lead to Torah. Since Moses knew who his brothers were, and they were not Egyptians, he learned on his mother’s knee who he was. His identity was an Israelite, not an Egyptian even while growing up in the ultimate Egyptian household.
I came up with this argument in Hebrew, not English. Much of the translations were inadequate for identifying what was going on in any of these texts. Too much is lost in the translation. And it is that that I think about when I think of this story of Moses’ early years. I think back to my own experience, and realize that most of my knowledge was acquired in my thirties, not when I was young. Yet, it was between before my sixth or seventh birthday when I gained my Jewish identity, not the one of my birth but the one in my head. It was an identity so strong even leaving Judaism for eastern religions meant I would eventually come back. Could Moses the Egyptian Prince really have had that revealed about him by some mere slaves? Would he believe it? Would he respond as he did in The Ten Commandments? More likely as the Egyptian prince, if he learned me was an Israelite, he would have had Aaron and Miriam killed to keep the secret and keep power and the girl. No one would have stopped him or even cared there were two more dead slaves. But his identity was already established in his youth. AS Isaiah 28:8 reminds us, to whom do we teach knowledge? To the one weaned from the breasts. In the biblical text that was Isaac, and that was Moses. With that knowledge and ethics Moses could do nothing but go out to his brothers because they were a part of him.
My Hebrew and knowledge of Torah keep getting better. But I am a minority. As I write this I know all to well, there are people out there who think movies like The Ten Commandments were the narrative of the Bible and not a mere Hollywood fiction. Indeed people would rather passively watch a movie than actively read the actual text, if they care at all. And that bothers me, watching the process of apathy and ignorance enslave and kill Jews as effectively as Pharaoh, that I feel the need to stop such slavery with knowledge of Torah.
May my efforts here at Shlomo’s Drash help in that effort.
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