The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (8 page)

From such couplings came the vast progeny of gods, even the Muses themselves.

T
HE
idea of an original Creation by a single all-powerful Creator comes to the West through Moses, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets. It was Moses, too, who announced the paradoxical, mysterious nature of the Creator. Bards and philosophers, priests and princes around the world had found countless reasons to turn away from the riddle of Creation. But this Hebrew prophet, born in Egypt of obscure immigrant parents of a servant class, allowed himself to be named the ambassador plenipotentiary of the Creator. And he brought epoch-making answers to crucial questions.

There was a historical Moses, as even skeptical scholars agree. Recent archaeology puts the Exodus from Egypt at about 1290
B.C.
, and suggests that Moses was born sometime in the thirteenth century
B.C.
It is not easy to separate history from legend, but we have evidence that he was a talented priest and politician, a persuasive moralist and lawgiver. Some say that he may have been an Egyptian by birth. “Moses” (the Hebrew “Moshe”), derived from the Egyptian
moser
, simply means “is born” (as in the Pharaoh Thutmose, “The God Thoth is born”). Perhaps his full name was longer, appending the name of a god. The name “Mose” was also in use. The associations of the word
mashah
(to draw out) in Hebrew suggests that Moses’ name may have referred to the fact that as an infant he was “drawn out” of the Nile, or perhaps that he drew the Israelites forth from Egypt and from the flood.

“Hebrew” (from Egyptian
Habiru
) was the name for a class of serving people who had been in Egypt for many generations. One of the pharaohs must have feared them and enslaved them. By Moses’ time, it seems, the Pharaoh had ordered the death of every newborn Hebrew male. The Bible reports how Moses survived:

During his years at the Pharaoh’s court (probably of Ramses II) not detailed in the Bible (Exodus 2:1–10), Moses must have had an opportunity to learn how a kingdom was governed and how an army was commanded. At this time the Pharaoh ruled a vast empire, including Canaan (Palestine) and some of Syria.

Probably knowing that he was born a Hebrew, Moses felt righteous anger at the oppression of his people. “And he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.” The next day when he returned to the Hebrew workers, he found two of them fighting. He reprimanded the worker in the wrong, “Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?” The guilty worker retorted, “Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?” Moses was alarmed that his own crime had been discovered, for he knew the Pharaoh would seek to slay him.

With grim appropriateness, Moses began his career as prophet of Judaism and founder of the community of Israel in the role of a refugee. He fled to the land of Midian, in northwest Arabia, east of the Gulf of Aqaba. There, a fugitive from the Pharaoh’s justice, he began a new life. Until then we know nothing extraordinary about Moses except the circumstances of his rescue in the bulrushes. If he had stayed on in Egypt and had not committed murder he might have had a successful career in the Pharaoh’s service.

In Midian, when he sat down to rest by a well, he had the good luck to meet the seven daughters of Jethro, a shepherd priest (Exodus 2:15ff.), who had come to water their flock. When some unfriendly shepherds tried to drive them away, Moses stood up for them and watered their flock. When the daughters returned home their father asked why they had returned so soon. Jethro invited Moses to come live with them, and offered his daughter Zipporah to be Moses’ wife. She bore a son whom Moses, recalling his refugee status, named Gershom (by folk etymology from “stranger”), “for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land” (Exodus 2:16–25). Meanwhile, as the sufferings of the children of Israel in Egypt became intolerable, they cried to their God to help them escape.

Then, with no further biblical explanation, came the event that changed
Moses’ life. He was tending his father-in-law’s flock in a remote “backside of the desert,” where he came to “Mt. Horeb”—probably the place later called Mount Sinai.

Rationalists suggest that what Moses saw may have been the brilliant blossoms of one of the mimosa families, the desert acacia (
Loranthus acacia
).

Moses’ first encounter with his Creator-God already revealed the divine paradox of Creation. Historians of religion call this Moses’ “theophany,” their name for a visible appearance of God or a god to a man. But Moses had not dared to look upon his Creator. The contradictory characteristics of this Creator-God appeared at once. For while the God was not to be seen or even to be named, He entered intimately into every man’s life and treated man as a kind of equal.

Responding to the cries from the children of Israel, God directed Moses to go to Pharaoh “that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.” Moses at first demurred. Who am I, an inept stammerer, he said, to take on this momentous task? When the children of Israel would ask the name of this God who had sent him, what was he to say? “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you … The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob … this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Exodus 3:14–15). The precise meaning of the Hebrew “I am that I am”—usually transliterated as “Yahweh”—has been the subject of endless speculation.

Until then, it seems, the God of the Fathers had been known as “El Shaddai” (God of the Mountain or Almighty God) or “El ’Elyon” (God Most High). In the future the God of Moses would be Yahweh. A widely accepted explanation is that Yahweh comes from the Hebrew verb “to be.” As the causative form it means “to bring into being.” The name derived from it would mean “He who brings into being,” or the Creator. The
magical uses of names, the power that knowing a name gives over the person named, and the fear of uttering the name of the Potentate—all these ideas are familiar enough to anthropologists. But for Moses, biblical scholar Martin Buber observes, Yahweh was not so much a name as a “dark, mysterious cry,” an elemental invocation of the Creator. To Moses’ diffidence, God had replied, “Certainly I will be with thee.”

The awe before this Creator-God, and the reluctance to utter or embody Him in a name remained strong in the Jewish tradition. The laity, to avoid irreverence, were still not to pronounce God’s name. Only priests at the benediction, and later only the High Priest, were allowed to utter the “unutterable” name. And the High Priest should whisper lest his fellow priests hear the name. The torture-death suffered by a famous rabbi (Hanina ben Teradion) during the persecutions of Hadrian was explained as God’s punishment for his sacrilege in having pronounced the holy name. Medieval Jewish philosophers still referred to “the proper, the great, the wonderful, the hidden, the excellent name, the written-but-not-read name.” Synonyms, abbreviations, and even deliberate mispronunciations were among the devices used to avoid the irreverence of naming the unnamable. A favorite epithet, with heavy theological and polemical overtones, was “He-who-spake-and-the-world-came-into-being.”

The belief that God existed but that His qualities could not be described became the basis of a whole new theology. In this way Philo of Alexandria (late first century
B.C.
to first century
A.D
.) would combine philosophy and theology in the style of Plato, foreshadowing Christian thought. At the same time Philo declared that the love which God had planted in man would help man become godlike. The great Unnamable had made men resemble Him.

Here was a path leading man to think himself a potential creator. Man would himself then be no mere object or victim or instrument of gods but part of the processes of creation. This was the paradox of the God of Moses. The God who would not reveal his name, and on whom Moses dared not look, promised Moses, “Certainly I will be with thee” (Exodus 3:12). The hint that man might himself possess Creator-like qualities appeared in a new intimacy between God and man. As the Bible explained in Genesis, the First Book of Moses, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him” (Genesis 1:27).

The perpetual “covenant” between a Creator-God and a Man-in-God’s-Image was an extraordinary idea. In religions and mythologies where the gods had been made in man’s image, it was not surprising that Zeus or Juno, or Poseidon or Aphrodite should be angered at their human rivals. But this God of the Unutterable Name actually entered into an agreement, a covenant,
establishing mutual obligations with his God-like human creations. The Bible offers numerous examples of “covenants,” solemn agreements between individuals or peoples. One of the most memorable was that between Jonathan and David (1 Samuel 18:3). God covenanted with Noah (Genesis 9:13) and with Abraham (Genesis 18–21; 17:4–14). And it was when “God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” and the sufferings of their descendants in Egypt that He commissioned Moses, at the burning bush, to lead out the children of Israel (Exodus 2 and 3). The covenant negotiated through Moses—that He would be their God taking them to their promised land, and they would take Him for their God above all others—dominated the Five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch). The word “testament” itself is an archaic synonym for “covenant.” Some versions still distinguish the two divisions of Scripture as the Books of the Old Covenant (The Old Testament) and the Books of the New Covenant (The New Testament). God’s ambassador, Moses, sealing the covenant with the children of Israel, brought into being the community of Israel. In this way Moses himself became a creator. Some students of religious history are tempted then to call Judaism by the name of “Mosaism.”

For man’s awareness of his capacity to create, the Covenant was a landmark. It declared that a people become a community through their belief in a Creator and His Creation. They confirmed their creative powers through their kinship, their sharing qualities of God, their intimate and voluntary relationship to a Creator-God.

In biblical times, there were many ways of sealing a covenant. One was to dismember and sacrifice a lamb or some other animal. Eating the sacrifice would symbolize a bond of union between the covenanters, just as the dismemberment of the sacrificial victim symbolized the fate of a faithless covenanter. Circumcision was the biblical symbol of sealing the covenant between God and the children of Israel. The removal of the foreskin of male members of the community is an ancient custom with varied forms around the world. It appears to have been common among the primitive Semites. As the use of a “sharpened stone” (probably a flint knife) by Moses’ wife, Zipporah, in the circumcision of their son suggests, it may even have preceded the age of metals (Exodus 4:25). In the Books of Moses, the ceremony on the organ of procreation affirmed the covenant between Yahweh and the children of Israel, past, present, and future.