Fifteen Eighty Four

The wilderness narrative, the story at the heart of the Torah, or Pentateuch, follows the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan—from enslavement, to liberation, to independence. In an important sense, though, the story of Israel is the story of Moses. Philo of Alexandria wrote his De Vita Moses as a biography of this leader and lawgiver par excellence, one arm of his effort to square Judaism with Hellenism. As it turns out, Moses’s story is biography, of sorts, all the way down to its core.

I did not set out to write a book about Moses. The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation started simply as an effort to put flesh on a skeleton.

I have long been curious about how literature relates to history. This curiosity drove the courses I took in graduate school and the research projects I have pursued since. In my first book, I honed in on the itinerary notices that form the backbone of the wilderness narrative. It is notoriously impossible to identify the route through the wilderness they seem to track, and I wanted to look at them from a different angle. They raise questions not only about historical geography, but also about the creative use of genre to craft literature—in this case a genre typically used to report on business travel or outline the movement of soldiers. What is it doing in literature?

My study of itineraries should have been narrowly focused, but it turned out to have far bigger implications than I expected. I learned how skilled and ingenious ancient scribes were, putting even mundane genres to work in profoundly creative ways. I learned that the wilderness narrative was formed in conversation with empire, something that is widely recognized about Deuteronomy and prophetic literature but less evident in other parts of the Torah. Finally, I learned that the small but mighty itineraries might give us a better way to understand the literary history of the Torah because fractures in the chain of notices can be productively read as signs of revision.

I simply had to explore these implications further.

The itinerary notices are the literary glue that makes a coherent narrative out of a series of compelling but otherwise self-contained episodes. These stories have a typical plot structure, with some variations. The Israelites complain about a circumstance that confronts them on their journey through the wilderness, such as lack of food or water, or military threat. Moses consults God, God produces a miracle that saves them (or, in some cases, punishes them), and the story ends with an etiology for a place (or, in some cases, an object). My goal for The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible was to extend my study of genre into these complaint episodes in order to put flesh on the skeleton. These variations in the typical plot structure—could they have been generated by combining it with other genres that we know from elsewhere in the Bible (prophetic legends, legal exegesis) and the ancient Near Eastern world more broadly (royal propaganda)?

This project, too, yielded several exciting surprises.

The earliest version of the wilderness narrative is, indeed, a biography of Moses, written using a genre of royal propaganda—fictional royal autobiography—that was deployed, perhaps most famously, by the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II. Like its model, this version of Moses’s story is political allegory. We have long assumed that Moses is a figure of history or memory that can be traced back to the late second millennium BCE, because we have understood the literature to correspond in some way to history. My study of the wilderness narrative showed me that it does not mirror history. It is entangled with history. This version was implicated in the politics leading up to the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE by the Sargonid king Sennacherib, a political crisis that Judah survived, due in part to efforts of King Hezekiah to engineer Judah’s independence in stone (the Siloam tunnel) and text alike.

The allegorical character of the wilderness narrative and its entanglement in history persist through various revisions that address the crisis of exile at the hands of the Babylonians, the possibility of return, and the difficulty of restoring Israelite society in the land under Persian hegemony. I was in for yet another surprise when I discovered that one of the complaint episodes contains every element of tragedy as Aristotle defines it in the Poetics. In this episode, the Israelites send scouts to reconnoiter the land, fear leads them to make a poor decision about their future, and their triumphant march home is transformed into wandering, long enough for an entire generation to perish in the wilderness—a tragedy, indeed. I had not expected to find Greek genres in the wilderness narrative, but this Mediterranean turn continued to bear fruit as I also found the influence of political rhetoric and even tantalizing signs that the wisdom tradition may have evolved into the intellectual rigors of philosophy (“love of wisdom”), as it did in ancient Greece.

Finally, I was struck by how these stories engaged with political thought. As reasoned discourse about how to constitute a society, political thought starts with Socrates, but this Hebrew literature is engaged with political ideas at every turn. Where does sovereignty reside? How should power be exercised? What makes a leader legitimate? How can emotions like fear or disgust influence our political fortunes for good or ill? What holds a society together, and what can destroy it? The Hebrew Bible contains no political theory in the usual form, but that is not due to lack of interest in politics or critical reflection on political ideas. The scribes who wrote it were simply doing politics rather than theorizing about it.

Historical-critical study of the Pentateuch has been in a slow-brewing Kuhnian crisis for several decades, abandoned by many in favor of literary or sociological methods that do more than dissect the Torah into sources. My study leaves me profoundly excited about possibilities for its future. If we want to understand its growth as a literary work and its entanglement with history, I have learned, we must start not with isolated observations about where the text is “smooth” or “fractured” but with deep, detailed, and holistic literary readings—strategies usually reserved for synchronic rather than diachronic studies. Conversely, engagement with history (and literary history) is often essential for understanding what the text means and cannot be ignored under the banner of so-called final form readings. The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible also raises exciting new questions about the Bible’s role in the emergence of intellectual culture and democracy. And, perhaps most poignantly, the complaint stories in the wilderness narrative prove good literary company to keep in our present moment, because they give us a raw look at the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to exercising power, especially the use of rhetoric either to divide and manipulate or to preserve society and challenge citizens to realize their highest ideals.