For all Islam’s respect for “the book,” however, it repeatedly refers to the Koran as “recited,” and thus the vehicle of God’s truth is a voice, not a scripture. Therefore, it is very fitting that the story of Moses, as told in the Koran, begins with God’s voice speaking out of the burning bush. When Moses tries to go around the bush in order to detect why it burns without being consumed, God stops him and tells him to take off his shoes in awe. What sets Moses on his mission is a voice.
The bush that burns without being consumed reminds me of the most memorable use of a terminal adverb in the English language. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, there are three metaphors for approaching death: autumn, evening, and a dying fire. The end of the sight of almost-extinguished embers is “consumed with that which it was nourished by.” But precisely, this fire is neither nourished nor consumed. God tells Moses that he is no longer in the domain of scientific explanation and mortality but in the domain of the holy, the eternal.
As one might expect, by far the largest number of books that attempt to retell the story of Moses are in the Jewish tradition, and unabashedly rely exclusively on the Bible. Their effort is not at all to showcase the tale’s multiplicity but to transmit pedagogically the “real meaning” of the first five books of the Bible (the Books of Moses)—to make sense of Judaism itself (no small task!).
A book by the great authority in matters religious and philosophical, Martin Buber, is called Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant,4 a title that indicates where the author’s emphasis lies. On the one hand, he tries to get at what can be learned about God; on the other, what is expected of God’s “chosen people.” The story of Balaam told in Numbers gives a good picture of the kind of soothsayer Moses was not. Yahweh was a new kind of god, and Moses was a new kind of messenger, neither priest nor prophet. The person of Moses has much less interest for Buber than the nature of God’s relation to Israel. His preoccupation with that leads him to explore seminomadic tribal behavior and the exact function of a portable holy Tabernacle, which can become fixed if the tribe reaches its destination (and is destroyed when that place is destroyed). Although he is not in search of a “historical Moses,” he does often call something “the oldest layer” and uses his knowledge of Hebrew, literary forms, and the rest of the Bible to make his points. The book consists of many little chapters that zoom in on subsidiary details, to which he brings immense and sometimes sententious erudition: “And at an unknown hour they pass out of our ken. The Word alone endures” (140). Impatient with biblical scholarship (“It may be enough to mention at this point that I regard the prevailing view of the Biblical text, namely as largely composed of ‘source materials’ [‘Yahwist’, ‘Elohist’, etc.] as incorrect” [8]), he dispenses unargued intuitions from the height of his authority, so that his Moses reads like a series of random thoughts from a master teacher.
Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution studies the ways in which the Moses story has functioned as an inspiration for social change all over the world.5 But his main politico-religious analysis is reserved for the way in which the Bible cools the optimism of the initial liberation and depicts the inevitable “backsliding,” “chiding,” and “murmuring” of a people liberated from external—but not internal—oppression. His analysis of internalized second-class citizenship (the longing to return to “the fleshpots of Egypt”) plus his remarks about the renewal of the Covenant turn his “revolution” into a much tamer kind of social contract, the father’s murder into an agreement among brothers. The paternal principle is no longer the defeated Pharaoh or Old Regime but the Lord of the fathers of Israel who continues to guide and promise. In other words, the theory of government in Exodus is not at all opposed to there being a father, as long as he is both omnipotent and infallible. Moses, too, has to learn to submit to the might of this jealous god, but Moses does not become a founding “father.” He has a role to play as God’s intermediary, but the people worship the God of Gods. Walzer ends up theorizing a very active “consent of the governed”—really a “participation of the governed.” His summary of Exodus politics runs as follows:
First, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
Second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
And third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.”6 There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.7
The best-selling American novel by Leon Uris, Exodus,8 makes use of the melodramatic aspects already in the story. Against a backdrop of human pettiness versus a great cause, he foregrounds human complexity and heroism, using just enough characters to tell the outlines of history through individuals. He sets up and counts on erotic tensions that declare themselves in the end while making his novel a tragedy in which every character ends up suffering a great loss. There are many delays in the Scriptures that can easily be transformed into suspense, and he knows how to use suspense: the ten plagues, the Ten Commandments, the murmurings in the wilderness, the night of the Passover when the children of Israel waited to leave with their shoes on, the impatience of the people when Moses tarried on the mountain, which led them to make a golden calf. . . . At the same time, there is no doubt as to where his sympathies lie. The Arabs surrounding Israel are often depicted as greedy, lazy, and cowardly: “The leader of the dreaded El Husseinis was the most vile, underhanded schemer in a part of the world known for vile, underhanded schemers” (253). Arabs, “with murder, rape, and plunder in their hearts” (466), “wantonly violated every concept of honor” (516). When the novel was first published in 1958, the founding of the state of Israel was still a miracle, and memories of the Holocaust were fresh. Gas chambers, concentration camps, the Final Solution—one didn’t need to make up the drama inherent in the history of the Jews. The idealism of the early settlers was untarnished; the unending persecution of the Jews goaded them into superhuman action; the whole drama of Israeli independence seemed like a replay of the story of David and Goliath. According to Uris, the sleazy Arab nations surrounding Israel could have easily integrated the Palestinian refugees, but they chose to keep them in easily inflammable refugee camps they could use for political purposes. The Jewish settlers had redeemed land the Arabs hadn’t wanted for centuries, made it productive, and in the process raised the living standards of both Jews and Arabs.
As for the remains of Western Imperialism, it is the Jews, not the Arabs, who suffer from it, and not from the Zionists but from the British. While dividing up the “free” world, the Western powers saw a danger in Jews overrunning Palestine after World War II, and the British, who at that time controlled Palestine, set up detention camps in Western Europe and ringed Palestine with a blockade. Our entry into the novel takes place in the detention camps in Cypress, focalized by two non-Jewish Americans, Mark Parker, who soon drops out of the book, and Kitty Fremont, who wants to go back to America but is always impelled to stay because of her attachment to two Jews, one a substitute for her dead daughter and the other (unavowed) a gigantic and enigmatic but indefatigable freedom fighter. We enter the story on the eve of an illegal departure by the aptly named ship Exodus, which is allowed to make the trip thanks to a hunger strike of those on board, as the British replay the refrain of Moses to Pharaoh, “Let my people go” (188). I think this gliding focalization helps the novel grip its American readership. The spectacle of good versus evil is played out for American eyes, and