Beshalach

Marc Brettler, Brandeis University

Marc Brettler is Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies at Brandeis University. He studies metaphor and the Bible, the nature of biblical historical texts, and gender issues. He is co-editor of the Jewish Study Bible, and wrote How to Read the Jewish Bible, among other works.

The question that I get asked most often as a Bible scholar is: "Is the Bible history, or is it 'simply' a story?" I believe that this week's parashah, Beshalach, answers this question quite clearly - it is neither.  A quick survey of several pairs of texts from this week's Torah and Haftarah portion illustrates this point quite clearly.

Who hardens Pharaoh’s heart? Our parashah states (Exodus 14:4): "Then I [God] will stiffen Pharaoh's heart," and we have seen this perspective as well in previous weeks. But what of verses such as (Exodus 8:15): "But Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he would not heed them," which suggest that Pharaoh stiffened his own heart? The Bible seems to have two conceptions here.

Or, within this week's parashah, to whom should we attribute the Song of the Sea: to Moses, as in Exodus 15:1, or to Miriam, as in Exodus 15:20? And how should we reconstruct the demise of the Egyptians? Did they go "down into the depths like a stone," (15:5), or were they washed up “dead on the shore of the sea”? (14:30)

The continuation of Beshalach raises many more such questions. For example, was the quail a blessing, interspersed with the manna, as the parashah suggests, or was it brought as a punishment to Israel, who were killed as they ate it? For example, in Numbers 11:33: "The meat was still between their teeth, nor yet chewed, when the anger of the Lord blazed forth against the people and the Lord struck the people with a very severe plague."  And what was the nature of the manna - was it (Exodus 16:14) "a fine and flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground" or (Numbers 11:7) "like coriander seed, and in color it was like bdellium"?

This confusion continues in the Haftarah as well, which contains two different accounts of the battle between the Israelites and the Canaanites: the Canaanite King Jabin figures prominently in the first, but is absent from the second. 

There are several ways that these differences may be treated. One is to follow much (though not all) of traditional rabbinic and medieval Jewish interpretation, and to try to reconcile these traditions, claiming that these differences are apparent. For example, the rabbis reconcile the treatments of the manna by suggesting that it appeared and tasted differently to different groups of people. Another way to handle these differences is to follow the model of most of modern biblical scholarship, and to suggest that they are real differences.

Related to this second model is the claim that ancient Israel did not care precisely about history in the sense of what exactly happened in the past for its own sake. This idea follows up several observations of the Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in his path-breaking book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, which recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary.  The title is Hebrew for "(you must certainly) remember", and is a translation of the word zakhor that appears five times in the Torah. It would seem to be an injunction that the past must be remembered for its own sake. Yet, in context, that is not how the word zakhor functions. Exodus 13:3, "And Moses said to the people, 'Remember this day, on which you went free from Egypt, the house of bondage, how the Lord freed you from it with a mighty hand'" must be read with the continuation of that unit: "no leavened bread shall be eaten ... Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a festival of the Lord ... no leavened bread shall be found with you, and no leaven shall be found in all your territory ... And this shall serve you as a sign on your hand and as a reminder on your forehead ... you shall set apart for the Lord every first issue of the ... Therefore I sacrifice to the Lord every first male issue of the womb, but redeem every first-born among my sons." The injunction is not to remember the past precisely for its own sake, but for the various laws that derive from the past.  In other cases the past is recalled for religious didactic reasons - the exact past is not crucial, but what may be gleaned from it is.

To state this differently: although many people see the Bible, including the Torah, as a history book, it does not serve that function. Nor should we, as Jews, buy into the non-Jewish view that the Torah means law. "Torah" means "instruction" - and narratives, in their multiple forms and complexity, can play a crucial role in instructing us as a Jewish community. In fact, given the complexities of this world, multiple stories and perspectives are often more instructive than a single, univocal voice.