Exodus 1:1-6:1
“Those Are My Brothers”
In this week’s reading the Torah recounts how Pharaoh, obsessed with the growing threat posed by the Hebrew slaves in his country, ordered that every newborn boy be cast into the Nile. Moses’ mother tried to hide her newborn son from the authorities, but after three months she decided on a desperate move: she placed him in a specially prepared wooden box which she then floated down the Nile, hoping that some sympathetic soul might manage to save him. And so it was. Pharaoh’s own daughter picked up the baby and adopted him as her own.
So it was that the baby Moses grew up in the royal court. At a certain point, however, he “went out to his brothers and saw their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew, one of his brothers” (Exod 2:11).
Sometimes seemingly trivial matters of wording are important. This verse uses the phrase “his brothers,” not once but twice, perhaps because it is, on the face of things, so improbable. After all, Moses is a pampered Egyptian, someone belonging to the highest echelons of society, who looks out from the royal palace onto a bunch of bedraggled slaves and, in the text’s description, somehow sees them as his “brothers.” What he says in his heart is not merely, “That’s where I came from,” in itself a non-committal observation, nor even “Those are my people,” which might still be uttered from some height and distance, but “Those are my brothers,” implying that he and they are absolutely on the same level. Despite all his royal finery and fancy manners, Moses insists on this improbability.
Sometime later, Moses leaves Egypt to settle in Midian. There he marries the daughter of Jethro, a “priest” (or perhaps “high official”) of Midian. Now, far from danger, Moses can once again look forward to an untroubled future. Normally, shepherding a flock is a job for a child or a teenager, but—as an ancient midrash explains—Jethro’s flocks were so numerous that Moses has to lead them “beyond the wilderness,” that is, beyond the sparse grassland where other shepherds might graze their flocks, to some more distant spot ample enough for Jethro’s many sheep. In the biblical world, your flocks were your bank account; Moses stands to inherit at least part of this family’s ample fortune.
But then, God calls to Moses from a burning bush and tells him that he is to go back to Egypt and lead the Israelites to freedom. To this Moses responds, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?”
On the face of things, this is a most puzzling response. “Who am I?” Moses, you are the ideal candidate! You grew up in the royal court, Egyptian is your native language, you know the ins and outs of the palace, the Egyptians respect you more than any other candidate imaginable—what do you mean, “Who am I?”
But from Moses’ point of view, the question is altogether appropriate. At this moment, he faces a choice. He can ignore this divine summons and remain in his comfortable surroundings together with his wife and family. Or, he can listen to a voice coming out of a burning bush, drop everything, and undertake what seems on the face of it a difficult and quite possibly dangerous mission. So indeed, like many people at a certain point in their lives, Moses must now peer into himself to ask a serious question, “Is this the person I am, and is this what the rest of my life looks like?”
Perhaps it’s no accident that, a few moments later, Moses—stalling for time, it seems—tells God he can’t possibly undertake this mission because he doesn’t even know God’s name. Philosophers and theologians have made much of God’s answer, “I am who I am,” but the truth is that this phrase simply means, “Mind your own business, Moses.” (Jacob gets the same answer in Gen 32:30, and Manoah in Jud 13:18). But then God goes on to tell Moses, “This is what you must say to the Israelites: ‘I am’ has sent me to you.” An apparently ungrammatical and altogether gratuitous response, unless it is understood as intended to answer Moses’ earlier question of God, “Who am I?” “Here is what you must say to the Israelites, ‘I am’ has sent me to you.”