That Stutterer Moses

• Author: Murray Baumgarten
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/106591297903200206
• Published date: 01 June 1979
• Date: 01 June 1979
• Subject Matter: Article

THAT

STUTTERER

MOSES

Mumy

BAURIGARTEN

Stevenson CoIIege, University

of

California

HE PENTATEUCH has

a

special claim upon the imagination of Western

culture. The characters delineated in it loom

as

potential role-models

T

throughout Western history, and the situations they confront

serve

as

per-

manent Western possibilities for consciousness and historical action. This is due,

I

think, not just to the history of the uses to which this text has been put, but to its

narrative perspective, which is such that the reader participates in the events re-

counted with

a

particular intensity. To read this book properly,

as

generations

testify,

is

to be transformed from bemused listener into potential congregant.

Nevertheless, heroes

are

hard to come by in the Pentateuch, and though he

is

central to the story,

Moses

is not its protagonist; nor,

as

Rapoport points

out,

does

he

exhibit heroic qualities. Despite the fact

of

God’s

immanence, the reader of the

Pentateuch is paradoxically limited in what hejshe knows. The reader identifies

with the struggling characters (Jacob, Joseph, the people of Israel, Moses, Aaron,

Caleb, Joshua, Miriam, Rachel, Leah, Sarah, etc.) who seek the meaning

of

the

experiences they undergo, rather than

with

an

omniscient narrator. Even Moses

disappears from the narrative for great stretches.

As

prose replaces poetry, and is

in turn replaced by legal treatise, the reader’s focus shifts.

It

is

difficult to center

on

one

character or one protagonist in this book.

So

too the various genres (theog-

ony, genealogy, blueprint, treaty, ritual, victory ode, family chronicle, etc.) make

it

difficult for one dominant situation, rhythm,

or

pattern to emerge. We do en-

counter certain repetitive negations and denials, essential to Hebraic monotheism,

in the contex-t of

a

consistent impulse to discover, articulate, and explore the mean-

ings of Isnclite history.’

One of the

virtues

of Rapoport’s essay is the care with which it deals with the

figure

of

Moses

as well

as

the political valences implicit in working with this

special, highly charged text. In testing charisma

as

a

political concept against this,

its originating text, Rapaport returns to one of the major sources of IVestern culture

and

makes

it

a

political touchstone. Pointing to the complexities of \Veber’s analy-

sis of charisma and its relation to covenant and law with particular reference to

Biblical situations, Rapoport suggests that the standard

typology

for

analogous

political phenomena developed from the IVeberian analysis is seriously flawed.

In

the process, Rapoport argues that Weber tends to neglect and even forget about

Moses in his discussion of charisma, and grounds his views in Jesus’ situation

as

that

is described and presented

in

the New Testament. Rapoport may indeed be right

in suggesting that Jesus rather than Moses is the figure

at

the unacknowledged

center of much of modern social theory. Surely this has been

one

of the funda-

mental assumptions of European culture for several Christian centuries. At this

’

I

follow Erich Auerbach here: “Abraham, Jacob, or even

Moses

produces

a

more concrete,

direct, and historical impression than the figures in the Homeric world -not because

they

arc

better described in terms of sense (the contrary

is

the case) but because the

confused, contradictory multiplicity

of

events, the psychological and factual cross-pur-

poses, which true history reveals. have not disappeared in the representation but still

remain clearly perceptible.”

Mimesis. The Representation

of

Reality

in

Western Litera-

ture

(Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1957),

p.

17.

And Herbert Schneidau,

in

a

comment that expands Auerbach’s, points out that “what we are witnessing in

Genesis and in parts

of

the David story,

is

the birth

of

a

new kind

of

historicized fiction,

moving steadily

away

from the motives and habits of the world

of

legend and myth.

It

works something like

a

pointilliste

painting: its very raggedness and incoherence forces

the beholder into an

extra

effort

of

imagination, giving the work

a

quality

of

dramatic

vividness

-

and yet at the

same

time distancing is accomplished. Strangeness is inherent

. . .

the world portrayed is

not

familiarized for

us,

as

in Homer, but kept ‘in darkness’

to

use Auerbach’s phrase.”

Sacred Di.wontent. The Bible and Western Tradition

(Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,

1976),

p.

215.