Bo 5786
With Staff in Hand
This week we are reading Parashat Bo, Exod 10:1–13:16. However, before we get to the story in the Bible, I want to start with a different story, a story that my wife tells. She’s a physical therapist, and some years back, when she was in the Peace Corps, she was the trainer for a cricket team. One day one of the players — a bowler — came to her and said, “I threw out my hand.” She looked at the guy’s hand and didn’t see anything wrong with it.
Meanwhile, he’s looking at her as if she’s crazy. “No, no, I threw out my hand! I threw out my hand!” What she eventually realized was that he had dislocated his shoulder. In that dialect of Caribbean English, it seems, “hand” can refer to your entire arm. We’re talking about that story today because the same thing is true of the Hebrew word יד yad (rhymes with odd), which features in this week’s parashah:
Exod 10:12 YHWH said to Moses, “Stretch out your yad over the land of Egypt with the locusts, so that they may swarm over the land of Egypt and eat every plant in the land, all that the hail has left.”
What Moses actually does is somewhat different:
Exod 10:13 Moses stretched out his staff over the land of Egypt, and YHWH directed an east wind over the land all that day and all that night. Morning came, and the east wind had brought the locusts.
All right, Moses is certainly not holding the staff with his foot or in his teeth; he must be holding it in his hand and stretching out his arm. The staff, of course, is the magic wand that he’s been using to perform some of these miracles: those of blood, frogs, lice, and hail — ##1, 2, 3, and 7.
Come with me now to a much later episode in our story, where Moses also does something slightly different from what he’s told to do:
Num 20:7 YHWH spoke to Moses, 8 “Take the staff, assemble the community — you and your brother Aaron — and speak to the rock in their sight, and it will give them its water …” 11 Moses lifted his yad and hit the rock with his staff twice.
That, somehow, was the sin that prevented Moses from going into the land of Israel (or, if you prefer, that was God’s excuse for finally granting Moses his long-ago wish that the task be given to someone else).
Now let’s go back to the first plague, the plague of blood:
Exod 7:19 YHWH said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and stretch out your yad over the waters of Egypt … that they may turn into blood.” 20 Moses and Aaron did so, just as YHWH had commanded. He lifted the staff and struck the water in the Nile in the sight of Pharaoh and his officials, and all the water in the Nile turned into blood.
Here (from my Commentators’ Bible translation) is a just a bit of Nahmanides’ comment to Num 20:7, where he points to our Exodus story:
If what God wanted was for Moses just to speak to the rock, why must he be holding the rod? In Exod. 7:15, Moses is told to take the rod because he is going to strike the water in the Nile with it. (The same is true in Exod. 8:1–2 with the miracle of the frogs; it is not explicitly stated because by now the implication was obvious.)
Let’s look again at the plagues performed with the magic wand in last week’s parashah:
blood: The command is to “take the staff and stretch out your yad,” and that is what “he” (it’s not clear whether it’s Moses or Aaron) does (7:19–20).
frogs: The command is to “stretch out your yad with the staff”; Aaron stretches out his yad (8:1–2).
lice: The command is to “stretch out your staff”; Aaron stretches out his yad with the staff” (8:12–13).
hail: The command is to “stretch out your yad”; Moses stretches out his staff (9:22–23).
That last is just what happens to begin this week’s parashah.
If we listen to what the text tells us (rather than imagining what it must have looked like), Moses has twice been commanded himself to hold out his yad, but what he holds out instead is the magic wand. Finally, with the plague of darkness (#9 in the Exodus version of the story) — the very last one before the smiting of the firstborn — YHWH tells Moses, “Stretch out your yad,” and Moses does so.
If we assume that the text has been choosing its words carefully up to this point, we see that Moses has been reluctant to just stretch out his yad. He wants to be holding that magic wand. There’s something about the staff that lets him feel that he’s invoking God’s power. In plain English, Moses has not actually been doing what God told him to do: just hold out his yad. Only at last with the plague of darkness is Moses willing to risk invoking the miracle with his yad and not with the staff.
Aaron had no such problem — but Moses did. Moses was reluctant, somehow, to invoke this power on his own. If we peek ahead to next week’s episode, we’ll see this:
Exod 14:16 You lift up your staff and stretch out your yad over the sea and split it.… 21 Moses stretched out his yad over the sea.
Exod 14:26 YHWH said to Moses, “Stretch out your yad over the sea so the waters will come back over Egypt.…” 27 Moses stretched out his yad over the sea.
And Pharaoh’s army got drownded.
By then, he seems to be quite comfortable exercising this amazing power directly with his own body rather than with the magic wand — and there may be a reason for this. Back (again) in last week’s parashah, YHWH tells Moses to say this (in his name) to the Israelites:
Exod 6:6 I am YHWH. I will bring you out from under the burdens of Egypt, rescue your from their service, and redeem you with an outstretched z’roa.
A זרוע z’roa really is more what we would call an “arm” in the kind of English that I speak. That, of course, is the “shankbone” on the Seder plate on Passover. You most likely recognize the word (or at least its translation) from the phrase (three times in the book of Deuteronomy, twice in Ezekiel 20, and once in Ps 136:12) בְּיָ֤֥ד חֲזָקָ֖ה֙ וּבִזְרֹ֣עַ נְטוּיָ֑֔ה b’yad ḥazaqa u-viz’roa netuya ‘with a strong yad and an outstretched z’roa’. “Outstretched” (netuya) is from the same verb that our text has been using to “stretch out” one’s yad — or one’s magic wand.
This is how God himself does it, and at last, with the plague of darkness, Moses is ready to give up his intermediary, the staff, and be God’s representative on earth, acting as an איש אלהים ish elohim would. That’s what Moses is called in Deut 33:1, “a man of God,” as we might translate those words, but they might also be translated “a divine man, a man-god.” Moses is God’s representative on earth and can just use his hand directly, as God himself would do. Don’t tell Maimonides I said so.
