Va’era 5786
As I Was Saying …
This week we are reading Parashat Va’era (Exod 6:2–9:35). If you have been reading my writing for a while, you know that I’m a fan of the word Wiederaufnahme — and this week, in Parashat Va’era, we have one. At least we do according to Rashi, in his commentary to Exod 6:29–30 (quoted here in my Commentators’ Bible translation):
The LORD said to Moses. This verse is a repetition of v. 11. The text resumes after the interruption of the genealogical information by repeating it.… Moses appealed to the LORD. This is the repetition of v. 12. Such “repetitive resumption” is standard. It is like a man saying to his friend, “Now let’s return to the original subject.”
That’s what we’re going to look at today. Starting with Exod 6:10 — which follows a פ paragraph marker — we read this:
Exod 6:10 YHWH spoke to Moses: 11 “Go tell Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, that he is to release the Israelites from his country. 12 Then Moses spoke before YHWH: “Look, the Israelites haven’t listened to me. Why would Pharaoh? Besides, I have a speech impediment.”
And what is God’s “reply”?
Exod 6:13 YHWH spoke to Moses and to Aaron and commanded them — with regard to the Israelites and to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, to get the Israelites out of the country of Egypt.
This does not seem to me to be a reply to Moses’s complaint (or let’s call it an “explanation”) that he is not going to be able to do the job. God simply reiterates: Go do it. In fact, we don’t actually even hear him speaking directly to Moses in his reply. We’re simply told — after another פ paragraph marker — that he spoke to Moses and Aaron.
Immediately before v. 14 we see a ס semi-paragraph marker and then a passage that is quite obviously an interruption, and a somewhat strange one at that. I’ll quote the NJPS translation:
Exod 6:14 The following are the heads of their respective clans.
The sons of Reuben, Israel’s first-born: Enoch and Pallu, Hezron and Carmi; those are the families of Reuben.
This is followed by:
15 the sons of Simeon
16 the sons of Levi
And now that we’ve gotten down to Roman numeral 3 of the outline, we’ll click on the little triangle and expand that one:
17 the sons of Levi’s son Gershom
18 the sons of Levi’s son Kohath
19 the sons of Levi’s son Merari
Now we expand v. 18, describing how Kohath’s son Amram married “his father’s sister Jochebed,” who “bore him Aaron and Moses” — at which point the genealogy resumes, introducing us to some of the characters we’ll be meeting later in Exodus and elsewhere in the Torah, ending with Aaron’s grandson Pinhas (or do you say Phineas?).
Vv. 26–27 assure us that the Moses and Aaron of the genealogy are the same Moses and Aaron who are going to speak to Pharaoh, as described in 6:13, “to get the Israelites out of the Egypt.” Then v. 28 resumes the earlier discussion, “on the day YHWH spoke to Moses in the land of Egypt,” and we see yet another פ paragraph marker — at which point v. 29 begins the repetition of v. 10.
The repetition is not perfect, however. The command to speak to Pharaoh is preceded by the assertion “I am YHWH” and followed by the command to say “all that I am speaking to you.” Presumably that means “everything I told you in the earlier part of the chapter.” V. 30 too is not an exact repetition, but it clearly is repeating what Moses said in v. 12:
Exod 6:30 Moses said before YHWH: “Look, I have a speech impediment. How is Pharaoh going to listen to me?”
You see, then, that after the interruption of the story by the genealogical information the text repeats the end of the material that was interrupted, at which point we rejoin the original story “already in progress.”
The technical name for that kind of repetitive resumption in biblical studies is Wiederaufnahme, though in fact (unlike some such cases) that long German word merely translates a concept that had been earlier described in English. It might be worthwhile, though, to look a bit closer and notice the differences in the repetition of what Moses says to God. It’s just what he said in v. 12, except …
He leaves out the claim, “the Israelites didn’t listen to me.”
He switches around the speech impediment and puts it before the rhetorical question, “How is Pharaoh going to listen to me?”
It’s possible that this is an example of what I was trained to call Seidel’s Law. Seidel’s Law, dating from a 1955 article by Moshe Seidel, notes multiple occurrences of phrases in which a later text switches around two elements of an earlier text — just what v. 30 does to v. 12 in Exodus 6. It’s meant to call attention to the repetition, and Rashi says that is just what it does:
It is like a man saying to his friend, “Now let’s return to the original subject.”
It’s as if — once the long genealogical passage is finished, making sure we readers know Moses and Aaron and their background — Moses tells God, “As I was saying …”
As long as I am putting words in Moses’s mouth, let me put in a few more: “I have a speech impediment. Do you really expect Pharaoh to listen to me patiently while I tell him to let the Israelites go? He’ll say, “Okay, that’s not going to happen.”
With Exodus 7, YHWH explains to Moses how it is going to happen:
Exod 7:1 YHWH said to Moses, “Look, I am making you into Pharaoh’s god, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. 2 You will speak everything that I command you, and your brother Aaron will speak it to Pharaoh. Then he will release the Israelites from his country.”
What the genealogy is doing, I suppose, is reminding us who Moses’s backup is: his own brother, Aaron. In the meantime, we readers have been on the edge of our chairs wondering just how God will respond to Moses’s quite reasonable objections. Perhaps Moses too is being kept waiting — in story time, at least, while the genealogy unfolds — to see how the situation is going to resolve. This is the Moses who, after all, in Exodus 3–4 has already tried to get out of this job.
Spoiler: By the time God finally gets around to letting Moses get out of the job, he will have stopped wanting to be replaced. Be careful what you wish for!
