God says to Moses, Behold I have made you like God to Pharoah. God says this as He sends Moses to command Pharoah to deliver the Children of Israel out from their slavery a second time. This is after a first attempt that seems to fail. After that first attempt, Pharoah in fact makes things harder for the Children of Israel than they ever were before. He sends them scurrying to all corners of Egypt to gather straw to make bricks. The Egyptian taskmasters beat the Children of Israel when they are unable to meet their quota.
But now all things are very different. Now Moses is like God to Pharoah. And so this time, when Moses is like God to Pharoah, Moses’ speaking to Pharoah marks the beginning of the process that leads to the Ten Plagues. That process leads to the Exodus.
I would like to explore what has changed between the first conversation with God and the next: how Moses has become like God to Pharoah and how that has placed him in the position to lead the people out.
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The first time God sends Moses to speak to Pharoah, Moses tells God that he is a man who is heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue. He is a man who has trouble speaking. God responds:
Who has made man’s mouth? or who makes a man dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? is it not I, the Lord?
The power of speech, God says, is in the realm of God.
And indeed, I have heard other people point out that as slavery sets in the names which are so blatant in the beginning of the Book of Exodus all but disappear. The Exodus story begins And these are the names of the Children of Israel who came to Egypt; and the verses proceed to list seventy names. But by the time we arrive at Moses’ birth, when slavery is entrenched, there do not seem to be names at all. Moses’ father is simply referred to as a man of the house of Levi. His mother is only a daughter of the house of Levi. His sister is only his sister. Moses is simply the child.
These people are nameless.
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But the power of naming is really a power of speech. Throughout the Bible, the giving of a birth-name will not be written as And his name was... or even His parents named him... but as his parents called his name so-and-so. His parents called his name. As the text describes Moses' naming of his own son: And he called his name Gershom. A name is something called. A name is something spoken.
Names are from speech.
And so in the depths of their slavery, the Children of Israel are nameless. And their leader, who is heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue, has trouble speaking. And so this is a nation gone mute.
But of course it would be a nation gone mute. Because God, who makes a man deaf, or dumb—in Whose realm is the posession of the power of speech—is absent from the midst of the Children of Israel. And with this absence comes the absence, part-and-parcel, of speaking.
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God sends Moses to speak to Pharoah a second time. Moses counters that Pharoah will not listen to him, a man of uncircumcised lips: a man with trouble speaking. God responds Behold I have made you like God to Pharoah.
Also just before this point in the text, the narrative interrupts itself. The narrative introduces a long genealogy of the names of the leaders of the Children of Israel, from the time they had entered Egypt through the birth of Moses and Aaron and even after. And the names of Moses’ parents, Amram and Yocheved, are finally introduced. Names have returned.
If names have returned, speech has returned. And if names have returned, the Children of Israel again control their own destiny (for naming is the controlling of destiny through defining it). And if names have returned, God has returned to the Children of Israel.
It is then that God makes Moses like God. Which, I think, is God’s making Moses a man who now has the power to use words, the power to speak: the power to act as God acts: God Who has made a man's mouth.
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What has created this change? It has come because Moses has learned how to listen.
The first time God sends Moses to redeem the people, Moses says of the Children of Israel They will not believe me, and they will not listen to my voice. This complaint means that it matters greatly to Moses that he is listened to. Perhaps he understands this as the goal of God’s mission for him.
But then the people do not listen to him. The people, who at first accept Moses’ word, ultimately come to say back to Moses:
The Lord look upon you, and judge; because you have made us abhorrent in the eyes of Pharaoh and in the eyes of his servants to put a sword in their hand to slay us.
What does Moses do then? Moses does something amazing:
And Moses returned to the Lord and said: Lord, why have You dealt ill with this people? why have You sent me? For since I have come to Pharoah to speak in Your name, he has done evil to this people, and You have not saved them.
In the view that Moses had taken at first--the view that he must be listened to--the mission has failed.It has failed completely. But then Moses’ tells God of the people’s suffering.
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This is in fact the same reaction as God’s own response to the suffering of Israel:
And the Children of Israel groaned from their work, and they cried, and their cry rose up to God; and God heard their groaning...and God knew.
The Children of Israel cried because of their suffering. God brought their cry before Himself: God brought their cry before God. Now the Children of Israel cry, and Moses hears their cry; and he, too, brings their cry before God.
And so Moses has learned to listen: he learns to act like God. And he has learned, as God knows, that the cries he has heard necessitate conflict with Pharoah. And he knows that this conflict must be undertaken by God. And so in this attitude he truly has become like God to Pharoah.
Now redemption can begin.
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