This week’s parsha continues the story of a reluctant Moses trying to fulfill his mission of national liberation. As we left our hero last week, Moses has had his first audience with Pharaoh. This audience did not go quite as well as Moses had hoped, because not only did Pharaoh not set the Hebrew slaves free, he actually increased their burden: they had to continue to make the same amount of bricks, but now they had to find their own straw, too. The children of Israel, lacking sufficient historical perspective to see the benefit of this development, initiated the first of what would become forty years of non-stop complaining to and about Moses, and Moses in turn complained to God. The parsha ends with God saying to Moses, "Just you wait and see what I do to that Pharaoh…"
As our new parsha opens, God is continuing his pep talk to Moses. He explains all the wonderful things they’re going to do together—extricating the Hebrews from under the hand of Pharaoh—and tells Moses to relay the good word to the people, which Moses does. Surprisingly, the people aren’t sympathetic to Moses’ message, pre-occupied as they are with scouring the countryside for straw to make their bricks. God tells Moses not to worry about them and to proceed with stage two, asking Pharaoh once more to let the Hebrews go. Moses questions the efficacy of such a plan, based in large measure on his poor reception at the hands of his own people. However, God is having none of Moses’ excuses, and sends him and his brother Aaron back to Pharaoh.
And at this point, just when the real confrontation is about to begin, and we are getting set to see blood and frogs start flying all over Egypt, there’s a commercial. The narrator stops to tell us who our heroes, Moses and Aaron, are brought to us by. Literally. All of a sudden, we are presented with a genealogy. And it’s this genealogy that I want to talk about.
The genealogy itself is not really complete and very lopsided. Since its purpose in the tale is to provide the back-story for Moses and Aaron, it is not surprising that it focuses on their tribe, Levi. Nevertheless, it gives the appearance of starting out as a full genealogy, beginning with the two eldest sons of Jacob, Reuben and Simeon. However, for these two tribes, it presents a very shallow genealogy of two generations only: here’s Reuben and his four sons, and Simeon and his six sons. Then we get to the tribe of Levi, and suddenly, we get six generations, down to Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson. And then that’s it: no mention of the other nine tribes. Once we have a full presentation of Moses’ and Aaron’s pedigree, we return to the action.
Another strange aspect about this genealogy is that there are two women mentioned in it: Jocheved, the mother of our heroes, and Aaron's wife, Elisheva. Now it's clear why Jocheved is mentioned: she played a major (albeit unnamed) role at the beginning of Exodus, when she hid baby Moses in the bulrushes, and then became his wet-nurse in the employ of Pharaoh’s daughter, so it's not unusual that she is named in the genealogy here. But it's Elisheva that I want to focus on. We not only learn Elisheva's name and the name of her father, Aminadav, but also the name of her brother Nachshon. And what do you know -- it turns out her brother is famous in his own right: he is the leader, the ‘prince,’ of the tribe of Judah. Nachshon is the one about whom the midrash tells us at the Red Sea, his faith in God was so great, he started crossing the sea before it had split, and it was only after he jumped in that God split the sea.
In his JPS commentary on Exodus, Nahum Sarna, quoting Tobias ben Eliezer in his 11th century Midrash Lekah Tov, notes that the genealogy shows the interrelationship of the family of the priesthood (i.e., Aaron’s family) and the family of the monarchy (i.e., Aminadav’s family), in that it ties the tribe of Levi to the tribe of Judah. After all, Aminadav is a direct ancestor of King David, to whom God promised that his dynasty would reign forever, and Aaron and Elisheva are the grandparents of Phinehas, to whom God promised an eternal covenant of peace—i.e., the High Priesthood. What a happy coincidence that these two most important tribes of later Israel are connected through marriage right from the time of the Exodus.
In fact, it begs the question, if we believe—pace Rabbi David Wolpe—in general the events of the exodus as narrated in the Bible, do we necessarily believe the details of the genealogies? After all, the genealogies generally come from a different source, which may not have the same level of reliability (or credibility) as that of the surrounding story; and more importantly, it’s not always clear which "truth" a given genealogy is telling us.
To take a simple example, in Genesis, there are two listings of Esau’s wives. The first appears in Gen 26:34 and 28:9, where in Gen 26, it talks of Esau having married two Canaanite women, and then in Gen 28, of his marrying Ishmael’s daughter in order to appease his parents. But then, in Gen 36:2-3, his marriages are recapped, and the names of all three wives are different. What could cause this instance of inconsistent genealogies? The simple answer is that there must be different traditions, and the Bible, in different places, is relaying both traditions. But why should there be different traditions about something as simple as the names of a man’s wives?
Dr. Ziony Zevit, a Bible scholar at the University of Judaism, has suggested an explanation of inconsistent genealogies, based on the modern (20th century) behavior of certain Bedouin tribes. In their culture, extended family is very important, because not only are these the communities within which one looks to arrange marriages, but also because most business is conducted intra-family. When exigent circumstances led to a certain Bedouin tribe having to begin conducting business with some Egyptian tribe, suddenly there arose stories showing that the Bedouin tribe was related to the Egyptian tribe with which it was conducting business. In point of fact, there was no prior business or marriage relationship between them, but it was important for them to feel that there was such a relationship in order to justify their business dealings. Of course, since they were now conducting business and behaving as if there were a prior relationship, soon marriages started being arranged between them, validating, as it were, the stories of the past relationships between them. At the same time, however, the stories of the actual historical relationships of this tribe continued to be told, thus creating "inconsistent" genealogies. And yet, each genealogy in it own way, was "true."
The phenomenon is not unlike sitting down old Aunt Sadie with the photo album and trying to pin down exact family relationships, and finding out that "Uncle Jeff" is nobody’s actual uncle; he was just a close friend of one of the family members who was always called "Uncle Jeff."
So, it may be that the observation of our 11th century midrashist is not a coincidence, but was in fact the whole point of the narrative. It is possible that the narrator of this story of Exodus thought it important to stress (or manufacture, if necessary) the relationship between the Davidic royal line and the Aaronid priestly line, to show or reinforce the inherent legitimacy of each. On the other hand, it may simply be that Aaron (my great-great-great-…-grandfather) had the good taste and foresight to marry a princess. For now, I think I’ll go with that truth.
Shabbat Shalom.