Saturday, November 7, 1998

Author offers a fresh look at Moses, warts and all

By Richard Scheinin

Knight Ridder Newspapers

For millennia, Moses has been "hailed as Lawgiver, Liberator and Leader," author Jonathan Kirsch tells us, "the prophet who bestowed upon Western civilization the Ten Commandments ... the hero who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and delivered them to the portals of the Promised Land."

But then Kirsch says, "Wait!" The "emancipator" was also an "exterminator ... arrogant, bloodthirsty and cruel." The evidence, excised from sermons and Sunday school lessons by overprotective preachers and teachers, is right there in the Bible. There's Moses ordering the execution of innocent Midianite men, women and children, and thousands of Israelites who were not sufficiently pious. Open the Book of Exodus: Moses comes down off Mount Sinai with the tablets and finds his tribe worshiping the golden calf. The rebellion so outrages Moshe Rabbenu ("Moses, Our Master," as he is known) that he grinds the idol into a powder and mixes it with water, a Biblical Kool-Aid that was then forced down the throats of the Israelites.

"It's a little like Jonestown," says Kirsch, a literary critic for the Los Angeles Times, who writes about the real Moses in "Moses: A Life" (Ballantine, $27).

So that's the news: Moses was a bad guy.

Well, a bad guy and a good guy. For Kirsch writes about the lessons to be learned by confronting the idea that Moses was an intensely flawed, human being (if he even existed). Veiled in the mists of pre-history, Moses has been interpreted through the ages, from the work of Talmudic scholars (who say he became king of Ethiopia during a 40-year gap in the biblical narrative) to Charlton Heston's heroic depiction in the movie "The Ten Commandments."

In December, audiences will meet the new, animated Moses in "Prince of Egypt," for which DreamWorks scriptwriters have invented a friendship between young Moses and Pharaoh Ramses II. Kirsch enters the ring by saying there are, in effect, two Moseses in the Bible -- Tormentor and Liberator, Warrior and Shepherd -- because it was written by authors with differing political agendas. One set of authors wanted to fan tribal nationalism, so they cast Moses as warrior. Another set wanted to highlight a message of compassion, which is why Moses was alternatively described as shepherd, teacher and conveyor of the Word.

The result is that the Bible offers "two models, two approaches to life," Kirsch said in an interview, "and we're called upon to choose between them. And they're both embodied by Moses." At the end of his "troubled and tumultuous" life, Moses presents humanity with a moral imperative to do the right thing. At the age of 120, Moses stands in the Jordanian hills, doomed by God to die without setting foot in the Promised Land. But Moses isn't bitter. He doesn't tell his people to once again strap sword to hip and kill the unfaithful. No, Kirsch says, Moses tells his people to make a better choice: "I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life."

But on the way to the finish line, Kirsch points out, Moses is "an inquisitor, someone who purges anyone who disagrees with him." He's "a nudge, a goad, a gadfly. He's one of those people who's always in your face about something."

Charlton Heston he is not.

The '90s are a time for deconstructing heroes. Columbus was a racist plantation owner as well as an explorer. Jesus was a mere sage, according to the Jesus Seminar and other pursuers of "the historical Jesus." Bill Moyers, in his 1996 television series on Genesis, explained how that book is filled with stories of fratricide and dysfunctional families. Now Kirsch, perhaps a little too glibly, presents Moses, warts and all: "He is the single most misunderstood figure in the whole of the Bible," Kirsch says. "We think we know Moses because we've all seen 'The Ten Commandments' and we learn about him in Sunday School. But the grittiest, most disturbing tales along the way are always left out of the official version."

Kirsch tries to offer up the historical Moses, but that's not an easy task since the prophet's life is undocumented by archaeological discoveries or ancient texts other than the Bible. For this reason, much of the book is a search for the literary and mythic Moses. Kirsch has culled much of the vast literature on Moses from Scripture, rabbinical writings, writings of the Church fathers, legend, folklore and Sigmund Freud. He concludes that while Moses may or may not have lived, he certainly has been used as a literary device to promote various agendas. Kirsch presents the idea, advanced by some historians, that Moses' birth story is simply a "cut and paste" reworking of the life of Sargon, an ancient Mesopotamian ruler. While many readers find such an assertion shocking, Kirsch has been surprised that "fundamentalist Christians are willing to debate, to come onto the turf where you're standing and convince you that you're wrong."

He says that most Jewish audiences engage him in "lively and welcoming discussions," but that Orthodox Jews, as a whole, have not wanted to talk much.

Kirsch's interest in Moses is part of his "lifelong, intellectual curiosity" about the Bible: "Here's this book that people regard as the word of God. They live their lives by it. Our civilization is built on it."

The son of the late Los Angeles Times book critic Robert Kirsch, Kirsch attended a conservative synagogue as a boy and received "a selective reading of the Bible ..." Kirsch graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz in 1971, majoring in Jewish history. When he became a father, he did some editing of his own.

His son, Adam, was 5 when Kirsch decided that the Hebrew Bible would make excellent bedtime reading. He flipped open the Book of Genesis and began to read the story of Noah. Unfortunately, Kirsch wasn't familiar with the episode in which Noah, after the flood subsides, lies naked and drunk in his tent. Kirsch didn't want Adam to hear how Ham blundered into the tent and discovered his "nude and besotted father," the author says, so he deftly deleted those passages. But Adam, a good listener, could tell that his father had left something out. And his father started to think of the Bible as a "mysterious, troubling, and challenging book" that forces readers to "dig below the surface" to find its moral code.

A direct line runs from that incident to Kirsch's book "The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible," published two years ago. In it, Kirsch tells seven tales that have been "rigorously repressed" by preachers and teachers. One of the seven, found in the Book of Exodus, concerns God's plot to "stalk" -- Kirsch's word -- and kill Moses.

That story shocked so many readers that Kirsch decided to dig deeper into Moses, and "Moses: A Life" is the result. Now a 22-year-old assistant literary editor at the New Republic, Adam assisted his father in the research.

The stories they collected won't shock seasoned Bible readers, but other audiences may be surprised to learn that Moses is portrayed as a magician and that he was said to be 80 when he wandered into the Midian desert.

Kirsch has his own way of imagining how Moses might have looked: "I see him as dark, thin, wiry, not especially pleasant ... He'd be leathery, dry, and maybe a little abrasive, like an old prospector."

There's more: When Moses, an 80-year-old charismatic leader with a stutter, was sent on his mission of liberation in Egypt, he confronted Pharaoh and led the Israelites to Mount Sinai. And when he came down from the mountain, the Bible says, Moses' face was mysteriously disfigured. It was as if God's light had inflicted "divine radiation burns" on the prophet, Kirsch says. As a result, Moses was viewed with terror by his people. He was "like the Elephant Man," the author says, and Moses felt compelled to wear a veil, or mask. He wore that veil -- a fitting symbol for a man so obscured by time's mists -- for the last 40 years of his life.

It's in the Bible. Is it true?

Kirsch compares Moses to "a grain of sand in an oyster, around which this accretion of storytelling and moral interpretation has built up ... If it is an article of faith that this is the inspired word of God, I'm not trying to change your mind. But," he adds, "I don't see how you can read the Bible and not see human fingerprints.

"The Bible was not written to be a history or a biography," Kirsch maintains. "It gives us a set of moral instructions and values. Like all sacred writings, it's intended to help people live. And that's enough. And when Moses, at the end of his life, has his final say, he doesn't tell people to go out and kill every last man, woman and child of the Midianites. No. He says, 'You choose how to live your life. Do what's right. Do what's in your heart.' "

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