The fundamental assumption of virtually all serious modern students of the Jewish Bible is that it ought to be treated as a historical document, valuable for the light it casts on the development of Israel as a nation and as a religion. The first higher critics showed that before the Bible could cast any true light at all, it had to be broken down into its component texts. These, when analyzed, yielded a history of the Jewish people radically different from the one which the Bible seemed to tell when read naively. Recent critics use archaeological as well as textual evidence to confirm rather than to deny the “essential historicity” of the Bible’s own story. The late editor of the Anchor Genesis, for example, argued that everything we now know about Abraham’s period “enhances the probability of Abraham as a historical figure.” But Professor Speiser would have been the last to disagree with the assumption that has governed so much biblical criticism in the modern age—that we should use the Bible to find out “what the events in Hebrew history actually were.”

As a lay reader of the Bible, I cannot share this assumption. It asks me to agree that the Bible is important because without it the modern historian would be handicapped in his task of reconstructing the life of ancient Israel. I prefer an assumption which, rather than pointing to the creative role of the modern historian, affirms that of the Bible itself: without the Bible there would have been no Israel for the historian to reconstruct. The Bible not only told the people their history, it also nerved them to endure it. It was a repository not of fact, but of motive. It was a creative force within the history we study, insensibly forming the very objects of our study, and it needs to be understood as such—as an agency, not as a document. As a document it can only be correlated with some external order of fact and experience. As an agency it is a fact and a field of experience in its own right.

What kind of experience? I would say, an autobiographical experience. We do not read a great autobiography in order to find out what a man was “actually.” We read it in order to know what he conceived himself to be, for an autobiography is our closest literary approximation to the most sublime act of which man is capable—the act by which he comes to know, and in knowing create, himself. The self known and made may not have existed prior to the autobiographical act, but it surely exists ever afterward. The same is true of the Bible. It is a people’s description of itself, a national autobiography, in which a people investigates, affirms, and perpetuates its own complex identity. The exodus from. Egypt may or may not have happened. If it happened, it may or may not have happened in the manner described. But what cannot be gainsaid is that over a period of many centuries a people differentiated itself from other peoples and achieved an identity in its own eyes by telling itself that it had been liberated from Egypt by God. Not the event, but the telling of the event is what matters. Not the event that can be corroborated, but the event that is the telling of the event—and therefore neither needs nor bears corroboration—is what should concern us insofar as our interest in the Bible is other than that of the professional historian.

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Coming on the Book of Exodus, the historian asks, “Was the people described in Exodus as emigrating from Egypt to Canaan ‘really’ of the same stock as the people described in Genesis as emigrating from Canaan to Egypt?” Whatever his answer, it will involve the construction of a second, non-biblical Israel, one existing, as it were, “behind” the text, and only partly and accidentally dependent on the text for its interest and value. Conceived as history, the biblical text becomes only the most important of the several windows through which we can spy the “real” Israel. Conceived as autobiography, the text becomes a mirror, not a window, to be looked at, not through. In Exodus as in Genesis, the autobiographical argument would say, a people is looking at itself. And it is looking at itself not as it “was” at any given and limited moment in its “past” but as—at any given present moment—it “is.” The image, to be sure, is composed of memories. But these memories have been made to do the work which “ideas” might have done in another civilization: they are meant to define permanent realities. Abraham, from this point of view, is not only the first Israelite, he is also the essential Israelite, a separate incarnation of the whole, and spiritually contemporaneous with all the other self-incarnations which the Bible has to offer, including Moses and the “people” as described in Exodus. The relation between Genesis and Exodus is thus not only between two sets of memories arranged in chronological sequence but also between two different modes of autobiographical statement, two different ways of defining the same self; neither way is necessarily anterior to the other. In Genesis, Israel encounters itself in the form of persons—patriarchs. In Exodus it encounters itself in the form of a people as well as in that of a person—Moses.

Genesis is about first beginnings. It is a story of many births: the earth’s, man’s, Israel’s. Each birth involves a separation—of the earth from the void, of man from the earth, and of Israel from man. These births relate to each other, moreover, not as phases of a natural process, but as separate events in a discontinuous series, each having the value of a reenactment of the first. Israel does not simply evolve from Abraham’s kin in Haran. It breaks off sharply from these tribal origins, and at the instance of the same creative energy which, in an earlier chapter, separated the light from the darkness.

Nor, once Abraham is separated from his kin in Haran, and from Lot, does the further history of Israel follow as a natural process. As each of Abraham’s patriarchal descendants separately receives the covenant, so each is separately created ex nihilo—out of the dramatized barrenness of his mother, out of a human void. Furthermore, none of the patriarchs merely inherits his father’s power. Each first supplants and separates himself from an older, better-endowed brother or brothers. Thus, each is in a sense twice-born, once biologically, when he is separated from his mother in conditions implying a revocation of the laws of reproduction, and again culturally, when he is separated from his brother or brothers in conditions implying a revocation of the laws of inheritance. Each, qua patriarch, constitutes a wholly new beginning, and the genealogy that each supports comes to seem nothing but a series of new beginnings, fresh creative moments, enabling Israel to know itself as the nation indebted not to nature or to sex, but directly to God, for its continued existence.

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What then of Exodus? Is Exodus not also a tale of new beginnings? For the biological birth of the patriarch in barrenness we have the saga of the people’s first genesis in Egypt, the reiterated report of births obtained in the face of obstacles at least as discouraging as barrenness. “They are vigorous,” say the midwives, “and are delivered before the midwife comes.” For the second or cultural birth, we have the violent tearing of the people from the side of Egypt, its “deliverance” from “the Sea of Reeds,” which is a parturition of another kind, leading to the most significant of all of Israel’s new beginnings, its spiritual birth in the barrenness of the desert, from which, like Jacob, it was to emerge as the supplanter of its older, better-endowed brothers in Canaan. In Exodus, as in Genesis, the essential drama is the same. It is the drama of becoming what one is, the drama of reenacting one’s own birth.

The connection between the exodus and Passover brings out this theme even more clearly. The Passover celebrates a new beginning. On the Passover Israel sacrifices “all that first opens [i.e., separates itself from] the womb,” redeeming its own first-born by sacrificing the first-born of the cattle. On this holiday Israel also refuses to eat bread that contains anything from the previous year’s harvest—i.e., any bread that has been leavened. We are told by Roland De Vaux that the original purpose of both rites, the one nomadic, the other agricultural, was to honor the spring and secure fecundity in the coming year. Thus, even in temporary abstraction from the biblical text, the Passover celebrates a new beginning—the spring—dramatized as a separation. The biblical text turns both rites into historical mnemonics. The sacrifice of the first-born reminds Israel of the last plague, and the eating of the unleavened bread reminds it of its hasty departure. But there is, of course, a deeper, plainly poetic connection between the rites and the event they commemorate. The exodus was history’s springtime, when Israel itself, like a newborn lamb, was “thrust out of Egypt,” “brought forth” into a new existence, its future fecundity assured on condition of its readiness to dissociate itself from its immediate past. The new beginning that Israel commemorates on the Passover is its own, when like a child it “cried out for help,” and when the Lord, like a father, came to its aid: “Israel,” Yahweh tells Moses, “is my first-born son.”

Indeed, it is not even sufficient to say that the Passover commemorates Israel’s first beginning as a people. In itself, the Passover is a new beginning, a time for the community as a whole to renew its identity as Israel—not merely by “remembering” the exodus but by actually undergoing it. On the festival of Passover the community is specifically enjoined to forget time-differences, return to the Egyptian womb, stay awake through the suspenseful night of its birth, feel God’s destructive angel passing overhead, and in all ways ready itself—“your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand”—for hasty departure. To perform this drama is, quite literally, to be born again as oneself, to become what one is, or should be. For what does it mean to be Israel except to be ready to separate, to venture into an unknown land and time, with God alone as steersmate, and with no identity save that of God’s conscious creature? It was because he displayed such readiness that Abram became Abraham, and Jacob became Israel. One might say, in fact, that there was no subsequent age when such readiness did not have to be displayed again—for there would never be an age when Israel would not, as in the Book of Exodus, need to “depart” from the alien peoples among whom it would find itself living.

But, as Yeats has said, no man is “himself” for more than a moment at a time. The historical community of Israel was almost never wholly itself—wholly separate, wholly the creature of its God. That is why it needed the Passover and all the other rites by which it could recover an identity always in jeopardy, always in need of being redefined. From Abraham through Moses to the prophets there is no lack of exemplary figures capable of saying, “Here am I!” But these figures represent an attitude to which the community aspires, not one which it ever quite achieves. In the 8th century, as the nation’s prophets were preparing it for a second entry into the “wilderness,” Hosea rebuked Israel as “an unwise son”—“The pangs of childbirth come for him,” but “he does not present himself at the mouth of the womb.” The Book of Exodus shows that Hosea’s rebuke was always in order. Like Genesis, Exodus personifies Israel in an ideal state of readiness (Moses), but it also, unlike Genesis, represents it in an actual state of unreadiness (the people). That is why as autobiography Exodus is perhaps more interesting than Genesis. In it the nation’s best self wrestles with its worst self. In it the birth of the nation takes place as what in fact it always was—a traumatic struggle between its prophetic and regressive elements.

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This difference between Genesis and Exodus is best seen in the life of Moses, who is both patriarch and prophet, God’s willing creature and the instrument by which an unwilling nation is dragged into its life. Like the patriarchs, Moses is twice-born, once upon his deliverance from the Nile, and again when, like Jacob, he flees from a man who “sought to kill” him. As in Jacob’s case, these twin events are preludes to twin births of another kind, taking place in solitude, and preceding his return to the community. What Bethel is to Jacob, Horeb is to Moses—the theater for a rebirth in consciousness, for a coming-into-awareness of the holiness of one’s creator. Then, later, at “a lodging place by the way,” as at Penuel, the Creator attacks His creature (a divine enemy thus replacing the earlier human one—“The Lord met him and sought to kill him”); and the creature, as a result, comes into awareness of his own holiness—he has met God face to face—and lived. Moses, like Jacob, foreshadows the history of his people, who will become conscious of God’s holiness and then of their own after fleeing into the wilderness from the land of their miraculous first birth. Unlike Jacob, however, Moses assists at the births which his own career foreshadows. He is the creature as co-creator, the midwife; almost every detail which is peculiar to his life, in a manner not reminiscent of Genesis, gives him to us in this capacity.

Thus, whereas Jacob is delivered from barrenness, Moses, the future drawer-forth of the people from “the Sea of Reeds,” is himself “drawn forth” from the Nile. Whereas Jacob struggles against his brother for a personal birthright, Moses struggles against his foster-brother, “the Egyptian,” in order to deliver “a Hebrew” from oppression. Even the pastoral idyll of his arrival in Midian, which seems at first to recall the betrothal of Rebecca, shows him in his essential role as the one who draws things forth. “An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds,” say Reuel’s daughters, “and even drew water for us and watered the flock.” It is perhaps too much to say that when God calls to Moses from the fire we hear an echo of Pharoah’s daughter’s words—“Moses! Moses!”; “I drew him out! I drew him out!”—but there can be no doubt that the language of God’s ensuing personal covenant identifies Moses as a midwife: “Come, I will send you to Pharoah that you may bring forth my people.” In every sense of the word, Moses is his people’s deliverer : the events which follow his return to Egypt only tell us what it truly means to be a people’s deliverer.

It means overcoming the resistance of child and mother alike. Like many another human mother, Egypt does not wish to “let go” the children who have come into existence within her, even though not letting them go is equivalent to letting them die. Therefore she must be made to let them go; they must become intolerable to her; she must eject them. “Get away from me,” says Pharaoh to Moses in disgust, “take heed to yourself; never see my face again.” The plagues which Moses inflicts on Egypt are the birth-pangs of Israel’s natural parent, recording the violence and the suffering that must accompany the separation of one culture from another. Israel, meanwhile, as Moses says to it on the border of the sea, has “only to be still.” But to be still, in this case, means to be transported, and the Israel that wrote Exodus knew itself too well to imagine that it could ever have suffered transport willingly. “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt,” the people complain, “that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?” In Canaan Israel would resist the efforts of its leaders to return it to a desert faith. Here in Egypt it resists the efforts of Moses even to introduce it to such a faith. It does not want to be itself; it never would. It does not want to enter the wilderness that symbolizes the loneliness of its life with a God in whom other nations do not believe; it never would. That, nevertheless, it does enter the wilderness, bawling and kicking, it knows it owes not to its own nature but to Moses, who frees it against its will from the culture in which it came to life and to which it felt itself bound by natural human ties. So in later periods there would arise prophets capable of freeing Israel from the cultures to which it was variously indebted, and of “returning” it to Sinai as a locus of inspiration peculiar to itself. The two processes are strictly parallel; each is a liberation, each a bringing-forth; perhaps, indeed, at the deepest level, to bring forth Israel is only to force it to comprehend the conditions by which alone it can preserve its individuality; perhaps also, then, Exodus conceived as autobiography is only Israel’s expression of its permanent indebtedness to the prophets who, like Moses, told it that the life it did not want to lead was the only life it could.

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The wilderness bears a curious resemblance to some of the institutions which the nation was to derive from its experience there. These institutions, in turn, bear a strange resemblance to the nation itself (they are virtually metaphors for it), so that it almost comes to seem that the “landscape” in which Israel travels is Israel. The wilderness resembles the Sabbath, first of all, for it constitutes what the French anthropologist, Arnold Van Gennep, calls une zone de marge, a kind of no-man’s land suspended between past and future, man and God. It also resembles the tabernacle or the temple, for it is a place peculiarly the nation’s own, secure from profane eyes, curtained off by bodies of water as the tabernacle (described in Exodus itself) is curtained off by “fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet stuff.” At the hidden moral center of the tabernacle, concealed by another curtain from the lampstand and altar standing in its forecourt, lies the ark, which is God’s throne and the vessel containing His law. And at the hidden moral center of the wilderness, relating to it precisely as the ark relates to the tabernacles, lies the summit of Sinai, concealed from the people huddled at the altar below by a curtain of fire; the summit of Sinai is also God’s throne, and it is from there that He delivers the law. The tabernacle is a portable wilderness, the temple a permanent one. The ark is a continuous Sinai. Only the high priest may approach the ark. Only Moses may ascend Sinai. Each in its way represents the sacred center of the nation, curtained off even from its own understanding, yet conceived as the source of the law which is its life and the fire which is its nerve. If, as the very possibility of national autobiography suggests, Israel may be compared to a person, does it not follow that Sinai and the ark may be compared to the mythical seat of a man’s soul, and God to the soul itself, which in all useful mythologies and psychologies is always other than the person, though residing within him? The wilderness would then be comparable to the outer environs of a person, to his very flesh, beyond which the eye of the stranger may not penetrate, and within which it is always a journey of initiation to travel. That, finally, is how I think the journey to Sinai ought to be explained—as the autobiographical record of a journey of initiation taking place within the self, like that journey of initiation which is every profound act of prayer. The journey begins when Israel crosses the Sea of Reeds—a frontier separating it from the human community at large. It will end in the Book of Joshua when it crosses the Jordan—a frontier connecting it again with the larger human community. But it comes to its climax at a frontier of a different kind, the “vertical” frontier of Sinai, which may not be crossed, for it is where the self can just dimly connect with that which is not the self—its soul, its inspiration, its God.

I have been using the word “initiation” designedly, recognizing that it is interchangeable with the word “birth” (a birth is an initiation from one kind of life to another, and an initiation is the birth of a new man out of the old), but reserving it for the events at Sinai so as to discriminate Sinai’s special relation to the births preceding it. The crossing of the Sea confers identity on Israel and admits it to a holy landscape. But until Sinai, the people remains only unconsciously and involuntarily itself, estranged from the land it inhabits and a spiritual resident of the land from which it has been estranged, “murmuring” against Moses and protesting the special conditions of its life After Sinai it will relapse into unconsciousness and disobedience, but no longer as before, with impunity, for like a child initiated into its father’s cult, Israel has been bound to the law, made responsible for its acts.

Nor is it simply in this legalistic sense that Sinai constitutes an initiation. It is also an initiation into insight. Fire as well as law pours from Sinai, and fire is the essential vesture of the Jewish soul, conveying its essential attribute, which i the attribute that fire shares with the name of God (“I am that I am”)—ungraspable reality The hand cannot grasp fire, and the mind cannot grasp the meaning of God’s name, and it is just this inability to grasp what one knows at the same time to be real—it is just this failure of consciousness that makes for the consciousness we think of as specially Israel’s: the consciousness that the source of one’s life is an inappropriable reality, to be feared and served, but not to be manipulated. To know this is to know what the prophets knew. It is to be Israel incarnate. Exodus records the “first” communal effort to apprehend this truth, which is why we call what happens at Sinai an initiation: to this event, as to an initiation, Israel will look back in order to account for whatever consciousness it has. And to this event it will in fact return—in quest of consciousness—whenever it repairs to the temple or to the Book of Exodus itself.

When at the altar before Sinai Israel swears fidelity to the content of its experience there—“All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient”—the reader finds himself at one of the rare moments in human experience when the personality is at one with its deepest convictions. But insight, like beauty, “holds in perfection but a little moment.” The biblical autobiography would cease to mirror Israel if the initiation at Sinai concluded before introducing the nation to the full range of its future response; including not only its capacity for insight but also its capacity for betrayal, and finally its capacity for continued life in the face of the knowledge of betrayal. If the essential condition of Israel is to be able to say, “Here am I,” to a life force, a daemon one can neither see nor grasp, its existential condition is to know itself incapable of enduring for more than a prophetic moment the terrible suspense of a life lived without the support of what are called “idols”—graspable, determinate forms, such as the forms that art makes out of nature. Idols, after all, are a psychological, a human necessity, even if for Israel, that human state grasped by an inhuman fate, they also betoken the death which is assimilation into the rest of humankind. Israel cannot not worship them. If it did refrain from worshipping them, if it did remain true to itself, it would falsify everything we know about its behavior. The only real question is, “What next?,” after betrayal. It is this question that Exodus constructs an answer to as it prepares to ease the communities of reader and subject back into relation with the children of Adam.

In a gesture at once regressive and predictive, the people contributes the gold that it took from Egypt to an image foreshadowing the Baals it would worship in Canaan. Moses has “delayed to come down from the mountain,” and the people are unable to abide his temporary absence in view of the permanent absence from their lives of a graspable god. To make up for the loss of the one, they invent the other, as they would do again later, after Moses had left them to their own devices in Canaan. God responds as He must, given the conditions of the “covenant,” given also the ultimate importance to Israel of the prophetic experience that has been betrayed. “I have seen this people,” He says, speaking in the accents of prophecy, “and behold, it is a stiff-necked people; now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation.” The point that the autobiography is making in the voice of its God is that a people untrue to itself has no right to live, and that if it remained permanently in the condition shown, it couldn’t live. We are here at the quick of the biblical autobiography, the point of ultimate contradiction between insight and behavior, between Israel’s prophetic and actual modes. Why should not insight, prophecy, Moses alone survive? What need is there at all for a human vessel? “Of you will I make a great nation.” Indeed, were it not for the humane institution of sacrifice, Israel would not have been able to survive this contradiction, nor the load of guilt which insight must inevitably pile up when confronted, as here, with behavior. For by sacrifice alone can man apologize to what he has come from for what he is, and will continue to be. Sacrifice is our only means of reconciling fact to truth, and not the least important work of Exodus is, as it were, to invent, or construct sacrifice as such a means. Moses assuages the “devouring fire” of God’s anger, then, significantly, takes God’s anger upon himself (his “anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them . . ., took the calf which they had made, and burnt it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it upon the waters, and made the people of Israel drink it”); then, even more significantly, he transfers his anger to the priests, “the sons of Levi,” who initiate themselves to the service of the Lord “each one at the cost of his son and brother.” This violence of self-mutilation, in which Israel executes God’s anger upon itself, playing God to its own Pharaoh, is the last of the separations which Exodus records, a separation of the self from the self, a sacrifice of that which is alien to the self within the self, in token of one’s fierce intention to be true. The rhythm of the spiritual life is thus established—insight or vow, violation, guilt, sacrifice. And the rhythm is more important even than the insight, because the rhythm indicates a means for the recovery of the insight.

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But this rhythm, which is nothing less than the life of Israel, its essential motion, is not yet complete. It has not yet reached the point at which it can begin again, and assume the ever new forms that it will find in the other chapters of the biblical autobiography. Still to come is a series of beautiful gestures whereby the body discovers its value to the soul, the actual nation its dearness to its own prophetic part.

For this series of gestures “grace” would be too imprecise a term did the gestures not define grace for us as the God-given power to bear the presence of God’s power—to bear it both in the sense of “carry” (as the ark is carried) and in the sense of “endure.” In response to Moses’s plea for a confirming sign of presence (“Is it not in thy going with us, so that we are distinct, I and thy people, from all other people that are upon the face of the earth?”), God uses His power to shield Moses from its effect: “while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.” Then, when the tables have been cut a second time, and Moses has descended a second time from Sinai, it appears that what God had been to Moses, Moses himself has become for the people—a radiance self-veiled, so as not to destroy that which it honors and animates with its presence. “The people of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’s face shone; and Moses would put the veil upon his face again, until he went in to speak with [God].” Finally, as the book closes, and the journey beyond Sinai is about to begin, the tabernacle becomes for the future what God had been for Moses, and Moses for the community of the desert—again, a radiance that has suffered itself to be borne. “Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.”

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In each of these gestures Israel is given to itself as something human involved with something holy—touched (Moses in the cleft of the rock), visited (Moses descending Sinai, his face shining), or inhabited and led (the tabernacle) by a holy fire. The fire is as inappropriable as ever. But in these gestures there is a new sense in which the fire seems tenderly respectful of its container, almost as if it were afraid of hurting it. The fire of God is Israel’s inspiration, without which it would be nothing. The reverse is not true: without poets there would still be such a thing as inspiration, and without Israel there would still be such a thing as God. That, at least, is the profound belief of both creative parties. But without poets, how would we express inspiration, and without Israel how would God have communicated Himself? For the sake of the nation which is His human vessel, God suffers Himself to be contained within the face of Moses, within the tabernacles, within the people, and within the Bible itself, which is the autobiography of His poet, recording here, as a final insight, its own value to its own source. If the poet did not know that his inspiration needed him, how could he endure the long and sordid history of his failure to respond to it adequately? And if Israel did not know the secret that these last gestures record, how could it have endured the shame of its own history, which is also, as Exodus shows, the history of a failure to respond adequately?

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