P H YLLI S TRIBLE “Bringing Miriam Out of the Shadows.” Bible Review (February 1989)
Buried within Scripture are bits and pieces of a story awaiting discovery. It highlights the woman Miriam. To unearth the fragments, assemble them, ponder the gaps and then construct a text requires the play of many methods but the dogmatism of none.' This enterprise welcomes all lovers of Scripture who seek to redeem life from patriarchal death
At the Bank of River
Hints and guesses begin the search A text hints, and the reader guesses. The setting is parlous: Egypt, an alien land; the kink a tyrannic ruler, his edict, a death decree. Disobeyed by two midwives who have refused to kill Hebrew sons, the Pharaoh extends his order to all the people: "Every son that is bom—into the Nile you shall cast him, but every daughter you shall let live" (Exodus 1:22).* In Pharaoh's land, sex determines life and death for Hebrew babies.
Although the royal decree sets the stage for the advent of Moses, the text (Exodus 2.110) focuses on three unnamed females.2 like the midwives, they too defy the oppressor. In the first section of the story, narrated &ourse permits us to see but not to hear these women (Exodus 2:16). Each is independent altbough connected to another. First appears a married woman identified only as a daughter of Levi A host of active verbs secures her presence. She conceived and bore a son; she saw how good he was; she hid him until she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket, sealed it, put him in it and placed it at the river's bank. {ler actions move between life and deah In cradle or coffin the living son waits on the waters decreed to drown him. Opposing the daughter of Levi, in artistic symme~y, is the second woman, the daughter of Pharaoh. A multitude of active ve*'s also establishes her presence. She came to bathe at the riva, saw the basket, sa~t ha maid to fetch it, opened it, saw the foreign child, had compassion on him and hailed his identiy: " 'One of the Hebrew babies is this!' she said" (Exodus 16). The princess, unlike the daughter of Levi, we hear as well as see.
Two women counter each other. One Hebrew, the other Egyptian. One slave, the other free One common, the other royal One poor, the other rich. One relinquishing, the other finding. One silent, the other spealdug. One is one; the other, the other. Who will bring the twain together?
The answer introduces the third woman. Narrative structure locates her in the middle of the other two women, just as content makes her their mediator. Between the placing and the discovering of the newborn child "stood his sister at a distance to know what would be done to him" (Exodus 2:4). Although she too is a daughter, she is identified as a sister. The designation sister seems odd, however, because a preface has already implied that the son is the firstborn. It reports a marriage. "A man from the house of Levi went and took a daughter of Levi" (Exodus 2:1). Immediately follows a birth announcement "The woman conceived and bore a son" (Exodus 2 2 RSV). These statements effect the elevadon of Moses at the expense of his sister. Yet apart from the preface, nothing in the narrative requires that the son be the firsthom. To the conrrary, his sister's appearance shows that he is not. Thus, the siblings begin their lives together in narrative tension.
"And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him" tExodus 2.4 RSV). References to water surround her. The Hebrew woman has placed her son at the river's bank (Exodus 2 3), and the Egyptian princess has come down to the river to bathe (Exodus 25). From afar, not yet approaching the water itself, the sister waits to know what will happen. Though the narrator's phrase may suggest a passive watch, it foreshadows the opposite. His sister, not the daughter of Levi or the daughter of Pharaoh, will take initiative to shape the destiny of the child
In the second half of the story the yet unnamed sister moves into closer view. She speaks to Pharaoh's daughter. "Shall I go and call for you (lach llahkh, to rhyme with Bach]) a woman nursing from the Hebrews so that she nurses for you (lach) the child?" (Exodus 2:7). By putring the phrase "for you" immediately after the verbs cal and nurse, the sister expresses solicirude and offers servitude. She also shapes the future by defining the need of Pharaoh's daughta to secure a Hebrew nurse. Skillflly crafted, ha words propose a perfect arrangement for the one and for the other, thereby bringing the twain together.
The royal command, "Go," is but the desired reply to the sister's question. To report the sister's acdon, the storyteller plays with vocabulary, repeadng crucial verbs and introducing new nouns. "Shall I go and call for you a woman nursing . . . ?" the sister has asked, but now "the young woman"—not "his sister"—``went and called" (Exodus 2 8). An independent description has replaced a derivatrve idendty. As the one in charge, "the young woman went and called the mother of the baby." The matemal noun makes explicit the beaudful irDnv of her proposal "A woman nursing from the Hebrews" ~s the child's own mother. Thus the sto~y comes swiEdy tO a clima~ The daughters meet to work out a plan. Nursed by his natural motha, the child grows to become the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter and receives from ha the name Moses. If Pharaoh had recognized the power of women, he might well have reversed his decree and had daughters killed rather than sons. But God moves in mysterious ways.
Central to the happy solution is the unnamed Miriam. She enters Scripture obliquely. No lineage, birth announcement or namingritual proclaims ha advent. Only silence gives her birth Ha first appearance is from afar. She stands "at a distance." With speech, she moves closa to unite two daughters for the sake of a male child. Having succeeded, she then fades from the story. Model of discretion and taming, the sister negotiates, mediates and leads. She inidates the plan that delivers ha brotha. Humanly speaking, the Exodus story owes its beginning not to Moses but to Miriam and otha women.
In the Midst of the Struggle
Yet the body of the story develops with scant recognition of its fanale orlg~ Moses, at times assisted by his brotha Aaron~ dominates the struggle against Pharaoh The received tradidon turns away from the woman who began it. In quiet, secret and effective ways, these women, Hebrews and Egypdans, have worked together. By contrast, Moses makes noise, attracts attention and becomes persona non grata to both Hebrews and Egyptians. For many chaptas, the text exalts him and ignores his sister. If silence gave birth to Miriam it also contains her during the bondage and the batde. Patriarchal storyuillas have done their work well. They have suppressed the women—yet without total success. Bits and pieces from the buried story surface at the conclusion of the Exodus narradve.
At the Shore of the Sea
These fragments have survived amid jumbled reports about events at the sea. But whan the strife is o'er and the battle done, Israd summarizes the victory won
"So the Lord saved on that day Israel from the band of the Egyptians.. . . .
The people feared the Lord and they trusted in the Lord and in Moses, God's servant."
Exodus 14:30-31
The poem condnues by proclaiming tbe power of God to lead the people, and it culminates with the affirmation, "The Lord will reign for ever and ever" (Exodus 15:18 RSV). Literarily and theologically, this long litany of triumph climaxes and closes the Exodus story.
How puzzling, then, is the narradve text that follows (Exodus 15:19). In capsule form, it recapitulates the struggle at the sea, thereby rerurning to the event that preceded the closure Ihe recapitulation jars. It seems awkward, repetidous and misplaced. An attentive reader begins to suspect tampering with the text, and, as she reads on, the suspicion intensifies. A subsequent unit, ever so small focuses on Miriam and the women of lsrael:
"Then Miriam the prophet, the sister of Aaron, took timbrel in ha hand. And all the women went out after her, with timbrels and dances. And Miriam answered them 'Sing to the Lord most glorious deity! Horse and rider God has hurled into the sea!"
Exodus 15:1
After Miriam's brief song, the text moves from sea to wilderness (Exodus 15:22). Thus her words become the definitive ending for the Exodus account. And yet they provoke discussion rather than closure.
In this passage Miriam receives her name for thc first time. She also has a title, "the prophet" Indeed, she is dhe first woman in all Israd to bear the title, and she acquires it before her brother Moses. That sibling relationship is not even acknowledged here. Instead, Miriam is called "the sister of Aaron." Earlirer Aaron bore the title prophet (Exodus 7:1), though with the specific meaning of spokesman before Pharaoh. As applied to Miriam, the title remains undefined and its meaning open. Altogether the line "Miriam the prophet, sister of Aaron" introduces her in a special way. Music also signals her importance. She "took a timbrel in her hand. joining her are all the women vnth timbrels and dances: The text says that Miriam sang responsively to "therm" Yet, the Hebrew pronoun "them" is masculine, not feminine, gender, yidding an ambiguous referent. Perhaps, under the leadership of Miriam, thc ritual irnolved all dhe people, though the major participants were women.
Thc song Miriam chants repeats with variations the first stanza of the long poem (Exodus 15:1-18) earlier attributed to Moses. The repetition suggests that the contribution is derivative and his original. Further, though he can sing an entire song, she can cite, and then not perfectly, only the first stanza. By comparison, her performance seems deficient, as does this entire small unit that awkwardly follows the grand Mosaic ending. As a second closure, it is anticlimactic, no more than an afterthought, a token of the female presence.
Divergent in length, content and emphasis, the two endings work in tension, not in tandem. The Mosaic conclusion so overpowers the Miriarnic as to raise the question of why the latter ever survived. Ironically, scholarly answers to this question (and they cannot be accused of a feminist bias!) diminish Moses and highlight Miriam. They hold that the very retendon of a Miriamic ending, in the presence of a Mosaic avalanche, argues both for its ant quity and authoriy. So tenacious was the tradidon about Miriam that later editors could not diminate it altogether. In fact, once upon an early time, before editors got jobs, the entire Song of the Sea, not just the first stanza, was asaibed to Miriam and the women of Israel. Later, redactors (editors) who were intent upon devating Moses took the song right out of her mouth and gave it to him—to Moses, the inarticulate one—in company with the sons of Israel. Thus they constructed an ending for the Exodus story that contradicted the older tradtion altogether, the redactors appended it in truncated form (Exodus 15:2021) to their preferred Mosaic vasion. So they gave us two endings: their preferred Mosaic version (Exodus 15:118) and their truncated version (Exodus 15:2021) of the original Miriarnic conclusion.5 To separate these two endings (as well as to introduce the Miriamic seaion), the redactors placed between them a narrative that recapitulated the struggle at the sea. It reported again the drowning of the Egyptians and the passing of Israel dryshod (Exodus 15:19). This entire exercise ended up both presuving and destroying the women's story. It kept Miriam but diminished her importance. And it heightened the apotheosis of Moses.
Though carefully done, the redactional work does not yield perfection. The juxtaposition of endings creates muted tension. By retaining the tension, Scripture provides, even if inadvertenty, a critique of itset£ While destroying the power of Pharaoh, the Exodus narrarive also turns inward to challenge the dominance of Moses. But the challenge is subtle, and in the saga of faith few among the chosen have detected it.
Like the beginning, the ending of the Exodus story belongs to women. They are the alpha and omega, dhe aleph and taw of deliverance. Providing continuity between the two groups and tunes is the figure of Miriam. At the bank (s~pat 1shePAHTD of the river we first meet her (Exodus 2.4); at the shore (spat) of the sea we find her again (Exodus 15:2021). The mediator has become percussionist, lyricist, vocalist, prophet, leader and theologian. In both places, narrated, not direct, discourse reports tension between her and Moses. It advances from sibling references to competing portraits of leadership. Between these narratives of beginning and ending, Moses, along with the men of Israel, has ruled over the Exodus account
Within and behind the text conflict mounts. The female voice struggles to be heard; a Miriamic presence counters a Mosaic bias. What began as a cloud the size of a baby,'s hand rising out of the River Nile and grew into a man's hand stretched over the Reed Sea (Exodus 14:21) will in time burst forth in a srorrn of controversy about authoriy. To that we now turn.
In the Wilds of the Wilderness
The story moves to the Book of Numbers, which in Hebrew is called bmidbar (behmeedBAHR), "in the wilderness." Wilderness symbolizes complaint, confusion and conflict Moving from site to site, the people of Israel murmur, inteed rebel. Their deity replies with ambivalence. Gracious acts mingle with kindled anger. Nothing happens in an orderly way. Entangled in the wilderness, muldple layers of tradition defy source analysis and intemal coherence to become much like the chaos they report. The task of the interpreter is to discern Miriam's story amid the muddle.
The portrait of Minam lodges in controversies about leadership, authority and prophecy. Moses is overwhelmed. Caught between the demands of the people and the blazing anger of the Lord, he protests. After all, he is not the mother of Israd. God is. "Did I conceive all this people? Did I bring them forth that you should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries the suckling child . . . ?' I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too hea;vy for me," asserts Moses (Numbers 11:1214). So he seeks a new kind of leadership, a shared responsibility. At first, the deity appears to consent, ordering him to choose "seventy elders" upon whom some of Moses' spirit will rest that the' too may bear the burden of the people (Numbers 11:1625). Moses complies, though ironically his choosing the seventy and receiving private revelation yet affirms his unique role. The elders are subordinate to him. Moreover, the entire plan comes to naught. Given some of Moscs' spirit, they prophesy, "but they did so no more," says the text (Numbers 11:25 RSV). Shared responstbiliy and shared authoriy there is not. The leadership of Moses remains supreme.
Another incident pursues the issue. Two men, not of the seveny, begin to prophesy. Rather than partaking of Moses' spirit, they are independency endowed and thus approach equally with Moses. While some lsraelites oppose them, Moses himself welcomes the news: 'Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would put the divine spirit upon them!" (Numbers 11:29). But the matter is far from settled. The elders no longer prophesy, some among the people seek to outlaw the independent prophets; and the deity remains ominously silent.
As the people joumey to a new site, the power struggle rages.7 Miriam enters the fray, and for the first time she lacks the company of women. Aaron is her companion, yet in a supporting role. Once prophetic and kinship language linked these leaders (both are called prophets and she is identified as his sister); now prophetic and priestly issues unite them. To be sure, nowhere in the received tradition does Miriam, or any other female, hold the title "priest" or perform cultic functions. Nevertheless, a few clues scattered in dhe Book of Numbers attest to priestly connections for her. They await further attention.
As for Aaron, some traditions proclaim him outright dhe first priest, even the founder of the priesthood. Altogether the historical picture is exceedingly complex and far from certain. Biblical narratives tantalize us with scant data and mammoth conflict. In the story at hand, Miriam and Aaron join forces against Moses. Miriam leads and Aaron supports her—in rebellion against Moses' authority.