I realize that my post is supposed to aid you, my 10101 class, in your endeavors with Exodus, the somewhat crabby God of the Israelites, those very stiff-necked, hardhearted people (as that God calls them), and Moses the middleman. First, though, I thought I should talk about something else. Call it a little-known fact, More Knowledge at College.
When I was a boy, a student teacher of ours told our class that some of her schoolmates at the large state university from which she was matriculating were so rustic that they believed that Jews had horns. Those of us with Jewish ancestry, as well as those of us whose ancestors were of a different origin, were simply appalled. Who could be so stupid, anti-Semitic, racist?
It turns out that even the most offensive things sometimes have a neutral provenance, no matter how mistaken they might be.
I have included a collage of Renaissance sculptures depicting Moses in all his glory, horned. Michelangelo was responsible for two of these, the famous statue in the bottom left, and the less notorious depiction in the top-right corner.
This medieval illuminated manuscript pictures Moses confronting the Israelites as they worship the golden calf (Ex 32). William de la Braile, or whoever the artist was, avoided demonstrating the overt emotions of his subjects, according to medieval artistic practice, but you'll see that this annoyed prophet is horned and his people are not.
St. Jerome, who translated the Greek Bible into the conversational Latin of the early medieval world, his version known thereby as the Vulgate, thought that "cornuta," or "horned," was the most accurate rendition of "dedoxastai." His version of Exodus 34.29: "cum descenderet Moses de monte Sinai tenebat duas tabulas testimonii et ignorabat quod cornuta esse facies sua ex consortio sermonis Dei" [when Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he held two tablets of the law and was unaware that his face was horned from his encounter with God]. Since Jerome's Bible was authoritative from Late Antiquity until the Reformation, there was no room to dispute what the Church had so decreed, and it might not have occurred to the Gentile population that a horned Moses could have offended Jewish readers, or Christians who were in sympathy with their Jewish fellow citizens.
The Authorized Version of 1611, known to most English readers as the King James Bible, reads the aforementioned verse, "And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses's hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him." William Tyndale's translation, first encountered in print in the so-called Matthew Bible (1537) reads: "And Moses came doune from mount Sinai and the .ij. tables of witnesse in his hande, and yet he wyst not that the skynne of his face shone with beames of his comenynge with him." There are no horns here, folks.
Incredible as it is to believe, it is also possible that Jews once believed that Moses was horned, as well. Though Christians associated horns with cuckoldry, the devil, and general bestiality, Jews in the ancient world generally did not share this frame of reference. This article from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz argues that Jerome could never have so mistranslated the Greek term, was acquainted with Jewish traditions and culture regarding virility, and was aware that a horned Moses had nothing to do with the Devil or anything else. Actually, to him, such a representation of this hero of the Bible was historically accurate and highly complimentary.
At the same time, to return to my long-ago student teacher: this is pretty arcane information, and she represented things to us as best she could. I'm sure that the anti-Semitism she no doubt experienced has stayed with her, and I'm sorry that she had to experience it.
My interest in the Bible is historical and literary. I've always tried to verse myself in the humanity of the God of the Old Testament and that of Jesus of Nazareth in the New. We make our gods in our own image, they say. Also, the commentaries by theologians and various divines and church fathers have struck me as essential reading and of compelling interest, because often, readers knew the Bible just as much from doctrine as from the words of the Scriptures themselves. In fact, doctrine has been much more influential than the by individual Christians, as Martin Luther and William Tyndale, for instance, recommended such readers arrive at for themselves during the Reformation. For God the Father, his interventions in the lives of his people seem to some readers, even the devout, as capricious, arbitrary, personal.
The God of the Old Testament, especially in Exodus, seems angry and impatient, outraged that his miraculous work on the behalf of his people to free them from the slavery of Pharaoh in Egypt does not seem to be appreciated except by Moses. Over and over again, the Supreme Deity not only plagues the Egyptians tenfold, culminating in the killing of the firstborn, human and animal, but constantly "hardens the heart" of Pharaoh so that he refuses to "let the people" of Israel "go." Why spread suffering when it could be so easily mitigated and eased, even for the oppressive Egyptians?
Sometimes this unexplained divine capriciousness extends to Moses himself. In Exodus 4:22-23, God orders his servant to pass along his command to Pharaoh that unless he liberates the Israelites, the Lord will smite the Egyptians in the worst way, which turns out to be the Tenth Plague: the killing of the firstborn. Surely God already knows he will do this awful thing. And then, complete madness seems to ensue. The next three verses read:
And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision. (Exodus 4:24-26, KJV)
Bible commentators are equally puzzled, though as devout and believing readers, they express their confusion reverently. (See this link for the incredible depth of commentary.) The first "him" is Moses. Zipporah is his wife. She was not an Israelite or familiar with that culture's customs. Their son was Gershom. Apparently, God was so angry at Moses's failure to circumcise Gershon that this rage would have turned deadly, if not for the intervention of Zipporah, who apparently did not understand or respect the covenant of circumcision, as first instituted by God with Abraham in Genesis 17.13.
As a coda, here are two illustrations of the fabulous engravings for the Matthew Bible (1537), the text of which most scholars agree was mostly the work of the magnificent William Tyndale. The illustrations might have been the work of Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the great artists of the early Renaissance. The copy whose illustrations appear below comes from the University of Pennsylvania. (Here is an informative essay, if you'd like to read it.) There is some irony at work here. Henry VIII and Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor, despised Tyndale, his gadfly-like criticism of Henry's new church, and particularly his translation of the New Testament. It was first published in Antwerp in 1526, and mostly confiscated and burned after the surreptitious copies were discovered by the royal agents who were somehow aware that reformers would be trying to smuggle them into England. More hated Tyndale so much that even when he himself was imprisoned and under interdict and death sentence for refusing to swear to Henry's Oath of Supremacy, he still insisted that Tyndale be captured, tried, and burned at the stake, which he was, in Brabant 1536. Tyndale's last words were, it is alleged, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes!"
Apparently, those eyes were opened. More's successor Thomas Cromwell saw the necessity of furthering the Reformation, presided over the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-37), and pushed his sovereign into accepting and authorizing an English translation, mostly by Tyndale, with some help from others. Henry's own production, known as the Great Bible (1539), though largely presided over by Myles Coverdale, differed very, very little from the Matthew. The title-pages were similar, though Henry added himself as a dispenser of divine wisdom.
Here is the title-page for the Matthew New Testament, which is identical to the same page for the Old Testament.
Here is a detail from the two top corners of this multiplex engraving. To the left and below, God the Father bestows the law on Moses, who is, as you'll see, horned. To the right, the infant Christ acts as agent of his own Annunciation to his mother-to-be, Mary, receiving the divine light. Christ carries the cross on which he will be crucified and by which he will act as lux mundi and redemptor mundi: the light and redeemer of the world.
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