Early on in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, a Hebrew slave explains his hatred towards Egypt the following way: “That’s what I hate ‘em for too, making me scared to die. It’s a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing—nothing.”[1] At this point in the story, the Hebrews can still remember a time when they were not slaves, a time during which they had much to live for, according to the logic of the above quote. But as their time under Egyptian rule grows longer, the enslaved people become used to their condition. Consequently, what may be described as a kind of ‘slave mentality’ becomes critical to the story’s movement and development, especially after Moses’s deliverance of the people. Just as Moses repeatedly plagues Egypt in response to Pharaoh’s “no,” so too does Israel’s longing for normalcy plague the people long after they have been delivered from slavery—a perceived norm constructed and put into place during their Egyptian tenure. Clearly, this is not a theme unique to Hurston’s retelling of the Moses story; the biblical book of Exodus portrays a newly formed “people,” slowly coming to grips with what it means to be God’s elect. But given the freedom and openness of the novel medium, Hurston is able to build on and even exceed the biblical narrative.[2] And in doing so, she simultaneously honors and goes beyond the storyworld of the Bible in order to fashion a narrative about Moses’ lifelong journey into leadership and a people struggling to own and live into the freedom given to them; a story very much paralleling that of African Americans in the United States after the Reconstruction Era.
Cover of Moses, Man of the Mountain (P.S.)
Towards the beginning of the story, two Israelites, Amram and Caleb, discuss the hardship of not being able to worship the same gods as the Egyptians do now that they (Israelites) are enslaved. “Those temples were built by Egyptians and those gods were made by Egyptians,” Amram tells Caleb; “Gods always love the people who make ‘em. We can’t put no faith in them.”[3] While conversations like this one are extrabiblical, Hurston’s fictionalization[4] of the book of Exodus allows her to offer lengthy, midrash-like details of the story by adding to the biblical narrative in ways that figure prominently in her version of it. For example, the previous quote fits nicely in Exod, 1.8-14, a functional explanation of how Israel found herself subjugated to Egypt’s service. And similar to its literary function in Hurston’s novel, the quote would also foreshadow in the biblical narrative the difficulty of growing into their identity as the particular people of YHWH, their God. This is made evident in the biblical text by the episodic ‘grumbling’ in the wilderness, the quick abandonment of the covenant stipulations and apostasy during the Golden Calf episode, and the need for YHWH to reconfigure the conditions of the covenant in light of Israel’s disobedience. Likewise, the difficulty Israel has coming to terms with her freedom in Hurston’s story is explicit in the ways that many Hebrews accept their condition of bondage, in their defiance and skepticism of their divinely-appointed leader, and in their construction of Apis, the Egyptian bull god.[5] Many of the extrabiblical material in the novel functions to articulate the silent spaces between what is in fact included in the Bible, hence the comparison above to midrashim. Not all of, though, is consonant with the biblical narrative arc of the Pentateuch.
While Hurston honors the biblical story by attending to its subtleties and textured history of interpretation, there are central features and thematic elements of Exodus that Hurston chooses to eschew or spin in a different direction. This, however, is not undergone haphazardly; it involves a focused authorial vision on Hurston’s part. Scrupulous readers of the Bible will undoubtedly notice the absence of the covenant and its implications for the people as God’s chosen.[6] This lack of emphasis on covenant, however, is not unusual in African American biblical interpretation. In The Talking Book, Dwight Allen Callahan notes how many African American spirituals fail to mention the law and the Ten Commandments. He writes, “The figure of Moses is celebrated in a way that Sinai is not. . . . The revelation is not to Israel but to Moses. Not Ten Commandments but one: keep moving.”[7] Also, while nearly half of the book of Exodus is made up of details pertaining to the building of the Tabernacle, Hurston’s novel pays little attention to these scrupulous blueprints. As a final example, the giving of the Ten Commandments is represented by Hurston in a way that glorifies Moses’s power rather than the gratuity of YHWH’s gift to Israel: “So that is how the people got laws and commandments from heaven, because Moses had power enough to take them out of the mouth of God and give them to the people.”[8] In this removal of YHWH (and his actions for the sake of Israel) from the center of the story, Hurston’s retelling is dedicated more to Moses’s maturity into one of the “finest hoodoo [men] in the world”[9] and his attempt to prepare the Hebrews for nationhood than it is any sort of theo-logic.
Another illustration of Hurston’s freedom with the text is in her representation of Moses. Given the book’s allegorical nature, it is of particular interest to us that Hurston’s characterization of Moses includes him being born to an Assyrian father and an Egyptian mother, not an Israelite. Moses is not the son of a Hebrew; he is the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and thus the grandson of the Pharaoh! It is perplexing to consider the literary function that Hurston has in view here. In light of her exploration and indirect commentary on African American existence in the United States during the early twentieth century, one might speculate that Hurston imagines the only sort of leader capable of reconfiguring what is possible for black persons is one who is either not black or has not grown up within the boundaries of bondage. In further support of this supposition is Hurston’s portrayal of the intra-Israel leadership of Aaron and Miriam. To further obfuscate any desire of the reader to discern a clear straightforward social critique on Hurston’s part, Joshua is adopted as an apprentice to Moses. Consequently, it is a Hebrew, one from within the community, whom embodies the possibility of true freedom at the end of the novel.
The artistic freedom in Hurston’s utilization of the biblical storyworld is not undertaken merely to relativize the original story. In order to accomplish the representational relations between her novel and the historical context in which she is writing, Hurston departs from the text to discuss the residual effects of bondage and captivity on those whose lives were lived out inside of such realities. It may seem extraneous to sumptuously embellish a biblical story that for the last one hundred years has widely been regarded as the biblical paradigm for divine liberation. However, many disagree with a rigid liberation hermeneutic. Arguing for an interpretive framework that pays equal—if not more—attention to why Israel is delivered (i.e., service to YHWH) as much as it does to what they are delivered from (bondage), John Levenson suggests that to over-emphasize liberation “is to miss the paradox that lies at the heart of the exodus: Israel’s liberation from degrading bondage is a function of their subjugation to YHWH their God. The exodus is not only a road out of Egypt; it is also a road to Mount Sinai.”[10] While Hurston’s novel may fall short of Levenson’s suggestion in its lack of thematic emphasis on service to God, her exploration of the struggles of an emancipated people lives up to it—that is, insofar as freedom from bondage entails freedom to choose whom you serve. Moreover, Hurston is using the biblical story as a vehicle, a means to an end rather than the end itself.
Moses, Man of the Mountain was published in 1939, a year in which African Americans were still subjected to rituals of approximation constructed by white notions of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Almost twenty-five years after Hurston’s novel was published, the condition of black persons in America was still such that Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel was able to comment, “The exodus began but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.”[11] Hurston’s novel, therefore, is representative of a powerful African American voice equipped with an acute critical consciousness and an intimate knowledge of the Scriptures. What results is a fascinating retelling of Moses and the Israelites that weaves together an artful–albeit, not explicity theological–exegesis and folklore embellishment in order to comment on a people who, in a fuller sense of the word, have yet to experience the freedom purportedly standard in the ‘land of the free’.
[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009), p. 6.
[2] By ‘exceeding the biblical narrative’, I simply mean the employment of traditions and themes not found in the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures.
[3] Ibid., p. 6.
[4] By “fictionalization” I do not mean to imply that the biblical book of Exodus is entirely without fictional elements. Indeed, reading Hurston’s account of the events surrounding Israel’s exodus from Egypt throws light onto the ‘arranged’ character of the biblical account.
[5] Moses, p. 230. The blatant forgetfulness that Egypt’s gods are not Hebrew gods is made evident in Miriam’s rhetoric while persuading Aaron to build Apis: “But we do know something about our gods back in Egypt. . . . Maybe that’s how come we having such a hard time, because we done give up on our gods. Isis will sure help you if you pray to her and pray right. Did the Bull God Apis ever go back on us? No” (p. 230)!
[6] On my count, the Ark of the Covenant is thrice mentioned, but covenant itself fails to make an appearance.
[7] The Talking Book (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 102.
[8] Moses, p. 228, emphasis added. The conflation of God’s actions with Moses’ is Hurston’s intentional play on the diversity in representation of Moses’ heroics. She is clear about this from the book’s beginning: “All across Africa, America, the West Indies, there are tales of the powers of Moses and great worship of him and his powers. But it does not flow from the Ten Commandments. It is his rod of power, the terror he showed before all Israel and to Pharaoh, and THAT MIGHTY HAND” (p. viii).
[9] Ibid., p. 114.
[10] John Levenson, “Liberation Theology and the Exodus,” in Jews, Christians, And The Theology of The Hebrew Scriptures, Second edition. Ed. Alice Ogden Bellis and Joel S. Kaminsky (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), p. 227.
[11] Quoted in Callahan, The Talking Book, p. 118.
FOR • THE • TIME • BEING 