Speaking Lies to Power: On the Exodus and Social Justice
I attempt here to make sense of a fundamental yet often overlooked dimension of the exodus story: that it is premised on a ruse. In Ex 3:16-17, God tells Moses to convey to the Israelite elders that God has heard Israel’s cries, and will take them out of Egyptian affliction to the promised land. God then instructs Moses that he should afterward tell Pharaoh: “The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, manifested himself to us. Now, therefore, let us go a distance of three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord our God.” (Ex 3:18) (I use the NJPS here and throughout, with occasional minor modification.) Here, then, is the ruse: To the Israelites God pledges that he will take them out of Egypt to the land of Canaan, but of Pharaoh he asks Moses to seek only a brief foray into the wilderness, to worship God.
Moses never veers from this line. Contrary to popular belief, he never tells Pharaoh, “let my people go,” full stop, but always, “let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness,” or a variant thereof. What are we to make of this?
The traditional commentators are troubled by the ruse. Abraham ibn Ezra (ad Ex 11:4) suggests that, technically, there is no lie here. After all, Moses asks for a three-day journey into the wilderness; he never says that the Israelites will come back. But Ibn Ezra does acknowledge that Moses is being misleading, and he offers two justifications for the deception. First, it was important to suggest that the Israelites would return, so that, when they instead fled, Pharaoh would pursue them, and meet his end at the sea. Second, the Egyptians would only have given the Israelites gold, silver, and garments on the assumption that were decking them out for their festival; they would not have done so if they believed that the Israelites never planned to return. I think it is fair to say that, for a modern reader, at least, Ibn Ezra’s justifications only compound the problem.
Samuel David Luzzatto (ad Ex 3:18) offers an alternative explanation for the ruse: If God had asked Moses to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, says Luzzatto, then Moses would have flatly refused the mission. As it was, Moses was extremely reluctant to seek a brief break for a festival; there was no way he would have agreed to make so bold a demand as setting the Israelites free.
Building on Luzzatto’s realist attentiveness to psychological limitations, I want to suggest that the festival request is not ultimately a real ruse. Yes, at first Pharaoh takes Moses’ demand seriously, if cynically, as an excuse to enjoy a few days’ leave from labor, and he accuses the Israelites of laziness. But as the story progresses, it is clear that Pharaoh appreciates that Moses hopes to take the Israelites out of Egypt altogether. When, after Moses warns of the coming locust, and after pressure from his courtiers, Pharaoh entertains the possibility of heeding Moses’ request, he is greatly concerned to ensure that the Israelites return, or, to put the point differently, he is deeply suspicious that Moses in fact intends to have the Israelites flee. “Who are the ones to go,” he asks. (Ex 10:8) When Moses says that he intends to have everyone go, Pharaoh immediately accuses Moses of bad faith: “Clearly, you are bent on mischief.” (Ex 10:10) (The Hebrew is difficult at this point, but the NJPS seems to get at the plain sense.) Again, after the plague of darkness, Pharaoh is inclined to let the Israelites leave to worship God, but, fearing that they will not come back, he insists that they leave behind their flocks and herds as surety. (10:24)
If Pharaoh clearly comes to appreciate that the ultimate aim is exodus, why does Moses never make this plain? Why does Moses stick to the claim that they mean only to worship God in the wilderness and then return? What we are seeing here is tactics, politics. Keep the temperature low, keep the request small. Perhaps Pharaoh will be willing to grant it, and then we can proceed from there. As the plagues and the pain mount, and Pharaoh digs in, there is every reason to hold fast to a small request. Allow him an off ramp, a means of saving face: Pharaoh will more likely agree to a short festival, knowing that the Israelites in fact mean to leave, because he will thus be spared the embarrassment of being compelled to let them go.
The exodus story has been a powerful inspiration throughout the ages for revolutionaries and for those seeking social justice, and for good reason. And yet we miss something if we count it as a founding moment for the notion of speaking truth to power. In fact it is a story of speaking lies to power. We tend to assimilate the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh to the confrontation between subsequent prophets and kings: Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, Amos and Jeroboam. But they are not the same at all. These subsequent cases involve Israelite kings. The prophets speak truth to power because they know that the kings recognize themselves to be bound by God’s law, even as they sometimes flout it. Nathan, Elijah, Amos are social critics, connected by bonds of identity to the kings whom they condemn. But Pharaoh is not an Israelite, and Moses does not speak truth to him. Moses’ voice in the exodus story is not prophetic but political.
I think that the “misremembering” of the exodus story—the contraction of “let me people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness,” which is a matter of speaking lies to power, as a political tactic, to “let me people go,” which is the quintessential act of speaking truth to power, as an appeal to the principle that every person should be free—is enabled by the fact that biblical tradition assimilates Israel to Egypt. The Bible recognizes the danger that we can become like Egypt: that our kings can act as oppressive Pharaohs toward their own subjects; that we can abuse the foreigners among us with the same severity that the Egyptians did. Retrospectively, Pharaoh indeed becomes an Israelite king, because the Bible rejects the association of evil only with enemies, and insists on turning critique inward.
