Moses and Multiculturalism

2. Moses and the Law

25 C h a P t e r t wo Moses and the law Moses is often associated with the founding of the rule of law: a U.s. judge who wanted to display the Ten Commandments in his office sparked an intense debate about the separation of church and state. Christians treated the Ten Commandments as their own; it was Christian fundamentalists who laid down their bodies to prevent the removal of what had become by then a granite version of the commandments in the (by then) disbarred judge’s office. Zora neale Hurston, too, refers to “the Moses of the Christian concept” and seems to have no inkling that Moses might not be Christian.1 And it is no wonder, finally, that both of DeMille’s versions of the story are called “The Ten Commandments.” And yet the so-called Books of Moses are mostly filled with dietary laws and decorating tips that have no place in Christianity. Is Moses Christian or Jewish? Christians appropriate his laws as if they were a universal moral foundation; Jews, as if the specificity of their religion started with him. As a founding moment in legal theory, Moses is often seen as providing a rationale for the rule of law. Arthur Jacobson’s “The Idolatry of rules: Writing law According to Moses, with reference to other Jurisprudences” uses Moses’ lawgiving to outline the differences between “static” and “dynamic” law.2 Jacobson studies the unprecedented references to writing in order to show how the Five Books of Moses insist on the collaborative and not fixed nature of law made by 26 / Moses and the Law Moses and God. The people see Moses talking with the god in the fire and cloud on the top of the sacred mountain, while they stay fearfully outside the borders of the sacred, lest they die. When Moses tells them what God has said, they reply several times, “All that the lord hath spoken we will do” (exod. 19:8). When Moses breaks the tables God has written, he writes them again. But having a fixed text is just the beginning; Jacobson mentions the years of study it takes to get to know the oral law. Jacobson does not mention a crucial but puzzling scene in the administration of the law. After the battle with Amalek, early in the relations between the children of Israel and Moses, Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, comes into Moses’ camp with Zipporah and Gershom and eliezer, who had apparently gone back to Midian. After seeing his son-in-law attempt to administer the law entirely by himself, Jethro suggests that it would be less exhausting (and more collaborative) if the cases that can be solved by simply applying a law would be administered by people appointed to fulfill that function, leaving only the difficult cases for Moses. Then the Midianites are again on their way. This scene shows some of the advantages of written law: it does not depend on any individual but allows for easy representation, delegation, and substitution. In the United states, for example, the written law—say, the Constitution— presents several advantages and several drawbacks for lawmakers. By being written, it cannot be changed by individual whim or historical circumstance. It can only be interpreted. The relations between the oral and the written, in order to keep that fixity, must consider that there is no interpretation in the original writing. But that is belied by the search for “original intent.” The seeming impersonality of writing, like the omnipotence of God, is an excuse for not having to think. Between God’s words to Moses and Moses’ words to the people, Jacobson often identifies interpretation. To God’s order to purify and cleanse in preparation for the third day, Moses seems to add, “Come not at your wives” (exod. 19:15). Indeed, Moses’ interpretations often have the allure of a woman. As Jacobson puts it, “‘Interpretation’ is necessary. It is also tempting. . . . He Moses and the Law / 27 ties the content of his interpretations to temptation and impurity—the necessity and danger, as he regards it, of women.”3 Jacobson uses the difference between elohim and yahweh to get at the difference between a finished law and a changing one. A dynamic jurisprudence , like the collaborative writing between Moses and yahweh, is written three times. A black-letter, elohistic, law requires only one or two writings. When the...