The Bible's Many Voices

9. Voices of Song and Legend

9 Voices of Song and Legend We have seen in earlier chapters several examples of how different biblical voices tell the “same” story in a slightly different way: the diverse and sometimes contrasting historical ideologies of Kings and Chronicles, the Sinaitic law collections revealed by Moses to the Israelites at varying stages of their journey through the wilderness, even the interleaved telling of the flood story by the J and P writers. In this chapter, we will go beyond the narrative prose of most of the biblical stories we have heard so far, and begin to listen to some poetic voices. As we will see, these “voices of song and legend” often refer to events that we remember from the more well-known stories in the Bible. But, like the prose variations we have already seen, they sometimes open a window to a new perspective on these familiar tales. We should not be surprised that Israel’s history was told in poetic as well as prose form. We know the story of the Trojan War, after all, from an epic poem—Homer’s Iliad—not from a novel or a history book. Our discovery during the past century and a half of a vast trove of literature from the ancient Near East makes clear that many peoples in the wider civilization out of which Israel grew told their basic stories in poetic form. In a world without the capability of mass reproduction of written texts, among a population where 302 Voices of Song and Legend literacy was most likely not widespread, it is reasonable to think that the rhythm and repetition of poetry made it preferable to prose for long stories. Perhaps the fact that Israel’s basic story is told in prose, though it seems natural to us, is the surprising phenomenon that needs explaining. Stories in Prose and Poetry The Bible does have a few examples of poetic storytelling. The two most famous are the “Song of Deborah” (Judges 5) and the “Song at the Sea” (Exodus 15). Judges 5 is a poetic version of the story of Deborah, a ruler of Israel during the period of the “judges”—better translated “magistrates”—who governed Israel before the kingship was established; it tells how she and her army commander, Barak, defeated the army of Jabin, the Canaanite king of Hazor, a story whose prose version appears in Judges 4. Similarly, the poem of Exodus 15 retells the story of the Israelites’crossing the Red Sea while the Egyptian army drowned in it, a story recounted in prose in Exodus 14. Since both these poems immediately follow the prose accounts of the events they retell, it is easy to compare the two versions. Indeed, when we think of these occurrences as “Bible stories,” we sometimes combine elements of the narrative and the poem to imagine a single version of the tale. But there are other biblical stories that are referred to in poems far removed from the familiar prose narratives. The plot elements of these poems rarely enter our thinking about the “original” prose story. In this chapter, we will look at two stories in particular. Poetic references to the plagues of Egypt will show us that some stories that are familiar to us may have been told in ancient Israel in more than one way, and for varying purposes. When we turn to poetic references to the story of creation, we will see that they reveal to us a version of that story quite different from the one we know from Genesis. Eventually, this poetic version of the creation story will lead us back, via Exodus 15, to Israel’s escape from Egypt. Voices of Song and Legend 303 How Many Plagues Were There? Way back at the beginning of our discussion, in chapter 2, we asked a question that had a surprising answer: Who killed Goliath? We saw that the biblical texts offered two answers to this question and that the “standard”answer offered in the main story line of the Bible (“David”) has made most of us forget the second answer (“Elhanan”), offered in what is essentially an appendix to the story (2 Sam. 21:19). A similar process has taken place with some famous details of the story of the exodus from Egypt. We can begin to focus on this by asking a similar question: How many plagues were there? The obvious answer is...