Aaron the Levite (WTF 4:14)

[Jimmy Higgins]

In another thread, I kind of derailed too deep into literary analysis. So, I decided to pull it out here. I haven't studied a lot about Exodus. Genesis was always my go to for fun. But the more I think about Exodus, the more it seems to be just like Genesis... in the sense of another bullshit origin story. I mean we've got two stories of creation, why not two origins of the Hebrews?!

Exodus 4:14 is really interesting because Yahweh just brings up "Aaron the Levite" and Aaron the Levite is coming to see Moses! What I gather here is that Aaron is a known quantity to the reader or audience. Moses' character is being established, but Aaron already is something (well was something, something big enough for the audience to already know of, so as there to be no further explanation as to who this person is)! And he is to be the mouth piece, but Moses is still the symbol and connection to Yahweh.

Which then makes me ponder, Why Moses? Is Moses simply on a Hero narrative of wealth turn banishment turn epiphany turn return? To me, Genesis is parsing different pre-Hebrew together. Is that happening here in Exodus? This gets even weirder when looking at Exo 32:24, where Aaron defends himself noting that a golden calf assembled all by itself. Is this telling us something? Is this and Ex 4:24-26 (God about to kill Moses for not being circumcised, and being saved by the actions of his Midianite wife) not quite as insanely random as they seem?

 

[Politesse]

In another thread, I kind of derailed too deep into literary analysis. So, I decided to pull it out here. I haven't studied a lot about Exodus. Genesis was always my go to for fun. But the more I think about Exodus, the more it seems to be just like Genesis... in the sense of another bullshit origin story. I mean we've got two stories of creation, why not two origins of the Hebrews?!

Exodus 4:14 is really interesting because Yahweh just brings up "Aaron the Levite" and Aaron the Levite is coming to see Moses! What I gather here is that Aaron is a known quantity to the reader or audience. Moses' character is being established, but Aaron already is something (well was something, something big enough for the audience to already know of, so as there to be no further explanation as to who this person is)! And he is to be the mouth piece, but Moses is still the symbol and connection to Yahweh.

Which then makes me ponder, Why Moses? Is Moses simply on a Hero narrative of wealth turn banishment turn epiphany turn return? To me, Genesis is parsing different pre-Hebrew together. Is that happening here in Exodus? This gets even weirder when looking at Exo 32:24, where Aaron defends himself noting that a golden calf assembled all by itself. Is this telling us something? Is this and Ex 4:24-26 (God about to kill Moses for not being circumcised, and being saved by the actions of his Midianite wife) not quite as insanely random as they seem?

Aaron is the founding figure for the Levites, very important to them. And whoever set down the final form of Exodus, they were almost certainly Levites themselves. But Moses is important to all twelve tribes, and a central figure no doubt in all of their oral traditions. It's not so much about the story, I don't think -- Moses makes for kind of a funny hero by modern standards, which is why American movies have to unleash merry hell on the mythos to jam it into cinematic mode. To the scribes who set all this down, it was about history, legacy, symbolism, and especially family. It's important to remember that these documents are themselves inventive retellings of stories that were already a thousand years old by that point, well known to the listening audience but probably various in their retelllings.

Imagine what we would be able to figure out if instead of holding presumptive copies of the Illiad, we were trying to deduce its contents solely based on whatever literary or dramatic retellings we could find from during the Roman era.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I get that. For me, I enjoy piecing together the implied history to the reader by the writer(s) based on the language. So in 4:14 we know that Aaron is a thing. Exodus is telling of a tale of origin and Moses is the main player. He presents a Levite origin but a foreign origin as well. This foreign aspect disappears later on when God tells Moses to smite Midian, but before the conquering BS spoken of later on, Moses goes off to a foreign land, which oddly is where he meets Yawheh. Not only Yahweh, but not from concentrate Yahweh. Exodus 6:3 has Yahweh blabbing, yeah, I pal'd with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel, but I was using a fake ID. I'm the Real Slim Shady!

WTF is that about? Again, this is telling us about origins again. It is a shift. It sounds subtle, but it doesn't look subtle at all. This isn't Facebook becoming Meta. Is this Aaron taking over? And again, who the heck is Moses?!

 

[Politesse]

Aaron is a pretty important figure throughout Exodus, as the first high priest; one thing you notice reading the Hebrew Scriptures in their totality is that he is a very morally ambiguous character in Exodus itself, but he is highly sanitized and lionized in Chronicles and other later works, those written in their totality much closer in time to the final version of the Pentateuch. If you can find a nearby library with a copy, J.D. Findlay wrote a pretty interesting study of Aaron and how his reputation changed along with the rising and falling fortunes of the Aaronites in later history.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yipes, at $96, yeah, that might be a library book. I have Brevard's Exodus commentary which has gathered a great deal of dust as my interest in Torah study was diminishing. I spent a lot of time with Genesis, reading Gunkel's and von Rad's commentaries on it. Funny I hadn't picked up on Exo 4:14 until just now. Tanakh be like that, sometimes a huge literary / historical plug is involved and it clicks.

That is what is funny about people who want the Bible to be taught as a literary work in high school... but they don't mean like this!

 

[Politesse]

That is what is funny about people who want the Bible to be taught as a literary work in high school... but they don't mean like this!

You know, I actually attended a Jesuit run private high school for a year when I was a lad, and I've no regrets about that. The early introduction to Catholicism opened some interesting doors later, and their approach to teaching Biblical studies was not hostile to modern studies, though in characteristic fashion Catholic dogmas were always logically arrived at. But at fourteen, I was woke enough to notice when they'd logicked themselves right past the facts.

Of course, these days I know many people who had compulsory religious education when they were young, and they seem barely more literate than the average joe. Have you ever looked at the Religious Studies GCSE they use in the UK? The exam, uh, does not get very far into the weeds of religious scholarship, that is for sure.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I went to a Catholic college (as an atheist, something I informed very few people about and no instructors), and the religious instruction there was 100% non-indoctrination (why would it need to be, it is a Catholic college after all ). Got along with a number of the Brothers that taught there.

Some of the stuff they taught I was shocked because it was poking significant holes into the Christian narrative on Jesus (and theism in general). I'm thinking, is no one getting where this is going? No, they weren't.

They had a class on Psychology and Religion, dealing with Freud, Maslow, and Jung, which was very interesting, especially with Maslow and the demarcation of religion and science that developed and Jung regarding shared archetypes among people. It was a nice dive into the Tanakh (I took Hebrew Scriptures) as I had not really studied the Bible much at all before and there was ample opportunity to explore concepts in depth. Definitely do not regret having that opportunity, as it help start my literacy in the subject.

 

[Tharmas]

I attended a liberal nominally Episcopal school from 7th through 12th grades. Ironically the student body was perhaps 25% Jewish. Religious instruction consisted of one 45 minute class per week, taught by our kindly pastor (incidentally a Jewish convert). He never touched the Bible. Instead we read C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters and discussed his “trilemma.”

The assistant pastor did in fact teach the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. His approach was to rationalize and normalize the described events. For instance, I remember him describing the Exodus. It wasn’t the Red Sea, he told us. It was the nearby “Reed Sea,” easy names to confuse. The Reed Sea was a swamp. Moses found the Israelites a path through, but the Egyptian army, heavily armed and riding in chariots, got bogged down in the mud, and so the Israelites escaped. “It must have seemed like a miracle to them” he claimed.

We were skeptical.

My actual Bible reading started later, in college. We used to get stoned and read Revelations aloud, along with Jabberwoky and other nonsense.

 

[Politesse]

Psychology and Religion sounds like a fun course. I made my way through William James' book on the subject not too long ago, and enjoyed it. It's funny how little the public discourse on religion has really changed over the otherwise turbulent course of this past century.

 

[steve_bank]

I watched a non religious documentary on archeology and the bible.

One concussion was that the Exodus story, pursuit by Egyptians, and crossing the se was a conflation of multiple earlier events and battles.

To me it is simple. Greeks had gods with narratives and stories. Jewish writers created stories based on oral traditions.

Religin has always justified and ordained ppower derived from a god.

As I see the Moses story leads wandering Jews to the land of Israel granted them by god. It puts the state of Isreal as ordained by god.

It was always obvious, Netanyahu as leader of Israel and a conservative biblical literalist eventually szid it explcity on camera. Jews can do what they want with the West Bank because it was given to Jews by god.

Moses or the story of Moses establishes god, 10 Comandmets, as the moral authority. Along with a prvledged priest class.

 

[Thomas II]

That is what is funny about people who want the Bible to be taught as a literary work in high school... but they don't mean like this!

You know, I actually attended a Jesuit run private high school for a year when I was a lad, and I've no regrets about that. The early introduction to Catholicism opened some interesting doors later, and their approach to teaching Biblical studies was not hostile to modern studies, though in characteristic fashion Catholic dogmas were always logically arrived at. But at fourteen, I was woke enough to notice when they'd logicked themselves right past the facts.

Of course, these days I know many people who had compulsory religious education when they were young, and they seem barely more literate than the average joe. Have you ever looked at the Religious Studies GCSE they use in the UK? The exam, uh, does not get very far into the weeds of religious scholarship, that is for sure.

I also went to the Jesuits for four years...We started the day with a mass and finished the day with a Rosary...Every day!...I lost my faith, but they taught me to think for myself...

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I watched a non religious documentary on archeology and the bible.

One concussion was that the Exodus story, pursuit by Egyptians, and crossing the se was a conflation of multiple earlier events and battles.

To me it is simple. Greeks had gods with narratives and stories. Jewish writers created stories based on oral traditions.

Religin has always justified and ordained ppower derived from a god.

As I see the Moses story leads wandering Jews to the land of Israel granted them by god. It puts the state of Isreal as ordained by god.

Except it already did this in Genesis. So the question becomes why Moses... why The Exodus? We know the goal, but the question is about why the story itself. There is so much buried in these tales and the OP was looking about to dig some stuff up. Kind of like how 4:14 just stands there as a single line of text, but if one is paying attention, it is said with a bullhorn.

 

[Thomas II]

 

[Politesse]

why The Exodus? We know the goal, but the question is about why the story itself.

Do we, though? Why would the Israelites, seemingly out of whole cloth, invent a story that paints themselves as vicious conquerors? And when did the story start circulating, relative to writing of the texts we now possess?

 

[steve_bank]

The ancient Hebrews were as aggressive and warlike as other groups.

Modern Israel seems to be sliding towards theIr ancient patterns.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

why The Exodus? We know the goal, but the question is about why the story itself.

Do we, though?

Yes, politics. It is about maintaining the status quo of authority.

Why would the Israelites, seemingly out of whole cloth, invent a story that paints themselves as vicious conquerors? And when did the story start circulating, relative to writing of the texts we now possess?

That we don't know quite as well, and what I find to be the more interesting.