“Who is God?” may be a question finally impossible to answer. Somewhat more easily within range, especially if we confine our attention—as in this book we do—to the Qur’an and the Bible alone, is the question “What does God want?” That question is an especially fruitful one to ask as we consider God in conversation and interaction with the remarkable and elusive figure of Moses, the man who, on a mission from God and with God’s help, led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt and through the desert to the Promised Land.
Or was that really what God wanted when he sent Moses into Egypt to confront its god-king, Pharaoh? Might God have wanted something else, something more important to Him than Israelite liberation? In the Qur’an, Allah mentions Moses more often than any other biblical figure. Moses’s story—like the story of Abraham—matters to Him. He tells it several times, with variations, and alludes to it many more times. Allah, as we have already seen, makes all of the biblical figures that he mentions precursors of Muhammad, each with a distinct emphasis. He makes Abraham paradigmatic of submission to Allah. As for Moses, Allah makes him a paradigmatic warner (of Egypt) and a paradigmatic messenger (receiving his message, Torah, on a mountain, just as Muhammad received his). Yes, along the way Allah sees to it that Israel is liberated, but this liberation is a corollary or secondary consequence of Allah’s primary mission for His prophet and messenger Moses, which is the spread of true religion.
To put the difference as briefly as possible, Yahweh Elohim wants to defeat Pharaoh; Allah wants to convert him. True, in the Qur’an, Pharaoh and the Egyptians do suffer defeat and Israel does escape across the Red Sea. True, conversely, in the Bible, Pharaoh and the Egyptians do at least fleetingly approach conversion. In broad outline, then, the story being told is the same in either scripture. But within that story, what Yahweh Elohim wants and what Allah wants retain their distinctive and illuminating emphases.
The biblical Book of Exodus opens with all the Israelites still in Egypt, just as they were at the end of the Joseph story, which concludes the Book of Genesis. The Israelites have multiplied in Egypt beyond all human reckoning. They now outnumber the Egyptians themselves. But things are beginning to change ominously for them:
Then Joseph died, and his brothers, and all that generation. But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they became so numerous and powerful that eventually the whole land was full of them.
Then there came to power in Egypt a new king [Pharaoh] who had never heard of Joseph. “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites are now more numerous and stronger than we are. We must take precautions to stop them from increasing any further, or if war should break out, they might join the ranks of our enemies.” (Exodus 1:6–10)
Pharaoh instructs the attending midwives to kill all the Israelites’ male newborns, but the midwives demur claiming that the Israelite women
“are hardy and give birth before the midwife can get to them.” For this, God was good to the midwives, {the narrator continues} and the people went on increasing and growing more powerful….
Pharaoh then gave all his people this command: “Throw every new-born boy into the river, but let all the girls live.” (Exodus 1:19–20, 22)
This tug-of-war between the two, now equally large rival populations continues for many years: the divinely assisted fertility of the Israelite women against the Egyptian ruler’s desperate and murderous attempt to reduce the burgeoning Israelites’ power by enslaving them.
At length,
the king of Egypt died. The Israelites, groaning in their slavery, cried out for help and from the depths of their slavery their cry came up to God. God heard their groaning; God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God saw the Israelites and took note. (Exodus 2:23–25)
Remember what Yahweh Elohim originally wanted when he commanded Abram, “Leave your country, your kindred and your father’s house for a country which I shall show you” (Genesis 12: 1). He wanted fabulous fertility for Abram, later Abraham, and He wanted the resulting great nation to take possession of one particular land, Canaan, which He proceeded to show Abram. Superhuman fertility is still what Yahweh Elohim wants for His people.
Why does He want it? Why for this people rather than for another? He does not say, and we do not know, but there can be no doubt at all that He does indeed still want it. Temporarily, Yahweh Elohim’s people are stalled in Egypt, but their fertility—much according to His plan—is so stunning that within just two lifetimes, they as immigrants have overtaken the host Egyptian population in number. Egypt’s Pharaoh is now trying to frustrate Yahweh Elohim’s plan, to roll back Israelite fertility, or even, over time, to exterminate Israel. Yahweh Elohim’s counterreaction is no surprise: this Pharaoh must be stopped and put decisively in his place. And because Yahweh Elohim’s fertility plan for His chosen people is to be realized in Canaan, where the twelve sons of Israel (Jacob) were taking root when famine struck, a time must soon come when they leave Egypt and return to Canaan. They will return, however, now transformed from a clan into a nation as populous as Egypt.
This is the point at which Allah begins the story of Moses in Qur’an 20, the longest and most elaborate telling of a Moses story in the Qur’an:
Has there come to you the narrative of Moses?
When he saw a fire, he said to his family: “Stay behind. I have glimpsed a fire; perhaps I will bring you a brand from it, or find at the fire guidance.”
When he drew near it, a voice called out to him: “Moses! It is Me, your Lord. Remove your sandals. You are in the sacred valley, Tuwa. I have chosen you, so listen to what is being revealed.
“It is Me, God: there is no god but I. So worship Me and perform the prayer for My remembrance.
“The Hour is coming—I am about to reveal it—so that every soul is rewarded for what it has achieved.
“Let him not turn you away from it, he who does not believe in it and follows his base desires, else you will perish.”
“And what is that in your right hand, O Moses?”
He said: “It is my staff; I lean upon it, and tend my sheep with it, and I have other uses for it.”
He said: “Throw it down, O Moses.”
He threw it down, and behold, it turned into a serpent, swiftly crawling.
He said: “Pick it up and fear not; We shall return it to its former state.
And tuck your hand into your armpit and it shall come out white, but without harm—another miracle. Thus will We show you some of Our greatest wonders.
“Go to Pharaoh: he has grown tyrannical.” (20:9–24)
Here, in commissioning Moses, Allah makes no mention of Israel or its distress. For the offenses of Pharaoh, “he has grown tyrannical” suffices. The bulk of Allah’s speech to Moses consists of a summary of the true religion that Moses must preach to Pharaoh:
—that Allah is one;
—that worship of Allah is required;
—that prayer is required;
—that Judgment Day (“the Hour”) is coming, though Allah wants it to come without notice so that all may be recompensed for just the sort of lives they are living when the fateful moment comes; and
—that those who believe in Allah must not be led astray by unbelievers who follow only their own whims and passions lest the believers, too, should perish.
Allah does intend that Moses should lead the Israelites out of bondage, out of Egypt, and on to a land that He has promised them, but this theme—so overwhelmingly central in the long, continuous story told by the anonymous narrator of the books of Genesis, Exodus, and beyond—is decidedly muted here as also in other parallel accounts in the Qur’an. Thus, Qur’an 26:10–11: “Remember when your Lord called out to Moses: ‘Go forth to that wicked people, the people of Pharaoh—will they not fear Me?’ ” For Allah, the Egyptians’ core offense is that they do not worship the one true God. Their oppression of the Israelites is just one instance of the wrongdoing expected of unbelievers. Whence Allah’s tone in the opening words of a third qur’anic telling of the Moses story:
We are reciting to you some reports of Moses and Pharaoh, the very truth to a people who believe.
Pharaoh had grown high and mighty on earth. He had turned its inhabitants into diverse classes, holding a group among them to be weak, slaughtering their progeny and debauching their womenfolk. He truly was a corrupter. (28:3–4)
Egypt is a land of factional strife in Sura 28, and the Israelites, again unnamed, are just “a group among them.” Pharaoh’s overall offense is that he “had grown high and mighty” and “was a corrupter.”
Allah’s desire that all mankind should worship Him, pray to Him, and await His judgment on them is the motivating desire on His part that drives the qur’anic narratives forward, just as Yahweh’s desire for the fertility of Abraham and his descendants drives the biblical narrative forward. Why ever does He desire human homage? Why should He not want, as do the gods of some classical Greek philosophies, to have nothing at all to do with humankind? To this question, Allah gives no answer in the Qur’an; nowhere, in fact, is that question even asked. But that such is indeed His desire is beyond doubt and must be accepted as the premise that animates the oratorically surging, page-by-page, sentence-by-sentence forward momentum of the Qur’an as a work of literature. No wonder, then, that the heart of Allah’s commission to Moses regarding Pharaoh and his Egyptian subjects is that they should all repent and, to echo Allah’s speech to Moses, should acknowledge that He is God and there is no God but Him.
We have had occasion before to note Allah’s quite deliberate way of forestalling suspense in narration before it has a chance to build up. Many other kinds of literary narrative seek to build suspense. Qur’anic narrative often seeks the very opposite. This can be true both of the larger elements in a given narrative and of the smaller ones. Contrast Allah’s manner in Qur’an 20, as just quoted, with the manner of the anonymous narrator of the Book of Exodus as he builds suspense both within the overall structure of Moses’s call and within Yahweh’s presentation of the two “signs” that Moses is to employ to convince skeptics that he is backed by divine power.
In the Exodus story, Moses sees not a fire but a burning bush and draws near out of simple curiosity rather than, as in the Qur’an, in search of either a helpful brand (to kindle another fire) or of “guidance.” The Bible gives no early clue to what will happen once Moses reaches the burning bush. The biblical narrator carefully avoids “spoilers.” Then Yahweh speaks from the burning bush:
“Come no nearer,” he said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I am the God of your ancestors,” he said, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” At this Moses covered his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Yahweh then said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying for help on account of their taskmasters. Yes, I am well aware of their sufferings. And I have come down to rescue them from the clutches of the Egyptians and bring them up out of that country, to a country rich and broad, to a country flowing with milk and honey, to the home of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. Yes indeed, the Israelites’ cry for help has reached me, and I have also seen the cruel way in which the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now I am sending you to Pharaoh, for you to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” (Exodus 3:5–10)
Yahweh identifies himself not by claiming, as Allah does, that He alone is God, but rather by linking Himself to Moses’s ancestors and, by implication, to what He has done for them. Yahweh continues, announcing that He has noticed the suffering of His people at the hands of the cruel Egyptians and that He intends to free them and bring them to “a country flowing with milk and honey.” Contrast this speech with the speech quoted above in which Allah recites what is required of Moses as a Muslim and thus what he must preach to Pharaoh. In short, Allah addresses Moses principally as a prophet of the eternal, unchanging message of Islam, while Yahweh addresses him as the designated leader of an oppressed people. The difference matters hugely to the unfolding of the story.
As Allah tells that story, Moses approached the fire ready for guidance: an early clue, for, indeed, in what follows Moses unhesitatingly embraces the mission he has been given, asking Allah only to strengthen his spirit, grant him eloquence, and recruit his brother, Aaron, as reinforcement. No suspense or tension arises between Moses’s initial openness and his later, willing compliance. It is quite otherwise in the Book of Exodus where tension arises as Moses initially resists Yahweh’s call to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. “Suppose they will not believe me,” Moses objects,
“or listen to my words, and say to me, ‘Yahweh has not appeared to you’?” Yahweh then said, “What is that in your hand?” “A staff,” he said. “Throw it on the ground,” said Yahweh. Moses threw it on the ground; the staff turned into a snake and Moses recoiled from it. Yahweh then said to Moses, “Reach out your hand and catch it by the tail.” He reached out his hand, caught it, and in his hand it turned back into a staff. “Thus they may believe that Yahweh, the God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.”
Next, Yahweh said to him, “Put your hand inside your tunic.” He put his hand inside his tunic, then drew it out again: and his hand was diseased, white as snow. Yahweh then said, “Put your hand back inside your tunic.” He put his hand back inside his tunic and when he drew it out, there it was restored, just like the rest of his flesh. (Exodus 4:1–7)
In the Exodus version, Yahweh provides these demonstrations, these signs, only after and because Moses has tried to fight off Yahweh’s great commission. Moses’s resistance builds suspense; Yahweh’s reaction momentarily relaxes it, or remands it to its later, intended exercise before the allegedly skeptical Israelites. In the Qur’an, no such tension ever arises, for the demonstrations come before Moses has spoken at all. The Exodus version proceeds cinematically, as it were. God tells Moses to pick up the serpent, and—as we, the readers, look on—Moses recoils, not knowing that the serpent will turn back into his staff. Vicariously, we experience something of his moment of anxiety and suspense. By contrast in the Qur’an, Allah tells Moses beforehand that the snake will change back. Again, in the Exodus version, we look on as Moses withdraws his hand from his tunic and finds it leprously “diseased, white as snow,” and we share the tension (and his presumed horror) as he does not yet know that Yahweh will restore his hand to health and to its normal color. In the Qur’an, whiteness and health are associated, and the two insertions and withdrawals of the hand are collapsed into one. More to the point, Allah again tells Moses in advance that his hand will come out healthy. Where the Exodus narrator builds suspense, Allah forestalls it. In Allah’s way of retelling a Bible story for Muhammad’s benefit, the moral of any story permeates it from the beginning. Entertainment merely distracts from that moral point.
Not to digress further on a matter of style, the conduct of Moses and of Yahweh Himself during Moses’s confrontation with Pharaoh and the Egyptians demonstrates clearly that Yahweh is out for as smashing a victory as possible, while Allah’s goal is conversion, even of Pharaoh himself. Yahweh seems to have no intention of ever becoming Egypt’s God. Allah has every such intention.
The qur’anic narrative of Sura 20 continues as Moses with Aaron at his side confronts Pharaoh with Allah’s message. Allah sends the two of them off with encouragement:
“So go forth, you and your brother, with My signs, and do not neglect My remembrance.
Go to Pharaoh: he has grown tyrannical,
And speak gently to him; perhaps he will remember or be in awe of Me.”
They said: “We fear he might fly into a rage against us, or grow tyrannical.”
He said: “Fear not. I am with you, listening and seeing. Go to him and say: ‘We are the messengers of your Lord. Send out with us the Children of Israel, and do not torment them. We bring you a wonder from your Lord, and peace be upon him who follows right guidance. To us has been revealed that torment shall fall upon him who denies and turns away.’ ”
He said: “Who is your Lord, O Moses?”
He said: “Our Lord is He Who gave each thing its likeness in form, and then guided it.”
He said: “What of earlier ages?”
He said: “Knowledge of them is with my Lord in a Book. My Lord neglects nothing, nor does He forget.”
It is He Who made the earth level for you, and marked out in it highways for you, and made water descend from the sky, through which We caused to come forth pairs of diverse plants. Eat, and pasture your animals—in this are signs for those possessed of reason.
From it We created you, to it We shall return you, and from it We shall once more resurrect you.
And We showed him all Our wonders, but he called them lies, and disbelieved.
He said: “Did you come to drive us out of our land, through your magic, O Moses?
“We will indeed bring you magic to match it.
“So set a date for us and you, not to be missed by us or you, at a place midmost between us.” (20:42–58)
Just as Allah provided Abraham the arguments to use against his father and his people, so here, too, Allah is involved every step of the way. When Moses expresses fear that Pharaoh will “fly into a rage against us,” Allah actually dictates the first words that Moses is to say, having first counseled Moses to “speak gently” to Pharaoh: “perhaps he will remember or be in awe of Me.”
The meaning of “remember or be in awe” appears in Moses’s answer to Pharaoh’s tentatively open first question: “Who is your Lord, O Moses?” With the touch of gentleness that Allah has urged, Moses characterizes Allah to Pharaoh as “He Who gave each thing its likeness in form, and then guided it,” and so forth. At just this point, Allah interrupts the narration and, addressing himself to Muhammad or through him to us, concludes that “in this are signs for those possessed of reason.” Allah’s point is that Pharaoh might well have seen Allah’s signs in natural reality itself and so been prompted to “remember or be in awe.” It is in this sense that Muslims think of Islam—spontaneous submission to God—as mankind’s “natural” religion.
Pharaoh’s first reaction, however, like Azar’s (Abraham’s father’s), is to invoke his forebears and their quite different beliefs. If they were so mistaken, what has happened to them? Their fate, Moses says, is “with my Lord in a Book.” The Study Quran takes this Book to be the “Preserved Tablet” referred to elsewhere in the Qur’an as including a record of all human good and evil deeds. Islam’s Preserved Tablet is alternately the Qur’an itself or something like the Book of Life that appears at various points in both the Old and the New Testament, notably at Exodus 32:33, below, and in the New Testament at Revelation 20:11–12:
Then I saw a great white throne and the One who was sitting on it….And another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged from what was written in the books, as their deeds deserved.
Glossing Moses’s reply to Pharaoh’s question at Sura 20:52, Muhammad Asad writes: “I.e., [Allah] alone decrees their destiny in the life to come, for He alone knows their motives and understands the causes of their errors, and He alone can appreciate their merits and demerits.”
Pharaoh seems at first to be drawn into a thoughtful consideration of Allah’s message as delivered by Moses, but then suspicion overtakes him: Moses is out “to drive us out of our land, through your magic.” But Pharaoh has magicians too, and so it is time for a duel. Before turning to that scene, however, we must contrast Allah’s initial commission to Moses with Yahweh’s. Yahweh says to Moses:
“Look, I have made you as a god for Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron is to be your prophet. You must say whatever I command you, and your brother Aaron will repeat to Pharaoh that he is to let the Israelites leave his country. But I myself shall make Pharaoh stubborn and shall perform many a sign and wonder in Egypt. Since Pharaoh will not listen to you, I shall lay my hand on Egypt and with great acts of judgement lead my armies, my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. And the Egyptians will know that I am Yahweh when I stretch out my hand against the Egyptians and lead the Israelites out of their country.”
Moses and Aaron did exactly as Yahweh had ordered. (Exodus 7:1−6, emphasis added)
Yahweh does not want to convert Pharaoh into a Yahweh-worshipper. He does not want to tell Pharaoh anything through Moses. Very much to the contrary, Yahweh is going to see to it personally that Pharaoh remains stubborn so that He can show Pharaoh in no uncertain terms just who He is. As subsequent events in the biblical narrative will make only too clear, Yahweh wants to do all this by inflicting maximum violence not upon Pharaoh alone but also upon all Egypt. Egypt, the oppressor, must suffer all the oppression it has visited on Israel and then some. Yahweh is out for revenge.
Both the biblical and the qur’anic account continue with a staffs-to-serpents duel between Pharaoh’s magicians and God’s delegates. As Allah tells the story, Moses, challenged by Pharaoh to name his date and time, replies:
“Your appointment is on the Feast of the Pageant, and all people must be gathered there, in the morning.”
Pharaoh retired, gathered together all his cunning and came back.
Moses said to them: “Wretches! Do not lie in God’s name, or He will ravage you with a torment; liars shall surely fail.”
So they argued among themselves over their plan of action, and consulted in secret.
They said: “These two are sorcerers who intend to drive you out of your land by their sorcery, and do away with your customary practice. So muster your cunning and go forth in single file. Today, whoso comes out on top will surely prosper.”
They said: “O Moses, either you cast, or we cast first.”
He said: “No, you cast first.”
And it was as if their ropes and staffs appeared to him, through their sorcery, to be swiftly crawling.
In his heart Moses sensed fear.
We said: “Fear not; you shall indeed be the victor. Cast down what is in your right hand and it shall swallow what they devised. They merely devised a sorcerer’s deception, but the sorcerer shall not prosper, wherever he may be.”
The sorcerers were hurled to the ground, prostrate.
They said: “We believe in the Lord of Aaron and Moses.”
He said: “You believe in him before I grant you leave? He is merely the greatest among you, the one who taught you sorcery. I shall cut your hands and feet, alternately, and I shall crucify you on the trunks of palm trees. And you will surely know which of us is more grievous in torment and morelasting!”
They said: “We will not prefer you to what has come to us by way of clear proofs, nor to Him Who created us. Decree what you wish to decree: your decree runs only in this present life.
“We believe in our Lord that He may pardon our sins, and what you forced upon us of sorcery. God is better and more abiding.” (20:59−73)
How did whatever Moses had in his right hand devour the sorcerers’ “swiftly crawling” ropes and staffs? Allah does not linger over the details. Instead, He jumps to the remarkable conclusion of the duel: the stunning conversion of the sorcerers to the worship of Allah and their even more stunning zeal for Him against Pharaoh’s vow to have them mutilated and crucified. Pharaoh may well have proceeded to martyr his magicians; Allah does not indicate whether he did or not. But no matter: the former magicians now have their gaze fixed on the afterlife, to which, as they boldly remind Pharaoh, his rule does not extend.
The elements of this scene—a torturing tyrant, subjects holding to their faith despite the agony of torture, and his subjects’ confidence that their vindication will come in the afterlife—might well remind a Bible reader of the Second Book of Maccabees. There, a Greek tyrant who, like Pharaoh, claims to be divine, has demanded that seven Jewish brothers and their mother eat pork, thus renouncing the Jewish law and submitting to him. All refuse. Six, in turn, are tortured hideously and put to death. The seventh, scorning the tyrant’s attempt to bribe him, addresses him as “unholy wretch and wickedest of villains” (7:34) and concludes his gallows speech with a vision of what awaits the torturer and the tortured in the afterlife:
“Our brothers, having endured brief pain for the sake of ever-flowing life have died for the covenant of God, while you, by God’s judgement, will have to pay the just penalty for your arrogance. I too, like my brothers, surrender my body and life for the laws of my ancestors, begging God quickly to take pity on our nation, and by trials and afflictions to bring you to confess that he alone is God.” (2 Maccabees 7:36−37)
It is to just this kind of fearless trust in Allah’s justice and His power that Moses and Aaron have converted Pharaoh’s sorcerers—standing in, we may well say, for all of Pharaoh’s subjects. Their conversion is what Allah really wants. This was the message that He wanted Moses and Aaron to bring. They brought it, and the common people, in the person of these magicians, have heard it.
The staffs-to-serpents duel takes place in the Book of Exodus as well and ends, as in the Qur’an, with Moses and Aaron’s serpents devouring those of the Egyptian magicians. Pharaoh, however, now under Yahweh’s psychic control, remains adamant and will not allow the Israelites to leave Egypt. Yahweh then proceeds to torment Egypt at great length, first turning the Nile River to blood and then imposing a series of infestations or other afflictions that the anonymous biblical narrator describes in lurid detail: frogs, mosquitoes, horseflies, the sudden death of all livestock, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness. Midway in the plague of locusts,
Pharaoh sent urgently for Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against Yahweh your God and against you. Now forgive my sin, I implore you, just this once, and entreat Yahweh your God to turn this deadly thing away from me.” When Moses left Pharaoh’s presence he prayed to Yahweh, and Yahweh changed the wind into a west wind, very strong, which carried the locusts away and swept them into the Sea of Reeds. There was not one locust left in the whole of Egypt. But Yahweh made Pharaoh stubborn, and he did not let the Israelites go. (Exodus 10:16–20)
So it goes after each demonstration of Yahweh’s power. Pharaoh may waver or even repent. To choose one example, he says midway in the plague of hail: “This time, I have sinned. Yahweh is in the right; I and my subjects are in the wrong” (9:27). But each time, Yahweh himself forestalls any such conversion and, as the King James Version and derived translations put it, “hardens Pharaoh’s heart.” Conversion is simply not Yahweh’s goal. To underscore the point that He is the God of the Israelites, Yahweh sees to it that each plague spares Goshen, where the Israelites live.
In the final plague, Yahweh at last revenges Himself for the slaughter of the Israelite newborn boys by returning the favor to Egypt and redoubling it. As Moses delivers the dire verdict:
“Yahweh says this, ‘At midnight I shall pass through Egypt, and all the first-born in Egypt will die, from the first-born of Pharaoh, heir to his throne, to the first-born of the slave-girl at the mill, and all the first-born of the livestock. And throughout Egypt there will be great wailing, such as never was before, nor will be again. But against the Israelites, whether man or beast, never a dog shall bark, so that you may know that Yahweh distinguishes between Egypt and Israel. Then all these officials of yours will come down to me and, bowing low before me, say: Go away, you and all the people who follow you! After which, I shall go.’ ” And, hot with anger, he left Pharaoh’s presence. (11:4–8)
“Never a dog shall bark”: thus does Yahweh demonstrate that He “distinguishes between Egypt and Israel.” Converting Egypt is the last thing on his mind. And though Pharaoh’s magicians do say to him after the plague of mosquitoes, “This is the finger of God” (8:19), their concession does not bear comparison with the whole-hearted, martyrdom-ready conversion that Allah reports in the Qur’an. In any case, it is not Pharaoh alone whom Yahweh wishes to humiliate. He instructs the Israelites to ask the Egyptians for silver and golden jewelry and for clothing, promising His people that He will render their enemy compliant: “Yahweh made the Egyptians so much impressed with the {Israelite} people that they gave them what they asked. So they despoiled the Egyptians” (12:36).
The plagues leading up to the climactic tenth plague are a vengeful “un-creation” of Egypt’s natural wealth and serve, essentially, only to prolong Egypt’s agony en route to the final divine atrocity. As an artistic element in the biblical narration, the multiplication of the plagues does undeniably build up suspense and once may have contributed to an actual duel of the deities. It is conceivable that in an earlier version of the myth, Yahweh combatted Satan or an Egyptian god for control over Pharaoh. In such a version, Yahweh would attempt to induce Pharaoh to let Israel go, and it would fall to Satan or the rival deity to “harden Pharaoh’s heart.” The oddity of what we now read in the Bible, with Yahweh at cross-purposes with himself, could reflect later, radical editing to bring the myth into conformity with Israel’s later, stricter monotheism, a monotheism with no room for Satan or any other supernatural power alongside Yahweh Elohim. Be that as it may, the effect of the artistically extended narrative as we now read it upon the characterization of Yahweh is to underscore His vengefulness and His determination to make dramatically visible the distinction that He wants to preserve between the Israelites and the Egyptians.
Allah, as we have already noted, mutes the centrality of Israel in telling the story of Moses. Allah also severely mutes the matter of the Egyptian plagues. He mentions them only once, in the account given in Sura 7, whose continuation carries us to the fabled miraculous crossing of the Red Sea:
[The House of Pharaoh] said: “Whatever wonder you work to bewitch us, we will not believe in you.” So We brought down upon them the flood, locusts, lice, frogs and blood—wonders most evident. But they grew conceited and were a people reprobate.
When God’s torment fell upon them they said: “O Moses, call upon your Lord according to the covenant you have with Him—if you take away this torment from us, we shall have faith in you and send out the Children of Israel with you.” But when We relieved them of the torment for a period of time set for them to reach, there they were, breaking their promise. So We took revenge upon them and drowned them in the sea because they called the lie to Our signs and paid them no heed. And to the nation considered weak We gave in inheritance the eastern and western parts of the land which We had blessed. Thus was the good Word of your Lord fulfilled upon the Children of Israel, for they had endured with patience; and We utterly destroyed the works of Pharaoh and his people, together with all the monuments that they had built.
Then We led the Children of Israel across the sea….(7:132−138)
So vengeance or at least retribution figures, finally, not only in the story that the biblical narrator tells about Yahweh but also in the one that Allah tells about Himself. Allah includes as well both the liberation of Israel and the fulfillment of His promise to Abraham of a homeland. Like Yahweh, Allah punishes those who defy Him and rewards those who honor Him. But only Yahweh wants so badly to humiliate Pharaoh that He actively prevents the Egyptian ruler from acceding to His wishes. Allah wants Egypt, and even Pharaoh himself, to convert; Yahweh wants nothing of the sort.
In the Bible, it is unclear whether Pharaoh accompanies the army that, after reneging one last time, he has sent to halt the Israelite exodus. In the Qur’an, it is quite clear that Pharaoh does accompany them, but what does the haughty monarch think as the waves of the returning Red Sea began to engulf him? Allah tells us at Sura 10:91:
Then we led the Children of Israel across the sea, and Pharaoh and his troops pursued them, in their insolence and aggression. When drowning was near, he said: “I believe that there is no god except Him in Whom the children of Israel believe, and I am a Muslim.”
So Pharaoh dies a Muslim, and such conversion, all along, has been Allah’s agenda. Why beat them when you can persuade them to join you?
Yahweh’s focus is far more tightly riveted on victory as such. Yahweh has by no means forgotten His wish to grow Israel into a mighty nation and settle that nation in Canaan, but His desire for a spectacular victory over Pharaoh has acquired a momentum all its own. Yahweh orders the hastily emigrating Israelites to camp on the shore of the Red Sea so as deliberately to lure Pharaoh into pursuing them:
“You must pitch your camp opposite this place, beside the sea, and then Pharaoh will think, ‘The Israelites are wandering to and fro in the countryside; the desert has closed in on them.’ I shall then make Pharaoh stubborn and he will set out in pursuit of them; and I shall win glory for myself at the expense of Pharaoh and his whole army, and then the Egyptians will know that I am Yahweh.” And the Israelites did this. (14:2–4)
Pharaoh’s army does set out in pursuit. Moses stretches out his hand, as instructed by Yahweh, and Yahweh sends a great wind that drives the water back: “The waters were divided and the Israelites went on dry ground right through the sea, with walls of water to right and left of them” (14:22). The Egyptian army gives chase, but their chariots bog down. The waters begin to return; the Egyptians then cry in panic, “Let us flee from Israel, for Yahweh is fighting on their side” (14:25). But it is too late: the sea swallows them, and—horse and rider together—they all drown. On the far shore, the exultant Israelites sing in triumph:
Yah is my strength and my song,
to him I owe my deliverance.
He is my God and I shall praise him,
my father’s God and I shall extol him.
Yahweh is a warrior;
Yahweh is his name. (Exodus 15: 2–3)
Yahweh—in poetry, sometimes “Yah,” as in hallelu-yah, “praise Yah”—is indeed a warrior and not a missionary. He was out to show them, not tell them, and He has triumphantly done so. Egypt now knows in its broken bones that “I am Yahweh.”
And as for His own people, as the climactic tenth plague is approaching, Yahweh provides them with elaborate instructions for an annual future commemoration of His coming victory and their own coming liberation. This commemoration is to be inaugurated in a ritual meal that will take place for the first time during the very slaughter of the Egyptian firstborn. The Israelites are to splash the blood of a sacrificed sheep on their lintels, signaling to Yahweh’s Angel of Death that he is to “pass over” these households on his grim errand. The ritual replication of this meal is to become Israel’s annual Passover feast. Allah, unsurprisingly, makes no provision for any such commemoration. As already noted, the story that He tells, rather than principally the story of Israel’s liberation, is principally the story of Moses’s prophetic vocation. Moses looms larger in Allah’s telling than do the Children of Israel themselves, Moses’s people.
In an earlier chapter, we noted that Allah portrays Abraham as a prophet inveighing against the idolatry of his people, while the anonymous narrator of the Book of Genesis portrays an Abraham who in his migrations never once encounters an idolater. No such idolatry contrast applies when we turn to the two portrayals of Moses in action after the Israelite exodus from Egypt. In both accounts, the Israelites lapse into idolatry, worshipping a golden calf instead of the one true God. In both accounts, Moses reacts as angrily as God does. And yet one key difference does remain between the two portrayals. Yahweh, with Moses as His captain, punishes Israel with ferocious violence, including a slaughter whose scope bears comparison with the drowning of Pharaoh’s army. Allah, by contrast, though He angrily condemns the faithless idolaters, forbears to punish them with any comparable severity. In the Qur’an, the Israelite idolaters immediately repent, and Allah never fails to answer repentance with mercy.
In both accounts, the liberated Israelites proceed through the desert and encamp at the foot of a mountain—called Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb in the Bible, called simply “the Mountain” in the Qur’an. Moses ascends to the top of the mountain, remains for forty days and forty nights, and receives in writing a momentous revelation from God. Meanwhile, in Moses’s absence, Aaron and the Israelites lapse into idolatry, worshipping a golden calf that they fashion from the gold and silver brought with them as booty from Egypt. Allah and the biblical narrator tell the story of this golden calf with differing, sometimes quite colorfully differing, details: in the Qur’an, the calf lows, for example; in the Bible, it does not. However, it is the aftermath of the scandalous apostasy that reveals most about the anonymous biblical narrator’s understanding of Yahweh as compared with Allah’s self-understanding in the Qur’an.
We begin with Allah:
Thirty nights did We appoint for Moses, and thereto added ten, so the period with his Lord was complete in forty nights. Moses said to his brother Aaron: “Be my deputy among my people; act with righteousness and do not follow the path of the corrupt.” When Moses came to Our appointment and his Lord spoke to him, he said: “My Lord, show me Yourself that I may look upon You.” He said: “You shall not see Me, but look instead upon that mountain. If it remains firmly in place you shall see Me.” When the glory of his Lord appeared upon the mountain, it leveled it to the ground. Moses fell down, unconscious. When he came to, he said: “Glory be to You! I have repented before You and I am the first among believers.”
He said: “O Moses, I have preferred you above mankind with My mission and My speech. So receive what I bring you and be thankful.” And We inscribed for him on tablets moral precepts regarding all matters, specific in all their details. “So grasp them firmly and command your people to adopt what is best in them. I shall show you the abode of wrongdoers.” (Qur’an 7:142–145)
After the miracle of the crumbled mountain, Moses humbly repents of his audacious request to see Allah. Allah, tacitly embracing his prophet’s repentance, proceeds to give him tablets upon which Allah has written “moral precepts regarding all matters.” The word Torah is not used in this passage but occurs often elsewhere in the Qur’an with reference to Allah’s great gift to Moses of comprehensive guidance for his people. Muslim commentators debate what is to be understood by “the abode of wrongdoers.” The Study Quran offers several suggestions, of which the most interesting is that this is a reference to the Land of Canaan, whose iniquitous inhabitants are shortly to be displaced by the conquering Israelites.
The biblical narrator says nothing about a leveled mountain but does tell a related story about Moses asking to see Yahweh:
[Moses] then said, “Please show me your glory.” Yahweh said, “I shall make all my goodness pass before you, and before you I shall pronounce the name Yahweh; and I am gracious to those to whom I am gracious and I take pity on those on whom I take pity. But my face,” he said, “you cannot see, for no human being can see me and survive.” Then Yahweh said, “Here is a place near me. You will stand on the rock, and when my glory passes by, I shall put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand until I have gone past. Then I shall take my hand away and you will see my back; but my face will not be seen.” (Exodus 33:18–23)
The cleft in the rock where Yahweh hides Moses is the cleft alluded to in a well-known Christian hymn that begins: “Rock of Ages cleft for me, / Let me hide myself in Thee.” Both the qur’anic and the biblical story bespeak the awesome and fearsome power of God. Allah implies to Moses that if he were ever to look upon Allah, he would crumble as the mountain crumbled. Yahweh, who regards the very enunciation of His name as a dread manifestation of His power, states quite clearly that if Moses were to gaze upon the glory of His face, he would die. In either case, God wishes to be known yet proclaims that, past a certain limited point, He cannot be known.
Allah continues:
After Moses had departed, his people fashioned from their jewellery a calf, an effigy that lowed. Did they not see that it neither spoke to them nor guided them to any path? Yet they worshipped it and were truly sinful. But when they rued their handiwork and saw that they had strayed in error, they said: “If God does not show us mercy and forgive us we shall surely be lost.”
When Moses returned to his people, furious and grieving, he said: “Wretched is the way you acted on my behalf while I was away! Do you wish to hasten the decree of your Lord?” He threw down the tablets and grasped his brother’s head, dragging it towards him.
He said: “Son of my mother, the people took me for a weakling and were about to kill me. Do not let my enemies rejoice at my misfortune, and do not count me among those who do wrong.”
He said: “O Lord, forgive me and my brother, and admit us into Your mercy, for You are the most merciful of those who show mercy. As for those who worshipped the calf, the anger of their Lord shall blaze forth upon them and disgrace will be their lot in this present life.”
This is how We requite those who utter falsehood.
As for those who commit evil deeds and then repent and believe, your Lord thereafter is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.
When the anger of Moses was stilled, he took up the tablets, inscribed with guidance and mercy toward those who piously fear their Lord. (7:148–154)
Even before Moses returns from the mountaintop, the people have repented of their sin. Moses is angry nonetheless. He tells them that they have acted like people who want to bring on the Last Judgment (“the decree of your Lord”) with all the Lord’s righteous wrath. In his fury, Moses throws down the tablets and grabs his brother, Aaron, by the head. Poor Aaron pleads with him, however, alleging his own weakness, and Moses immediately relents, begging Allah’s forgiveness on the two of them, “for You are the most merciful of those who show mercy.”
The passage concludes with Allah’s own commentary on the episode, predicting punishment, to be sure, but only “in this present life”—that is, not forever in hell—for the briefly idolatrous Israelites and presumably promising a fuller pardon for Moses and Aaron. Why? Simply because—as Allah says, characterizing Himself—“your Lord thereafter is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.” The story resumes as Moses picks up the dropped tablets and, his anger abated, prepares to lead his people on to the Promised Land with the precious tablets for guidance. The mood, as the episode concludes, is one of forgiveness and reconciliation.
The same episode comes to a far more turbulent and violent resolution in the Bible. Descending the mountain, Moses
saw the calf and the groups dancing. Moses blazed with anger. He threw down the tablets he was holding, shattering them at the foot of the mountain. He seized the calf they had made and burned it, grinding it into powder which he scattered on the water, and made the Israelites drink it. (Exodus 32:19–20)
As in the Qur’an, Aaron tries to exonerate himself by blaming the Israelite people. Ignoring him, Moses abruptly takes his stand at the gate of the camp and cries out: “Who is for Yahweh? To me!” (32:26). All the Levites rally around him, Moses himself being of the tribe of Levi. Moses then reveals to his brethren that they are to be the instruments of Yahweh’s dire rage:
He said to them, “Yahweh, God of Israel, says this, ‘Buckle on your sword, each of you, and go up and down the camp from gate to gate, every man of you slaughtering brother, friend and neighbour.’ ” The Levites did as Moses said, and of the people about three thousand men perished that day. “Today,” Moses said, “you have consecrated yourselves to Yahweh, one at the cost of his son, another of his brother, and so he bestows a blessing on you today.” (32:27–29)
We have seen Allah, in conversation with Noah and later with Abraham, insisting that devotion to Him must take priority over mere friendly affection or family feeling. We see the same severity here in Yahweh. Later in the Bible, the Levites’ place in the life of Israel will be that of a landless priestly or semi-priestly caste supported by a tithe on the other Israelites.1 The biblical narrator explains here that they earned this privilege through their ruthlessness at Mount Sinai.
As in the Qur’an, so in the Bible, Moses eventually begs forgiveness from Yahweh for his people’s sin. A day after leading the Levites in their punitive massacre, Moses says to the people:
“You have committed a great sin. But now I shall go up to Yahweh: perhaps I can secure expiation for your sin.” Moses then went back to Yahweh and said, “Oh, this people has committed a great sin by making themselves a god of gold. And yet, if it pleased you to forgive their sin…! If not, please blot me out of the book you have written!” Yahweh said to Moses, “Those who have sinned against me are the ones I shall blot out of my book. So now go and lead the people to the place I promised to you. My angel will indeed go at your head but, on the day of punishment, I shall punish them for their sin.” (32:30−34)
And Yahweh then proceeds to send a plague upon the Israelite camp: the day of punishment turns out to be the very day of Moses’s intercession.
In the story that the biblical narrator tells, Yahweh is far more violent with the Israelites than Allah is in the story that He tells. Moses as well is a far angrier, more impetuous figure in the Bible than he is in the Qur’an. In the Qur’an, Moses casts the tablets down but does not break them and later picks them up again. In the Bible, Moses shatters them. Earlier, some of Moses’s words to Pharaoh were virtual rants. With regard to the Levite slaughter and the following plague, Yahweh’s vengeance may seem warranted inasmuch as, first, the Israelites do not repent in the Bible as they do in the Qur’an, and, second, while Allah punishes both in this life and in the life to come, Yahweh punishes only in this life and so, as it were, must inflict more or less immediately whatever punishment has been merited.
Nonetheless, reading these two accounts side by side, one comes away with the strong impression that Allah is positively eager to forgive, while Yahweh has to be talked into it. At Exodus 33:11, we read, “Yahweh would talk to Moses face to face, as a man talks to his friend.” The Old Testament makes this claim of intimacy with Yahweh for no one but Moses. Yet in seeking Yahweh’s forgiveness, Moses must put this very friendship into play. Forgive my people, he says in effect, or we can no longer be friends. Yahweh has to be cajoled or almost bribed into mercy. And even then, He must give Israel one last kick, that final plague, for good measure. The Hebrew root n-g-f usually means “strike with plague” but can simply mean “strike” or, in my (admittedly loose) translation, “kick.”
Both the qur’anic and the biblical accounts end with the Israelites and their divine Lord exiting stage left, bound for Canaan. In our comparative review of the two accounts and their respective characterizations of God, we have not considered every stage in the story. We have not discussed the infancy of Moses, for example, or told of his early murder of an Egyptian. We have not recounted his flight into the desert, where he takes a Midianite wife who mysteriously circumcises him in the middle of the night, shortly before God appears to him. We have not considered the hugely detailed provisions and prescriptions of Torah as the Bible conveys them—or the Books of Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy, or even the Ten Commandments incised on tablets “by the finger of God.” Nor have we considered in their entirety the different accounts of Moses given in the Qur’an, with their often quite specific details and their sometimes complementary morals. We have offered only a harmonized selection from them, just enough for the purposes of comparison.
Within that comparison, the story that the biblical narrator tells, despite the violence of its characterization of Yahweh, has remained with reason an archetypal legend of up-from-slavery liberation. African slaves in the pre–Civil War United States sang,
Go down, Moses,
way down in Egypt’s land.
tell ole Pharaoh
to let my people go!
The legend, its commemoration in the beautiful ritual meal of the Passover seder, the charming, child-centered, early-medieval Hebrew Haggadah—all this has been borrowed and borrowed and borrowed again by other groups than the Jews, and not without textual warrant. Exodus 12:37–38 says that the Israelites departed Egypt as
about six hundred thousand on the march—men, that is, not counting their families. A mixed crowd of people went with them, and flocks and herds, quantities of livestock.
Taking that “mixed crowd” to be non-Israelites who followed Moses to freedom, there is reason for the Passover seder to have become a kind of universal liturgy of liberation with Yahweh at its center as the divine liberator who “brought us up out of Egypt.”
But enough has been shown along the way of this double exposition to make clear a further point of overriding importance for our understanding of Allah. By Allah’s own account, no figure in the Qur’an had a vocation more closely paralleling Muhammad’s vocation than did Moses. For besides being the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad—in this regard very clearly paralleling Moses—was the unifier and liberator of the Arab people, and Allah was his guide, his support, and his refuge as he fulfilled that vocation. In responding to Allah’s call, Muhammad was required to be as determined as Allah Himself to proclaim Allah’s unique divinity and to summon first the Arabs and then the world beyond Arabia to worship Him. In so doing, he was required to be as ready as Allah shows Himself ready at all times to be “the most Merciful of those who show mercy” (Qur’an 7:151). A historian would call Muhammad’s vocation historic. Unsurprisingly, the Muslims of the world have been content to call it by the nobler term prophetic.