Our word “hypocrite” comes from a Greek term for “actor.” You pretend to be someone you are not. Today it is commonly applied to anybody who says one thing but does another. Such as a preacher ranting against homosexuality and then being found in a love tryst with his pool boy. There is a passage in one of Paul’s letters that many Christians like to use to condemn certain sinful practices (sexual sins, greed, etc.), found in Romans 1:18f. But they fail to continue into chapter 2 (there were no chapter divisions in the original writings). There Paul rebukes the Christians, saying “Therefore you have no excuse, you foolish person, everyone of you who passes judgment; for in that matter in which you judge someone else, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.” Paul is essentially calling out the members of the church for being hypocrites, in that they were doing the same things they were condemning in others. Jesus had a similar message: “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). It is easier to judge others than to examine oneself.
One of the principal characters in the Bible is Moses. He is the one said to be the great Lawgiver, as the story in Exodus has him going up on Mt. Sinai to be given the Law by God Himself. Scholars think the law of Israel actually developed gradually, finally coalescing during or after their times of captivity, as they sought to strengthen their national identity and seek God’s favor to avoid further catastrophes. Moses may be a literary creation, designed to show that the Law truly came from God, to build up the nation’s identity and to give credibility to the Law. (You can go back to post #12, The Next Ten Commandments, and decide for yourself if these laws sound like they are the product of divine wisdom or not.) But for this discussion we will treat the story as if fact rather than fiction.
But was the great Lawgiver himself a hypocrite?
In Exodus we are told that Moses is raised in Pharaoh’s household, but kills an Egyptian for abusing a fellow Hebrew. He flees from Egypt and ends up in Midian. There he comes in contact with a Midianite priest and his family, and marries one of the priest’s daughters. So, Moses is married to the daughter of a Midianite priest; keep this in mind for later. Moses goes on to encounter God up on Mt. Sinai and is commissioned to rescue the Hebrews from Egypt. He embarks on his way back to Egypt per God’s instructions. Then we encounter a short but exceedingly odd story that most people are unaware of (previously discussed in detail in post #14):
But it came about at the overnight encampment on the way, that Yahweh met him [Moses], and sought to put him to death. So Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and threw it at Moses’ feet [lit: made it touch at his feet]; and she said, “You are indeed a groom of blood to me!” So He left him alone. At that time she said, “You are indeed a bridegroom of blood”—because of the circumcision.
Exodus 4:24-26
God sought to put Moses to death! Shortly after assigning him the task of freeing the Israelites from Egypt. That’s odd, to say the least. I assume the story means that God afflicted Moses in some way that would lead to death, while giving him an opportunity to live, since God can smite pretty quickly throughout the Bible. But why? It seems that Moses, although a Hebrew and therefore living under the covenant made with Abraham, and later an enforcer of God’s law among the Hebrews, had not even had his own son circumcised. Perhaps because the Midianites did not circumcise, and Moses went along with the customs of his wife’s people? Judging from Zipporah’s reaction, maybe because she did not want their son circumcised? But with Moses threatened with death (God accomplishes a lot by threat throughout the Bible) Zipporah takes a flint and circumcises their son. Apparently this causes God to relent and He lets Moses live. Now, why didn’t God review this with Moses when He was commissioning him on Mt. Sinai, rather than waste all that effort only to kill him on the way? Seems like something they should have discussed before Moses started out on his journey. The message of this odd story seems to be that circumcision is so important that God was willing to kill even Moses for not adhering to this command. So, Moses, the great Law-giver, is off to a rocky start for not following one of the most basic laws among the Hebrew people.
Most people in the Judeo-Christian tradition believe that God is absolutely pure and therefore incapable of lying, but apparently God is not above having other people lie for him. God told Moses to lie to Pharaoh. In Exodus 3:18 God tells Moses to ask Pharaoh to let the Israelites go three days out into the wilderness in order to sacrifice to their god, when He is merely using this as an excuse to punish Pharaoh and both God and Moses know the intention is to keep going and never return. This is clearly a deception. One could argue that this is not a lie, just not the full truth, but either way it is a deception. Most believers think God’s character does not allow him to lie/deceive, but such people ought to read 1st Kings 22, where God makes it quite clear He is willing to deceive people. And Moses, the great Lawgiver, goes on to deliver this lie to Pharaoh in Exodus 5, and in fact Moses even embellishes it a little. He tells Pharaoh, “Otherwise He will strike us with plague or with the sword,” which God did not say. So, Moses is not only willing to lie on behalf of God, but even juice it up a bit. Lying is not exactly hypocrisy, but they are both forms of duplicity.
Fast forward past all the plagues God puts upon Egypt including the killing of innocent children and the people of Israel arrive at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19). There Moses goes up on the mountain to commune with God and receive the Law. Apparently it is a fearsome sight, with smoke and thunder and earthquakes around the mountain. The people become frightened and turn to Moses’ brother Aaron for advice. He has them give him their gold so he can fashion a golden calf to serve as an idol for the people to worship (Exodus 32). Aaron then declares, “This is your god, Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (v. 4).
God is very angry about this and tells Moses He is going to destroy the people and start over with Moses. Wait, didn’t God try this with the flood, and then came to regret it? Well, Moses talks Him down and “the Lord relented [or repented] of the harm which He said He would do to His people.” So, after forgetting the lesson He should have learned from the flood episode, He needs Moses to straighten Him out, and then unchangeable God changes His mind. So, what does happen? When Moses returns to the people it is his turn to get angry. He has the golden calf ground into powder and makes the people drink it. (Since gold is good for treating arthritis maybe this helps them trudge through the desert for forty years?)
Let’s pause for a moment. In verse 4 Aaron actually says in the original Hebrew: “These are your gods…” in the plural. In 1st Kings 12:28 King Jeroboam makes two golden calves for the people to worship and makes the same statement in the plural. But Aaron only made one calf. Was King Jeroboam’s blasphemous action the basis for the Exodus golden calf story, even retaining the same phrase, without correcting its plural tense? Then in 2nd Chronicles 34 we are told good King Josiah grinds idolatrous molten images into powder, similar to what Moses did with Aaron’s calf. Many scholars believe the Mosaic Law and the surrounding stories may have been developed around the time of King Josiah, so that events later in Israel’s history were incorporated into the Exodus narrative. This may explain why the book of the Law was “discovered” during Josiah’s reign (2nd Kings 22:8f, 2nd Chronicles 34:14f). Another interesting glimpse into how the Bible came together.[1]
Returning to the story, Moses calls for those who are faithful to him, and he has them go through the people with their swords, killing (indiscriminately it seems) about 3,000 of them. Apparently God is still angry so He also “smote” them: “Then the Lord struck the people with a plague, because of what they did with the calf which Aaron had made.” (Exodus 32:35).
So, the people are killed because of the calf which Aaron had made. Surely Aaron, the ring leader, the creator of the golden calf, is dead, right? On the contrary, Aaron gets promoted to be the head priest over all of Israel! I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that he’s Moses’ brother, right? I am not sure how to characterize this other than pure hypocrisy. The worshippers of the calf are killed, but the maker of the calf gets promoted. Clearly we cannot use the example of God or Moses in trying to understand principles like justice and fairness.
The book of Numbers has a number of disturbing stories. In chapter 15 the people find a man gathering wood on the Sabbath. They take him into custody because they are not even sure what is to be done in this situation. Recall that the Commandments simply say that one is not supposed to work on the Sabbath. Is picking up wood work? What if wood carving was this guy’s hobby? Is that work? Anyway, Moses says the Lord says to stone him to death, and they do. Stoned to death for picking up wood. So, Moses’ brother makes a golden calf to be worshipped and gets promoted to high priest, but this guy picks up some wood on the wrong day (did they even have calendars?) and he gets stoned to death? To make it worse, it says earlier in that same chapter that a sin committed in ignorance can be forgiven through certain offerings. You’re telling me that the Lord, or Moses, could not allow this man some slack for a first offense and require an offering rather than his life? The people were not even sure what to do in this situation; did it really demand a death penalty? And making a golden idol does not? This seems like pretty clear hypocrisy.
As the people of Israel are slowly making their way to the Promised Land they go through the regions of Moab and Midian (Numbers 25). There some of the men of Israel get involved with the women of these tribes and begin to worship their god Baal. This results in more executions among the Israelites. There is also an interesting episode in which one of the men brings home a Midianite woman to his family, right in front of all the people. Apparently he didn’t get the memo. One of Aaron’s grandsons takes a spear and runs them through together, suggesting perhaps that the two were having sexual relations at the time. All this prompts the Lord to tell Moses to strike the Midianites, blaming them for deceiving the Israelites. I would point out that the Moabites and Midianites were simply practicing their religion; they were being true to their own religion. It was the Israelite men who were betraying their covenant with Yahweh and turning to worship Baal. But the Midianite women get the blame, not the unfaithful Israelite men. That’s at least a bit hypocritical. Maybe a lot.
This comes to a head in Numbers 31. Moses sends an army of 12,000 men to slaughter the Midianites. The army goes out and kills all the men, and brings back the women and children. Moses is angry that they spared the women, because he blames them for causing the Israelite men to falter (Numbers 31:15, 16). Hold on Moses. Who did you marry? Not just a Midianite woman, but the daughter of a Midianite priest! If you go back and read the exodus story in detail you will see that Moses’ Midianite priest father-in-law proves to be helpful to him, as does his Midianite brother-in-law. In return Moses commands his army to wipe out all his wife’s kinsfolk. This is clearly gross hypocrisy on Moses’ part. Maybe he’s remembering that bloody foreskin episode, but Moses was to blame there, not his wife; God was punishing Moses for that, not his wife. (Perhaps we can take solace in knowing that this slaughter did not really take place, even according to the Bible. The Midianites are recurring opponents in the narrative. E.g., later in Judges 6 we are told the Midianites were “innumerable” and even take control of Israel for seven years.)
To make it worse, Moses tells them to kill all the male children and all the women who are no longer virgins. “But all the girls [lit: female children] who have not known man intimately [i.e., virgins] spare for yourselves” (Numbers 31:18). This is essentially a form of war rape, which sadly has been practiced throughout the history of war. (At this writing war rape is being reported again, this time in the Russia-Ukraine war.) In fact, this treatment of war victims is incorporated into the law of Israel: see Deuteronomy 21:10-14. Basically it says that if a soldier sees a beautiful woman among the captives then he has to give her thirty days to mourn the family he just killed, and then he gets to take her as his wife. I’m sure that in those thirty days all will be forgiven, right? Of course, the woman is given no say in the matter; her only right is that if you are not pleased with her then you have to let her go without selling her for money, “because you have humbled her,” “humbled” being here a euphemism for “enslaved and raped.”
Some of you may be tempted to perform some mental contortions to explain why such actions were acceptable in the sight of a god from whom all morality and ethics are supposed to originate. Just don’t. Please don’t. It is OK to simply say that these stories and the laws they engender are horrible and wrong. Even if you love your God and you love your Jesus then worship Them, but do not worship these horrible stories and pretend that they have anything to do with goodness and righteousness.
There’s another odd episode involving Moses’ wife, or should I say wives. In Numbers 12 Miriam and Aaron appear to be upset that Moses had married a Cushite woman. So, Moses had a second wife beside his Midianite one, and this one was not Hebrew either?! Scandalous, and hypocritical, since Moses seems to think Hebrew men are supposed to marry within the tribe. The Cushite people were in the area of what is now Ethiopia and were likely black. I think this is borne out by the punishment given to Miriam. Just Miriam, even though Aaron also complained; Aaron is clearly teacher’s pet. Miriam’s punishment after complaining about Moses’ dark-skinned wife is that her skin is turned “as white as snow” – with leprosy! She remains that way for seven days. So Moses the Hypocrite married two non-Israelite women and is not punished, nobody ran a spear through him and his wives, and God the Inconsistent once again declines to punish Aaron who was just as guilty as Miriam. Again, don’t look to these stories if trying to understand the concepts of justice and fairness.
I find it sadly ironic that the Great Lawgiver Moses should be portrayed as such an unprincipled, cruel and hypocritical figure. But why would the story tellers do this? These stories likely developed over time, independently. The story of Moses marrying a Midianite woman may have come from a different source than the one about slaughtering the Midianites. Likewise the idea that he married a Cushite woman from another. The golden calf story may have been adopted from events in King Josiah’s day, without concern for how it made Aaron look. Such inconsistencies are seen throughout the Bible, probably representing the way these books were spliced together from various sources. Using the Moses story as an example, read Exodus 33. At one point it says, “So the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend” (v. 11). Then later in that same chapter the Lord says, “You cannot see My face, for mankind shall not see Me and live!” (v. 20) I strongly suspect these were two separate stories that ended up in proximity to each other. The scribes and priests who assembled these texts did not let such concerns get in the way of a good story. You can also find such discontinuities in the Gospels and Acts if you look for them. (The author of Luke/Acts explicitly states he compiled his gospel from various sources.)
How odd that when God finally does punish Moses it is for striking a rock to produce water rather than just speaking to it as he was instructed (Numbers 20). Moses is not executed, like so many others before him; he lives to a ripe old age of 120. He is just not allowed to enter the Promised Land but only to see it from a distance. And not for one of his acts of cruelty or gross hypocrisy but for a technicality. If you are looking to learn about morality, Moses and his god are not the role models you seek, at least, not in these stories.
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Thinking exercises:
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1. Do you think Zipporah ever wished she had let God finish Moses off, considering what he later does to her people?
2. If you told your child not to go over to a certain friend’s house, and he did anyway, would you punish the friend, or your child? Does this principle apply to the Israelite men going over to the Moabite and Midianite women?
3. If your boss told you and your fellow employees to falsify your time cards, with the result that you all were fired while your boss got promoted, what would you think of the ethical standards of your boss and that company? Does this apply to Aaron and his golden calf and how Moses and God responded to it?
4. What do you think of the morality of killing a girl’s family and then forcing her to be your wife?
[1]The excellent book Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman goes into more detail about this.
2 responses to “17: Moses the Hypocrite”
Another very interesting column!
Thanks!