Black Spirituality Religion : Moses' Tongue

silent-ra

Well-Known Member
BANNED
Dec 29, 2004
247
9
Moses' Tongue

Common Knowledge - Volume 12, Issue 1, Winter 2006, pp. 150-176

Marc Shell​


As a child I had a habit, frequently ineradicable among young stutterers, of preferring the weak vowel. Instead of saying "da-da-daddy," for example, I would say "duh-duh-daddy." The English-language term schwa—sometimes called the "murmur vowel"—names this uh sound.1 My teachers in Hebrew school taught me that schwa was related to sheva, which is the sign in written Hebrew "placed under a consonant letter to express [what Jewish grammarians regard as] the absence of a following vowel sound," and, they always emphasized, it was "an arbitrary alteration of shāw', emptiness, vanity."2 As such, the schwa recalled for me the Mosaic commandment that we should never speak lashav (vainly) about adonai (God):

Lo tisa etshem-adonaieloheycha lashav ki lo yenakeh adonai et asher-yisa etshmo lashav. [Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.].3
Does this commandment mean that one should not use the name of God for any frivolous or malicious purpose or in magic? Or does it outlaw using God's name in guaranteeing commercial contracts? Or does it only prohibit "swear [End Page 150] words"? In Hebrew school, my friends and I compared this Mosaic commandment with the prophet Ezekiel's complaint about the vanity of false prophets (Ezek. 13:6–9). But, as a young stutterer, I took Moses to mean something like, "Don't use the schwa vowel." And for me, that meaning amounted to "Don't stutter." This was a regulation that, once internalized, all but assured that I would stutter.

My most unbearable stuttering experience in Hebrew school was the unavoidable one at the beginning of every class. I would be called upon to announce my presence during the alphabetical roll call. Mr. Teicher—a stern and always disapproving teacher—would begin to read out the roll in predictable, inexorable sequence. There was plenty of time for me to anticipate my failure. I trembled fearfully, more and more, until my name, me-ir, came up. "Me-ir, are you present?"

Every stammering schoolchild rehearses the phrase, "I am present," in his head—over and over and over again—during the hours-long minutes before his turn comes up. (Stutterers who have difficulty saying their own names sometimes resort to changing their names to easily pronounceable ones. Soon afterward, however, they discover that their new, once easily pronounceable names, have now become difficult to pronounce.) Not a few stutterers—including many who have gone on to prominence in the field of stuttering therapy—dropped out of school on account of their stuttering.4 And many young scholars who stutter do not go on to do graduate work because they fear that they will fail oral examinations—even as I failed fourth grade in elementary school.5

In Hebrew school, I would try, always unsuccessfully, to answer, in Hebrew, ani poh ("I [am] present"). But the schwa—a-a-a-a-ani—was too much for me; and my fear of stuttering helped precipitate the failure I feared. Stuttering at Hebrew school was so difficult an experience for me that I often played hooky all day in order to avoid being there at all. (Many stutterers play hooky.)6 On such days, I would hide out from Mr. Teicher at the local French-language library. I would read the Five Books of Moses and identify with Adam, who hid among the trees when God called to him: "Where are you?" (Gen. 3:8). And I would especially read over the passage in Exodus where God calls out "Moses, Moses" from the burning bush in Midian (Ex. 3:4).

Moses had a severe speech impediment of his own. Yet somehow Moses managed to get out a magnificent answer, hineni ("I am here"), when called. I knew that it was more difficult for Moses, as a stutterer, to answer hineni even [End Page 151] than it was for Abraham to say hineni when God sought him out to ask for the sacrifice of Isaac his son.7 Hineni eventually became a great prayer of mediation between the congregation's emissary and God: the cantor, both dummy- and ventriloquist-like, recites a private prayer that begins hineni as he takes over the crucial synagogue service on the morning of Rosh Hashanah.

My colleague and former officemate Neil Schmitz, at SUNY Buffalo, is right to insist, in his first person account "To the Speech Clinic," that "at some point in the stutterer's early life there must be a question—a question so powerful that it is forgotten, because all that is remembered is the circumstance. I am obliged to speak." "It is not what is to be said that makes the stutterer hesitate," Schmitz claims, "but that it must be said."8

At the Burning Bush
At the burning bush, God tells Moses to speak for him. Why Moses?

On the face of it, God's choice of Moses to be his dummy spokesperson is odd. Moses is not a person who speaks well. Presumably, an omnipotent God could cure Moses of his speech impediment. (God says so himself, though in the form of three questions: "Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?")9 Isaiah reminds us that "the tongue of the stutters shall be ready to speak distinctly."10 God's capacity to cure "tonguelessness" is a principal aspect of the miracle of Pope Leo III's tongue-restoration.11 There is also the story reported in the Gospel According to Saint Mark: "And they [the disciples] brought to him [Jesus] a man who . . . had an impediment in his speech; and they besought him to lay his hand upon him. And taking him aside from the multitude privately . . . he spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and said to him, Eph'phatha, that is, Be opened. And his . . . tongue was released, and he spoke plainly" (7:32–35).12 Most relevantly for our present purpose, there is Moses' own report about Balaam's talking ***: "And the Lord opened the mouth of the ***" (Num. 22:28).13 An *** is a creature that has no faculty for speech, but in Numbers an *** speaks eloquently to the pagan prophet Balaam. God also made Balaam's mouth utter blessings [End Page 152] rather than curses—they are Balaam's words that Jews recite every time they enter a synagogue: "How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel!" (Num. 24:5).14 If God could make an *** speak, and could make an enemy speak well of Israel, surely God could heal Moses' tongue.

In some religious traditions Moses actually asks to be cured of his stuttering. So in the Qur'an Moses says, "O my Lord! Expand my breast for me, / And make my affair easy to me, / And loose the knot from my tongue, / (That) they may understand my word."15 And Allah cures him. Some Christian interpreters likewise expect that God's presence ought to cure Moses of his speech defect. (The Easy-To-Read Translation thus has Moses say, "And now, even after talking to you, I am still not a good speaker" [Ex. 4:10]). But Moses makes no explicit request in Exodus to be cured, and he is not cured. (The Knox Translation of 1955 even emphasizes that the appearance of God, while not the cause of the stutter that Moses has already apparently had for years, is a factor that "exacerbates" it. Says Knox's Moses at Exodus 4:10, "I am more faltering, more tongue-tied, than ever.")

The Stuttering God
Moses is not the only being to hesitate at the burning bush. God does too. Is that why he seeks out a stutterer? Like a teacher reading out the roll, Moses demands that God speak out the ineffable name: "What [is] his name?" (Ex. 3:13).16 The stutterer James Malcolm Rymer was right to stress, in his first person account, The Unspeakable; or, The Life and Adventures of a Stammerer (1855), God's relevant status as "unspeakable."17 But God says in the Hebrew of Exodus 3:14, eheyeh asher eheyeh ("I am that I am" in the King James Version). The prophet Isaiah recalls this passage in his reduplicative paraphrase at 51:12, anokhi anokhi hu ("I, even I, am He" [King James Version]).18 The Septuagint's Greek rendering of Isaiah's paraphrase—ego eimi ego eimi ("I am I am")—likewise brings out the repetition or existential doubling in the Hebrew. The Latin of Saint Jerome's Vulgate—ego ego ("I, I")—suggests indeed a divine stutter.

When I was coming up the speech ladder in the 1950s, my francophone Jesuit teachers interpreted Jerome's "ego ego" mainly in terms of Jesus' self-presentation in the Gospel According to Saint John ("Before Abraham was, I am").19 But I had my doubts, since we all knew well the anglophone Protestant [End Page 153] doggerel that mocked the divine antiname: "I Am I Am, I Am I Am, / What kind of name is I Am I Am?" This version of the doggerel is quoted from "I Am I Am According to Dr. Seuss," a poem published in the journal Theology Today.20 At the time, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) had already authored books and animated movies featuring Gerald McBoing Boing—the little boy who spoke only in nonanimate sound effects. Celebrated as a talking-animal poet, Dr. Seuss made hay from making puns and fun of "childish" speech defects like mine. (Dr. Seuss went on to write about "Sam-I-Am" in Green Eggs and Ham [1960].)21

God as ventriloquist needed a spokesman because he was unable to speak directly to the people. We will see that the dummy Moses, whom he required to speak for him, was both too much and too little like God to do the job. We will also see, though, that the most important aspect of the job would seem to require that the Hebrews' monotheistic legislator and alphabetical scribe be a stutterer.

Heavy and Uncircumcised
But my tongue is not flexible. Thought is easy; speech is laborious.
—Arnold Schoenberg, Moses and Aron
The tongue is not an efficient servant of the intelligence.
—Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems 11.1902b
Moses frames his reluctance to call on Pharaoh in terms of two kinds of speech impediment. The first is that he is "heavy of speech"; the second, that he has "uncircumcised lips."

The passage relevant to the first (Ex. 4:11) is translated thus by George M. Lamsa, an Assyrian from "Kurdistan": "O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore nor since thou hast spoken to thy servant; for I am a stutterer and slow [kaved] of speech." Lamsa was an expert translator from his native Aramaic (Syriac), often said by scholars to be much like ancient Hebrew. However, the Hebrew term kaved would seem to mean, "literally," something like the English heavy, which is how a few translations deal with the term.22 The second time that Moses brings up his impediment, the dialogue goes: [End Page 154]

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: "Go and tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelites depart from his land." But Moses appealed to the Lord, saying: "The Israelites would not listen to me; how then should Pharaoh heed me—a man of impeded speech!"
(Ex. 6:10–13)23
There are various alternates for the translation of impeded speech.24 The more literal translators have it that Moses claims to be "of uncircumcised lips."25 The German Elberfelder has the relevant passage as "ich unbeschnittene Lippen habe"—slightly varying the terminology from the great Bibel (1545) of Martin Luther. (Luther's momentous "conversion" of July 2, 1505—the day he decided to become an Augustinian monk—took place near the felicitously named town of Stotternheim, sometimes glossed as "Home of Stuttering.") Rashi said in the eleventh century that "uncircumcised" means "closed" or "stopped up," and he gives several examples from other biblical verses to corroborate his view.26 Some of these verses relate to circumcision events.27 A few involve physical "deformity" linked with language disability. But none tell us what it really means to have "closed" lips.

Only earlier and later events in Moses' life—and likewise in the concomitant history of monotheism and alphabetical writing—help us understand what's wrong, or what's right, with Moses' tongue. We will consider first how Moses [End Page 155] talked in terms of how he walked, then interpret how he talked in terms of aspects of his life that have to do with burning, nursing, forgetting, multilingualism, and alphabetization.

Walking the Talk
. . . just as when we are children, we always have less control over hand and feet and at a still younger age cannot walk at all, so the young cannot control their tongue.
—Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems 11.902b
We tend to forget it: Moses had trouble walking as well as talking. He really needed that staff of his. Sometimes his staff did not suffice. Moses was sometimes unable to stand on his own legs—or even to lift up his own hands because they, too, were "heavy." At the battle of Adonai-nissi against the Amalekites (associated with Balaam), Moses required a stone chair on which to sit. Human shoulders then propped up his arms and hands:

And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses' hands were heavy [ki-vae-deem]; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.
(Ex. 17:11–12)28
Had Aaron and Hur not provided Moses with lapidary "wheelchair" and humanoid "crutches," the Israelites would have been destroyed. Instead, they destroyed the Amalekites, who were descendants of Esau.29 Esau was, according to one theory, the "stranger" with whom Jacob had had a famous wrestling match.30 (Other theories say it was God.) On account of that match, Jacob, thereafter known as Israel, became so crippled that he had to use a staff.

The "heaviness" of Moses' hands, to which the Torah refers, was partly the result of Moses' having to stand, arms outstretched, for a long period of time, without the aid of his usual prosthesis, his staff. Yet Exodus had already identified [End Page 156] "heaviness"—which here qualifies his weakness of limb—as the principal factor explaining his stutter. When God had commanded Moses to tell Pharaoh to let his people go, Moses was reluctant to take on the mission because, as he insisted, he had a heavy (ke-vad) tongue (Ex. 4:10). The same brother, Aaron, who at Pharaoh's court had become the stuttering Moses' prosthetic mouthpiece, became at Adonai-nissi a prosthetic support of one of Moses' lame arms. Moses' physical weakness goes "hand in hand" with his oral one. The Knox Translation of Exodus brings out this relationship by thus translating Moses' comment about his having a heavy tongue: "Then Moses said, Lord, have patience with me; but all my life I have been a man of little eloquence, and now that Thou, my Master, hast spoken to me, I am more faltering, more tongue-tied than ever." The English word falter can indicate problems both with walking and with talking. ("He felt his legs falter," writes Richard Wiseman in his Treatise on Wounds [1672];31 "Thy tongue falters in thy mouth," writes John Fisher [1535]).32

By some accounts, the Egyptian princes with whom Moses has been associated and even identified are likewise lame of leg or arm. Philip Glass thus displays Moses' prototype as lame in his opera Aknaten (1984).33 Freud, though, gives short shrift to the literal lameness of Aknaten (presumably Amenophis IV) and likewise to the literal lameness of Moses.34 Freud focuses instead, in his last work Moses and Monotheism, on the monotheistic aspects of Aknaten's rule—to which James Henry Breasted in his 1894 dissertation devoted much attention.35 And, following Arthur Weigall, Freud also looks to a stuttering likeness, supposedly uncanny, between the sound of the apparently Hebrew word adonai (God), with its schwa, and the sound of the seemingly Egyptian aten or atum.36

Moses' lameness partly explains why he always has his staff (matteh) about him. We first learn about that staff in the section of Exodus where we hear Moses complain about his speech disorder. God responds to Moses' carping about his speaking disability with a question:

What [is] that in thine hand? And [Moses] said, A rod. And [God] said, Cast it on the ground. And [Moses] cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, [End Page 157] Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And [Moses] put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand: That they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee.
(Ex. 4:2–5)37
Perhaps Moses' staff is a Hermetic caduceus like the serpentine staff of cure-all Asclepias.38 In any case, the staff serves to remind us that Moses' ancestor Jacob was lame of hip (as the result of a wrestling match) and carried a staff; that Jews are descendants of Jacob, called yisrael (Israel), meaning "he who wrestles . . . with God"; and that Jacob is said by some to have leaned on his staff when passing on his blessing to his sons39 and when crossing the Red Sea on his way to Egypt.40 Not surprisingly, the view is widespread that the stuttering Moses' staff and the stumbling Jacob's staff are the same. Moses' wife Zipporah herself apparently said so.41

Jewish families, descendants of Jacob (or Israel), celebrate every spring the holiday called pesach (Passover). One etymology has it that the name comes from the Angel of Death "passing over" the Jews at the time of the tenth plague. A lesser known etymology is that pesach has the same root as the Hebrew word meaning "to hobble."42 That word is used with reference to another lame Jewish [End Page 158] prince, Mephibosheth, who was a model for the polio novel The Little Lame Prince.43 The English term hobble is cognate with the Dutch term hobblen, meaning "stammer, stutter."44

Expelling the Cripples
Egypt, Moses' native land, is the source of human beings' earliest visual record of crippling like that caused by polio. The Glypotek Museum's "polio stele," our first "written" record of a virus infection, consists of a hieroglyph from Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt, drawn in approximately 1400 BC. It depicts someone (perhaps a temple priest) showing typical clinical signs of paralytic polio.

The stele alludes to the epidemic plague recalled in both Egyptian and Hebrew cultural history and mythology. In some versions, a group of people were expelled from Egypt not because their deity caused an epidemic plague (like the calamities that Moses brings on the Egyptians and that Moses' deity safeguards the Hebrews against) but because these people carried an infectious disease. Pharaoh isolated them in order to protect others from getting ill.45 Many writers take Moses to have been an Egyptian—among them Manetho, Strabo, Toland, and Freud.46 And many ancient authors, including the Roman historian Tacitus, claim that the exodus began because Bocchorius (as Tacitus calls Pharaoh) consulted with the oracle of Hammon and tried to rid Egypt of the portion of the population whose bodies had been deformed (tabes quae corpora foedaret).47 Only then did a leader (Moses) arise from among those with deformed bodies.48 We do not know whether the long-lived historical memory of this tabes should be associated with tabes dorsalis (now called "creeping paralysis"), syphilis, leprosy, polio, or some other deforming illness.49 Eduard Meyer, whose influential Aegyptische Chronologie develops this thesis, was writing at a time of polio epidemic in the first years of the twentieth century. [End Page 159]


Click for larger view Figure 1
"The Polio Stele." Limestone with original paintwork. Memphis, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, c. 1300 BCE. The man has a thin, withered leg widely believed to be the earliest evidence of poliomyelitis. Courtesy of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Burning of the Hand or Tongue
One gloss on Moses' speech impediment has it that infant Moses was injured during the course of a contest with Pharaoh's counselors (at this time Moses was presumably still without language—literally infans). Moses had worried some of Pharaoh's counselors by making an occasional grab for Pharaoh's crown. So these counselors offered baby Moses a choice of two plates: one with burning coals on [End Page 160] it and the other with gold. The infant was directed now by the angel Gabriel: Moses chose the coals. Hence Moses burnt his tongue, either by placing a live coal in his mouth or by attempting to cool off his hand in his mouth. There is some dispute as to the details—and many different illustrations—in the Jewish and Christian traditions.50 Still, this ancient story has it that Moses' stuttering is the result of politically needful physical damage to his tongue during infancy. That damage gives Moses what one stutterer calls a "handicap in the mouth."51 The tale is silent about any long-term handicap to Moses' hand of the sort about which we learn at the battle of Adonai-nissi.


Click for larger view Figure 2
Nehemia ben Amshal of Tabriz. "The Infant Moses Challenging Pharaoh and Undergoing an Ordeal by Fire." From Nawlana Shahin of Shiraz, "Commentary on the Book of Exodus," Judeo-Persian manuscript (Isfahan, Iran, 1686), fol. 18a. Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

[End Page 161]

Most Muslims reject the tongue-burning story. After all, they also insist that Moses was cured of his stutter. Moses, they suggest, must have been bodily perfect. Many Jews, on the other hand, are willing to entertain not only the notion that Moses was bodily imperfect but that he had other bad traits as well:

A certain king, having heard of Moses' fame, sent a renowned painter to portray Moses' features. On the painter's return with the portrait the king showed it to his sages, who unanimously proclaimed that the features portrayed were those of a degenerate. The astonished king journeyed to the camp of Moses and observed for himself that the portrait did not lie. Moses admitted that the sages were right and that he had been given from birth many evil traits of character but that he had held them under control and succeeded in conquering them. This, the narrative concludes, was Moses' greatness, that, in spite of his tremendous handicaps, he managed to become the man of God.52
Some rabbis have attempted to ban further publication of legends putting down Moses' character.53 But most Jews accept the idea that there was something odd, if not also wrong, with Moses' tongue (langue)—and hence also with his various languages.

Moses' Tridental Language
The chronology of Moses' life divides into three, forty-year geolinguistic divisions (Egyptian, Midianite, and Hebrew). These chronologically equal periods match Moses' association with three women (Batya, Zipporah, and Jochebed).

Egyptian: first is the Egyptian-speaking Batya, the noblewoman who was Moses' adoptive mother. During his forty years' "sojourn" in Egypt, Moses learned the tongue of Batya, who was Pharaoh's daughter and/or sister. (Presumably, Moses believed that Batya was his biological mother in the same ambiguous way that lame, punning Oedipus believed mistakenly that Corinthian Merope was his biological mother.) If we believe the New Testament Book of Acts, moreover, Moses also learned hieroglyphic writing and the Egyptian legal and religious lore.54 Some argue that really the only written language Moses could have known, before leaving Egypt, was Egyptian hieroglyphs. In keeping with this view, Freud—who follows here such other "historians" as the Greek-writing Egyptian priest Manetho of Sebbenytos, the Latin-writing Roman geographer [End Page 162] Strabo, and the English-writing Irish scholar John Toland—insists that Moses was essentially if not also biologically an Egyptian.55 Did Moses also learn to speak a little Hebrew during his first forty years? Perhaps so. As an infant, only a few days old, before being set out on the Nile, Moses would have heard Hebrew from his biological mother Jochebed and from his siblings Aaron and Miriam. (It is left unwritten whether this period was long enough for him to have been circumcised.) After being plucked out of the Nile, Moses probably learned a good deal of Hebrew from Jochebed, who then became his nurse mother. Moses clearly knew some Hebrew when, at age forty, he killed the overseer of Hebrew-speaking slaves. That incident led to Moses' fleeing to Midian.

Midianite: the flight to Midian marks the beginning of Moses' second geolinguistic period. Goethe, in his essay "Israel in the Desert" (1819), writes that we meet Moses in exile in Midian as one who is "barely able to communicate."56 Presumably, Moses' high-style Egyptian and infantile Hebrew wouldn't do there. At forty years old, Moses was de facto again an "infant" and had to pick up the Midianite tongue along with the customs and traditions of that people.57 From among the Midianites, Moses took a wife, Zipporah, daughter of the Midianite "high priest" Jethro (also called Reuel). The notorious passage in the Torah in which his wife Zipporah flings his son's foreskin at Moses is, as Rashi suggests, not unrelated to the question of Moses' "circumcised tongue." (Circumcision as such is sometimes understood in terms of writing and elision.)58 In his "Experiment Solitary Touching Stutting," Francis Bacon too writes of "Moses, who was linguae praepeditae."59 (Lingua means "the tongue or a tonguelike organ" as well as "a language," and praeputium means "the foreskin, the prepuce."60 Curiously, Freud does not really pick up the hint.) Zipporah has an important role in one of the earliest works on the subject of Moses, the drama Exagoge by Ezekielos the Poet, a Jewish playwright.61 The Midianites lived by Mount Sinai and held that [End Page 163] mountain in awe.62 Moses was around eighty years old at the time that God, from the burning bush at Mount Sinai, told him to go back to Egypt. Moses by then had spoken the Midianite tongue, perhaps almost exclusively, for forty years. (The topos is picked up by Zora Neale Hurston in Moses, Man of the Mountain.)63 The Hebrew-language Torah leaves unsaid what spoken language, if any, God used when he spoke with Moses at the burning bush, or which language Moses used.

Hebrew: we have seen that the Hebrew-speaking Jochebed, Moses' biological mother, became his nurse mother after Moses' adoptive mother Batya hired her. (One legend has it that Moses refused milk from the first nursemaid whom Batya hired, perhaps because it was unclean or nonkosher.) In Midian, Moses might well have forgotten a good deal of his Hebrew mother's tongue; by the same token he might have forgotten some of his spoken Egyptian. So argued Rashbam in the twelfth century: Moses told God that, since he had left Egypt at a young age and was now eighty, he lacked fluency in the Egyptian language and would have to stutter to find the proper words.64 Moreover, since Midian, which had a strange system of writing (now called "alphabetical"), Moses might have begun to develop a different attitude toward the "hieroglyphical" writing he had learned in Egypt. We may speculate that Moses stuttered for the reason that, as a Hebrew who did not know that he was a Hebrew, he had forgotten who he (really) was—at least in terms of "ethnic" identity. One consequence of exile and enslavement is how easily it comes about that one's tongue will "cleave to the roof of [one's] mouth."

Thus, Psalm 137, in its concern with such forced emigration and forgetfulness of the homeland as often befell slaves, suggests that the consequence of slavery in Babylon is a form of hand-and-mouth disability: "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors / required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! / Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.65

After the Babylonian exile due to Nebuchadnezzar, most of the Israeli people forgot the Hebrew language and were able to say only one prayer.66 If anyone [End Page 164] stood in danger of forgetting his people, it would be the infant Moses. Is that one reason for translating Moses' first complaint to God as, "When I get up before a crowd my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth"? (That is the translation of Moses' words to God in The Word Made Fresh.)67 From talking with Egyptian travelers, Midianite-speaking Moses might also have noted that both Egyptian and Hebrew had changed during his forty-year absence from Egypt. Forty years is a long time—enough, as it would turn out, even to build or rebuild a people, its culture, its language.

So Moses, required by Sinai's God to speak to Pharaoh, might have felt heavy of tongue at the burning bush because he had burned his tongue, or did not know Egyptian very well, or had forgotten the Promised Land (or had never known of it at all).

Let My People Go: Which Language?
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt-land
Tell old Pharaoh
To let my people go.
—African-American spiritual
It is not clear to us (and maybe not clear to Moses either) which language God wants Moses to use when he speaks before Pharaoh. When Moses gives his reason for hesitating to take on the job, is he thinking of his inability to speak well in one particular language or another—Egyptian? Hebrew? Midianite?—or in any and all languages? The prophet Ezekiel's task is thus apparently much easier than Moses' was, and he knows it: "And he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them. For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel" (Ezek. 3:4–5).68 (As a child playing hooky in Montreal, I used to wonder whether my observation that infants from bilingual homes often "babble" differently in different languages was relevant to the infant Moses' speech impediment. My assumption about multilingual babbling has since become the subject of scientific study.)69

Is the long-term emigrant Moses prone to stutter in Egyptian, say, on account of his having lost the diplomatic language of Egypt? That is the suggestion of the emigrant Rambam (he had left Spain for Egypt) in the twelfth century.70 [End Page 165] Or was God requiring Moses to speak Hebrew to Pharaoh, his adoptive grandfather? An outburst in Hebrew would be one way for God—through his dummy Moses—to announce to Pharaoh that the slaves had now become a nation in their own right.71 Herder, millennia later, would say that a nation, or Volk or gens, simply is its language. If Pharaoh were a late-eighteenth-century monarch, he would understand the gesture of a rebellious Jew using baby Hebrew in the royal court—even if the king himself knew no Hebrew whatever. Was Moses worried that, if he spoke Hebrew, Pharaoh would be unable to understand the particular meaning of his words? Or was he more afraid that, if Pharaoh understood the gesture of his using Hebrew, Pharaoh's heart would harden?

The Dummy Brother
A ventriloquist God, himself something of a stutterer, suggests, in response to the stutterer Moses' hint that God find another dummy to go to Pharaoh, that Moses become a ventriloquist and find himself a dummy of his own (Ex. 4:13–15). Enter now, the Hebrew-speaking Aaron, brother of Moses. Aaron is the elder brother. (One view has it that Moses hesitated to accept God's mission because Moses thought that the honor, such as it was, should go to the senior brother.)72 From now on, Moses' brother Aaron speaks for Moses as if he were Moses' Lordkeeper. (The "Lordkeeper"—an official title—spoke for the stuttering English King Charles I. Charles was the ostensible author of the strangely iconodule best seller Eikon Basilike, and he called himself unfit to speak in propria persona: "Now, because I am unfit for much speaking, I mean to bring up the fashion of my predecessors, to have my Lordkeeper speak for me in most things.")73

The Torah often refers to Moses and Aaron as if they two were one subject. It is almost, in the grammar of Exodus, as if stuttering Moses and fluent Aaron were Siamese twins. Recognizing the ekphrastic, conjoined personification at work, the Torah (often) uses a singular verb with a double subject: "Moses and Aaron goes." Or sometimes it uses a singular subject with a plural verb: "Moses go" or "Aaron go." The Qur'an renders the brothers even more explicitly corporate.

The Torah's frequently plural name (elohim) for its apparently single God (adonai) is a related problem, expressed nowhere more clearly than in a need for written law. [End Page 166]

Aleph-Bet
Moses was the . . . the first [man] who imparted the alphabet to the Jews.
—Eupolemus (second century BC), [Greek] Fragment 1
When the stutterer Moses travels from Midian to Egypt in order to join up with his fluent brother, Moses knows more or less three languages. What language did Moses and Aaron speak to each other as they started out on their conjoint, ventriloquist-dummy career? Perhaps it was the infant Hebrew that Moses remembered from having played with his Hebrew-speaking nurse mother Jochebed's son some eighty years earlier. Or perhaps Aaron knew some Egyptian.74 Ultimately, it may not matter (much) which of these languages they used when speaking with each other. In terms of the great intellectual, spiritual, and legislative journey that the consanguineous, collactaneous, and conjoint brothers had to make during the following forty years, both the Hebrew language and the Egyptian language were seriously defective—from the perspective of the Jewish God. Hebrew was not a written language at that time, and the Jews needed a written language. Egyptian, though a written language, was also defective: it relied on a hieroglyphic, an image-based, system of representation that was anathema to the Jewish God. (Some scholars understand hieroglyphic script as purely conceptual or nonrepresentational writing, but their overly historical view is, as we shall see, beside the philosophical point. So too is the opposite view: that alphabets are partly representational.)75 As soon as the Jews left Egypt, these twinned problems—that Hebrew was not a written language and that Egyptian was an inappropriately written language—became clearly significant. At this point, the writing system of Midianite—a language that Moses the stutterer could read and write, while his fluently speaking brother could not—came to the forefront of Jewish spiritual history, where it has remained ever since.

Scholars have long believed that Moses picked up something from the Midianites as well as something from the Egyptians. Usually they say that Moses got the idea of a violent God in Midian and the idea of monotheism in Egypt.76 These scholars would do well to focus also on the linguistic factors at work in Moses' multicultural background. The tablets of the law obtained by Moses on Mount Sinai were apparently written in the North Semitic alphabet, or aleph-tov, of Midian.77 (This speculation is related to a claim made in the first fragment attributed [End Page 167] to the Greco-Jewish historian Eupolemus in the second century BC,78 and it is supported by scholars like Hubert Grimme.)79

So the two brothers needed each other: the elder was able to speak properly, like most people; but only the younger, the socially handicapped, knew how to write properly. The laws retrieved from Mount Sinai had to be written in an alphabetical, nonpictographic language such as Moses had learned in Midian. In order to accomplish God's purpose, Moses needed the linguistic help of Aaron to prepare the geographic exodus from Egypt, but he also needed the Midianite alphabet to express the spiritual exodus from Egyptian creed and the spiritual entrance to a new religion. The tablets of the law, themselves graven, include the quintessentially important prohibition of "graven images," so it stands to reason that the tablets should not be graven with images or hieroglyphs. The alphabet was crucial in the reformation of Israel as a literate, iconoclastic people.

Still, even the newly Hebrew, Midianite alphabet was, in some small way, pictographic, not absolutely unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is all too easy to confuse some North Semitic letters with some hieroglyphs: that is, to confuse some more-or-less pictographic or acrophonic—yet still transitionally alphabetic—symbols with the older, idol-reminiscent signs. The decalogue, which commands, "Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image," was itself graven, like the Golden Calf. The English word graven in the King James Version is not a bad translation of the Hebrew pesel. And the same God who disallows the graven image (pesel) actually enjoins Moses to engrave (pisal-licha) the second set of stone tablets of the law (Ex. 34:1). No matter how worried Moses might be that his iconodule people would misunderstand the stone tablets and their new symbols—the alphabet—as images, God insists that Moses produce tablets at least like the ones that he smashed when provoked by the Golden Calf: "Pisal-licha two stone tablets like unto the first . . . which thou didst break."

Whatever Aaron's fluency in spoken Hebrew, his understanding of the distinction between idol-reminiscent hieroglyphs and alphabetical written characters is inadequate. Nowhere is the inadequacy clearer than when he goes along with the making of the Golden Calf, soon after the exodus from Egypt and at precisely the moment when his brother is on Mount Sinai receiving the laws: "And [Aaron] received the gold at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving [End Page 168]


Click for larger view Figure 3
The hieroglyph for stutter. Vladimir S. Golénischev, ed., Les papyrus hiératiques nos. 1115, 1116 A et 1116 B de l'Ermitage impérial à St.-Pétersbourg (St. Petersburg: Manufacture des papiers de l'état, 1913). Widener Photographic Services, Harvard University.
In the Middle Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, from which this writing is taken, the servant speaks to his master: "You must answer when questioned. You must speak to the king with presence of mind. You must answer without stammering! A man's mouth can save him . . ." (Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3 vols. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973], 1:212).

In the writing, the seated man with hand to mouth is the determinative used after verbs (and other words) for speaking, thinking, eating, and feeling. The Egyptian verb nitit is one of a set of verbs with a preformative n- and a reduplicated biliteral root (in this case, it, keeping in mind that i is a consonant here). These verbs are generally intransitive, often reflexive, and frequently iterative, conveying repeated or continuous action. See Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 3rd ed. (London: Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, 1957), 212, § 276; and Giovanni Conti, Studi sul bilitterismo in semitico e in egiziano (Florence: Istituto di linguistica e di lingue orientali, Università di Firenze, 1980).


[End Page 169]
tool, and made a molten calf" (Ex. 32:4).80 Making an Egyptian idol—the graven image of a calf—is not the act of a man who has transcended representational symbolization or understands alphabetical writing. (Muslim tradition denies Aaron's backsliding in much the way that it denies Moses' stutter: the Qur'an introduces one "al-Samiri" into the narrative, and it is al-Samiri, not Aaron, who makes the idol.)81

Moses disliked graven imagery so deeply that he smashed the graven tablets that God had given to him in the presence of Aaron's graven idol. (An engraving of Rembrandt's Moses Smashing the Tables of the Laws hangs in the Freud Museum in London.)82 Such anger is often associated with those who stutter, or happer. (William Horman writes in his Vulgaria [1519] about "a foul anger: in the which the mouth foams, the nostrils drop, and the tongue happers.")83 The same anger came to the fore when Moses violently struck the rock in the desert; and some interpreters claim that anger helps to explain Moses' buffing. (Buffing denotes "speak[ing] with obstructed and explosive utterance, . . . stutter[ing].")84

The Golden Calf that so angered Moses was probably a representation of Hathor85 —an Egyptian cow-deity often shown with a solar disk flanked by horns on her head. The Theban Hathor was considered a goddess of the dead and wore the interestingly "acrophonic" hieroglyph for "west" (amenta) on her head.86 From this viewpoint, Moses might have objected to the Golden Calf not merely because it was an idol, and in particular the idol/goddess of love, dance, and alcohol—Hathor. He might have objected also because Hathor could have had on her head an exemplar of the system of quasi-representational writing that Moses was trying to reject. The Golden Calf may have been a linguistic shibboleth-in-reverse, which could help to explain the demigenocide that an acrophone precipitated among the Jewish population after their crossing of the Red Sea.

Arnold Schoenberg, in his great opera Moses and Aron (1926–32), suggests how "Aron," when he allows for the worship of the Golden Calf, himself stands for something so presumably material as the idol. Moses, on the other hand, stands for something so ideally immaterial as alphabetic writing.87 Moses' words [End Page 170] fail in the public sphere, where they are most needed, because of the relative difficulty of the alphabetic abstraction required to conceive the Hebrew God. Thus Schoenberg's insightful opera "ends" with Moses' plaint about how words fail him: "O word, thou word, that I lack! (Moses sinks to the ground in despair)."88 As Michael Gielen says, "[Moses'] vocabulary is quite limited. He uses immense concepts like 'eternal,' 'omnipotent,' etc., whereas Aaron is much more fluent and more nimble at speaking."89

The "source" of the alphabet seems to me and other scholars to have been Midian, where Moses spent the middle forty years of his life. But it does not follow that Moses was the only Jew to pick up on it there. It even seems likely that the Jews already had long-standing relations in Midian. First, Jacob's youngest son Joseph was sold into slavery (instead of dying in the pit into which his brothers had cast him) thanks to the mediation of Midianite traders.90 The way to slavery in Egypt was thus by way of Midian, even as the way out of idolatry in Egypt was by way of Midian. Second, Pharaoh's Semitic slaves probably worked the turquoise mine at Serabit el-Khadem—in the Sinai desert near one of the spots that scholars say was the historical Mount Sinai.91 By Midianite trading, the Jews were brought to Egypt as slaves; by Midianite writing, the Jews were freed.

Law Codes
Also laws were first written by Moses for the Jews.
—Eupolemus, Fragment 1
Moses' speech impediment indicates a kind of legislative capacity. (It is the law of Moses that Martin Luther criticizes when Luther puts down stammering in his commentary on Galatians.)92 By the same token, Moses' stutter suggests how [End Page 171] inability to get words out makes for acting out—and for action. (In the great Translation Scene in Faust [1808], Goethe allies the biblical Moses with Faust's transformation of Word into Deed.)93

Other cultures too feature innovative legislators or rulers who stutter. Battus consulted the oracle on account of his stutter and came thus to found the Greek colony at Cyrene in Libya (630 BC).94 (One legend has it that Battus's name means "stutterer.") The stuttering Roman Emperor Claudius (41–54 AD) made new laws on the subject of language and added three letters to the Roman alphabet.95 The Huron lawgiver Dekanawida (sixteenth century) stuttered, which is sometimes educed as an explanation for why and how he formed, through his spokesperson Hiawatha, the great alliance with the Iroquois.96 There are also the iconoclast Byzantine Emperor Michael II "the Stutterer" (820–29); the French King Louis II (877–79); Bohemund III "the Stutterer," Prince of Antioch (1163–1201); the British King George VI (1937–52); and King Charles I of England, already discussed.

Consider as well Camille Desmoulins (1760–94), whose speech impediment has long been an interest of novelists,97 playwrights,98 and biographers. Desmoulins was a notary who, on account of his stutter, had no law clients. But when it came to politics, Desmoulins finally found his persona or speaking voice. Called "the first republican of France," Desmoulins became fluent on July 12, 1789.99 On that day, famously, he was the man who called the crowd "to arms" and, as some say, commenced the French Revolution.100 After that day, Desmoulins's medium of fluency became writing—the revolutionary press of pamphlets and newspapers. [End Page 172]

Do legislators stutter because speech dysfunction helps create political language? Enthusiastic prophets such as Jeremiah and Isaiah are given precise instructions about what they should say to the people and to rulers. But the reluctant, speech-impeded Moses is given room for creativity. The Hebrew word tzit-tzit refers to the 613 fringes of thread attached to the corners of the prayer shawl that male adult Jews are commanded to wear; each fringe signals one of the laws that Moses, the stuttering legislator, passed on.101 The term tzit-tzit suggests Moses's stutter: it is a "pure" reduplicative, like murmur and barbar.


Click for larger view Figure 4
Jean Duplessis-Bertaux, "Camille Desmoulins Addressing the People on July 12, 1789, at the Palais Royal," in Historical Pictures, Representing the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred during the Early Period of the French Revolution, intro. Claude Fauchet and Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas (Paris: Auber, original proprietor, 1803). Courtesy of Collection Selechonek.

Cure-Alls
The Jewish God made no offer to repair Moses' heavy tongue. God called upon Aaron to be Moses' spokesperson instead.

But the Christian deity cures even mutes. The Douay Bible's "comment" (1609) on the Isaiah passage, "The tongue of mafflers [stutterers] shall speak readily and plain," is: "This prophecy of maffling or imperfect tongues, to speak readily, is fulfilled in the Church of Christ."102 Not surprisingly, then, the Christian apostles did not need the same prosthetic aids that Moses required: spokespersons like Aaron and alphabetic writing borrowed from Midianite. When Jesus sent forth his apostles, and warned them about opposition and persecution, his enthusiastic dummies were unafraid. Along with his command to spread the gospel was his promise that God would be with their mouths: "When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what [End Page 173] you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you." (Matt. 10:19–20).103

God's being "with the mouths of his disciples" is at the very center of Pentecostal Christianity and its endorsement of enthusiastic ventriloquism. On the day of Pentecost, it was "given to them what they should speak." For it was not they who spoke but "the Spirit [who] gave utterance" (Acts 2:4): "The Spirit took full control of their mouths so that they said not one word except what He wanted spoken. And He wanted only one thing said: ' . . . they spoke the wonderful works of God'" (Acts 2:11).104 For the Book of Acts, Christology would seem to overcome the problems about language and multilingualism that inform the story of Moses.105

We have asked which particular language Moses speaks to Pharaoh. The Book of Acts seeks to void this question by overcoming (or sublating) the very notion of particular tongues. The familiar may become an other one or the all-fulfilling none:

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.
(Acts 2:1–11)106
Acts obviates the problems posed by the stuttering barbarians of Babel and, likewise, puts down all the down-to-earth ways we muddle through despite our problems with language and communication. The Book of Acts posits a perfection of [End Page 174] absolutely fluent simultaneous translations by which to overcome every ordinary and political issue of communication in a postalphabetical Promised Land.

Moses—as any happerer, buffer, or cripple might—irascibly struck a desert rock when he was told to talk it into producing water. The failure to speak persuasively to a stone is apparently why this thrice infanted stutterer was not allowed to enter the Promised Land.107 He had also smashed the engraved tablets of the law—more stones—when he could not communicate his anger adequately in words. Still, it seems likely that, had Moses, or another of his socially disabled ilk, not really destroyed the first set of tablets and then really carried down the second, there would have been no Promised Land for anyone to write about as a spiritual ideal.

A Glottal Catch
A glottal stop is, in Webster's words, "the speech sound produced by momentary complete closure of the glottis, followed by an explosive release." The word for stutter in some languages contains the glottal stop, or glottal catch, which is "a complete stoppage of the breath-stream by the vocal cords."108 In English, speakers make this stop "between the two oh's of 'Oh-oh!,' when spoken in surprise or reproof."109 The feel is very much like a cough—which is how Henry Sweet, a model for George Bernard Shaw's Professor Higgins in Pygmalion (1916), described it in his Handbook of Phonetics (1877) and History of English Sounds (1888).110 Among languages where glottal stops play an important role is the Native American Chumash.111

In written Hebrew, the first letter, aleph, is not, as it is often said to be, "silent." The aleph indicates the glottal stop with which stutterers are so familiar112 —and the letter is also the alphabetic counterpart of a hieroglyph associated with the ox or cow, and hence with idolatry and the Golden Calf.113 The [End Page 175] sound of the sudden opening or shutting of the glottis with an emission of breath encapsulates Moses' difficult role as legislator in a context where the One God is revolted by images; where the divine prophet stutters; where the divine name is unpronounceable as written; and where the system of writing, while alphabetic, is borrowed from a polytheistic and still partially hieroglyphic tradition.

The language-stymied Jewish exile Paul Celan ends his great poem "Frankfurt, September" at the point where the glottal stop, or Kehlkkopfverschlusslaut (literally, occlusion of the head of the throat), all but impossibly manages almost to break forth into the song that alone would grant fluency:

Die Simili-
Dohle
Frühstückt
Der Kehlkkopfverschlusslaut
singt

My teacher John Felstiner translates thus: "The simulate / jackdaw / breakfasts // The glottal stop / Sings."114 In Mosaic tradition, only the glottal stop could sing. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh translate "Die Simili- / Dohle" as "the pseudo-jackdaw (cough-caw's double)"—the hyphenated "cough-caw" recalling the Czech word kavka, meaning "jackdaw," and recalling as well the Jewish Czech author Kafka, who died in silence when an infection utterly stopped up his larynx.115

Marc Shell, a former MacArthur Fellow, is the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and professor of English at Harvard University. His books include The Economy of Literature; Art and Money; Money, Language, and Thought; Children of the Earth; The End of Kinship; American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni; Stutter; and Polio and Its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture.
Footnotes
1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "murmur," n. II6.

2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "sheva." See also "schwa."

3. King James Version. The "Ten Commandments" are listed, with one slight variation, at Exodus 20:2–14 and Deuteronomy 5:6–18.

4. For example, Einer Boberg was a severe stutterer, so afraid of teasing that he quit school at age fifteen. He eventually managed to conquer his fears and continue his education.

5. See the case of "Bill," who does not go on to do a year of work at Oxford: "The oral dissertation required of him he could not fulfill. He was too broken to make the attempt." See Abraham Kanter and A. S. Kohn, —And the Stutterer Talked (Boston, MA: Humphries, 1938), 157.

6. For an example, see Marty Jezer's memoir, Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 91.

7. Abraham's response (to God, to Isaac, and to the angel who halted the sacrifice of Isaac) was likewise hineni (Gen. 22:1, 22:7, 22:11). So also Isaiah, when God asks "Whom shall I send, / And who will go for us?" (Isa. 6:8).

8. Neil Schmitz, "To the Speech Clinic," International Quarterly 3.2 (1998): 36–39.

9. Ex. 4:11 (English Standard Version).

10. Isa. 32:4 (Geneva Bible translation [1560]), spelling updated. In the King James Bible (1611), the word used is "stammerers." Cf. Richard Whitlock, Zootomia (1654), 150: "What mighty lines hath Isaiah? read, and confesse Demosthenes and Cicero, but Stammerers at Eloquence."

11. For a nonhagiographical account of Pope Leo's tongue, see Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (1997; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 94.

12. Revised Standard Version.

13. King James Version.

14. King James Version. gg15. Sura 20:26–29 (The Holy Qur'an, trans. M. H. Shakir [Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur'an, 1983]).

16. Robert Young, Young's Literal Translation of the Holy Bible (1898; Grand Rapids, MI: Barker, 1953); square brackets inserted by Young.

17. See James Malcolm Rymer, preface to The Unspeakable; or, The Life and Adventures of a Stammerer (London: Clarke and Beeton, 1855).

18. Cf. Isa. 43:25.

19. John 8:58 (King James Version).

20. W. Alan Froggatt, "I Am I Am: According to Dr. Seuss" (poem), Theology Today 48.4 (January 1992): 465. Froggatt was a minister of the Bridgewater Congregational Church in Connecticut.

21. Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham (New York: Beginner Books, 1960).

22. "You know that I talk slowly and don't use the best words" (English Version for the Deaf). "I speak slowly, and I become tongue-tied easily (God's Word). "I am weak in speech, and slow-tongued" (The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, with Apocrypha: Greek and English [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970]). "I have no command of words" (Moffatt New Translation). "I am slow of speech and of an awkward tongue" (New Berkeley Version). "I speak slowly and can't find the best words" (New Century Version). "I'm clumsy with words" (New Living Translation). "I am slow in talking and it is difficult for me to speak" (New Life Version). "I am slow and hesitant" (Revised English Bible). "I am slow of speech and slow in expressing my ideas" (The Shorter Bible). "For heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue I am" (Restoration of the Original Sacred Name Bible). "I am a poor speaker, slow and hesitant" (Today's English Version). "I am a slow speaker and not able to speak well" (Jerusalem Bible [Catholic]). "When I get up before a crowd my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth (The Word Made Fresh).

23. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Jewish Publication Society), italics mine.

24. These variants include "unskilled in speech" (New American Standard Bible), "of deficient and impeded speech" (Amplified Bible), and "no orator" (New Living Translation). French translators offer up moi qui n'ai pas la parole facile (Louis Segond) and je n'ai pas la parole facile (Bible de Semeur). German translations include Ich bin einfach ein zu schlechter Redner (Hoffnung für Alle).

25. See the English Standard Version, New International Version, King James Version, 21st-Century King James Version, American Standard Version, Young's Literal Translation, and Darby Translation.

26. Rashi is Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, who lived in what is now France. "Uncircumcised lips" (aral sefatayim) occurs at Ex. 6:12 and 6:30. Rashi commenting on 6:12 says: "aral sefatayim: atum sefatayim (one whose lips are blocked). Likewise, I [Rashi] say that all instances of the term orla mean blocked." Rashi gives six examples from Jeremiah and Habakkuk. Rambam uses aral sefatayim as opposed to ragil. An aral sefatayim is not learned and is unable to recite statutory prayer (la'arokh tefilla) and praises. In some way his lips are "blocked" (uncircumcised). Isaiah (at 52:1) takes circumcision as a symbol of purity, and we read of uncircumcised ears (Jer. 6:10), lips (Ex. 6:12, 30), and hearts (Lev. 26:41). The fruit of a tree that is unclean is spoken of as uncircumcised (Lev. 19:23). Various texts of both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament refer to circumcision as spiritual, inward, a purification of the heart (see Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Ezek. 44:7; Acts 7:51; Rom. 2:28; Col. 2:11).

27. On Moses' way to Egypt, there occurs one of the most mysterious episodes in the Bible (Ex. 4:24–26). God, for reasons unexplained, seeks to kill Moses, and Zipporah comes to the rescue: with a sharp stone she circumcises "her son"—which one is not specified—and holds the severed foreskin to Moses' "feet" (a euphemism, perhaps, for genitals), saying: "Surely a bloody husband art thou to me." As a result, God spares Moses, with Zipporah reiterating, "A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision." Modern readers guess at the possible meanings but see also such older essays as Johannes Milenius, Tsiporah koretet 'orlat benah, seu Dissertatio philologica de Zippora praeputium filii sui abscindente: Exod. IV, 24, 25, 26 (Stockholm: Laurentii Salvii, 1758); and Andreas Stein, Tsiporah kortah, sive De circumcisione Zipporae: Exercitium academicum, quod ex Cap. IV. v. 24, 25, & 26 Exod. (Jena, Germany: Literis Samuelis Krebsi, 1663).

28. For Aaron and Hur propping up Moses' weak arms in battle, see Marc Shell, Stutter (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, forthcoming), 2.

29. The Amalekites lived in the desert, south of Canaan around Kadesh (Gen. 14:7), presumably in the northern part of the Negev (Num. 13:29; 14:25, 14:43) and the north-central Sinai peninsula. See Louis H. Feldman, "Remember Amalek!" Vengeance, Zealotry, and Group Destruction in the Bible according to Philo, Pseudo-Philo, and Josephus (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004); and Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, An End to Evil = Reishis goyim Amalek: The First Chassidic Discourse Delivered by the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, trans. Sholom B. Wineberg, ed. Uri Kaploun (Brooklyn, NY: Sichos in English, 1998).

30. On Esau as Jacob's wrestling partner, see Marc Shell, Polio and Its Aftermath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

31. Richard Wiseman, Treatise on Wounds (London: Royston, 1672), I. ix. 120, spelling updated; MS.

32. Bishop John Fisher, English Works (1535) (London: Early English Text Society 1876), I. 356, spelling updated; MS.

33. Glass suggests that, according to the archaeological records, Aknaten was "distorted physically, that is, had a physical distortion." See John Richardson, Refractions of Masculinity: Ambivalence and Androgyny in Philip Glass's Opera "Aknaten" and Selected Recent Works (Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä, 1995), 49.

34. See Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

35. James Henry Breasted, "De Hymnis in Solem sub Rege Amenophide IV. Redactis" (PhD diss., University of Berlin, 1894).

36. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1960), 23:25. See Arthur E. P. Weigall, The Life and Times of Akhenaton (London: Butterworth, 1923).

37. King James Version.

38. Asclepias studied the art of healing with the centaur Cheron. Cheron is often represented with a serpent coiled around a staff. The name of Asclepias may be derived from the Greek askalabos, meaning "serpent." His knotted staff, the origin of which can be traced to a magician's wand used by the Egyptians (and by Moses?), has a single serpent entwined around it. For centuries this staff, though with a double serpent, has been the symbol of the medical profession and known as the caduceus.

39. Some writers (for an early example, see Hebrews 11:21) say that, when the time came for Israel (né Jacob) to bless, he did it "leaning upon his staff." This gesture was presumably symbolic of the night of wrestling with God and the resulting change in his name and life.

40. See Midrash Yelamdenu (Yalkut on Ps. ex. § 869): "the staff with which Jacob crossed the Jordan is identical with . . . the holy rod with which Moses worked" (Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. "Aaron's Rod").

41. Pirke D'Rebbe Eliezer, 40, gives the history of the staff: "Created at twilight, before the Sabbath, it was given to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Adam gave it to Enoch, who gave it to Methuselah; he in turn passed it on to Noah. Noah bequeathed it to his son Shem, who transmitted it to Abraham. From Abraham to Isaac, and then to Jacob, who took it with him to Egypt. Jacob gave it to Joseph; upon Joseph's death, all his possessions were removed to Pharaoh's place. Jethro, one of Pharaoh's advisers, desired it, whereupon he took it and stuck it in the ground in his garden in Midian. From then on no one could pull out the staff until Moses came. He read the Hebrew letters on the staff, and pulled it out readily. Knowing then that Moses was the redeemer of Israel, Jethro gave him his daughter Zipporah in marriage." It was while a shepherd to Jethro that Moses investigated the phenomenon of the Burning Bush, and God asked him, "what is that in your hand?" (Parshat Balak, trans. Yosil Rosenzweig, July 19, 1997, www.ujcvp.org/adath_jeshurun/vortify/balak.html [accessed July 27, 2005].)

42. The etymology of pesach has been disputed because it is indeed uncertain. See Judah Benzion Segal, The Hebrew Passover from the Earliest Times to A.D. 70 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), and Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Social Institutions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), vol. 1. The verb occurs in Isa. 31:5 with the connotation of "to protect," but Brevard S. Childs suggests that this usage was already influenced by the Exodus tradition: see Childs, Exodus: A Commentary (London: S.C.M. Press, 1974), 183 n. 11.

43. For Mephibosheth's lameness, see 2 Samuel 4:4, 9:13. Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, The Little Lame Prince (New York: Mershon, 1875). See also Shell, Polio and Its Aftermath, 60, cf. 152.

44. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "hobble."

45. The relationship between the Israelites and a group of lepers (who suffered from "the Asiatic illness") that had been expelled is taken up by Eduard Meyer in his Aegyptische Chronologie (Berlin: Verlag der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1904), esp. 92–95. Cf. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, esp. 29.

46. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 21.

47. Tacitus, Historia, 5:3.

48. "Plurimi auctores consentiunt orta per Aegyptum tabe quae corpora foedaret, regem Bocchorim adito Hammonis oraculo remedium petentem purgare regnum et id genus hominum ut invisum deis alias in terras avehere iussum" (Tacitus, Historia, 5:3).

49. In many of the Greek and Roman stories, it is a plague (some say leprosy—a most serious problem of pollution among the Jews) that separates the Egyptians from the aliens, in which case it is the plague that gives rise in some way to the latter's Jewishness. (Leprosy, one should add, often leads to paralysis. The same doctors often work on both paralytic polio and leprosy; an example is William Lloyd Aycock at Harvard.)

50. Midrash Rabbah on Exodus 1:26; cf. Encyclopedia Judaica, 12:396. Islamic tradition has a similar story, as reported at Encyclopedia Judaica, 12:403. The same story is found in Midrash Jalkut on Exodus, and also in Shalsheleth Hakabalah (see the text notes in J. M. Rodwell's translation of Qu'ran, Sura 20).

51. For this term, see Jezer, Stuttering, 222.

52. From the commentary on the Mishnah entitled Ti-feret Yisrael, on Tractate Kiddushin, end, n. 77, as trans. in Encyclopedia Judaica, 12:400.

53. See Encyclopedia Judaica, 12:400.

54. Acts 7:22 (King James Version) reads, "And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds." The New Century Version reads: "The Egyptians taught Moses everything they knew, and he was a powerful man in what he said and did."

55. For Toland, see especially his Adeisidaemon, sive Titus Livius a superstitione vindicatus. . . . Annexae sunt ejusdem Origines Judaicae (The Hague: Thomam Johnson, 1709).

56. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Israel in Wüste" ("Israel in the Desert"), in Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans, in Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols., 12th ed. (Munich: Beck, 1981), 2:207–25. See also Konrad Burdach, "Faust und Moses," Sitzungsberichte der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaft 1 (1914): 358–403.

57. See Nachum Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken, 1986).

58. For comment on the relevant psychoanalytic authors, see Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 340–41.

59. Francis Bacon, "Experiment Solitary Touching Stutting," no. 386 in Sylva Sylvarum, 470, in vol. 2 of The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman, 1857–74), facsimile ed. Bacon refers in general, it seems, to Pseudo- Aristotle, Problems, 11.54, in this "Experiment."

60. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "lingua," 1.a and 2.a; and s.v. "praeputium."

61. Preserved in Eusebius of Caesarea; see Howard Jacobsen, The Exagoge of Ezekiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Encyclopedia Judaica, 12:404. Cf. Benjamin Stillingfleet, Moses and Zipporah (1765) and the interesting play The Maid of Midian by the American Samuel B. H. Judah (1799–1876), never staged because of its treatment of the slaying of the Midianite captives.

62. Some hold that even the Torah considers Jethro to be "the father-in-law" of the Jewish religion; he suggests its political and judicial organization (Ex. 18:13–27). He also praises God after the liberation of the Jews (18:9–12).

63. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); on the language issue, see chap. 31.

64. Rashbam, Commentary on Exodus 4:10. Rabbi Samuel ben Meir, or Rashbam, was Rashi's grandson and a Tosafot commentator in France.

65. Revised Standard Version.

66. Jewish exiles sometimes spoke "distorted" versions of the languages of their diasporic homes according to supposed regulations about the use of a sacred language. David Cohen (Sefer Avraham Yagel Yitzchak Yeranen [Brooklyn, NY: Artscroll Mesorah, 2000], 126), suggests that this so-called distortion helps explain the development of languages like Ladino and Yiddish (he refers to Even HaEzer and Talmud Yerushalmi [Shabbat]).

67. Andy Edington, The Word Made Fresh: A Down to Earth Version of the Old Testament (Austin, TX: Eakin, 1989).

68. King James Version.

69. See, e.g., Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies, Laurent Sagart, and Catherine Durand, "Discernible Differences in the Babbling of Infants According to Target Language," Journal of Child Language 11 (February 1984): 1–15.

70. Rambam is Rabbi Moses ben Maimon—Maimonides. His own emigration history is worth recalling here: his family fled Almohad, Spain, for Fez, Morocco, and eventually settled in Forstatt, Egypt.

71. "When God told Moses to deliver a message to Pharaoh, Moses assumed that he was to speak in the Egyptian language. . . . [God] told him, 'I have appointed you a master over Pharaoh. Thus, he is your inferior, and you are the head of a major empire. Consequently, in accordance with proper protocol, you will address him in Lashon Hakodesh [the Holy Language]—Hebrew. Do not be concerned about his inability to understand Hebrew because Aaron will be your interpreter'." Moshe Bogomilsky, Vedibarta Bam: And You Shall Speak of Them (Brooklyn, NY: Bogomilsky, 1995–97), Exodus 6:30–7:1.

72. Exodus Rabbah 3:16; cf. Encyclopedia Judaica, 12:396.

73. Isaac Disraeli, Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England, new rev. ed., 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1851), 1:11.

74. See Leonard Kriegel, Falling into Life: Essays (San Francisco, CA: North Point, 1991), 161. A polio survivor, Kriegel, in his essay "From the Burning Bush," calls Aaron "a kind of verbal aide-de-camp" and thus "the first editor."

75. See Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 18.

76. See, e.g., de Certeau, Writing of History, 269, and of course Freud's Moses and Monotheism.

77. For aleph-tov, see Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization (New York: Morrow, 1986); there is still considerable debate about the Proto-Sinaitic script found at Serabit el Khadim; cf. note 91 below. Moses' feelings about his forty years in Midian are unclear. In Num. 31:15–18, after his soldiers had killed all of the men among the Midianites, Moses—despite his own intimate connection to Midian—ordered his army officers to kill all of the male children and the nonvirgin females but to save alive all of the virgin girls for his troops. The Israelites had already taken the animals and goods of the Midianites and burned their towns in divinely commanded revenge "regarding the matter of Peor" (recounted in Num. 25:1–9).

78. For the fragment, see Felix Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Leiden: Brill, 1954–64). See too Ben Zion Wacholder, Eupolemus: A Study of Judaeo-Greek Literature (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1975).

79. Hubert Grimme, Die altsinaitischen Buchstabeninschriften (Berlin: Reutner and Richard, 1929), 21–22, 100–109.

80. Revised Standard Version.

81. Encyclopedia Judaica, 12:403.

82. The engraving is a copy of Rembrandt's painting Moses Smashing the Tables of the Law (1659), oil on canvas, which hangs in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

83. William Horman, Vulgaria (Sentences in English and Latin) (London: Richard Pynson, 1519), 75, spelling updated; MS. For the word happer, see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "happer."

84. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "buff," v1.

85. Alternative transcriptions: Hathoor, Het-heru, Het-Hert.

86. The writing system might use the initial sound or acrophone rather than the entire syllable. Thus bee could stand for /bee/, /bah/, /boe/, /beh/, and so on. A "picture" of a bee and also "simplified" representations of it might be acrophonic pictograms.

87. In Moses and Aron, Moses is a bass-baritone, barking out the Word of God in sprechstimme, unable to convey to the people his vision of an all-powerful, invisible deity. Aron (the name was shortened in the title of the opera by the superstitious Schoenberg to prevent it from having thirteen letters) is a lyric tenor who "sells" Moses' visions to the Israelites with conjuring tricks and visible miracles—water turning to blood, a staff becoming a serpent, the pillar of fire, and the Golden Calf.

88. As trans. by Allen Forte.

89. Gielen is conductor of a fine recording of this opera (Phillips 1974), which is also the soundtrack for the movie; he is also a composer in his own right and a student of Josef Polnauer (who studied early on with Schoenberg).

90. Ex. 37:28–36 (American Standard Version): "Then there passed by Midianites, merchantmen; and they [Joseph's brothers] drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt. . . . And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh's, the captain of the guard."

91. A crucial tablet/idol was discovered there in 1905 by Sir Flinders Petrie: see William Foxwell Albright, The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 12. According to Benjamin Sass, The Genesis of the Alphabet and Its Development in the Second Millennium BC (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 1988): "The origin of the Phoenician letters [and even more so the Old Negev letters] in the Proto-Canaanite and Proto-Sinaitic scripts, and the borrowing of most, if not all, letter forms in the latter script from Egyptian hieroglyphics on the basis of acrophony are now seen as indubitable facts."

92. Martin Luther, A Commentary on Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, trans. Theodore Graebner, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI.: Zondervan, n.d.): "The conscience ought to know only Christ. To say this is easy, but in times of trial, when the conscience writhes in the presence of God, it is not so easy to do. At such times we are to believe in Christ as if there were no Law or sin anywhere, but only Christ. We ought to say to the Law: 'Mister Law, I do not get you. You stutter so much. I don't think that you have anything to say to me'" (Luther on verse 3, chap. 4).

93. See Burdach, "Faust und Moses," 358–403.

94. Herodotus, Inquiries, 4:150–56; cf. Pindar, Pythian Odes, 4:10.

95. For Claudius's relevant legislation, see Shell, Stutter, chap. 6, esp. sec. 5.

96. Dekanawida (also spelled Dekanahwidah and Dekanawidah) likely means something like "two rivers flowing together" as well as "Siamese twin." He convinced the fifty leaders of the Iroquois nation to sit at a grand council to work out problems peacefully. In this way, it is sometimes said, he created the world's first representative government. Benjamin Franklin, who studied the Iroquois, proposed that the new United States adopt a similar system. See Alice Beck Kehoe, North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992).

97. In Hilary Mantel's novel, A Place of Greater Safety (London: Viking, 1992), 402, Danton seems to argue that Desmoulins's stutter was a key to understanding him: "In the old days, [Camille] claimed that his stutter was a complete obstacle to successful pleading [in court]. Of course, when one is used to it, it might discomfit, irritate or embarrass. But Hérault has pointed out that Camille has wrung some extraordinary verdicts from distraught judges. Certainly I have observed that Camille's stutter comes and goes. It goes when he is angry or wishes forcibly to make a point; it comes when he feels put upon, and when he wishes to show people that he is in fact a nice person who is really not quite able to cope."

98. See, e.g., Suzanne Alleyn's play, A Far Better Rest (New York: Soho Press, 2000).

99. See Jacques Janssens, Camille Desmoulins, le premier républicain de France (Paris: Perrin, 1973).

100. For the supposed Déclaration de Camille Desmoulins aux Parisiens, see the text in Collection Gulliver: Histoire, cycle 3 (Paris: Nathan, 1996). See also René Farge, Un Épisode de la journée du 12 juillet 1789: Camille Desmoulins au jardin du Palais-Royal (Paris: Leroux, 1914).

101. The numerical values of the Hebrew letters in the word tzit-tzit add up to 600. If you add five knots and eight strings, then the sum is 613, which is the number of Mosaic commandments.

102. Isa. 32:4. Douay translation spelling updated.

103. English Standard Version.

104. See the multilingual web site of David Wilkersen: www.tscpulpitseries.org/english/undated/tsmouth.html (accessed July 28, 2005).

105. But then, some people find Christology itself a kind of stuttering—as when my old neighbor Leonard Cohen sings, "Oh bless thee continuous stutter / Of the word being made into flesh," in "The Window" (1979) on his album Recent Songs.

106. King James Version.

107. See Num. 20.12. For legends about the striking of the rock, see Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, trans. Henriette Szold (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909–38), vol. 3, esp. 609–19.

108. Robert Anderson Hall, Introductory Linguistics (Philadelphia, PA: Chilton, 1964), 42.

109. Hall, Introductory Linguistics, 42.

110. Henry Sweet, A History of English Sounds from the Earliest Period (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), 1: "The glottal stop is produced by a sudden shutting or opening of the glottis, as in a cough." See also Sweet, A Handbook of Phonetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1877), 2:6: "The most familiar example of this 'glottal catch' is an ordinary cough."

111. For the glottal stop in the Chumash language, see www.chumashlanguage.com (accessed July 28, 2005). See also the two essays on this language and its stops in Proceedings of the Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, July 2–4, 1993 (Berkeley, CA: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, 1994) and essays in Hokan-Penutian Workshop, July 3, 1993, ed. Margaret Langdon (Berkeley, CA: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, 1994).

112. John F. A. Sawyer, A Modern Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (Stocksfield, UK: Oriel, 1976), 8: "Aleph not pronounced, except between vowels where it stands for a glottal stop."

113. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "aleph": "a. Heb. and Phoenician āleph, lit. 'ox'; the character may have developed from the hieroglyph of an ox's head."

114. This poem appears in Fadensonnen [threadsuns] (1968). The English version is from Paul Celan, Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan, trans. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000).

115. So Popov and McHugh point out in the preface to their translation.
 

Similar threads

Donate

Support destee.com, the oldest, most respectful, online black community in the world - PayPal or CashApp

Latest profile posts

HODEE wrote on Etophil's profile.
Welcome to Destee
@Etophil
Destee wrote on SleezyBigSlim's profile.
Hi @SleezyBigSlim ... Welcome Welcome Welcome ... :flowers: ... please make yourself at home ... :swings:
Back
Top