Uses and Abuses of Moses by Ziolkowski Theodore;

Author:Ziolkowski, Theodore;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2016-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

THE LEADER OF THE PEOPLE

In 1925 and 1926 the prolific Austrian writer Vinzenz Zapletal (1867–1938), who claimed to be unaware of earlier literary treatments of the topic (although textual hints suggest that he knew at least Ebers’ Joshua), published the first of his two novels about Moses: The Godseeker (Mose, der Gottsucher, 1925) and Leader of the People (Mose, der Volksführer, 1926). Zapletal, a Dominican theologian and scholar, had earlier distinguished himself with numerous studies of the Old Testament (e.g., Alttestamentliches, 1903), as well as metrical translations, with detailed commentaries, of Ecclesiastes (1905) and Solomon’s Song of Songs (1907). After World War I, presumably in the hope of reaching a wider public, he turned to fictional treatments of the same material, beginning with Jephtas Tochter (1920; Jephthah’s Daughter), David und Saul (1921), and David und Bethsabe (1923)—all bearing the designation “cultural-historical tale” (Kulturhistorische Erzählung). Even before he undertook his biblical novels, he tells us in a preface, he had visited the Sinai peninsula and climbed Mount Horeb,9 and both works display his obvious pleasure in describing the landscape and scenes that he had seen firsthand.

The first volume of his entertaining Moses, a “cultural-historical tale of ancient Egypt,” has more to do with cultural history and Egyptophilia than with Moses’ search for God. In fact, many chapters amount to detailed and knowledgeable depictions of Egyptian ceremonies: Pharaoh’s triumphal return to Thebes, the religious festival of thanks, the embalming and burial of Moses’ Egyptian foster father, and others, including extensive quotations from Egyptian songs, hymns, and fairy tales (based on authentic sources). In addition, we are given historically informed accounts of the curriculum at the school for princes that Moses attends and, later, of his activities as a military commander in Nubia. (His schoolboys and soldiers talk very much like their counterparts in the twentieth century.)

The first third of the novel, moreover, is almost wholly concerned with a nonbiblical subplot meant to explain Moses’ later killing of the brutal overseer. At school he is hated, both as the adopted son of a princess and as an outstanding scholar, by Enebni, son of the high priest. Enebni plots against Moses by stealing gold and jewels from the temple and leaving behind a filched note that Moses had written to his mother, Princess Merit. Moses is jailed; but his friend, the dwarf Nub, principal steward of the princess, establishes his innocence by recovering the jewels, which Enebni had stolen in order to impress a dancing girl, and demonstrating Enebni’s guilt. Moses is freed, and Enebni, hating him more than ever, is punished with thirty lashes and sentenced to the demeaning lifelong task of an overseer of Hebrew slaves in Goshen. There, years later, Moses encounters and kills him when the enraged Enebni attacks him with his heavy club. Moses’ escape to Midian with a caravan is portrayed with details based, as the author tells us in a footnote (346), on his own ride from Suez to the central Sinai peninsula, where he encountered similar caravans.

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