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06 May 2008
Regarding Pharaoh.
I was once told that we draw lines in order to make sense of the world. Anymore, I think that we may instead draw lines to ensure that we’re always on the right side of them. Call it fundamental attribution error, self-serving bias, or whatever else, but we generally end up the beneficiary of our own gerrymandering. Perhaps we are unaccustomed to seeing things from any perspective other than our own. Our story is the only narrative we know, so even without choosing it, we parse the world to fit our storyline. But the world is bigger than we are, and all of our stories happen in a much larger context than we could know. Perhaps things are more complex than we make them out to be.
We all know the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The story looks so straightforward on Sunday School flannelboard. Pharaoh, undoubtedly the villain, inexplicably oppresses the unfortunate nation of Israel. The hero, Moses, rides in on a white horse shouting ‘let my people go!’ Which is not actually what he says, if you read the story. It is not until much later that Moses raises the ante to complete emancipation. Students of Rousseau, Jefferson and Dr. King, we read into the story from the very outset the self-evident guilt of Pharaoh, the great oppressor. But this is not how the story reads. Even the unabashedly Hebrew Exodus account does not seem to hold him guilty from the outset. The plagues seem to be more trial than sentencing, with the final exception of the very last deadly curse. The plagues are not retribution for his sin of slavery. They are judgment for his defiance of YHWH. Faced with ever-increasing demonstrations of His power, Pharaoh’s blasphemies become all the greater. Hardening his heart, God gives Pharaoh the opportunity to make the case against himself, which he gladly accepts. In that escalation, the people of God win their freedom at the expense of Pharaoh‘s great shame. But Pharaoh’s downfall is not the result of some redefinition of the ancient conception of social justice (even the later Mosaic law made provisions for slavery.) It is solely on account of the power of Jehovah. Pharaoh picked a fight, and he lost big to a God much bigger than him.
Things are often more complex than they seem. Remember that Exodus is a chronicle of the Hebrew people, not the Egyptian people. I wholeheartedly affirm the infallibility of Scripture, but realize that the Hebrew books of history are (appropriately) unconcerned with Egyptian history except insofar as it concerns Hebrew history. Therefore, there is no reason for Moses to discuss the history of Egypt before the coming of Joseph. But it plays into the story nonetheless. So let us leave for the moment the story of Arphaxhid’s offspring and instead look to the children of Mizraim.
(Irrelevant Historical note: Arabic for Egyptian is al-Masri. In a Semitic language, the three consonant combination makes the word, I.e. m-z-r.)
Things were, of course, not always as they are now. Lines on maps change and lines between peoples change as well. A typical Egyptian today looks undeniably Semitic, and speaks a Semitic language to boot. But look at King Tut’s sarcophagus… he looks more like he belongs in Sub-Saharan Africa than in the Middle East. Judging phenotype is a shaky endeavor at best, but one thing seems borne out by the Exodus account: the Hamitic Egyptians don’t seem to think much of the children of Shem. Perhaps it was just imperial snobbery, but even blind hate is usually accompanied by some sort of justification. And in the Egypt of that day, you didn’t have to dig very deep to find that justification.
Like every empire, ancient Egypt underwent periods of waxing and waning. During the last nadir before the arrival of Joseph, a number of Semitic immigrants called the Hyksos arrived in Egypt and set up shop. These people prospered tremendously, grew in number and eventually decided that they should run the place. They ruled the native Egyptians for a hundred years, until a new line of Pharaohs rose up under a banner of ‘Egypt for to the Egyptians.’ After years of bloody, ugly fighting, the Pharaohs finally expel their foreign overlords and win their country back. If you are Pharaoh, this is your story and your claim to legitimacy. But even framing narratives have exceptions, and Joseph is an exception by virtue of his exceptional worth. An Otto Bismarck of sorts, he turns disaster into a boon for the Pharaoh, using the power of food during a famine to break the power of the feudal lords. Under his grain-for-land policy, Pharaoh consolidates control over the whole of the land, and hence Joseph becomes indispensable.
Of course, Joseph did not live forever and neither did his Pharaoh. Undoubtedly, the unlikely Prime Minister created rivals in his meteoric rise, and undoubtedly a number of native Egyptians were not enthused by the possibility of a foreigner usurping the top posts in their land once again. Nothing makes enemies quite like success, and Joseph’s people were finding plenty of it. So, to the newly minted Pharaoh, this story seems to look suspiciously familiar. A bunch of Semitic people show up in Egypt, grow in number and, well, he remembers how that story ends. To him, one Semite looks like another, and he’s not about to fight another century-long struggle for emancipation. Better them slaves in our land than us slaves in our own land, he figures. Therefore, he makes an shrewd security policy move in accordance with the standards of the time. If you’re William Wallace, would you be happy about a bunch of English immigrants moving to Edinburgh and prospering? Pharaoh wasn’t. So as uncomfortable as it is to a contemporary reader, what Pharaoh did was just good politics.
Jehovah is the Holy One of Israel, but He is the God of all Nations as well. He is God over Egyptian History as well as that of the Hebrews. He is God over Pharaoh, and understand where he comes from as well as He understands Joseph or Moses or anybody else. Perhaps in the eyes of the Egyptian people, Pharaoh is a freedom fighter, a William Wallace of sorts. The Egyptian Lou Dobbs is undoubtedly applauding his tough stand on immigration. With a view of history inspired by the best rhetoricians Egypt had to offer, it is understandable why Pharaoh would do what he did. Therefore, in order for the Exodus to occur, there was a case that had yet to be made. So Moses arrives with an arraignment rather than a sentence.
Perhaps the seeds of Pharaoh’s hardened heart can be found in his initial choice to oppress the nation of Israel. God gives him a chance to become who he was all along; He gives Him a chance to show himself and the world who he truly is. So it started with a very reasonable request to allow the people into the desert in order to worship God, accompanied with a demonstration of Jehovah’s power. The scorn and contempt that Pharaoh heaps upon the Name raises the stakes of the game. Pretty soon, it becomes clear that the whole thing is not about some flavor of social policy but rather about Lordship over Egypt. Jehovah and Pharaoh cannot simultaneously be God over Egypt, and both claim the throne. Recount after recount, Jehovah wins. Casting down every god from the Egyptian pantheon, Jehovah mocks the Egyptian deities on their home turf. The Egyptians have a frog god of fertility, so Jehovah gives Egyptians more fertile frogs than they ever wanted. His allies picked off one by one, soon enough Pharaoh is the only remaining pretender to the throne. There is no loss in the destruction of some demon counterfeit god, but Pharaoh is God’s beautiful and unique creation. Nonetheless, he has made an airtight case against himself and his people through his undying rebellion. So he must be cast down as well. The firstborn sons of Egypt didn’t die because Pharaoh failed to be the first ruler in the ancient world to realize that all men are created equal. They died because Pharaoh challenged Jehovah for the Throne.
So what’s the point? I think the point is remarkably simple: things are rarely simple. With One exception, people are rarely all the way good or all the way bad. Almost always, people have some sort of reasons for doing what they do, and almost always they would tell the story quite differently than you would. But God is the refiner, and as the old metaphor goes, the same sun that hardens the clay will melt the wax. We are surrounded by complex people with complex motives, and we are those people ourselves. The great oppressor Pharaoh turned out to be a villain, yet the great oppressor Saul of Tarsus turned out to be a hero. Augustine, at my age, acted more like my unsaved friends than like me. Judas was well respected in Christian leadership circles, right up to the point of his betrayal. Simon Peter betrayed Jesus just as surely, yet he sought forgiveness and was restored to leadership. It is good to trust the gift of discernment, but I cannot know people’s hearts the way that God can. When it comes down to it, only God knows who will turn out to be a Paul and who a Pharaoh. Therefore, let us pray for our friends, let us pray for our enemies, let us pray for the whole world.
Perhaps there is one more point. Grey fades to black. All of our motives are complex, but our hearts are dark and that complexity leads us astray. Judas’ motives were complicated by the desire for a political messiah. He clearly didn’t expect things to turn out as they did. Peter’s motives were complicated by his disappointment and doubt. The difference is that Peter sought redemption. Jesus forgave Peter as He would have forgiven Judas. He replaced Peter’s complex motives with ones simple enough to bring him home stretched across boards when he faced with the same question years later. Saul of Tarsus, Pharaoh, and Augustine all have a hundred reasons for becoming the complex men that they were. All three men become simpler as their story is told. Saul and Augustine yield their complex motives to God in exchange for His simple motive of love. Pharaoh finds the complexity of his motives stripped away until he is left only with the simple motive of pride. In the calculus of redemption, we will eventually surrender all of our complex reasons either to God or to our own pride. Accordingly, we are free of our pride only when we lay down our rights and our reasons before God‘s Throne. But perhaps this was the point all along: to be less like us and more like Him.
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