AMBIGUOUS RELATIONS:
PRIESTS, SISTERS, AND STRANGE WOMEN IN THE MOSES NARRATIVE

Claudia Camp

This paper is a part of a larger project on the construction of women as foreign or otherwise strange in the book of Proverbs and in Hebrew narrative. As you're probably aware, foreign women often get a bad rap in the Bible. Jezebel and Delilah remain today quickly recognized as prototypes of seduction. Ezra and Nehemiah tried to convince the Jewish men of their day that the dangers presented by foreign wives to Israelite identity was so great they should divorce them and send them and their children away. The figure of the Strange Woman in the book of Proverbs epitomizes all that is evil. Yet a quick look elsewhere in the Bible reveals that the rejection of foreign women was a matter of debate in biblical times. Rahab the Canaanite harlot saves the Israelite spies and wins herself a place among the victorious invaders. Ruth the Moabite marries into Boaz's family and becomes an ancestress of King David. Yet the dangerous Strange Woman remains a force within the biblical construction of reality. A complex characterization develops around her, so that typically she is not simply foreign, but a worshipper of foreign gods; thus her presence brings impurity into the people of Yahweh. She behaves, moreover, in ways sexually outside the norm. She is a loose woman, an adulteress. She also is often made out to be a deceiver, one who twists the necessary discourse of society in devious ways.

Recognizing this constellation of deviance surrounding the figure of the Strange Woman gives us one hint that we are not necessarily dealing here with a real woman. In fact, this figure typically serves a rhetorical purpose in the Bible; she shows up when someone, or some group, wants to make an attack on some other group; to accuse them of unacceptable Otherness. Recent scholars have argued that, especially in the period following the exile, there was virulent struggle among those who returned to the land of Judah, and between the returnees and those who had never left. It was a struggle over the question of Jewish identity. Who was a real Jew and who was not? Like any identity struggle, it was also a power struggle. Who would get to determine who was in and who was out? This was one context in which accusations that men had married "foreign wives" became prominent. Yet, were these women really "foreign"? Perhaps not. Perhaps they simply were outside the group of those making the accusation. Perhaps, as many scholars today conclude, they were women of the land whose families had not experienced exile. Real Jews, in other words, by most definitions, yet not acceptable to those in control. And who was in control? That was no doubt a complicated and changing situation, about which often can only make educated guesses. What seems reasonably clear, though, is that some of this conflict involved the priestly families, fighting for control with each other and over non-priestly groups. The Bible makes clear that the priests claiming descent from Aaron ultimately won this battle, but not without a struggle. The need of the Aaronite priestly line for authorization over others will loom large in our discussion today.

The perception that rhetoric about foreign women may have been applied to women who were not foreign at all, as part of a debate about what in fact constituted "Israeliteness" and "foreignness," led me to take a look at two narratives in which the figure of the Strange Woman gets an interesting twist, stories in which Israelite women are, as it were, "made strange." Dinah is raped by (or, at least, has illicit sex with) a strange man while out visiting strange women; Miriam is struck with the uncleanness of leprosy and, later, dies in the wilderness, where there is no water for purification from corpse contamination. I think of Dinah and Miriam, then, as Estranged Women, Israelite women narratively construed as Other. Notably, these estranged women are sisters of the two major forebears of the priestly lineage(s?): Levi and Aaron figure prominently as characters in the respective women's stories. There are, I would argue, striking ideological resonances between the Dinah and Miriam stories resulting from common priestly interests at work in their transmission (even if not their origin). In the present paper I focus on Miriam and her relationships with her brothers and with two women who are really strange: the Midianite Zipporah and an unnamed Cushite women, both wives of Moses. Two women-or is it just one? As we shall see, their identities overlap in interesting ways.

One important conceptual framework from recent scholarship that has guided my attempt to read Miriam as the estranged sister of a priestly brother is that of Seth Daniel Kunin. Kunin's work on Genesis, The Logic of Incest, focuses on a deep structure, arguably pervading the entire biblical mythos. He suggests that the ideology of Israel as the chosen lineage generates a contradiction regarding this lineage's relationship with the non-chosen peoples. The problem is this: according to the creation stories, the whole human race is descended from the same two parents, thus all are ostensibly related. Yet Israelite identity, especially in the priestly writings, hinges on being a lineage apart, fundamentally distinguishable from all others, and, indeed, forbidden intercourse with them.

Let me take a step back for a moment and say a little bit about the kind of argument Kunin is making, about his theory of myth, which I too will be assuming in this paper. This theory is a structuralist one, based generally but not dogmatically on the work of Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss discerned that there are often deep contradictions within the defining beliefs, values, and practices of any given society. These contradictions need to be both expressed and suppressed. Myths serve this purpose, shifting the difficulty elsewhere, clouding the contradiction so that the accepted patterns are naturalized as the only reasonable ones.

So, when we think about our biblical texts, how are we to cope with the contradiction generated by an ideology of identity based on lineage? Where does one draw the line between insider and outsider when in and out are determined by one's family of birth, and yet all families are mythically of the same family?

One way the contradiction plays itself out, says Kunin, is in a mythic preference for endogamy-for marriage within the family-that manifests itself in narratives about incest. Brother-sister marriage would be the best way to avoid marriage to a foreign woman. Unfortunately marrying your sister is just as prohibited as marrying an outsider. So what's a man to do? Whom might he marry? We're caught in a fundamental contradiction between ideology and practice, the mythic version of a rock and a hard place. So here's what happens in the narrative. The wives of the patriarchs, though related by wider family ties, come from outside the chosen lineage; they are thus acceptable according to the social code that forbids incest. However, precisely because they are outside the chosen lineage, they are mythically unacceptable, potential contaminants of lineage purity. What must happen is that these wives become sisters for the chosen seed to be passed on. The problem at the level of deep structure is mythically solved in the wife-sister stories involving Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Rebekah. Only after the outsider wife is structurally identified as a sister-however deceitfully in surface narrative terms-does she become pregnant with the child of promise. The myth takes an alternative form in the story of Jacob's marriage to two sisters, a relationship regarded as incestuous in the laws of Leviticus. But incest is exactly the point: in marrying the sister of his wife, Jacob marries his own sister. As far as Genesis is concerned, it is Rachel's son Joseph who is the primary representative of the chosen seed.

As Kunin discusses this ideological contradiction and the myth it generates, it applies mainly to the problem of "Israel's" relationship with "foreigners." In my study, however, the problem shows up internally as well, in terms of the priests' relationship with the rest of the people of Israel. Who is inside and who is outside the true priestly lineage? Somewhat surprisingly, in the priestly literature, it is the Israelite laity who are referred to as zar (strange). As we shall see, though, the internal problem of priestly identity is closely connected to the rhetoric of national/ethnic foreignness.

Let's have a look, then, at how the category "strange", zar, gets applied in priestly ideology, particularly in the book of Numbers, the context of the Miriam story. Here we find what I think of as an infinite regression in boundary line drawing: zar designates the outsider to the chosen priestly lineage, but the line between inside and outside proves unstable, and the circle of insiders tends to shrink. The book of Numbers has a terrible time with the Levites, for example: they are on the one hand fictively related to the Aaronites who may approach the tabernacle; Aaron is said to be a member of the tribe of Levi. But the non-Aaronite Levites are also, rather arbitrarily, consigned to the class of zarim (i.e., everyone else), whose attempt to approach the holy place results in death. The Levites are assigned to "perform duties" for Aaron and his sons. This seems to be a middle ground, between priests and laity, but it is an unstable one. Exactly what the duties are-which of the holy objects they may touch or even see-is ambiguous. So too is the relationship of Levites to the subgroup of Kohathites, who in Numbers 3-4 stand genealogically in between Aaron and the larger group of Levites, but who then disappear as a distinct entity in the text. This is the problem of the stranger-within writ large, a problem of infinite regression in the drawing of genealogically-based boundary line drawing, where one branch after another of the tribe of Levi gets cut off from the center of true priesthood, which in the end proves a small place indeed. In Leviticus 10, two of Aaron's four sons are wiped out by a strange fire from YHWH.

My proposal today is that the identity provided by this sort of myth is too unstable, the boundary between insider and outsider too fuzzy, to be tolerated in its pure form. It requires further myth-making to avert what threatens to become a mythic annihilation of the lineage. It is this problem for which the narratives of estranged sisters provide both icon and displacement.

The priests (at least that faction dominant in our present canon), are preoccupied not with lineage alone, but with male lineage as the key to a closely monitored and sometimes contested in-group identity (Eilberg-Schwartz 1990). For them, sisters represent an unbearable contradiction: they are, by birth, of the "right" lineage, yet, by gender, "not us." So now we turn Kunin's mythic logic around: whereas the outsider wives in Genesis had to be transformed into sisters to produce a genealogically pure child, here the sisters of priests, the strangers-within-the-family, must be narratively transformed into Outsiders. In this sense the story of Miriam as priestly sister is part of the myth identified by Kunin that mediates and also suppresses the contradiction of a group of people that considers itself genealogically both part of and separate from a larger group. How does this work?

The narratives about Miriam and her brothers in Numbers and Exodus present a series of characters with overlapping identities that generate the need for drawing identity boundary lines, and provide the means of execution. Father and daughter, brother and brother, sister and brother-all these relationships, in their multiple facets, require the narrative's attention to produce, in the end, YHWH's true priest.

The Miriam narratives in Numbers 12 and 20, with their emphasis on sibling rivalries and relationships, stand in close connection to Exodus 2 and 4, which also deal with a sister and a wife of Moses, as well as introducing the brother-brother relationship of Moses and Aaron. Turning first to the female characters:

An intertextual reading of Exodus and Numbers foregrounds, in the first instance, the identification of Zipporah, the daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro, who becomes Moses' wife in Exodus, with Moses' "Cushite" wife, who appears briefly in Numbers 12:1. The Cushite wife is the source of a dispute between Moses and his siblings regarding Moses' right to speak for YHWH. The foreignness of both women unites them, as do their peculiar roles in mediating the relationship of Moses and Aaron. So, the first overlap I want to note is that of Moses' two foreign wives.

But the character of the Cushite wife also overlaps with that of Miriam, for the protest of the insider sister against the outsider wife in Numbers leads to the sister's own estrangement. Their transformational identification is signaled by the narrative replacement of the black wife by the leprosy-whitened sister. From the perspective of Kunin's theory, the foreign wife has become the Israelite sister in a manner structurally analogous to the narrative assignment of sister status to the wives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So, overlap number two: foreign wife and Israelite sister.

But Numbers complicates the simple version of the myth found in Genesis. For in Numbers the wife-made-sister does not reappear to conceive endogamously with chosen child. Instead, another narrative agenda takes over, one governed by the relationship of the priest and the Strange Woman. To pick up this thread, we must return to Exodus, where we are introduced not only to Moses' relations, but also to his god.

Let us examine, then, the family relationships in Exodus, under the signs of priest and Strange Woman. In the wilderness, Moses meets four significant characters: Jethro and Zipporah, YHWH and Aaron. While the first two represent quintessential outsiderness, the latter two embody the ultimate inside. All four also intertwine around the attribution of priestly status and the related practice of circumcision. As we shall see, curious hybrids will thus appear. In Exodus 4, Jethro, the Strange Priest, is matched by Zipporah, the Strange Wife, who performs a priestly act (circumcision) to save Moses from YHWH, who sought to kill him. The combination of shocking plot and anti-typed characters inverts expectations about insider and outsider status, as well as their attendant moral evaluations. How can we deal with a malevolent deity and a salvific Strange Woman? Inversion and anti-typing create challenges to orderly categories and identities, challenges that Numbers 12 will attempt to resolve.

Jethro (elsewhere Reuel or Hobab) is Zipporah's father and a priest. Despite speculation by some biblical historians that Moses may have learned worship of YHWH from Jethro, there is little way to understand his status in the text except as a foreign priest, "a priest of Midian." The potential tension inherent in the scene of a strange priest offering a sacrifice, as Jethro does in 18:12, is on one level mitigated by a sort of structural neutrality. Although Jethro is a foreign priest, his deity is unnamed; in the presence of Aaron, the not-yet priest of YHWH, Jethro offers his sacrifice "to God" (Elohim, Exod 18:12). As the priest of no-god-in-particular, Jethro leaves a structural blank that Aaron's ordination to YHWH (Leviticus 8-9) will only later fill. As the father of Moses' foreign wife, on the other hand, Jethro and his daughter highlight what should be a dangerous combination of strange cult and strange woman.

Outsider and insider status also collapse, however, in the character of Zipporah: she is a foreign wife, but one who performs the definitively Israelite priestly task of circumcising her son and, symbolically, her husband. I shall suggest below that the recollection of the foreign wife who circumcises lingers at the beginning of Numbers 12 in the person of the Cushite wife, and is not incidental to that text's priestly concerns. For the moment, there are two other points of interest regarding the characterization of Zipporah. First is the way in which Exodus identifies the strange wife with her father Jethro through the use of the root htn. Htn is used regularly, in the form of an active participle (hoten), to designate Jethro's relationship to Moses, in these cases most often translated "father-in-law." It is also used, in what can be construed as a passive form, by Zipporah to describe the effect of her circumcising: "you are a bridegroom of blood (hatan damiym) to me . . . a bridegroom of blood by circumcision," she says to Moses after "touching his feet" with the bloody foreskin. The text resonates with what seems to have been an archaic connection, both linguistic and ritual, between circumcision and marriage (Propp 1993: 508). Ritually, the first prepared a man for the second. Linguistically, hoten and hatan-father-in-law and bridegroom-also imply "circumcisor" and "circumcised." Thus, in creating a hatan, Zipporah adopts her father's role as hoten (1993: 514). Character overlap number three: the Strange Priest and his strangely priestly daughter.

The circumstances of the circumcision are also noteworthy, to say the least, indeed, incomprehensible in terms of the surface logic of the narrative. YHWH has just appointed Moses his hero, then, on Moses' journey to Egypt to carry out the divine plan, tries to kill him (Exod 4:24). But again, it is the characterization of Zipporah I want to track. Moses is saved only by his foreign wife's timely act with the flint, which causes YHWH to "let him alone." As with the other characters we have examined, however, YHWH and Zipporah stand not simply in antithetical but also dialectical relationship to each other: the strange woman plays the role of a savior who overcomes the deadliness of Moses' god, as dramatic a reversal of expected roles as ever there was. Character overlap number four: strange god and strange woman.

The narrative has offered Zipporah a priestly identity as the circumcising daughter of a priestly father. This identity takes on further substance when her connection with Aaron is also considered. Exodus 4-6 establishes a relationship between Moses' wife and Moses' brother-character overlap number five-again by means of the motif of circumcision, understood both literally and as a metaphor for language. Examination of this relationship will, in turn, shed light on the shifting relational boundaries in Numbers 12, where the metaphorical interpenetration of sex and language also appears.

In Exodus, Moses requires circumcision of two sorts: that by Zipporah of his penis (4:24-26) is narratively sandwiched between two versions of the circumcising of his tongue, involving Aaron and YHWH (4:10-17, 27-30 and 6:10-13, 28-30; 7:1-2). The sequence begins in Exod 4:10, where, having been commissioned by YHWH to speak to Pharaoh, Moses complains of being "heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue." Although the explicit sexual metaphor, "uncircumcised of lips," will not appear until Moses' second protest in 6:12, sexual word-play is already present here. "Heaviness" (kbd) can connote sexual "weight," and appears in another biblical story in connection with circumcision. Shechem in Genesis 34 is said to be the most kabod of men, just before submitting to the knife.

YHWH responds to Moses' resistance with the offer of a verbal assistant, brother Aaron, into whose mouth Moses will put YHWH's words (4:15). Moses' circumcision by Zipporah follows, after which he meets Aaron in the wilderness, appropriately, with a kiss (4:27). Moses' protest about his inability to speak is repeated in chapter 6. Here he uses the explicit metaphor, "uncircumcised of lips" ('aral sepatayim; 6:12). Again, Aaron is the solution: he will be Moses' "prophet" (7:1-2).

To summarize, then, the relationship between Aaron and Zipporah is tightly drawn in three ways:

(1) First, by the movement of the narrative. In the narrative flow of Exodus 4, YHWH's introduction of Aaron (4:14-16) is followed by the re-introduction of Zipporah (4:20), while her priestly act (4:24-26) is followed by the meeting of Moses and the man who will be priest (4:27).

(2) The second form of narrative linkage between Aaron and Zipporah appears in the thematic envelope created by the circumcision metaphor. The repetition of Moses' complaint about speaking in chapter 6, with its reference to "uncircumcised" lips, completes the circle of mouth-penis-mouth begun in chapter 4: Moses has complained to YHWH about his heavy mouth and tongue; Zipporah has circumcised Moses' penis in defense against YHWH; now YHWH repeats the opening of Moses' lips by means of Aaron. While the language moves in a direction from less to more sexually explicit (from "heavy" mouth to "uncircumcised" lips), the gaze returns in chapter 6 from the embodied danger of the penis to the more abstract matter of the tongue, as well as from the strange woman to the Israelite brother.

(3) Third, Zipporah and Aaron, along with Jethro, are drawn together through their successive fulfillments of the role of priest. As the second generation, Zipporah and Aaron are, in effect, daughter and son to father Jethro, and thus sister and brother to each other through this priestly connection, as well as through their shared relationship with Moses.

What light, then, does this analysis of collapsing relational, gender, and priestly identities in Exodus shed on the difficult dynamics in Numbers 12 involving Moses, his strange wife, his estranged sister, and his about-to-be-priestly brother?

Assuming Moses' Cushite wife can reasonably be read as Zipporah, the brief and apparently anomalous appearance of this character in Numb 12:1 in fact draws with it a wagonload of significance. The Cushite woman is the nodal link between the wife-brother identification established in Exodus 4-6 and the wife-sister conflation that will occur in Numbers 12. Two things happen at the mythological level. First, as Kunin would have it, the wife is narratively transformed in Numbers 12 into a sister. In the process, however, the sister herself is revealed as Other, leprous and thus cultically polluted. Identification with a strange wife makes the sister strange. This second move, not predicted by Kunin's model, occurs, I suggest, because of the priestly ideology at work in these texts. It is a function of the paradox of infinite regression in genealogical boundary-drawing. The paradox begins with the need to separate the "true" priestly family from otherwise related families in the tribe and nation. But this process of separation has no logical conclusion, as the arbitrary deaths of two of Aaron's four sons at YHWH's altar makes clear. Lineage exclusivism becomes lineage annihilation. The mythic solution lies with the sister. Because this ideology is as concerned with gender as it is with lineage, the estrangement of the sister, the stranger within, displaces the implacable mythic cutting off of brothers onto the relative who can be named as "Other."

Numbers 12 works out this agenda in a very precise way, undoing the intimate relationship generated in Exodus between Aaron and the priestly wife-sister, there Zipporah, now the Cushite woman. The Cushite evokes the blurred boundaries in Exodus, between the strange wife who circumcises the penis and the brother who both kisses and circumcises the lips. Circumcison, metaphorically and metonymically considered, has, in effect, joined the brother and the wife-sister at the sites of sex and speech. Thus joined, Miriam and Aaron approach the cloud alongside Moses in Numbers 12 to face YHWH's wrath at their rebellion. There YHWH distinguishes Moses as the only one with whom he speaks "mouth to mouth." Then the cloud departs, leaving Miriam leprous, unclean, thus set apart from her untouched brother. Aaron speaks, first in confession of sin, then in intercession for Miriam, joining his speaking mouth with Moses', as he had with his kiss on their first meeting (Exod 4:27). Severed now from Aaron at the lips, so also at the genitals, Miriam is multiply-polluted, barely human, her unpurified death in Numbers 20 pre-figured. What Exodus joined together, Numbers rends asunder. Thus is Aaron transformed into a fully male-identified self, the true priest whom the narrative has been seeking all along.

Footnotes

1. The debate as to who is "really" circumcised by Zipporah seems to me largely irrelevant. It is precisely the confusion between the son and the husband that is the point.

2. I suggest this connotation based in part on the ideology of honor and shame in which male honor (also kabod) is closely linked to sexual control. The same play of ideas also occurs in Gen 34:19, where Shechem is described as the most kabod (honored, weighty) in his familyjust at the point when he is circumcised (see below, chapter 7), as well as in 2 Sam 6:xx (see Fewell and Gunn 19xx).

3. Further, Moses' convoluted protest includes the notion that his lack of eloquence is evident both in the past and the present (gam mitmol . . . gam me^az). Mitmol is aurally reminiscent of mul, meaning "to circumcise"; compare mulah, which appears in Zipporah's "bridegroom of blood" speech (4:26).