Without Precedent

Have You Ever Seen Anything Like Israel in the History of the World?

After accepting that he won’t get to enter the promised land, Moses sends the people on an errand back to the beginning of time.

כִּי שְׁאַל־נָא לְיָמִים רִאשֹׁנִים אֲשֶׁר־הָיוּ לְפָנֶיךָ לְמִן־הַיּוֹם אֲשֶׁר בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אָדָם עַל־הָאָרֶץ וּלְמִקְצֵה הַשָּׁמַיִם וְעַד־קְצֵה הַשָּׁמָיִם: הֲנִהְיָה כַּדָּבָר הַגָּדוֹל הַזֶּה אוֹ הֲנִשְׁמַע כָּמֹהוּ׃

For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created humankind upon the earth, and from the one end of heaven to the other: has there been anything as great as this, or has anything like it been heard? (Deuteronomy 4:32)

אוֹ הֲנִסָּה אֱלֹהִים לָבוֹא לָקַחַת לוֹ גּוֹי מִקֶּרֶב גּוֹי בְּמַסֹּת בְּאֹתֹת וּבְמוֹפְתִים וּבְמִלְחָמָה וּבְיָד חֲזָקָה וּבִזְרוֹעַ נְטוּיָה וּבְמוֹרָאִים גְּדֹלִים כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂה לָכֶם יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם בְּמִצְרַיִם לְעֵינֶיךָ׃

Or has God ever assayed to go and take for himself a nation from the midst of a nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes. (Deuteronomy 4:34)

The verb he uses here in his rhetorical question, after telling the people to scan the archive, is הֲנִסָּה, hanissah: has God ever assayed, ventured, put it to the test. And the method the verse names in the next breath, בְּמַסֹּת, b’massot, by trials, is built from the very same root, נ־ס־ה. The attempt and the trials are the same word wearing two forms.

Moses is telling the people that not only is the Exodus unprecedented, objectively, but it is also unprecedented for God. It is an assay, a נִסָּיוֹן, run for the first time since the world began, and Moses dates the search from the day of creation because that is the only day on which anything of the kind was attempted.

The last time the Torah set נסה beside the divine name, God was the one testing and a man was the one tried: וְהָאֱלֹהִים נִסָּה אֶת־אַבְרָהָם, and God tested Abraham (Genesis 22:1), the opening word of the binding of Isaac. There the venture belonged to the human. Abraham was the being under strain, the one who might break. At the Jordan, Moses takes the same נִסָּה and points it heavenward. He asks whether God has ever put himself to the assay of drawing a nation out of a nation. The test that once fell on the one who obeyed now falls on the one who commands.

The object of that verb presses harder still. לָקַחַת לוֹ גּוֹי מִקֶּרֶב גּוֹי, to take for himself a nation from the midst of a nation. מִקֶּרֶב is no soft “from among.” The קֶרֶב is the inward part, the entrails, the gut of a living thing. Israel is drawn out of the body of Egypt while that body is alive and clenched around it. Egypt is also put through trials because God is attempting to deliver something from inside it.

The rabbis heard the same violence in the word. Midrash Tehillim, the aggadic commentary on the book of Psalms, reads this verse against the psalm of the Exodus, בְּצֵאת יִשְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרַיִם, “When Israel went out of Egypt” (Psalm 114:1), and asks what גּוֹי מִקֶּרֶב גּוֹי could mean:

מַהוּ גּוֹי מִקֶּרֶב גּוֹי? כְּאָדָם שֶׁשּׁוֹמֵט אֶת הָעוֹבָר מִמְּעֵי בְּהֵמָה.

What is “a nation from the midst of a nation”? Like a man who pulls a fetus from the womb of a beast. (Midrash Tehillim 114:3, R. Abba bar Aha in the name of R. Chanin)

The deliverance is an obstetrics performed on a living animal, and the midrash spares neither party. It marks צַעַר לַנִּשְׁמָט, the pain of the one pulled loose, and then it names the hand doing the pulling by reaching two verses back, to the phrase Moses uses for Egypt itself, כּוּר הַבַּרְזֶל, the iron furnace (Deuteronomy 4:20). God takes Israel out כְּאָדָם שֶׁנּוֹטֵל אֶת הַזָּהָב מִתּוֹךְ הַכּוּר, like a man who lifts the gold straight from the smelter with his bare hands, without tongs and without rags. Birth and smelting carry one image between them. Something living is drawn out of the body that held it, and the body is at full heat when it happens.

Moses reaches past every national history to the one prior act of the same kind. In Genesis 2:7, God takes אָדָם, adam, out of the אֲדָמָה, adamah, the human out of the humus, a living thing lifted from the ground that held it. In Egypt, God takes a גּוֹי out of the קֶרֶב of a גּוֹי, a people lifted from the innards that held it. אָדָם from אֲדָמָה, גּוֹי from גּוֹי: the Exodus is a second creation, run this time not on clay but on a living nation, inside history.

A dozen verses before the search for precedent, Moses forbids Israel to carve God into any form, and he does it by taking an inventory of the world:

פֶּן־תַּשְׁחִתוּן וַעֲשִׂיתֶם לָכֶם פֶּסֶל תְּמוּנַת כָּל־סָמֶל תַּבְנִית זָכָר אוֹ נְקֵבָה: תַּבְנִית כָּל־בְּהֵמָה אֲשֶׁר בָּאָרֶץ תַּבְנִית כָּל־צִפּוֹר כָּנָף אֲשֶׁר תָּעוּף בַּשָּׁמָיִם: תַּבְנִית כָּל־רֹמֵשׂ בָּאֲדָמָה תַּבְנִית כָּל־דָּגָה אֲשֶׁר־בַּמַּיִם מִתַּחַת לָאָרֶץ׃

lest you make for yourselves a graven image, the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the heavens, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth. (Deuteronomy 4:16–18)

Heaven, earth, the water beneath: he walks the zones of creation and empties each of any shape that could stand in for God. The commandment forbids an image of anything אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם מִמַּעַל וַאֲשֶׁר בָּאָרֶץ מִתָּחַת, that is in the heavens above and that is on the earth beneath (Deuteronomy 5:8). Now watch what Moses does with them at the end of the chapter:

וְיָדַעְתָּ הַיּוֹם וַהֲשֵׁבֹתָ אֶל־לְבָבֶךָ כִּי יְהֹוָה הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים בַּשָּׁמַיִם מִמַּעַל וְעַל־הָאָרֶץ מִתָּחַת אֵין עוֹד׃

Know therefore this day, and lay it to your heart, that the LORD is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath; there is none else. (Deuteronomy 4:39)

בַּשָּׁמַיִם מִמַּעַל וְעַל־הָאָרֶץ מִתָּחַת. The regions in which you may carve nothing are the regions God fills.

You cannot create an image of that which is unprecedented. A God who has just done what was never assayed since creation cannot be poured into any shape drawn from the finished world, because that shape does not yet exist. The formlessness of God and the newness of God’s deeds are related.

Centuries later, Jeremiah took this same errand and ran it in reverse. Jeremiah was a priest from Anathoth, a village just outside Jerusalem, who prophesied through the city’s last decades and lived to watch Babylon breach its walls in 586 BCE. He knew Moses’s move well: command a search across every nation and every age, so that the failure to find a match proves the deed has no equal. Moses had used the search to take the measure of a rescue. Jeremiah uses the identical form to take the measure of Israel’s sin.

כִּי עִבְרוּ אִיֵּי כִתִּיִּים וּרְאוּ וְקֵדָר שִׁלְחוּ וְהִתְבּוֹנְנוּ מְאֹד וּרְאוּ הֵן הָיְתָה כָּזֹאת׃

For cross over to the isles of Kittim and see, and send to Kedar and consider carefully, and see whether there has been anything like this. (Jeremiah 2:10)

Look west to the isles of Kittim, look east to the desert of Kedar, look in every direction: has any nation ever done such a thing? The next verse gives the answer. No nation ever trades away its gods, false as those gods are. Israel alone has traded away its glory, the living God, for what cannot help. To abandon a true God proves rarer than to keep a false one, and so Israel’s betrayal turns out to be as much without precedent as Israel’s rescue was. The search that found no equal to the mercy now finds no equal to the treason.

Jeremiah runs the search a second time, placing it in God’s own mouth: שַׁאֲלוּ־נָא בַגּוֹיִם מִי שָׁמַע כָּאֵלֶּה, inquire among the nations, who has ever heard the like (Jeremiah 18:13). Again the thing no one has ever heard of is Israel’s faithlessness. The instrument Moses built to weigh a mercy, Jeremiah turns to weigh a rejection, and it takes both weights. This is what makes the Exodus an assay and not a guarantee. A people brought into being for the first time since creation can also break faith for the first time since creation. The nation drawn out of the קֶרֶב of Egypt can turn against the God who drew it, and that turning is itself without precedent, unseen since the day God made אָדָם.

Jeremiah does not let the failure stand as the last word. Shut in the court of the guard while the Babylonians breach the wall, with every reason to call the experiment finished, he reaches one more time into Moses’s vocabulary and says the deed again: אֲשֶׁר־שַׂמְתָּ אֹתֹת וּמֹפְתִים בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם, you who set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, a God who won a name by them בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל וּבָאָדָם, in Israel and among humankind (Jeremiah 32:20). There is the word a final time, אָדָם, the whole species standing as witness. Jeremiah holds both ends at once, the deed that has no precedent and the ruin that has no precedent. The venture is still open. Its outcome is still being decided, in Israel and in humankind, by whether the people taken out of Egypt knows what it now carries.

So Moses ends the errand where he began it. He closes on a verb turned toward the patient on the bank: וְיָדַעְתָּ הַיּוֹם וַהֲשֵׁבֹתָ אֶל־לְבָבֶךָ, know this day, and return it to your heart. Understand the unprecedented nature of the covenant, and the correlation between a God who resists graven images and a God free enough to do the unimaginable.

Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar

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