Between Pharaohs and Nomads | 145scene in the tragedy of Moses, like those which had preceded it, derives from
the resistance of the human material. Moses wished for an entire, undivided
human life, as the right answer to the Divine revelation. But splitting up is the
historical way of mankind, and the unsplit persons cannot do anything more
than raise man to a higher level on which he may thereafter follow his course,
as long as he is bound by the law of his history.^70In almost any other context, Buber would treat such a choice as an avoidable er-
ror, but in this one he ties it to an elemental tragedy.
There is a parallel here to one of the strangest episodes in the biblical text,
Exodus 4:24–26. Immediately after meeting God at the burning bush, Moses sets
off on his journey, whereupon God comes upon him and tries to kill him. The
murder attempt is halted by Zipporah, Moses’ wife, who performs an impromptu
circumcision on her baby. The passage is puzzling because the attack comes with-
out warning or explanation, and seems to run completely counter to the mission
God has just given to Moses. Some scholars propose that the story originally
told of a demon, rather than YHVH, attempting to kill Moses, and that it was
revised by later editors who were theologically opposed to the notion of any di-
vine powers apart from YHVH. Buber, however, sees the opposite: YHVH was
the original actor in the story, and later editors felt that even to render the story
comprehensible from the standpoint of later theology, it was impermissible to
alter it. Only this assumption “reveals the whole significance of the tale for the
history of faith,” which goes far beyond the role of the rite of circumcision in the
ancient West Semitic clan structure.^71
Buber connects the attack on Moses to the attack on Jacob; both represent
a “dread night” (grausige Nacht, ליל הזועה) or “event of the night” (Ereignis der
Nacht, מאורע של הלילה), in which takes place “the sudden collapse of the newly
won certainty, the ‘deadly factual’ moment when the demon working with ap-
parently unbounded authority appears in the world where God alone had been
in control but a moment before.”^72 Yet because there is no dualism in Israelite
religion, no realm given over to Satan, any power that attacks a man must be
recognized as YHVH, “no matter how nocturnally dread and cruel it may be; and
it is proper to withstand Him, since after all He does not require anything else
of me than myself.” Yet Buber goes further, connecting the literal circumcision
that stops the attack to the metaphorical one applied to Moses’ speech: “For I am
uncircumcised of lips” (Exodus 6:12, 30). “This is a kind of uncircumcision which
cannot be eliminated by any circumcision, an absence of liberation which is
clearly not organic but penetrates to the core of the soul, an absence of liberation
and an impossibility of liberation; not a mere defect in the instruments of speech
but a fundamental inhibition of expression.”^73 Moses has been chosen to deliver
God’s word to Israel, but he lacks mastery over his own speech. He is thus sepa-
rated from his fellow humans by a basic and insurmountable barrier: “Teacher,