Thursday, December 25, 2014

Why is Moses called Elohim (God) in Exodus 7:1?

Firstly, Happy Xmas to all my readers (yep, all two of you), and all the best for 2015. I have been reading an interesting volume which I got for myself for the holidays, which I recommend: Forming God: Divine Anthropomorphism in the Pentateuch (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2014). On pp. 237-38, we have the following quote which adds light to why Moses is referred to as “god” (אלהים ) in Exo 7:1:


[The Priestly source] is not so explicit regarding the means by which YHWH brought the people out of Egypt. YHWH and his glory do not appear in P until Sinai, so there was no visible manifestation to lead the people physically out of Egypt and to Sinai. P explicitly establishes Moses’ and Aaron’s roles as divine mediators in Exod 7:1-5 . . . In effect, Moses takes the role of YHWH and Aaron of Moses, which involves Moses speaking commands to Aaron who carries them out. The source of the actions, their true agent, remains YHWH, as the passage makes clear by the summarising the entire process as YHWH stretching his hand out over Egypt and removing the Israelites. In the way, Moses and Aaron act out which is otherwise obscured from human observation, YHWH attacking Egypt and rescuing his people. Divine action here is both mediated by human proxies and represented typologically by human action.