Moses Had All the Miracles and Still Had to Argue Every Day

If you have ever wondered why faith does not stick, why people who witness something undeniable still find their way back to doubt by the following Tuesday, the tradition has a case study. It is called the forty years in the wilderness.

Moses had done the ten plagues. He had parted the Red Sea. He had drawn water from a rock. The people had eaten bread from heaven every morning. And then they ran out of water again and began complaining that Moses had brought them out of Egypt to die. Not metaphorically. Literally, within days of the previous miracle, as if the previous miracle had not happened.

The Legends of the Jews, Ginzberg's synthesis of rabbinic tradition published between 1909 and 1938, captures Moses's response with precision. He was not angry at the words. He was disappointed by the pattern. After witnessing the plagues in Egypt, after the parting of the sea, the fickleness struck him as something stranger than ingratitude. It was structural. The people were built this way. Their faith was not an accumulation. Every miracle zeroed out at some point and the doubt reset to its original position.

The rabbis in Shemot Rabbah, the great midrashic collection on Exodus compiled in late antique Palestine, go back to an earlier moment: the burning bush. God appears and tells Moses he has been chosen to liberate Israel. Moses's response is to explain that he is not a good speaker. He has a speech impediment, or a reluctance, or both. God's reply in Shemot Rabbah is brisk: who made your mouth? The creator of the instrument does not need to be taught what it can do. The argument collapses and Moses goes. But he goes already knowing what the people are like, because he has been among them before, and that knowledge does not fill him with eagerness.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century midrashic text, approaches the plagues from the angle of the Egyptian magicians. The magicians were not frauds. They could match Moses up to a point. They turned rods into serpents. They turned water into blood. They replicated the frogs. But the lice stopped them. "This is the finger of God," they admitted, and stopped trying to compete. The text finds this important: even the professionals who made their living manipulating appearances recognized, at some threshold, that they were facing something categorically different from what they did.

Ginzberg records a moment near the end of the wilderness journey, when Edom refused the Israelites passage and they had to detour around the entire country. The people, already exhausted, started grumbling again. God provided quail. An enormous flock of quail descended on the camp, more meat than they could eat, and the people gathered it until they were sick of gathering it. And then people began to die, not of starvation but of eating too much, too greedily, after years of depending on manna. The miracle killed the people who could not receive it right.

Shemot Rabbah, in its commentary on the Passover night, locates Moses in an unexpected place during the plague of the firstborn. While Israel sheltered in their homes and God moved through Egypt, Moses was wading in the Nile, ensuring that the bones of Joseph would be found and carried out. The greatest miracle of liberation was happening above him, and Moses was underwater, doing the quiet work of keeping a promise made two hundred years earlier. He knew how to hold both things: the enormous and the intimate, the spectacular and the faithful.

Bamidbar Rabbah, the midrashic collection on Numbers, preserves the story of how Moses chose the seventy elders. He could not pick five from each tribe without leaving two out, and picking unevenly would create resentment. He solved it with a lottery: seventy-two lots, seventy marked and two blank. Every man who drew a lot accepted the result as divine. Moses gave the miracle to the process so that no one could accuse him of favoritism.

The people forgot miracles because miracles addressed the body. They fed the hungry and watered the thirsty and killed the enemies. But the hunger came back. The thirst came back. The enemies came back. Moses understood this better than anyone, which is why he spent forty years arguing, negotiating, absorbing complaint, and refusing to give up on a people who kept requiring him to start over. The work was not the miracles. The miracles were the evidence. The work was the daily business of staying present for people who forgot.