-Caveat Lector- Moses and Oedipus
William H. Pahlka Every culture expresses its sense of community and its matrix of values by telling stories of great heroes whose sacrifices liberated the people from a clouded past and established the people as a nation. In the dozens of parallels between Moses and Oedipus, there is convincing evidence that the two figures play corresponding roles in their two cultures. And then, in the differences between them we can observe some fundamental distinctions between the essential values of Greek and Hebrew cultures. First, both Moses and Oedipus fulfill the general mythic requirement that the hero be a person of mysterious birth. Both are threats to the safety and well-being of their parents--Moses because his birth could lead to the death of his parents, and Oedipus because of the prophecy that he will kill his father. Both are abandoned by their parents to possible death in the natural world--Kithaera and the Nile--and both are rescued by the intervention of strangers. In fact, in one of the early versions of the Oedipus story, Oedipus was put in a chest and left afloat in the sea. In that version, the queen of Corinth found him on a trip to the shore to do her laundry (Bremmer 43). Both are adopted by royalty and raised as princes in a strange land. Both are marked by significant defects symbolically related to their roles: Oedipus is lame (his name means "swollen foot"); Moses has a speech defect. Both achieve high status and comfortable lives from which they are cast out by a divine message: Oedipus is driven from Corinth by the oracle at Delphi; Moses is dislocated three times, first from his family, then from the royal Egyptian palace, and then from security in Midian by the God on Mt. Sinai. In connection with their flights from their adopted homes, both are guilty of killing strangers--King Laios and the Egyptian foreman--in ambiguous circumstances. Oedipus's triumph over the ancient magical and chthonian powers of the Sphinx is paralleled by Moses's victories over the Pharaoh's priests. As Oedipus is both the cause and the healer of the plague on Thebes, so Moses is both the cause and the remover of the plagues on Egypt. As Moses on his return to Goshen encounters both cooperation and opposition from Aaron, who may be his brother, so Oedipus encounters both cooperation and opposition from Creon, his newly acquired brother-in-law. (The fact that Creon is also his uncle sets up a second level of the parallel to Moses as he is presented by Zora Neale Hurston in Moses, Man of the Mountain, since Moses is opposed by his uncle Ta-Phar.) In both cases, the blood relation between the hero and the brother figure (or the uncle figure) is clouded by uncertainty. At various times, both Moses and Oedipus are isolated in their determination to solve problems in ways contrary to the common opinion, and both are confident in following their paths in spite of all complaints and advice. Oedipus finds himself in conflict with Teiresias, a prophet revered by the people; Moses faces off against Miriam, a prophetess revered by the people. In both cases there is a mysterious link between hero and prophet: Moses and Miriam are linked as possible siblings; Oedipus and Teiresias are linked by their blindness. And just as Oedipus is condemned to wander in exile from Thebes throughout his old age, Moses spends his old age wandering for forty years in the wilderness with his reluctant tribes. Oedipus and Moses are both heroes of liberation. Moses liberates the Hebrews not only from actual slavery, but also from slave mentality. Oedipus's liberation is more subtle; he represents the triumph of rational human autonomy over the more primitive priestly culture's subservience to dark natural forces (which are, incidentally, symbolized most directly by the Egyptian sphinx). As in most myths of cultural transformation, the hero simultaneously represents the powers of the new order and the sacrificial victim demanded by the powers of the old order which is being overthrown. Thus, Moses is required by God to sacrifice his personal life to the larger demands of the needs of the nation. Thus Sophocles has Oedipus blinded and cast out of the city he has worked so hard to save. This joining of hero and victim is characteristic of myth, the general principle of which is opposition and contradiction. For example, Moses must contain both the power of the oppressor and the vulnerability of the oppressed. Oedipus must represent the courage and strength of autonomous human action, but he must also represent the intensification of possible suffering that comes from deciding to be master of one's own fate. Both Moses and Oedipus are examples of the yoking of the opposing terms "insider" and "outsider." Oedipus is a Corinthian who is also a Theban, a native who is also a stranger. To serve as liberator, the hero must be someone who belongs to the people, "one of us," and, at the same time, an outsider who is in a position to introduce something new and alien. Moses fulfills this necessity in at least four ways. He is an Egyptian among Hebrews, a Hebrew among Egyptians, an Egyptian among Midianites, and finally the truest of Midianites among Midianites, since his adopted home in Midian is near Mt. Sinai, his mountain, his spiritual home. Likewise, Oedipus is a Corinthian among Thebans, but also a Theban in Corinth, while his Sinai is neither Thebes nor Corinth, but Athens. His sacred place is the grove outside of Athens called Colonnus. In both cases, the outsider who proves to be an insider proves ultimately, once again, to be an outsider, a visitor, like Jesus, from a wholly different realm. As the Moses story moves from Goshen to Canaan, so the Oedipus cycle moves from Thebes to Athens. It is characteristic of such liberation stories that the benefits of the new order which the hero brings into being are not conferred upon the original group, but are passed on to a second generation or even to another nation. The Exodus generation must be killed or allowed to die off before the promised land can be achieved. When the Levites slaughter their Hebrew brethren, they are fulfilling the same requirement of the mythic paradigm of cultural transformation that is represented by the civil war in Thebes, in which Oedipus's children destroy Thebes and each other. It is Athens, not Thebes, which will inherit the mantle of the Apollonian rationalist society, grounded in human autonomy. And it is Joshua's wilderness-born generation, not the Egypt-born generation, which will inherit the mantle of Jehovah and thereby become, not slaves, but chosen people. One of the better known examples of this mythic rule is the way in which the Gentiles become the inheritors of the Messianic fulfillment Jesus brought to the Israelites. Just as Moses must die in a holy place just short of the entry to Canaan, while a different kind of hero, Joshua, takes his place, so Oedipus dies in a holy place just on the outskirts of Athens, while Theseus, governor of Athens, pays homage to Oedipus's powers by accepting them from him. Both Oedipus and Moses are specifically excluded from the new societies they have created because both possess the two central liabilities of the hero of transformation. They are the sacrifical victims on the altar of the new god, and they are tainted with the pollutions inevitably attached to their roles. Parricide and incest are the kinship images which embody the theme of destruction of the old and founding of the new. Oedipus's crimes make him unfit to live in the new Athenian society, but those same crimes, transformed by suffering, become holy memories, and the place of Oedipus's death becomes a holy place symbolizing the birth of the new. There are a number of differing ways of accounting for Moses's taint. Hurston seems to emphasize one in particular, having to do with his exercise of Egyptian supernatural powers. She belabors the opposition between the two kinds of magic Moses possesses: the book of Thoth guarded by a snake at the bottom of a river, and the voice of God speaking from the unconsumed bush at the top of a mountain: Egyptian chthonian magic on the one hand, and monotheistic celestial magic on the other. The snake which symbolizes Moses's power while he is still in Egypt represents what is needed to overcome the idolatrous enemy; it is power on the enemy's terms, so to speak. Moses needed that magic to carry out his role, but it is one form of the taint which bars him from membership in Joshua's new civilization.Theseus and Joshua, Athens and Canaan--these represent the true "children" of the hero of transformation, whose biological offspring tend to pay the price of their fathers' heroic "crimes." Parallels like these are not restricted to the two examples given. Joseph, Jesus, Osiris, Prometheus, King Arthur, and a host of other ancient heroes follow the same structural patterns. But similarities of overall structure do not prevent significant differences in the details. Once we have observed the similarities that demonstrate how the Moses story and the Oedipus story are two versions of one central mythic story, we can go on to use the differences between those stories to pinpoint important differences between the two cultures that produced them. The Oedipus cycle is clearly a myth about the birth of a humanist and rationalist culture. Oedipus believes in the power of human intelligence to solve problems (Oeda means "to know"). He takes his stand against supernatural modes of knowing, against the seer-knowledge of Teiresias, and against the handed-down communal wisdom of a play-it-safe society governed by oracles and magical forces under priestly control. He takes absolutely seriously the Apollonian imperative of self-knowledge. He asserts his will and carries out his mission not only willingly, but with total disregard for his own security and comfort. Moses, on the other hand, accepts his mission only reluctantly, clinging to his hope for the comfortable life of a non-hero. Whereas Oedipus employs the rational skills of a detective, Moses is a wielder of irrational and supernatural powers he does not understand. The Greek story is, to a degree, about liberating human culture from its passive submission to divine control, while the Hebrew story is about liberating human culture from human enslavement and from a slave mentality by bringing it back into the fold of divine authority and protection. In the Moses story, ethical concerns, questions of loyalty and obedience, and the gradual development of moral strength born of faith are all central themes which appear with much less visibility in the Greek story. The Greek story emphasizes tragic concerns, like knowledge of the limits of human power, while the Moses story emphasizes more "comic" concerns, like the problems of forging a sense of community. In the Moses story, God is finally the central character; his absolute control of the action converts all conflicts and complications into preordained elements of an unthwartable plan. In the Oedipus story, Apollo remains much more in the background, communicating with his chosen leader chiefly by oracles which mystify and threaten Oedipus, even as they keep him unwittingly in proper motion toward his preordained goal. There is a curious twist in the fact that Oedipus, who represents a new degree of independence from divine will, remains unaware, most of the time, of the Apollonian will which drives him on, while Moses, who represents submission to divine will, is favored with a reasonably clear understanding of the divine intentions. Perhaps this irony is related to the fact that the chief weakness of the Thebans (Oedipus himself, Creon, Polyneices, Eteocles, Antigone) is pride, whereas the chief weakness of the Hebrews is humility born of enslavement. Even the arrogant puffery of Aaron and Miriam is simply one of the effects of their constant humiliation. I have been more thorough about pointing to the parallels between these two stories than about pointing to the differences. There is much more to be extracted from the second half of this exercise, but my purpose here is simply to lay the groundwork for treating these stories as culturally emblematic. Anyone interested in doing so can develop these ideas further. References: Bremmer, Jan. Interpretations of Greek Mythology . Totowa: Barnes, 1986. Hurston, Zora Neale. Moses, Man of the Mountain. New York: Harper, 1991. Sophocles. The Oedipus Cycle. Tr. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. San Diego: Harcourt, 1949 Essays and Publications / Pahlka Main Page ----- Om K <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. 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