Dear Elisheba,
You were Aaron’s wife, a woman who would face disruption in
your life to as your husband took the role of prophet and Moses’s spokesman.
I wonder how you felt about everything going on. I am
taking it that you would have been suffering like everybody else in your
community. Were you ostracised by those who blamed your wider family for
bringing suffering upon them or did they try and use you to speak reason to the
brothers?
How was Moses viewed by you? Did you worry about the
influence he appeared to have over Aaron? Did you and your husband have to
accept that Moses was acting on God’s word and not completely mad? Were you and
your husband amongst those who refused to believe Moses originally? These are
questions the text raises for me but which it does not have answers to.
I wonder if heritage and genealogy was the thing which was
used to persuade you that you had little choice or that Moses wasn’t crazy. I
guess the family stories passed down and you knew them well, especially as the boy’s
mother was also their great aunt and so she would have had a link to that previous
generation too.
Was Jochebed still alive when
all this was going on? If she was did she use the story of Moses’ survival as a
baby during that slaughter of the innocents as evidence that God was really
with him?
You obviously had four sons to
think about too. Did you both decide to follow Moses because of a fear of what
would happen to them and a desperation that something had to change so they had
hope of a better future?
Did Moses tell Aaron that he
was going to harden Pharaoh’s heart? It seems to me that your husband got a lot
of the raw deal on what was going on. He was the one who was charged on
speaking truth to power but was only the intermediary, having to trust Moses
completely.
The dynamic is something I
find really interesting and is something I will explore further in a letter to
your husband I am sure.
How did you feel about Moses
speech defect? Was stammering or whatever faltering would be most fully
translated as in our day and age common or was it judged as a sign of weakness?
Was it something used to mock by yourselves? I can imagine the children doing
impressions of Uncle Moses which you probably had to tell them off for or were
they too well behaved for that?
What was going on in your head
on that day when Aaron headed off with Moses to see Pharaoh? Did you know what
was going on or was it hidden from you to some extent?
What was it like when Aaron
got home and told you about the staff turning into a snake and the others having
their staff’s turn into snakes too but his eating them up. Did it scare you
even more? I think it would have me as this was clearly getting into the world
of the supernatural and in your pre-modern society there would have been even
more myths around such actions than we have today.
Then there was the blood in
the Nile, that would have been really scary and I guess your people would have
suffered doubly too. Did it mean that you did not have water and had to dig the
wells for the Egyptians?
As you can tell I have lots of
questions for you. They relate in part to the fact the narrative focuses on the
main events but do not look at the impact of you as women. Yours is in many
ways a hidden history. Yet, I think it is an important history because we have
so much to learn about how to relate to and support the families of those who
lead in whatever capacity. Having the stories of women such as yourself would
help us as it would having the stories of men who supported women who lead and
having the stories of children and so on.
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