Your Unfinished Song
Then Moses and the sons of Israel sang this song to the Lord, and said,
“I will sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted; the horse and its rider He has hurled into the sea.” Exodus 15:1 NASB
Sang – In 2014 we looked at the odd grammar of this verse. The rabbis noticed that the verb šîr (to sing) is not a past tense. It is yiqtol (imperfect), indicating that the song Moses sings is not finished. The rabbis went on to explain that this song will be sung when the final act of the exodus is finished, that is, when God restores His kingdom on earth, and therefore, since Moses will sing the song, there must be resurrection from the dead. You can read about this oddity here.
What I want to explore is another implication of this grammatical “mistake.” That implication is that the original Hebrew text is not a report about some past event in the life of Moses and Israel. It is an invitation to experience involvement in the event. That is to say, we also anticipate Moses singing. This singing has yet to occur and so we can be there when it happens. We can sing with Moses on that day. The implication here is that the text deliberately invites the reader to participate, to make this supposedly historical event a part of the reader’s story.
We should not be surprised to find oddities like this in Hebrew. Why? Because Hebrew requires reader involvement. It can’t be read, it can’t be communicated, without adding vowels, and, as this verse points out, it can’t become reality without your involvement either. Hebrew is essentially existential spiritual language. It invites the reader to integrate the story it recounts into present life. Therefore, the biblical text is actually a continuous journey where the present reader’s involvement is just as important as the original audience’s experience. When we read the Hebrew text, we construct a narrative that attempts to integrate past experiences in order to understand or even anticipate new experiences. The fuller the past narrative, the more robust it will be for present guidance. This is why we read the biblical narrative, not for theological affirmation or justification but for involvement in God’s story. The Bible is God’s story about His commitment to Israel and the path that leads back to Him, but it is our story too.
Now compare this Semitic idea with the shift that occurred in the Middle Ages (in both Judaism and Christianity):
The pivotal point of turning in evangelical thinking which demands close attention is the change that has taken place from the Protestant emphasis upon the objective facts of the gospel in history, to the mediaeval emphasis on the inner life. The evangelical who sees the inward transformation work of the Spirit as the key element of Christianity will soon lose contact with the historic faith and the historic gospel. At the same time he will come to neglect the historical acts of God in the Old Testament. The Christ enthroned in the human heart loses his own incarnate humanity, and the humanity of the Old Testament history will be soon discarded so that the ‘inner spiritual’ meanings may be applied to the ‘inner spiritual’ life of the Christian.
The crisis of the Old Testament today is only another form of the crisis of the Protestant faith. Inner-directed Christianity, which reduces the gospel to the level of every other religion of the inner man, might well use a text from the Apocrypha to serve as its own epitaph for the Reformers:
There are others who are unremembered;
They are dead, and it is as though they had never existed.[1]
Some months ago I wrote about the NASB’s use of the asterisk to denote active participation in the text. You might remember this:
“Sacred history may be described as an attempt to overcome the dividing line of past and present, as an attempt to see the past in the present tense.”[2]
Heschel’s point is crucially important. The purpose of the biblical stories, so clearly exemplified in the note about Greek translation, is for the reader to become part of what is happening. But that doesn’t mean experiencing a warm and fuzzy interior spiritual feeling (knowing Jesus in your heart). No, it means living the history today. It means Shabbat, the festivals, the rituals, the community, the prayers, and retelling the story of the ancestors. It’s not merely an inner spirituality. That is not a biblical faith. A biblical faith is what Heschel meant when he wrote, “to believe is to remember.”
Today you must become a storyteller by adding your life to Moses’ future song.
And now a politically-incorrect note, added at the last minute on November 4. If there were ever a time to integrate God’s faithfulness and actions with Israel into our own experience, now is that time. As my rabbi friend reminded me just a few days ago, God does have a plan in all this. What that plan is and how it will be revealed might be a complete mystery at this moment. How such civil unrest and worldwide panic can become the grounds for political upheaval is almost impossible for me to comprehend. But here we are. Will we let the God of Israel, the God of grace and faithfulness, rule? Will we place our trust in His unwavering commitment to His Kingdom? These are questions that should occupy us now, when the world is listening to something else. May peace be upon you.
Topical Index: sang, šîr, yiqtol, Moses, story, narrative, spirituality, Exodus 15:1
[1] Graeme Goldworthy, Gospel and Kingdom: A Christian Interpretation of the Old Testament, p. 113.
[2] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 116.
