Dear Miriam,
I am taking it you were with Moses and the Israelites when
they sang a song exalting the Lord for what he had done to the Egyptians.
It is obviously a song of praise mixed with a telling of
your people’s story. I find it a hard song of praise to connect with.
You are praising God for his anger against another group of
people and for taking the lives of others. Yes, they were oppressors and they
were your supposed enemies but they were still people made in the image of God.
In verse seven it talks about God unleashing his burning
anger and that is something I can sort of get. I have no doubt God looks at the
world at the moment seeing all the pain and senseless killing in it and is both
angry and sad. Yet, as I say you are also celebrating violence and the destruction
of others.
I could dwell on this but will not. I have recently read
the Christmas Sermon on Peace which Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1967 and I
think that says far more about where my concerns lie than I could.
What I want to enquire about is you and your status. Verse
20 describes you as a prophetess. What exactly did that mean in your context?
You are also described as Aaron’s sister but we also know you to be Moses’. Is
it the fact you grew up around Aaron which made you identified in that way?
You appear to have the role of leading the women. Was this
because yours was a segregated society? Did you, as an Israelite, have a role
Moses’ wife ,who was partly foreign, could not?
How did the men relate to you? Were you married and did you
have a position of leadership higher than your husband or were you single?
Again you are a figure who seems significant but we seem to
know relatively little about.
Then there is the wandering without water. Were you scared?
Did people turn on you as well as Moses?
I know a lot of questions but you raise them in my mind and
as so often the text can’t answer them.
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