Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Sisobk could have uncovered this instance of family squeamishness himself had he been as dedicated a student of Genesis as he was of Numbers. Or had he been aware of Rashi — Rabbi Shelomoh Yitschaki — the worried Talmudical scholar in a skull-cap whose interpretation of Jacob’s precautionary curse we have unapologetically borrowed. Alternatively, he could have searched his own psychology to find the reasons for his mind’s retention of Jacob, and recalled that he too — even Sisobk the Scryer — was the cursed son of a son-cursing father, and the cursed grandson of a grandson-cursing grandfather before that.

‘There is some fatality in us,’ Sisobk’s male ancestors had taken it in turn to predict. ‘Not a one of us is born to escape a premature and violent death. It is written. Pass it on.’

In receipt of this message from a father who fell on to the tusks of wild pigs in his thirty-fifth year, the young Sisobk took up celibacy to spite succession, and scrying in the hope that absorption in other people’s futures would preserve him from his own.

The wonder is not that he pre-remembered Jacob, the caster of long shadows, the prophet of all that would befall his sons, but that he ever pre-forgot him.

Sisobk the Scryer, of course, now knows of our intervention in his difficulty and thanks us for it. We have freed him to get on with his steam-reading.

NOW Korah, the son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi, (no son of Jacob); and Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab and On, the son of Peleth, sons of Reuben, took men:

And they rose up before Moses, with certain of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown:

And they gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you…

The smell of insurrection floats deliciously into Sisobk’s nostrils.

So, now that we’ve extricated one prophet from the story, and thereby made another happy, who does that leave us with?

Let’s deal with the small-fry first.

On On, the son of Peleth, we need not for the moment dwell. He found himself enlisted in a mutiny by wills stronger than his own, before being safely hauled out of it again by a will stronger even than theirs. Like many before and since, he owed his survival more to a spouse than to a father, and ought to have been known as On, the husband of his wife.

Dathan and Abiram, on the other hand, had been agitating in alley-ways for years. In Alush they had broken the Sabbath. In Pihahiroth they had infuriated the Lord by suddenly waxing lyrical about the comforts of the country from whose servitude they had just been led. In Egypt itself they had carried stories to the Pharaoh — ‘We have this minute seen Moses smite a citizen, Highest’ — and gave further notice of their sullenness the time Moses caught them fighting over brick and mortar, and tried to step between them — ‘Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou to kill us as thou didst the Egyptian?’

It was hardly unexpected, therefore, when the muttering began at Kadesh-Barnea, in the waste Wilderness of Zin, that the voices of Dathan and Abiram should be heard louder than almost all the others, and that their disgruntlement should be as wind to fire.

Korah, however, was the fire. Intelligent, articulate, vain of his looks, of his influence, of his gift for satire, Korah had been treasurer to the Pharaohs, in which capacity he had stumbled on one of the three great hoards amassed by Joseph as a precaution against Egypt’s unstable economy, and had helped himself thereto. It was said of his wealth that it was so great, three hundred mules were needed to carry the keys to it alone. In order to arrive at a just estimate of his importance you have to imagine the Lord holding apart the waters of the Red Sea long enough not only for the Children of Israel but also for each of those three hundred mules to pass safely through.

There is an argument that says Moses should have been more careful of Korah. Should have and could have. It doesn’t, after all, take much to alleviate the dangerous sadness of the immoderately wealthy: a kind word or a title, a ribbon here, a garland there. Yet when the time came to hand out the chieftainships of the families, Moses passed over Korah in favour of his cousin, Elizaphan. As son of Izhar, who was the second son of Kohath, Korah had a far stronger claim to head the house of the Kohathites than did Elizaphan, whose father, Uzziel, was Kohath’s last and least born. A slight or an oversight? Surely not the latter. The Children of Israel were able to remember who had begotten whom, and in what order, since Adam begat Cain; they cannot lightly be accused of inattentiveness to the niceties of family precedence. So what did Moses intend by his rudeness to Korah?

Korah had his own theories. One of them relating to his, Korah’s, wife.

A word of caution here. Korah was careful and courteous, as well as shrewd, sad and rich. He knew better than to lay about him with charges of sexual covetousness. A man can look foolish, even in a desert, always suspecting others of wanting to crawl through the flap of his pavilion. And he had no actual proof that Moses lusted after his or, come to that, any other man’s wife, even in his heart.

There was a rumour in circulation that Moses had long since ceased lusting after his own. In a rare but very public falling-out with their brother, Miriam and Aaron had taken the side of their sister-in-law, the Cushite woman, and accused Moses of neglecting his conjugal duties to her under cover of piety. What was he doing, they wanted to know, separating himself from flesh as if that was what the Lord expected of him? ‘Hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses? Hath he not spoken also by us?’ They, his sister and brother — not exactly deficient in holiness themselves — were not aware of any new prohibition against lawful lying together, no, not even if the wife of God’s chosen prophet did happen to be as black as night. It looked liked spiritual pride to them; sanctity over and above what was necessary.

Nor was Zipporah the first of Moses’s wives to have complained of his aloofness, or to have remarked on his propensity for withdrawal, for quickly upping his tent and pitching it in some other place.

Accounts varied as to how long, after he had fled from the consequences of slaying an Egyptian, Moses spent in Ethiopia; but two reports consistently recurred. The first told that he had attained great military distinction there and eventually won the hand of Adoniah, the dusky Queen of Ethiopia herself. The second intimated that in no time at all the Queen had grown disillusioned with his performance as a husband and more or less given up on him as any sort of usefully functioning consort or companion. It appears that after some initial enthusiasm he had bethought himself of Isaac’s words to Jacob (we whisper that name so as not to discompose Sisobk the Scryer who is still reading) — ‘Thou shalt not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan’ — and on that pretext never laid a finger on her again.

Moses liked his wives to be dark, foreign and forbidden — or at least borderline forbidden — that much can be said, and after that he liked not to have to suffer their proximity.

That such a pathological compulsion to make women disgusted with themselves should have assumed the guise of a religious imperative was no surprise to Korah, who had a secular intelligence, suspected all impulses to mysticism, and was himself sufficiently at ease in his virility not to mind being under the sway of a wife. It is not out of the question that Moses, too, had an inkling that what made him grow as a mountaineer and law-maker shrunk him as a mere terrestrial man, for he fell unusually quiet — unusually quiet for a person of quick temper — whenever he was challenged in this weak spot in his probity. Miriam’s and Aaron’s opposition called out meekness in him, not rage; confronted, later, by Korah’s rebellion — Ye take too much upon you — he dropped upon his face; and later still, when Zimri would challenge him with the Midianite woman, Cozbi, and taunt him with the inconsistency of his disapproval of her –