Ulysses Essay 23 (41:32)
Chapter 3 (Proteus) Note 9
“The two maries. They have tucked it safe among the bulrushes”


Walking along the broad Sandymount Strand near the Poolbeg power station, Stephen sees the “the bloated carcass of a dog” and then a live hunting dog – a “point” – running across the beach. As he gets his walking stick ready in case the dog should attack him, he makes out two distant human figures walking towards the water. He inwardly christens them “the two maries” – the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene – who are significant in Catholic theology for having attended Jesus’s crucifixion and also for having watched his sepulcher, and thus were the first to give notice that the grave was empty and that Christ “had risen”. From the “two maries” Stephen free associates to the infant Moses, his pitch-daubed ark caught in the bulrushes at the banks of the Nile.

The most obvious connection between “the two maries” and Moses in the bulrushes is the name Miriam. In Hebrew “Mary” is “Miryam” (anglicized to “Miriam”), and hence the Virgin Mary is “Miryam ha’Betulah”, and Mary Magdalene is “Miryam ha’Migdalit” (“Miriam, the Migdalite” – a reference to her origin from the village of Migdal on the shores of Lake Galilee, today a prosperous farming and bedroom community situated just north of the city of Tiberias, and not far from the Zionist farming village in Galilee which so occupies Bloom in the next chapter of Ulysses).

The original Miriam was of course Moses’s sister, who was instructed by her mother Yocheved to keep watch on her infant brother who had had been placed by Yocheved in the reeds of the Nile in a pitch-covered basketwork ark so as to avoid the Pharaonic decree that all Hebrew male children were to be drowned. Pharaoh’s daughter bathing in the Nile hears the baby crying and realizes that he is a Hebrew infant. Taking pity on the baby, she decides to adopt him. Miriam, standing by, asks her if the she would want “one of the Hebrew women” to nurse the baby. The princess agrees, and Miriam brings Yocheved to Pharaoh’s daughter. Yocheved nurses him until he is weaned, and then returns him to the palace. The princess takes him as her son and calls him “Moshe” (Hebrew – “drawn from the water” – anglicized to “Moses”), and he grows up in the palace as an Egyptian prince (Exodus 2:3-10).

The parallels between the Moses story and the Jesus story are legion and many of them are part of standard Christian bible commentary. All religious and national mythologies (compare the story of Romulus and Remus) tend to involve supernatural or metahistorical elements in the births and deaths of the founding fathers of the religion or nation.  In this sense the story of Moses (a foundling brought up in the palace of the tyrant and buried by God in an unknown grave) is a pale prefiguration of Jesus’s virgin birth and post-crucifixion resurrection. Still both stories share a tyrannical king (Pharaoh and Herod) who carry out genocidal attacks against male Jewish babies (Pharaoh – the drowning of all the newborn male infants; Herod – the attempted elimination of the unknown usurper of his throne by killing all the male infants in the Bethlehem area: the “Massacre of the Innocents”) and both have a strong connection to Egypt (the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, and the flight to Egypt of Joseph, Mary and Jesus to escape the Herodian decree).

Yet to my mind it is Miryam-Miriam-Mary who proffers the strongest connection between the two stories. Indeed Miriam of the Tanach is Moses’s sister while the New Testament Mary is Jesus’s virginal mother, but they both insert a strong feministic component into their respective narratives. By protecting the newborn leaders they leave a strong message that women are ultimately the final arbiters of human history.

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