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.
,
Comments
Post a Comment