Listening to Accuadio this morning, I chanced to hear a song from a musical called “Children of Eden.” There was a line in it which suggested that Moses made his miraculous staff with a branch of the Burning Bush (which doesn’t make much sense, unless bush=tree, but that’s another matter); there was the strong implication that the staff’s miraculous powers were a result of its origins. This struck me as an interesting idea, and I’m wondering if anyone knows of any other stories which make a similar claim.
“Children of Eden” by Stephen Schwartz doesn’t have Moses in it. Is there another one? I’m confused.
Perhaps Adam crafted his staff out of the tree which God destroyed when he set the sword of flame into the earth and banished/cursed Adam and Eve from the garden.
No Moses though.
God, Adam, Cain, Abel, Noah and his sons – that’s the male cast of “Children of Eden” as far as I know:
Maybe, or maybe I’m confused. I was writing as I listened to AccuRadio, and most of my attention was on the former activity; the Moses line caught my attention and I checked the Accuradio window a second later, but I could easily be mistaken.
But didn’t Moses turn his staff into a snake in front of Pharoah before they all left Egypt? That means it was magical before Moses saw the burning bush and received the Commandments.
Also, my understanding is that Moses didn’t have a ‘magical’ staff. Yahweh turned the staff into a serpent and swallowed the Pharoah’s magician’s staff, which would have more closely fit the definition of ‘magical’. Moses could have tossed candy bar down on the floor and the same thing would have happened, because God made it happen.
I read a book called The Jester by (I think) Peter Straub. A lowly innkeeper-turned-jester returns from the Crusades with a crude staff taken from a dead priest in the Holy Land. He leads a peasants’ rebellion, and in a battle the staff splits open to reveal a spear. It’s the spear that pierced Jesus’s side on the cross. The spear has no magical powers, but it helps to rile up his amateur troops. The nobles on the other side desperately want the spear, because it’s the most valuable relic in Christianity. Getting the spear becomes at least as important as beating the rebels.
I knew someone would bring this up. It’s not been my understanding that Moses’ staff had any inherent virtue either; certainly I don’t think that’s the usual Christian view (and I think most Xtians I know would have a cow over describing the staff as “magical,” a word I tried to avoid in my OP. I was asking if there is any tradition, literary or otherwise, that ascribes the miracles done WITH the staff in hand to powers it possessed on its own, and further ascribing the origin of those powers to the staff being made from the burning bush.
Read your Exodus again (or watch The Ten Commandments, or Prince of Egypt, or whatever) – God spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush to send him back to confront Pharaoh in Egypt, so he saw the BB before he did the trick with the staqff.
You’re right that, ultimately, the power of the staff came from God, so it didn’t need to be cut from the BB. But it would tie everything together in an interesting way.
Just to be clear, it wasn’t Moses staff that transformed into a snake, it was his brother Aaron’s. (who became high priest) Of course, the priests of Egypt were able to do the same thing. It was also Aaron’s staff that was used to produce several of the plagues of Egypt.
Moses did use his own staff for a few things, but the snake trick wasn’t one of them.
To further confuse the issue, it was only Aaron’s staff in the P text but in the E text it was Moses’ staff. And in the E text Aaron and Moses are not even related.
It is not clear where the staff comes from in P, but in E it pretty clear that Moses had it with when he was at the BB.
Wikipedia has the Torah with sources highlighted. The staff is referred as a rod.
“Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen! Now, for my next trick, i’ll need to borrow a staff from someone in the audience…now now, I only need one!”
