There’s an interesting idea in the Book of Numbers that seems, at first, somewhat small but, after careful consideration, expands our view of the narrative world of the Book of Numbers, the spiritual, sociological, and cultural landscape of the Old Testament, and our thinking about history and our place in it as a whole.
“Now, the rabble that was among them had a strong craving, and the people of Israel also wept again and said, ‘Oh, that we had meat to eat. We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.’”
— Numbers 11:4–6
In the broader scope of Israelite history, we see the development of two conceptions of memory.
First, there is collective memory.
Events like Passover and the deliverance from the Egyptians at the Red Sea are not just instances of divine deliverance; they are formative moments in the shaping of national identity and collective memory. Israel is supposed to remember what happened in Egypt. They are supposed to remember their oppression, their cries to God, God’s response to those cries, and their eventual deliverance.
Numbers complicates the idea of collective memory by putting it into tension with its antithesis: constructed memory.
“We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt that cost nothing.”
— Numbers 11:5
The Israelite memory of Egypt in this text is a fabrication.
The reality of their time in Egypt was very different. Exodus chapter one records harshness, oppression, and a rapidly changing, politically and culturally hostile environment. This was the context from which the Israelites called out to God. They evidence an awareness of both their oppressors and their oppression when they are in Egypt.
God hears their groans and, in time, sends Moses, and in time they are delivered.
Exodus reports this accurately, but the Book of Numbers does not report the Israelites remembering this accurately.
The same people who were in slavery and called out to God to deliver them are reflecting on the experience of slavery as being much better than it actually was.
The fish that they ate in Egypt was not free.
It didn’t cost them “nothing.”
Economically speaking and sociologically, it cost them everything.
It cost them their freedom. It cost them control over their own labor. It cost them the ability to determine the course of their own lives. Exodus even describes a political order in which the lives of their children were threatened.
Whatever the fish cost, it was not nothing.
The problem in Numbers is therefore not simply that Israel remembers Egypt. The problem is that Israel has reconstructed Egypt into something it never was.
The place from which they once begged God for deliverance has become, in their memory, the place where they ate freely.
The question is why.
The Dizziness of Freedom
In his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, Danish theologian and existentialist Søren Kierkegaard reflects that “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
To develop this point, Kierkegaard puts forward an illustration. Suppose a person is standing on the edge of a cliff. This person would experience a range of emotions, one of them being fear. Fear in this illustration would stem from the fact that they could fall.
However, separate from fear is the emotion of anxiety.
Anxiety comes from the realization that the person standing on the cliff also possesses the freedom to jump.
The dizziness is not caused by the cliff itself. Instead, it is caused by the sudden realization of freedom and the terrifying awareness of its consequences.
Hence, with freedom can come anxiety.
The Israelites in the Book of Numbers are free, and they are dizzy.
Freedom has delivered them from Egypt, but freedom has also placed them in the wilderness.
Egypt was oppressive, but Egypt was familiar.
The wilderness is free, but the wilderness is uncertain.
This is one of the tensions that emerges in the Book of Numbers. Freedom does not immediately eliminate uncertainty. In fact, freedom can introduce new forms of uncertainty.
Israel must now travel somewhere they have never been. They must depend upon God for food they did not produce and move toward a future they cannot completely see. They have been delivered from the predictability of Egypt into the uncertainty of the wilderness.
They are no longer slaves, but neither are they settled.
They are free, but they are dizzy.
The Distortion of Perspective
At the time with which Numbers is concerned, the Israelites had not been free for very long. They had been in slavery in Egypt for a lot longer than they had been free.
As inhumane as slavery was, it became familiar.
Their desire for material things like food, and their desire for the existentially familiar, contort their memory and inhibit their trust in God.
This is what makes their recollection of Egypt so important.
Israel does not misremember Egypt for no reason.
Their dissatisfaction with their present circumstances begins to reshape their interpretation of their past circumstances. The discomfort of the wilderness makes Egypt appear more comfortable than Egypt actually was.
The manna they have now changes the way they remember the fish they had then.
The uncertainty they experience now changes the way they remember the predictability they experienced then.
Their present dissatisfaction reconstructs their past.
The biblical text is demonstrating that familiarity is highly desirable and highly influential on our thinking, even when the social situation of history was not ideal. What is familiar can become desirable simply because it is familiar. Conversely, what is new can become frightening simply because it is uncertain.
The Israelites know what happened in Egypt. They experienced it themselves.
Yet the anxiety of their present circumstances allows their desire for what is familiar to become more powerful than the facts of their own history.
The Construction of Memory
This is where Numbers complicates our understanding of memory.
Collective memory says:
“We were slaves in Egypt, and God delivered us.”
Constructed memory says:
“We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt that cost nothing.”
— Numbers 11:5
Both statements look backward, but they do not remember the same Egypt.
One memory understands the past in light of what actually happened. The other reconstructs the past in response to dissatisfaction with the present and anxiety about the future.
This is not simply an Israelite problem.
It is a human problem.
We have a tendency toward distortion that represents itself as triumphalism in our memory of our history and negativism in our imagination of our future, both divorced from the facts.
When the present is difficult and the future is uncertain, the past can become increasingly attractive. We can remember previous seasons, institutions, cultures, communities, and even previous versions of our own lives as being better than they actually were.
The danger is not in remembering the past. Israel is repeatedly commanded to remember.
The danger is in constructing a past that never existed.
Numbers therefore gives us an important warning about both memory and freedom.
Freedom can be disorienting. The uncertainty that accompanies freedom can make the familiarity of the past attractive, even when the past was oppressive. If we are not careful, the anxiety of the present can cause us to rewrite yesterday and, in doing so, distort our imagination of tomorrow.
The Israelites had asked God to deliver them from Egypt.
God delivered them.
But once the difficulties of freedom became real, they began remembering the place from which God had delivered them as though it were the place where their needs had been freely met.
The fish was not free.
And neither was Egypt.
The danger of constructed memory is therefore greater than simply remembering history incorrectly. When we distort the past, we can begin to distrust the present and fear the future. We can even begin to interpret the places from which we once prayed to be delivered as preferable to the uncertain places toward which God is leading us.
The Book of Numbers reminds us that remembering truthfully is not merely about understanding where we have been.
It shapes whether we can faithfully move toward where we are going.
This is a great look into freedom, and how we are all sheep who need a Shepard. Thank you for your writings.