The story of Moses’ infancy is well known.14
Seeking to save the baby from the death sentence of Pharaoh, his mother hides him in a floating basket among the bulrushes along the bank of the Nile. There he is found by Pharaoh’s daughter. She not only adopts him but unknowingly hires his mother as his nursemaid. The future liberator of Israel is then raised in the imperial household.
Now grown up, Moses one day sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave. He intervenes, kills the Egyptian, hides the body in the sand, and flees Egypt. A fugitive from the empire, he finds refuge in Midian, marries a woman of that region, has a son, and becomes a shepherd.
Many years pass. In Egypt, the situation of the Hebrew slaves worsens:
The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.15
The twofold repetition of groaning, crying, and slavery underlines the desperation of the Israelites’ plight. God hears their groaning, remembers the covenant, looks upon them, and takes notice of them.
Immediately thereafter God calls Moses to be the liberator of Israel. While tending his flock on Mt. Horeb, “the mountain of God,” Moses has a numinous experience—an experience of the sacred—that changes his and Israel’s life forever. It is the famous story of the burning bush:
The angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.16
Moses sees a bush blazing with light, filled with the divine radiance. This is the first of several direct experiences of God reported about Moses. Like Abraham and Jacob before him, he is described as having firsthand experiences of the sacred.17
Then God speaks to him out of the bush and calls him to go back to Egypt:
I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians. . . . So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.18
Moses is reluctant and resists. He asks, If I do this and the Israelites ask me about the name of the God who has sent me, what shall I say? The answer God gives him still mystifies: “I am who I am.”19 Moses finally agrees and, with his brother Aaron, returns to Egypt.
Confrontation with Pharaoh: The Plagues
Moses and Aaron appear before Pharaoh and announce the divine imperative to the imperial power that rules their world: “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go.’ ” Let my people go—an imperative, not a plea—is the repeated refrain of the next several chapters. Pharaoh’s response is haughty and contemptuous: “Who is the LORD that I should let Israel go?” Moreover, he increases the work burden of the Hebrew slaves, saying, “You are lazy, lazy.”20
Then begin a series of dramatic episodes in which God sends plague after plague against the empire. The plagues afflict the Egyptians, but not the Israelites.
The Nile and all the other water in Egypt turn to blood.
Frogs fill the land.
Gnats afflict humans and animals alike.
Flies ruin the land.
All the livestock of the Egyptians die.
Boils attack Egyptians and their animals.
Hail kills all exposed Egyptians and animals and ruins half the crops.
Locusts consume the rest of the crops.
Thick darkness covers the land for three days.21
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and still occasionally today), it was common for historical scholars to seek to correlate the plagues with natural phenomena known to occur in Egypt. But such correlations miss the point. By seeking to save the historicity of the plague stories with natural explanations, they eliminated the central claim made by the storytellers of Israel: God did this. It was God who sent the plagues and “brought us out of Egypt with a great and mighty hand.”
But even after nine plagues, Pharaoh still refuses the imperative to “let my people go.” And so the most devastating plague strikes: the death of the firstborn of all Egyptians, including Pharaoh’s son. The Israelites are spared by smearing blood upon the doorposts and lintels of their dwellings so that God will “pass over” their houses. Thus, in the midst of the tenth plague, the festival of Passover is established.22 But the empire is not spared.
The Liberation and the Sea
The death of all firstborns does it. Pharaoh finally relents and lets the Israelites leave Egypt. But almost immediately he changes his mind. His army pursues the fleeing slaves and catches up to them at the sea. With the water in front of the Israelites and the army of the empire behind them, the threat to God’s promise is again acute: Israel faces extermination. Then occurs the event that has been remembered and celebrated in Jewish and Christian liturgies ever since: God causes the waters to fall back, the Israelites cross, Pharaoh’s army and chariots become mired in the mud, the sea returns, and they drown. God has rescued Israel.23
The deliverance of Israel at the sea is celebrated scripturally in a magnificent hymn of praise to God. Commonly called “the song of Moses” and filling almost all of Exodus 15, it obviously comes from a much later date. It praises God not only for the victory over the Egyptians but also for the conquest of Canaan. Its last lines refer to “the mountain” and “the place” and “the sanctuary” where God has chosen to dwell, apparently a reference to the temple in Jerusalem built by King Solomon on Mt. Zion in the 900s BCE.24
There may be a much more ancient hymn behind this one. Many scholars think that the song of Moses is based on the much shorter hymn at the end of the chapter, known as “the song of Miriam” (the sister of Moses).25 Called a prophet in that hymn, Miriam takes a tambourine and leads the women in song and dance:
Sing to the LORD, for God has triumphed graciously;
Horse and rider God has thrown into the sea.
In the judgment of many scholars, this poetic couplet may be the oldest part of the Hebrew Bible.
From the sea, the liberated slaves continue their journey through the desert to Mt. Sinai, led and nourished by God. God guides them with a pillar of cloud by day and a column of fire by night. God quenches their thirst with water from a rock. God feeds them with manna, a breadlike substance that falls from the sky each morning, and with quails that cover the ground each evening.26
Sinai and the Covenant
What happens at Sinai occupies a major portion of the Pentateuch. It takes the narrator of Exodus eighteen chapters to tell the story of bondage in Egypt, the call of Moses, the confrontations with Pharaoh and the plagues, the departure from Egypt and the crossing of the sea, and the journey to Sinai. The events at Sinai take the remaining twenty-two chapters of Exodus, all of the twenty-seven chapters of Leviticus, and the first ten chapters of Numbers—fifty-nine chapters in all.
Theophany and Covenant
The Sinai events begin in Exodus 19 with a stupendous theophany (manifestation of God) or hierophany (manifestation of the sacred). Thunder and lightning erupt, and the sound of an ear-splitting trumpet can be heard as a thick cloud covers the sacred mountain. As God descends upon the mountain in fire, it quakes violently. Moses ascends the mountain and there, at the place where heaven and earth meet, goes to meet God. Moses’ role as mediator of the covenant and giver of divine law has begun.
What happens at Sinai is that Israel becomes a people, a nation. Though the narrator of the Pentateuch has frequently used the words “Israelites” and “Israel” earlier in the story, it is here that Israel comes into existence. Here God offers the people a covenant:
You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you
shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.27
With the offer and acceptance of the covenant with God, they become God’s “treasured possession” and “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”
The Giving of the Law
Most of the chapters covering what happens at Sinai consist of the laws given by God through Moses to Israel. They include the Ten Commandments (in two slightly different forms), the Book of the Covenant, and the rest of the laws of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.28 It is clear that these laws, drawn from many different periods in Israel’s history, have accumulated over a period of centuries.29 But all are presented as God’s revelation to Moses on the sacred mountain, and all go back to a time of sacred beginnings.
As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, they include ethical and ritual laws as well as civil and criminal laws. Some of them express broad ethical principles with a wide application, such as “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Many are highly specific rules, dealing with issues such as what foods may and may not be eaten, what the penalty is for cursing one’s parents (death), what to do when an ox gores a person or another ox, what to do after an emission of semen, and so forth.30
These laws also include some of the most radical socioeconomic legislation in human history. For example, no interest is to be charged on loans to fellow Israelites. Especially striking are the regulations for the sabbath year and jubilee year. Every sabbath (seventh) year, all debts owed by Israelites to other Israelites are to be forgiven and all Hebrew slaves released.31 Every jubilee (fiftieth) year, all agricultural land is to be returned at no cost to the original family of ownership.32 These laws reflect Israel’s origin in Egypt as a radically oppressed and marginalized people. Their purpose was to prevent the emergence of a permanently impoverished class within Israel.
Israel’s Infidelity
There is yet one more theme to the Sinai story and the subsequent journey through the wilderness to the promised land—namely, the threat to God’s promise now coming from within Israel itself. In several episodes, most famously in the story of the golden calf that the Israelites erect while Moses is with God on the mountain, Israel becomes unfaithful to God.33 God the liberator of Israel then threatens to become the destroyer of Israel. But Moses intercedes, God relents, and in another theophany renews the covenant with the people. In the middle of this epi-sode, Moses again meets God on Sinai. We are told that God passes before him and proclaims:
The LORD, the LORD, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children, to the third and fourth generation.34
This speech is one of the classic characterizations of God in the Hebrew Bible.
From Sinai to the Promised Land
Because of their infidelity, the exodus generation is not allowed to enter the land that God promised to the ancestors. Instead, after they leave Sinai, they spend almost forty years in the wilderness.35 As the book of Numbers ends, the descendants of the exodus generation are camped in the plains of Moab just east of the Jordan River, the border of the promised land.
The Pentateuch then concludes with the book of Deuteronomy, structured as a series of speeches spoken by Moses to the people of Israel just before they cross the Jordan.36
“Deuter-onomy” means “second law,” a fitting title since much of the book is a second giving or summary of the law. The final chapters of this book, rich in exceptional language, consist of Moses’ “farewell address” to the people he has led for forty years.
Deuteronomy 34 (the last chapter of the book) describes the death of Moses, who at 120 years old climbs to the top of Mt. Nebo on the east side of the Jordan. From its summit, God shows him the whole of the promised land that he himself will not enter. About the land displayed before Moses’ eyes, God says, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ ”37 Then Moses dies, just as the promise that arches over the Pentateuch is about to be fulfilled.
The narrator tells us that no one knows where Moses was buried. Jewish tradition suggests that God dug his grave and placed his body in it. The brief obituary that concludes Deuter-onomy affirms, “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses.” For the narrator of Deuteronomy and for the Jewish tradition ever since, Moses is the greatest of the prophets.
Central Meanings of Israel’s Primal Narrative
I return briefly to the question of historicity—to the question of how much of the exodus story and subsequent events “really happened.” I do so because of what is at stake in the question. It is not simply that “the modern mind” has difficulty with the most spectacular elements in these stories and needs reassurance that they need not be taken literally. Rather, it is that how we address the question of historicity affects (and is affected by) how we see God and the ways that God interacts with the world.
To use the story of the crossing of the sea as an example: something happened at the sea. But it was not the sea dividing into parallel walls of water with a canyon of dry land in between. To imagine that God acted to bring about that in the past violates the principle of “divine consistency.”38 Divine consistency affirms that God acts now in the same way that God acted in the past. Some might—some do—argue with this claim. But the notion that God acted in fundamentally different ways in the past compared to how God acts now presents insurmountable difficulties. Why would God change how God acts? What possible reason can be imagined? If God intervened in such dramatic ways then, why not now?
The issue for me is not whether paranormal events that have no reasonable reductionistic explanation happen now. They do. And the issue is not whether there are movements of human liberation empowered by God now. There are. Rather, the issue is whether God has ever acted anywhere, anytime, as portrayed in the stories of the plagues and the crossing of the sea. To say that God did so act in Moses’ day is to leave inexplicable the noninterventions in situations of intense human suffering in the centuries ever since.
It also risks making the story of the exodus irrelevant to subsequent generations. The narrative of the Israelites’ rescue from Egypt would then become a story of what God did once upon a time but no more—a story about how God “jump-started” Israel but then became mysteriously inactive.
Instead, as Israel’s primal narrative, the exodus account is a paradigmatic story of God’s character and will. I turn now to some of its meanings as Israel’s primal narrative and paradigmatic story.
The exodus story was Israel’s decisive and constitutive “identity story.” In the words of Walter Brueggemann, the best-known Hebrew Bible scholar in North America today, it is
that most simple, elemental, and non-negotiable story line which lies at the heart of biblical faith. . . . It is an affirmation in story form which asserts, “This is the most important story we know, and we have come to believe it is decisively about us.”39
For the ancient Israelites, and for Jews ever since, this was the most important story they knew. It was the primary story shaping their understanding of the divine-human relationship, their identity, their life together as a community, and their vision of the character of God.
Within this story, Egypt and Pharaoh are a type—an archetype—of a widespread way of organizing human society. In the exodus story, Egypt is of course Egypt. The ancestors of Israel were in bondage to the pharaohs of Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE. But Egypt is also a perfect type of “the ancient domination system” or “the preindustrial agrarian empire.”
A common form of society in the time from the emergence of early agrarian empires in the 3000s BCE through the Middle Ages of the current era, these societies had two primary social classes. The urban ruling elites—elites holding the reins of power, wealth, and status—consist
ed of the traditional aristocracy, with the monarchy at its center. With their extended families, these elites comprised about one to two percent of the population. The other primary social class, typically making up slightly over ninety percent of the population, was composed of rural peasants (mostly agricultural workers, but also fishers, artisans, and so forth).40
The key economic fact necessary to an understanding of the central dynamic of these societies is this: roughly two-thirds of the annual production of wealth (mostly from agriculture, and thus produced by peasants) ended up in the hands of the ruling elites. The means whereby they acquired their wealth were primarily twofold: taxation on agricultural production, and direct ownership of agricultural land (with peasants working as sharecroppers, day-laborers, or slaves). The consequences for peasant existence were dire: unremitting labor, borderline nourishment, high infant mortality rates, and radically lower life expectancies.
To describe such societies with three phrases, they were marked by economic exploitation (just described), political oppression (ordinary people had no voice in the structuring of society), and religious legitimation (the religion of the elites affirmed that the structures of society were ordained by God).41
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