Exodus — themes & analysis

The first thing Exodus does, before Moses, before the burning bush, before any of the famous scenes, is establish what kind of book it is going to be. Chapter 1 ends with Pharaoh ordering every Hebrew boy thrown into the Nile. Chapter 2 ends with this: the Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out, and their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God knew. The four verbs are placed where they will be heard. He heard. He remembered. He looked. He knew.

This is what the rest of the book takes for granted. Whatever else happens — whatever the plagues are, whatever the law is, whatever the tabernacle is — it is happening because slaves cried out and a God whose name has not yet been given heard them. The deliverance does not begin with Moses. It begins with a cry. Moses comes later, called for the purpose, and his reluctance is built into the call from the beginning. He is a man who has already failed at being a deliverer once, in the killing of the Egyptian in chapter 2 that he had to flee to Midian to escape, and the burning bush is God conscripting him for the second attempt.

The theological move is precise. The God of Exodus is not a god who hears the prayers of the powerful and grants them victory. He is a god who hears the groaning of the slaves and acts. Liberation theology has not invented this reading; the text is built around it. The Magnificat in Luke's Gospel — he has put down the mighty from their seats and exalted the humble and meek — is reading Exodus. The Negro spirituals — go down, Moses, way down in Egypt's land, tell ole Pharaoh, let my people go — are reading Exodus. Martin Luther King's I have been to the mountaintop, the night before he was killed, was reading Exodus.

What the book insists on, against every later attempt to spiritualize it, is that the deliverance is from a real Egypt. The slavery was actual brick-making in actual heat under actual taskmasters. The plagues are unleashed on an actual political and economic system that depended on the slavery to function. The exodus is not a metaphor for inner liberation. It is the deliverance of a particular people from a particular place, and the metaphor of inner liberation works only because the historical liberation came first.

Where to follow it: Ch 1 (the oppression), Ch 2 (the four verbs), Ch 5 (bricks without straw), Ch 14 (the sea crossing).

Exodus 3 is one of the strangest theophanies in any religious literature, and it turns on a name. Moses, who has been keeping his father-in-law's sheep for forty years in the wilderness of Midian, leads the flock to the back of the wilderness and to Horeb, the mountain of God. He sees a bush burning but not consumed. He turns aside to look. God calls his name from the bush — Moses, Moses, here I am. Take off your shoes, the ground you stand on is holy. Then the commission: I have heard the cry of my people, I am sending you to Pharaoh, bring my people out of Egypt.

Moses objects. Five times. Who am I? What name shall I give them? They will not believe me. I am slow of speech. Send someone else. To the second objection — what shall I tell them when they ask the name of the God who has sent me — God gives the answer that has been argued about for three thousand years. The Hebrew is ehyeh asher ehyeh. It can be translated I am who I am, I will be what I will be, I am who I will be, or I cause to be what is. None of the translations is wrong. None of them is exactly right. The name evades the kind of capture that giving a name normally permits.

The contrast with the Egyptian context is sharp. The Egyptian gods have names; their names can be spoken; their priests know them and use them. The God of Israel offers a name that resists exactly that operation. He will not be a god a magician can summon, a god a king can co-opt, a god whose name can be bought. He will be what he will be. From the four Hebrew letters of that name — yod, hey, vav, hey, the Tetragrammaton — comes the entire later Jewish tradition of refusing to pronounce the name aloud, of saying Adonai or HaShem in its place, of leaving the four letters on the page as a presence that cannot be reduced to a vocable.

Moses takes off his shoes. He walks back to Egypt with his brother Aaron. The whole rest of the book — and arguably the whole rest of the Bible — is the unfolding of what it means that the God who sent him is the God whose name is also a refusal to be named. Every later theological tradition that has insisted on apophasis, on the inadequacy of human language to God, on the way the divine reality always exceeds what can be predicated of it, traces back to this scene. The bush is still burning.

Where to follow it: Ch 3 (the burning bush), Ch 4 (Moses's objections), Ch 6 (the name revealed again), Ch 33 (Moses asks to see God's glory).

Exodus 7–12 is a set-piece. Moses and Aaron go before Pharaoh and ask, again and again, for the people to be released. Pharaoh refuses, and one after another the plagues come. The Nile turns to blood. Frogs cover the land. Gnats. Flies. Disease on the cattle. Boils on the people and the cattle both. Hail mixed with fire. Locusts that strip the country bare. Three days of darkness so thick it can be felt. And finally, after Pharaoh has refused nine times, the death of every firstborn in Egypt in a single night.

The plagues are not random. They are a methodical dismantling of Egyptian religion. The Nile, source of all Egyptian life and itself a god, is fouled. The frog-goddess Heqet is mocked by the swarm. The sun-god Ra is darkened. The pharaoh, who is himself supposed to be a god, watches his own son die. By the end every claim Egypt makes about the order of the cosmos — that the river gives life, that the sun is reliable, that the throne is divine — has been falsified by the God of the slaves. The point is not that Pharaoh is a bad man, though he is. The point is that the system over which he presides has built itself on a lie about who runs the world, and the plagues correct the lie.

Then, on the night of the tenth plague, the Passover is instituted. Each household takes a lamb, slaughters it at twilight, paints the doorposts and lintel with the blood, and eats the lamb roasted with bitter herbs and unleavened bread. The angel of death passes over the houses with blood on the doors. The firstborn of Egypt die in the night. By morning Pharaoh has summoned Moses and told the Israelites to leave. They take the unleavened bread because there is no time to let it rise. They go.

The institution of the Passover is one of the most striking moves in the book. Right at the climax of the deliverance, the narrative pauses and gives detailed liturgical instructions for how to remember it — every year, in every generation, by every household in Israel. When your children ask you what this service means, you will say: it is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when he struck the Egyptians and spared our houses. The deliverance is built into a calendar before it has finished happening. Every Jewish family that has eaten matzah and bitter herbs for thirty centuries has been performing a liturgy this chapter wrote into them.

Where to follow it: Ch 7 (blood, frogs begin), Ch 10 (locusts, darkness), Ch 11 (the firstborn announced), Ch 12 (Passover instituted, departure).

Three months out of Egypt, the Israelites camp at the foot of Mount Sinai. Exodus 19 sets the scene with care: thunder, lightning, a thick cloud on the mountain, the sound of a trumpet that grows louder and louder, the mountain wrapped in smoke because the Lord has descended on it in fire. The people are warned not to go up or even to touch the foot of the mountain. Moses goes up alone. Then comes Exodus 20, and the ten utterances — aseret hadibrot in Hebrew, the ten words, which we call the Decalogue.

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The first word is the only one that is not a command. It is the basis of the commands. The God who is now speaking is the God who has just delivered them. The law that follows is the law of a free people whose freedom is older than the law. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Honour your father and your mother. You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. You shall not covet.

The ten have been argued about for three thousand years — how to count them, how to apply them, how to rank them, whether the prohibition on graven images is a separate command or part of the first. They have been carved into courthouse walls and rejected from courthouse walls in the same generation. They are recognizable to a six-year-old and inexhaustible to a Talmud scholar. Their content is not unique in the ancient Near East — Hammurabi's code, the Egyptian negative confessions of the Book of the Dead, and various Hittite and Assyrian legal corpora have parallels for many of the prohibitions. What is unique is the framing. The Decalogue presents itself as the constitution of a people delivered from slavery to be the people of the God who delivered them, and every command is heard against that.

The rest of the legal material in chapters 21–23, sometimes called the Book of the Covenant, develops the Decalogue into casuistic detail — what to do about the slave who chooses to stay, what to do about the goring ox, what to do about the seven-year fallow, what to do about the stranger who lives among you, since you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt. The Sinai covenant is concluded in chapter 24 with a meal on the mountain and the sprinkling of blood — a ratification ceremony recognizable as such to its first audience and resonant for its later readers in ways the original participants could not have foreseen.

Where to follow it: Ch 19 (Sinai theophany), Ch 20 (the Decalogue), Ch 21–23 (Book of the Covenant), Ch 24 (covenant ratified).

Moses is up the mountain receiving the law. He has been gone forty days. The people at the foot of the mountain become nervous. As for this Moses, the man who brought us out of Egypt, they say to Aaron, we do not know what has become of him. Make us gods who shall go before us. Aaron, who has been in charge in Moses's absence and who does not seem to have many tools for handling a frightened mob, asks for their gold earrings, melts them down, and casts a calf. The people declare: these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt. The next morning Aaron builds an altar and the people offer sacrifices, eat, drink, and rise up to play.

The scene is the dark mirror of everything the book has just done. Sinai had been a refusal of images — no graven image, no likeness — and within forty days the people are dancing around a graven image. The deliverance from Egypt had been the work of the God whose name is I will be what I will be, and within forty days the people are crediting it to a calf they made yesterday afternoon out of their own jewellery. The crime is not just disobedience. It is theological forgetfulness on an industrial scale.

God tells Moses on the mountain what is happening below and threatens to consume the people and start over with Moses alone. Moses does something extraordinary. He argues with God. He reminds God of the promise to Abraham, of what the Egyptians will say if the people are destroyed in the wilderness, of the reputation of God's own name. The Lord changed his mind, the text says, about the disaster he had planned to bring on his people. Moses comes down the mountain with the two tablets of stone, sees the calf and the dancing, and in fury smashes the tablets at the foot of the mountain. He grinds the calf to powder, scatters it on water, and makes the people drink it.

The rest of chapters 32–34 is the long, painful renegotiation of the broken covenant — Moses interceding, asking to see God's glory, receiving the strange answer that he can see God's back but not his face, descending again with two new tablets, his face shining so that the people are afraid. The Bible's account of Israel begins with a betrayal of the covenant before the covenant is fully ratified, and the rest of the Hebrew scriptures will never quite get clear of it. Idolatry is the besetting sin of the book, and Sinai is where the pattern is set.

Where to follow it: Ch 32 (the calf, Moses intercedes), Ch 33 (Moses asks to see God's glory), Ch 34 (covenant renewed, face shining), Ch 40 (the glory fills the tabernacle).