I was planning on going over the entire first fifteen chapters of Exodus, but I kinda forgot that I was going to need to talk about a lot in the first few chapters, as they contain a very important event; arguably, the most important event in the history of Judaism besides the exodus itself: god reveals his name. So we'll examine the first few chapters in detail, and discuss why this event is so important. This is going to take a lot of reading and research for such a short entry, so I apologize that this is going to take the longest of any entry so far. And since I'm always worried about your attention span, I will go no further than chapter 3 verse 15, because there is so much to talk about.
So now the story of the Bible finally begins. Genesis was as account of the origins of the Israelites, but this is where things finally get interesting, now that we have the back story.
Exodus
Chapter 1
So the Israelites are now in Egypt. And apparently, they are proliferating quite well. Eventually a new king came to power in Egypt; one who did not know Joseph. And since Joseph is now dead, he can't exactly become acquainted with him. This new king notices that the Israelites have infested Egypt and he doesn't like it one bit. So he decides to oppress them with forced labor. But this doesn't stop them from multiplying, and that increases the Egyptians' hatred of them.
Since the forced labor doesn't work, he decides to take more drastic measures. He instructs his midwives to the Hebrew women to kill all the boys born, but let the girls live. But the midwives apparently "feared God," and would not kill the male children. This is odd. Which god? Moses hasn't even come in to do his thing yet. Are the Israelites even worshipping any god at this point? We're not sure if the midwives are Hebrews or Egyptians. The names are Semitic, but it is doubtful that they correspond to actual individuals anyway. God apparently rewarded them with families of their own for sparing the Hebrew boys.
By the way, the term Hebrew used here probably refers to displaced persons in general rather than to a specific ethnic group. So the people god saves are more than just the descendants of Jacob (Israel).
Since that didn't work, Pharaoh (which pharaoh?) commands all of his people to just start chucking Hebrew baby boys into the Nile. The Bible isn't clear on whether this worked or not.
Chapter 2
1-10
Moses' mother has a very healthy baby boy, so she hides him for as long as she can (3 months). When she can no longer hide the child, she makes a basket of papyrus, waterproofs it, and sets it afloat amongst the reeds on the river bank. His sister stayed nearby to see what would happen. Pharaoh's daughter found the baby and decided to raise him. Moses' sister asked if she should go get a Hebrew woman to nurse the child for her. Capital idea! So she grabbed mom and Moses' mother got to raise her own baby. I see what you did there.
11-22
One day after Moses had grown up, he saw an Egyptian (presumably one of the taskmasters) beating a Hebrew. He looked around to make sure no one was around, and then he killed the Egyptian and hid his body in the sand. So Moses is now a murderer. He is never punished for this, of course. God either doesn't notice, or doesn't care. I'm gonna guess doesn't care. After all, when god says "Thou shalt not kill," it actually means "Thou shalt not kill another Jew." But that is a discussion for a later date.
The next day, Moses the murderer saw two Hebrews fighting. He said to the guy who was in the wrong, "Why are you beating up on another Hebrew?"
The response was basically, "Who died and made YOU king? Are you gonna whack me like you did that Egyptian?"
Expectedly, Moses shat a brick. He figured people must know about his murder of the Egyptian. Sure enough, Pharaoh heard about it, and wanted Moses dead, but Moses got the fuck outta Dodge, settled in the land of Midian, and even found himself a wife.
23-25
Eventually the king of Egypt died, but this did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Israelites. They cried out and "…their cry for help rose up to God." Rose up. Why up? Well, that's where ancient peoples believed heaven was. Up. They gazed into the night sky with fear and wonder. I mean look up there. You see all these lights and patterns, and you can't reach them, you don't know how far away they are, you don't know what they are, you don't know what's behind them…they are beautiful and mysterious, and as such have always been the domain of the gods. But now that we know about structure of the universe, what could it possibly mean to look up when referencing deities? Given that we have much general and even quite a bit of specific knowledge of what outer space is, what planets, comets, stars, and other visible bodies of the cosmos are, how far away they are, and what it would mean to travel away from the Earth, why do people point and look up when imagining that they are talking to god?. Why did Jesus ascend up? Where was he going? How far did he go before he stopped? Or is he still flying towards the edge of the Milky Way galaxy? Is he being affected by the gravity of stars he passes by? Where is Jesus going in the universe that we know about??
But more on Jesus much later, of course.
God heard their cries and remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Wait. He forgot? Ok "remembered" could also be translated as "focused attention on." That might be even worse. He didn't really forget, he just kinda ignored the covenant? What the dick, man? I wouldn't trust this god character to pay back a $20 loan, much less with a covenant detailing the fate of an entire ethnic group.
Chapter 3
1-6
Ahh yes, the burning bush. Moses is tending his father in law's flock near Mount Horeb, which will later be called Mount Sinai. He sees a bush that is burning, but not being consumed by the flame. God calls out to Moses the murderer, and tells him to remove his sandals because he walks on holy ground. He claims to be the god of Moses' ancestors. Again, pointing out which god he is doesn't make sense unless there are other gods.
He tells Moses that he has heard the cry of the Israelites. He has apparently decided to finally get off his divine ass and do something about it.
7I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt…
The emphasis is mine. That fact that the Israelites are his people is another thing that always struck me as odd when I was a kid learning about this stuff in church. I mean, wasn't god supposed to love everybody? Why does he have a chosen people? What's so special about one group of mammals that just happens to be related to each other through Jacob? Does that make them better than everybody else? Does that make them more important than everybody else? Does god love them more than he loves anybody else? Well if the events of Genesis didn't convince you that the answers to the last 3 questions is a resounding yes, then Exodus will certainly leave no doubt that god doesn't give a flying fuck about anyone else in the entire world…contrary to what Christianity would have you believe.
God tells him that he will free the Israelites from the Egyptians, and bring them to Canaan, and that he, Moses, would be god's agent in this endeavor.
11-12
Moses objects, asking, "Who am I that I should to go Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" But god promises to be with him. He says that this shall be the sign that it was god who sent him: Moses will bring them back to this mountain to worship him. Uhhh, that's a sign? Shitty sign if you ask me.
13-15
13But Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"
God actually gives 3 answers to the question of exactly who he is. The first answer is "I AM WHO I AM." Ummm, ok…whatever. The second is "I AM". Mmmm, sure. And the third, finally, is YHWH, usually rendered in small caps as "Lord" in English translations. The Bible reads a little differently in your mind when you replace "Lord" with the name YHWH. Keeping in mind that it is obvious that these people are pagans, and believe in the existence of a pantheon of gods, here we have one of these gods identifying himself, rather than The Lord, which suggests that he is the one and only. Even the very act of translating the Bible changes the meaning. The translators in using Lord for YHWH were definitely helping P out with the idea of monotheism.
Speaking of meaning, I'll briefly discuss the etymology of the name YHWH, though I don't want to dwell on it. So I'll just say that the way it is juxtaposed with the verb to be (hwy is one form of it), and the similarities of the words suggests that the words are related. YHWH may mean "he who causes to be," but there is no consensus on the meaning of the name.
So who the hell is YHWH? Like El, YHWH was one of the gods in the Canaanite pantheon. He was a storm god, and his name sometimes appeared as Yahweh Sabaoth. The title Sabaoth meant "Commander of Armies." So he was the Canaanite god of war, as Ares was the Greek god of war. THAT should explain a lot. That explains most of YHWH's behavior throughout the remainder of the Hebrew Bible.
Again, the Bible should now read distinctly differently than it read when you were in Sunday school now that you know that YHWH was their war god.
The name YHWH appears here as if it's being introduced for the very first time, but in the actual text, this is not so. YHWH appears in Genesis as well, but interchangeably with El and his various incarnations. If instead of the translations to "God" and "Lord" English translations used the actual names that are in the Hebrew, the polytheism would be so obvious as to make even the least observant believer wonder what the hell is going on.
Of course J would have us believe that YHWH had been worshipped since the beginning, but P writes as if the Israelites didn't know the name YHWH until just now. P makes YHWH explain that he is the same god that Abraham worshipped. But we know better. We know that Abraham was worshipping El, often called El Elyon by the Canaanites – "God Most High". The name El is part of many Hebrew names that we are already familiar with, such as Israel, and Ishmael. The patriarchs' experiences with El would have been familiar to any pagan. They often imagined gods to be very humanlike, and that interactions with them were nearly casual in nature. Remember in Genesis 18, when god and two angels come and have dinner with Abraham? Remember Jacob's encounters with god? J, while insisting that this God was YHWH, nonetheless preserves of the character of these pagan-like interactions with god. The YHWH seen from Exodus on is a frightening entity to encounter, appearing to Moses in fire and in the midst of a volcanic eruption later. Moses took care to look away. You probably didn't notice this difference in the nature of how people interacted with god, but this is another change that takes place right at this point in the Bible. The idea that you would casually interact with god in the ways that Abraham and Jacob did would be practically blasphemous to later Jews. From this introduction onwards, god's presence is a terrible and frightening thing, unlike his previous incarnations.
Remember when Jacob returned to Haran to find a wife among his relatives? He had the ladder dream and whatnot. After he awakes and realizes that he is in a holy place, J makes him say, "Truly YHWH was in this place and I never knew it!" Yet he renames it Bethel. That shouldn't surprise you by now. Before he left, he decided to make the god he encountered there his elohim. Which is to say he made that god his high god; the only god that mattered to him. This god promised to protect him even after he left Canaan and wandered in foreign lands. Since pagans considered gods to be territorial as we've discussed before, this was a big deal. If this god could truly protect him wherever he was then he was worthy of being the only god that Jacob would call on.
God's giving three answers to the question of his name may be intentionally vague for a couple of reasons. For one, later Jewish religion certainly projects a sense of mystery onto their god. Also, there may have actually been priestly debate around the time this was written about exactly which god the patriarchs really did worship. Was it El? Was it YHWH? J wrote to convince us that it was YHWH. P wrote to convince us that El and YHWH were the same and that there was really only one god. But as we can see upon close inspection, the patriarchs and the early Israelites were not monotheists. They worshipped a few different gods, El Elyon and Yahweh Sabaoth chief among them. But we will meet Baal and Asherah soon enough. These are two more gods from the pantheon of Canaanite gods that we know the early Israelites actively worshipped.
At specific points, the Cult of YHWH dominated Israelite religious thought. These people, who demanded strict adherence to YHWH, are now called Yahwists. J is the "Jahwist" source. It makes sense when you think about it. They believed that YHWH was the god who appeared to Moses and delivered them from slavery in a foreign land. This is THE defining event of the Israelite people.
Just think about how many times god will refer to himself as "the Lord, who delivered you from Eqypt". It's only natural that this would create staunch devotees to YHWY above all the other gods they worshipped. These types of cults were common phenomena of paganism. Ever heard of the Cult of Apollo, or the Cult of Athena? Same thing. These cults encouraged strict devotion to one particular god. It's not that that didn't believe in the other gods, they just believed that one particular god should be worshipped and not the others. The order of the day was to worship many gods. Worship whatever gods seemed practical. Worship whatever god you needed favors from. Worship whatever god had dominion over the lands you were travelling through. But many gods of antiquity had cults that encouraged not monotheism, but monolatrism – the recognition of many gods, but consistent worship of only one.
We will continue this delightful discussion of polytheism in the Bible when we get to the infamous golden calf, and again at the infamous and important Jahwist, Josiah. Next week, Moses learns a few neat parlor tricks and lays the smack down on Egypt!
