Final Reflections on Exodus: Rise of the New Priesthood

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Over the course of Genesis, as intra-family politics got more and more violent and the patrimonial system clearly collapsed, God withdrew from first-hand direct interactions with characters - as well as with the reader - to become a silent, mysterious figure pulling the strings from the shadows, leaving Joseph as his dubious and opportunistic spokesman. Essentially, God abandons the family of Israel to a trap of its own making - the newly authoritarian state of Egypt.

After abandoning his people to slavery while he cooks up plans for the future, God returns in Exodus to institute a new social order, this one based on what presumably is supposed to be a stabler and more effective hierarchy, one based upon the supremacy of a divinely appointed priesthood over the rest of society. The chief of the new order - Moses - functions as spiritual, political and military leader of Israel all rolled into one, though by the end of the book, God is clearly attempting to shift the locus of power from Moses as individual to his Levite family as a lasting institution. Rather than Moses himself, God selects Aaron to be the patriarch of the new priesthood. This seems to be a strange choice, but Moses, unlike the Genesis patriarchs, is notably weak on the subject of family himself: his (and Aaron's) father is notably anonymous, he is raised by an Egyptian woman, and his own sons are nearly absent from the narrative.

Even the priesthood seems to be fairly unreliable - given Aaron's foolish experiment with the golden calf - but next to the elders of Israel and particularly to Moses, the masses of unnamed Israelites are dangerously faithless. No miracle seems awesome enough to hold their attention for more than a few days. Even God is a dubious figure at times - he slaughters Egyptians in order to "glorify" his name, loses his temper and nearly annihilates the Israelites only a little while after he frees them, then picks Aaron's family as his high priests, apparently forever. Though God once again speaks directly to the reader in Exodus, as he didn't in the closing chapters of Genesis, it's significant that he really only speaks to Moses and Aaron, and spends a sizeable chunk of the book unwilling to reveal himself fully to the undependable Israelites.

Despite this, I think Exodus is supposed to be an optimistic story. God liberates his people from slavery and leads them to a promised land. He even does their fighting for them; we haven't yet descended into the gritty genocides of the following books. God and Moses kill thousands of people in punishment for the debacle at Mt. Sinai, but afterwards, all appears to be more or less forgiven: God's cloud returns to guide the Israelites, Moses institutes laws which provide at least a few protections for the disadvantaged, and a portable temple is prepared. Though they had wandered astray days before, the people seem glad to participate in building this temple, as it is built through a surplus of donated supplies and volunteer labour. God even gives the Israelites a magic light every night.
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The Lord Forgives? Exodus 35-40

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

If there's anything duller than an instruction manual, it's a riveting blow-by-blow account of the Lord's favourite manual labourers, Bezalel of Uri and Oholiab of Ahisamach, as they move through the instructions and create the desired "tabernacle."

Moses begins by prescribing an absolute day of rest on the Sabbath. It occurs to me that the purpose of this is not simply a purity regulation intended to mimic and honour God's own day of rest (it is this too, but even God's day of rest was clearly theologically unnecessary, so there must be some other purpose). A day of rest from which no one, even a slave, can at any time ever be exempted is, like the requirements for free agriculture in the seventh year, a check against exploitation. Unlike, for example, the Seventh Commandment on adultery, the commandment on the Sabbath is notably free of exceptions. This, perhaps, is part of why Jesus was critical of the Jewish establishment in the New Testament, alleging that they had perverted the Sabbath; at that time the Sabbath was misused to prevent charity to the poor and needy.

Afterwards, Moses issues essentially a fundraising call. Interestingly, all the necessary provisions for the Tabernacle are to be provided through "free-will offerings"; there is no flat-tax imposed by God or by Moses or by anyone else. And these free-will offerings are provided by both men and women; the Bible is quite careful to specify that "all who were willing, men and women alike," contributed to the project. It is an interesting moment in the early history of a system which is systematically precluding women from any interaction with the divine. Ultimately the people bring too much and Moses orders them to cease their donations.

With the Tent of Meeting completed, Aaron and his sons are brought and anointed. Aaron, as originally promised, becomes high priest. It's a peculiar choice - you'd think God could find someone better than the ringleader of the golden calf affair, but apparently not. All is forgiven, at least for Aaron, presumably.

God makes another interesting choice: he orders that the high priesthood is to be a hereditary office held by Aaron's descendants. Why? During Genesis, God routinely displayed blatant contempt for traditional inheritance rights; virtually all of his chosen patriarchs aren't the eldest son, and some of them actively conspire against the eldest son. Moses doesn't even have a father - at least not one worthy of mention, anyways. What has persuaded God that a traditional inheritance structure has regained its worth?

Once all the requisite rituals have been performed, the Bible records that God's magic cloud descended upon the tabernacle and his "glory... filled the tabernacle." God's presence was so overwhelming that at first even Moses couldn't make his way in. Strangely, Exodus closes with the optimistic claim that from that day forth, God's cloud traveled with the Israelites, guiding them in their wandering; "the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel during all their travels." God seems to have calmed down enough to travel with the Israelites after all. It's a touching moment.
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The Second Ten Commandments: Exodus 34

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

After being mooned by God, Moses heads up the mountain again for the latest set of rules. Because Moses broke the first set of stone tablets, God promises to make a new pair. Strangely, the new Ten Commandments have nothing to do with the old ten (or at least, what we call the old Ten Commandments. These ones are, in order: don't make treaties with foreigners; don't make idols; celebrate the annual feasts; give every firstfruit and firstborn animal to God; respect the Sabbath; and don't cook a young goat in its mother's milk (there are actually ten commandments but I've combined a few for the sake of brevity). Interestingly, God requires Moses to write this set of commandments, perhaps because he's still grumpy over the original set getting smashed up. That's kind of strange because originally God promised to write on them at the beginning of the chapter. The new rules are specifically called "The Ten Commandments" in v. 28, leaving us to speculate as to when the Jews pulled a switcheroo and left us with the other Ten from chapter 20.

It might be going too far to call God insecure, but his introductory remarks to Moses in ch. 34 seem unnecessarily long and descriptive, and a trifle misleading, from what we've seen to date. God descends in his magic helicopter and announces, "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation." He seems to have forgotten that a couple of days before, he was on the verge of annihilating the entire tribe, before Moses convinced him to rethink the plan.

God has grown increasingly concerned about the pagan tribes inhabiting Israel's promised land. He actually orders Moses twice not to "make a treaty with those who live in the land." All religious icons and idols are to be destroyed, and there is to be no intermarriage. God has little faith in his people, claiming that "when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of thier daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same." So, Israelite boys must not go out chasing the pagan girls. Fall for a pagan chick, and you'll fall for her god. You might think that a God with routinely impressive and devastating miracles would attract the wives of his followers, not lose them to some other god, but clearly this isn't the case.

Moses comes down the mountain and, unbeknownst to him, God has made his face glow. The Israelites are as afraid of a man glowing in the dark as we would be today, so they shy away from him. Eventually Moses approaches the leaders of the community and all the Israelites follow, to receive the new sets of commands. He takes advantage of the new glowing-face trick to institute another barrier of separation between himself and the people: Moses will now wear a veil except when he is meeting privately with God, and except when he emerges from those meetings to speak on God's behalf.
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Who is Less Reliable -- the Priest, the Congregation, or God?: Exodus 31:12 - 33

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

In these two chapters, the Israelites rebel, make a "golden calf" idol for no apparent reason other than that they're bored, and the priesthood (except for Moses) basically goes along with it, which is a pretty cynical indictment of the Jewish clergy if you ask me. The conservative authors of Exodus managed to regain control at the next editorial meeting, however, and the general theme is not the faithlessness of Aaron (though this is apparent) but the power of Moses. Moses plays a sort of divine lion tamer. God is wild, angry, vengeful. It is Moses who goes up to meet God, he who challenges God, he who defends the people from God and ultimately channels God's powers for Israel's benefit. Way to go, Moses!

The faithlessness of the Israelites, in many ways, beggars belief. Moses has been up on the mountain for quite some time now, and in the camp people are getting restless. They go to Aaron, whom - we must remember - is Moses's close kin and not just that but is high priest of God in his own right. He may not realize all the riches that are in his store for him and his sons, but he's been with Moses since the beginning of the Egyptian insurgency and he's seen the power of God on every occasion Moses has.

The mass of the Israelites, an apparently unanimous and indistinguishable multitude of spiritually weak and greedy morons, decides they want a new god, and go to Aaron to ask him for one. Aaron, good priest that he is, agrees to make a god - one out of all the women's gold jewelry. It's interesting that women's jewelery is the source of this new god; is this a criticism of jewelry, of women, or both? In any event the Israelites get all their gold together, gold which God intends to be used in his own Tent of Meeting, and Aaron makes "an idol cast in the shape of a calf." Then he proclaims that "these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt." The next day, he proclaims a festival, at which the people "sit down to eat and drink and get up to indulge in revelry." I'm not sure which is more inexplicable - the people's decision to make a new god, or Aaron's ready acquiescence to this project. It's a strange moment in Exodus - on the one hand we again see the general contempt for the faithless masses that we saw before, but on the other hand, this is an extraordinarily brutal and subversive criticism of the priesthood, as well.

Later, when an irate Moses demands an explanation for the festivities from Aaron, the high priest is unable to offer anything even approaching a real justification. He simply blames "these people," who are "prone to evil." Aaron mystifies the origins of the golden calf idol he has made, telling Moses that he "threw" all the jewelry into a fire "and out came this calf!" Uh huh. Sure, Aaron.

In the meantime, God has seen the rebellion and apparently gets quite upset - indeed, were he human, we might say he has flown off the handle. He tells Moses to go back down to the people, who he calls "stiff-necked," and leave him alone. Then he says that he is so angry with the Israelites he's going to "destroy them." Once the carnage is complete, God promises, he will "make [Moses] into a great nation." That's an interesting promise; it's essentially one that he's given before, in Genesis, but now he's going to wipe the slate and start over again, sort of like he did in the flood.

Unlike Aaron, Moses plays the role of a proper priest and mediates for his people before God. If God slaughters them now, he points out astutely, the Egyptians will conclude that God wanted to punish the Israelites, not to liberate them. Theefore God should "turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people." He even implies that any murder by God here would be breaking God's promise to Abraham, Isaac and Israel. Strangely, the Bible says that "the Lord relented." A pity Noah didn't speak as eloquently or courageously as Moses does; we might have been saved a lot of trouble in Genesis. Is God joking when he declares his destructive intentions to Moses? Is he testing them? Is his will to destroy the Israelites really thwarted by a single human prophet? Is God so emotionally volatile that sometimes he needs to be talked down by his human children? It certainly gives some added credibility to the Jewish priesthood - "You must let us continue to mediate between you and God, because remember, we saved your lives from his righteous anger on previous occasions, and if we hadn't, you'd be dead now."

Whatever happened, God gives Moses two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them. Moses climbs down to meet up with Joshua, who, being a soldier, thinks that the sounds coming up from the camp indicate there is fighting going on. It isn't, Moses assures him, but when they arrive at the scene of the revelry, now it is Moses's turn to "burn with" righteous anger. He throws the tablets at the people, and they smash to pieces. Then he takes the calf idol, grinds it into powder, scatters the powder into some water, and makes the people drink it. Water miracles have been quite important so far in the Exodus story, but usually the Israelites aren't suffering because of them - if anything it's the Egyptians who usually suffer. Aaron whines that the people asked him for a new god, so he gave them one; in Moses's eyes, according to my Bible, this proved that "Aaron had let them get out of control." So the people are a mob of rambunctious children, basically.

You'd think Moses had gained control of the people, if he'd managed to make them drink that tainted water and before that had even busted up their new god. But he clearly hasn't, because after all that has happened, he calls "whoever is for the Lord" to assemble with him at one end of the camp. Only the Levite tribe comes - all of them, apparently. Moses commands them to arm themselves with swords and then "go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor." The Levites kill three thousand people on Moses's command.

This is a very curious result. Moses has not prescribed any limits on the massacre which is to take place, yet clearly there are some. In the census records in Numbers 1, each tribe numbers approximately forty to sixty thousand men strong. (The Levites aren't counted in the census, but we may safely assume they are of comparable size.) Clearly the vast majority of the Levites did not kill their "brother and friend and neighbor." And if they did do so, this introduces more problems - wouldn't this mean Levites were killing other Levites? It is a very strange circumstance. Once the killing is done, Moses gets his tribe back together again (because he is a Levite himself, don't forget) and thanks them for their work: "You have been set apart for the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day." Jesus said relative to our love for God we ought to hate our kin. The Levites took it one step further and killed their kin, it would appear - though again this raises the question of how, if "all the Levites" rallied to Moses at the beginning of this raid, many Levites had to be killed for their faithlessness during the same raid.

The sin of the golden calf is evidently so severe that God is no longer willing to talk to the Israelites, according to chapter 33 - an odd conclusion given that he wasn't willing to appear to them before either, but still, it reaffirms the general theme of a priesthood-led society that has emerged in Exodus. Moses returns to God after his Levite killing spree and begs that God forgive their sin. Initially God agrees, but then he equivocates and suggests that "the time for me to punish" them has not yet come; and when it does, "I will punish them for their sin." In the meantime, the killing of the 3000 is a useful sacrifice for staving off God's righteous rage. Instead of killing them all, Moses bargains God down to "strik[ing] the people with a plague." Way to go, God!

Once the people are suitably disease-ridden, God speaks to Moses again. He intends to keep his promise to give the freed slaves a new "land flowing with milk and honey," but he isn't going to accompany them anymore, "beacuse you are a stiff-necked people." Their rebelliousness is so great, God implies, that he won't be able to control himself in their presence: "I might destroy you on the way... If I were to go with you even for a moment, I might destroy you." He sounds almost grumpy here, keeping his word because he's promised it to so many generations of Hebrews but no longer as happy about it as he was when he brought the Israelites out of Egypt via the Red Sea. The peace and tranquility of God's new utopia has been broken and he doesn't like it.

In contrast to the faithless Israelite children, Moses seems to grow considerably in his walk with God (I've been waiting to use that cliche). He erects a provisional "tent of meeting" outside the camp so that he can talk with God at a safe distance from the Israelites. God descends in the form of a "cloud pillar" to talk with Moses "as a man speaks with his friend." Only Joshua is permitted anywhere near these cloistered visits. By the middle of Exodus 33, he exercises considerable influence with God: he asks that God "teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you," which he justifies on the grounds that he leads the Israelites who are "your people," and God agrees to give him "My Presence." My Bible actually capitalizes the word Presence, which is stupid, because ancient Hebrew doesn't have capital letters, which means the editors of the NIV just thought there was some mystical importance to the word. No doubt someone somewhere thinks this is a codeword for the Holy Spirit.

Once God promises Moses his "Presence," Moses successfully bargains with God to return that Presence to the Israelite community generally. His reasoning is, once again, sound but quite manipulative: "How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unles you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?" God ponders that and agrees readily. Once again Moses has changed God's mind.

Then Moses goes what appears to be a step too far: "Now show me your glory." That this is phrased as a bald imperative is interesting. God agrees anyways, though, saying he will "cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." But there are limits even to Moses's power: God will do this only if Moses does not look upon his face, "for no one may see me and live." This is kind of strange given that before the two of them were suppoesd to have been meeting face to face, "as a mean speaks with his friend." I guess God is two-faced, and it's the second one we're worried about here. At any rate, Moses stands on a bluff while God flies past him, and lets Moses only see his back. Basically God agrees to moon Moses.

Exodus 31-33 cements the new priesthood-led power structure of the Israelite tribe. The people have proven that they cannot be trusted - that, given the opportunity, they will promptly make new gods. Even some of the priests can't really be trusted, but the Levites redeem themselves by killing some of the rabble-rousers. Aaron gets to keep his status as high priest, and Moses, who along with Joshua was apparently the only leader to remain faithful throughout, becomes Israel's sole remaining link to God (at least until Aaron's priestly garments are ready for action). God has become a dangerously wrathful force and the priesthood's authority is justified not only on the grounds that they serve God for the people, but that they serve the people by protecting them from God's wrath.
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God's Custom-Made Religion: Exodus 25-31:11

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

God spends a mind-numbing six chapters of Exodus describing in precise detail to Moses everything he will need to know to conduct religious rituals: the appropriate places, the appropriate props, and the appropriate participants. I see very little reason to go through it piece by piece. At one point, God tries his hand at being an interior decorator, showing Moses some samples of the lampstands he has in mind. Later he moves on to fashion design for the priests. Even the type of underwear they should wear during rituals is important to God - if they get the details wrong, they will "incur guilt and die." After giving his instructions, God even goes so far as to select specific craftsmen who will oversee each aspect of the construction phase. If you like long, lengthy instruction manuals, I highly recommend reading Exodus 25-31.

The God of Exodus is clearly very concerned about not just his own holy places but about the dignity and honour of his high priests. Great attention is given not just to God's props but to high priest Aaron's "sacred garments." First, he gets what's called an "ephod." We might as well translate this as "asdphi" - because neither word means anything! No one seems to know what an "ephod" is, so we just transliterate the word and leave it in place. It's clearly some sort of special garment the priest will wear, and that's all we get.

What's interesting about the priest's clothing is the strange symbolic power attached to them - something that my Protestant background has particular trouble with. The breastpiece, for example, is worn for "making decisions." Whenever Aaron wears the breastpiece, he must carry with it a device called "the Urim and the Thummim." Once again, no one knows what "the Urim and the Thummim" acutally were, but given the context, it seems apparent they're some sort of method of divination. Usually today Christians would denounce this as black witchcraft, but I guess the Old Testament laws do permit some forms of the study of omens after all.

The ordination of priesthoods is a wet and dirty affair. After their fancy clothing is prepared, God instructs bulls brought to the altar. Bulls and rams are burned for God, then sheep's blood is poured on the heads of Aaron and his priests. After the head, they get blood poured onto their hands, and then onto their feet (specifically, "the big toe"). Some of the meat is specifically spared from the burning; God orders it "waved" before him and then given to the priests for food. Then and only then do we get to the issue of anointing oil; unsurprisingly, perhaps, the anointing oil still carries some queer significance in certain Christian groups, including charismatic ones, even though the blood-splashing is universally rejected. Some modern-day money-changers are actually willing to "sell" you some of the Exodus anointing oil - here, for example - which is quite stupid because Exodus 30 clearly states that the oil is a "sacred formula" and if it is used by people who aren't Jewish priests, those people must be "cut off" from the congregation. Whoops.

It is interesting how much space and effort the writers of Exodus give to details of an area that most Israelites will never be permitted to see, and to clothing only a handful of people will ever wear. On the one hand, it's a sign of honour to God - the creation of a privileged and decorative meeting place for those occasions on which he descends to speak to the priest or the prophet. On the other hand, I can't help wondering why these deserve so much detail when we skirted through one brief story after another in Genesis and the first half of Exodus. I noted in a previous post that the new covenant was based on the supremacy of the priest caste. God appears to be cementing and legitimizing this supremacy further by privileging them with such a rich set of commandments. After all, right now the nation of Israel is essentially a group of nomadic refugees, according to the narrative. The rich cloth and precious metals needed for the new project are therefore, we may presume, a considerable expense for the Jewish people.

In order to offset the costs of the new "Tent of Meeting," God proposes the first census, and the first flat tax, based upon that census. Each Israelite male over twenty is to pay a "ransom" fee to the priests so that they may be free of sickness. God very specifically insists that rich and poor must pay the same fee: "the rich are not to give more... and the poor are not to give less." This appears to be a one-time tax which will be "a memorial for the Israelites before the Lord," as well as paying for "the service of the Tent of Meeting." God doesn't explain why everyone must pay the same fee, or what will happen to any among the Israelites who weren't able to take money with them from Egypt, or have blown it all on cheap trinkets and souvenirs in the meantime. I guess they're screwed. For those who can afford to pay, a bonding and rite-of-passage ritual is prescribed: everyone will line up on one side of a line, then walk up to pay the priests, and then "cross over" to those who have paid.

As I recall, the census is a weird instrument in the Bible. I think someone gets punished severely for one later on. I'll consider it in more detail if it's not a false memory of some sort and it eventually comes up again, but in the meantime it's worth noting that Exodus 30 appears to suggest that sickness could result from participating in the census without paying the fee. Is a census sinful? What kind of sickness does a census cause? Is this mere superstition? Why would the people need to pay to atone for participating in a ceremony which God has orderd them to participate in? Seems like a convenient method of legitimizing fund-raising by the priesthood, to me, but here God seems perfectly on side with the proceedings. He may even be the one contributing the sicknesses.

Women will be pleased to know that under the Exodus laws they don't need redemption. I'm reaching a bit on this one but the Bible doesn't bother to specify that women participate as well, and given the context it appears only to be men who are involved in the ceremony. Whether this is because women can't be redeemed anyways, they're not worth counting, or their lives just aren't worth half a shekel (the prescribed price for each man to pay), I'm not sure.
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The Covenant of Removal: Exodus 23:20 - 24

The following post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

At the beginning of Exodus 24, Moses and the elders of Israel affirm the covenant. Once again, God clearly specifies that only Moses may "approach the Lord; the others must not come near." Moses does this, then comes back and relates the laws that wer given, and the people agree "with one voice" that they will follow the commandments. It's probably a very touching and powerful moment for this assemblage of freed slaves. The next day, they celebrate with a number of sacrifices, a repetition of the laws and thier affirmation to obey God. (It's easy to think of the Israelites as though they were pretty much culturally the same as us, so it's worth noting the gory nature of this ritual: the prophet scoops up the blood of the slaughtered bulls and flings it over his people, splashing them with blood in the name of God.) Once the sacrifice has been performed, the elders of Israel have become more righteous in God's eyes: he permits them to come up with Moses to meet him, and appears to them standing upon "a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself." Then Moses heads up the mountain for another set of commandments, taking Joshua with him and leaving the elders in charge. Joshua hasn't done much yet, though he gets his own book later; here in Exodus, he's simply described as an "aide" to Moses.

This covenant involves some text at the close of ch. 23 which I left out of the last post because it isn't about the law. God provides some specific promises about how the Israelites will go about claiming territory. He will give the Israelites "an angel" to guard and protect them, and to give them instructions. God describes him like sort of magic spokesman: "if you listen carefully to what he says and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose those who oppose you."

It's interesting that in this first covenant, we don't see any specific references to the homicidal or even genocidal approach the Israelites are later commanded to take, and which in my clearly flawed memory I was expecting to read here. God appears to intend to conduct any killing that is necessary by himself: as the Israelites advance, "my angel will go ahead" and will "send terror" and "confusion" to each nation in Israel's path. They will be scared, and they will "turn thier backs and run." God describes himself not as a massacring warrior but as a harassing and irritating force: his angel will play the role of a "hornet." And it will do so gradually, because if all the nations were wiped out at once, the land would go barren and the Israelites would have to spend too much time dealing with "wild animals."

Indeed, the only explicit war the Israelites are commanded to partake in will be the annihilation of other gods, not other people. As they advance, God explains, he will "wipe out" the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites. The Israelites will follow behind and "demolish" the gods, and "break their sacred stones to pieces." The new country, God promises, will stretch from the Red Sea to the "Philistine sea," and "from the desert to the River." (My Bible specifies in footnotes that this means the Mediterranean and the Euphrates; this is speculation but seems plausible.) This would pretty much mean that Israel is claiming all of its present-day territory, parts of the Sinai peninsula, and parts of what is now Syria, Lebanon, western Iraq, and northern Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, at this point the focus seems to be on the removal of indigenous groups, not their extermination. God is going to give the Israelites a new land after their exodus by chasing out some other tribes, thus causing other exoduses (exodi?). These people, he specifies, will be "drive[n] out before" the Israelites. They must not be permitted to remain in the land, because they will "cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you."The fact that a covenant of removal seems like a relief is probably relative only to the covenants of genocide which eventually follow, as it becomes clear that the indigenous peoples will not be "drive[n] out" but in fact will be slaughtered.

Another point which bares some reflection is the curious claim that the indigenous gods will "ensnare" the Israelites. By "gods" we may or may not mean actual entities here - earlier God speaks of the gods as idols which may be smashed rather than other gods like himself - but, particularly if that's true, what's going to make these other gods so tempting? God has demonstrated to the Israelites some pretty fucking incredible powers - so much so, indeed, that even the Egyptian magicians were convinced of his divine authority. What are these local gods going to do that's going to so impress the Israelites that they forget about the exodus? Is God planning on taking an extended vacation during which he expects the fickle Israelites to begin doubting his existence?
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Rules, Rules, Rules: Exodus 20:22 - 23

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

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First, a note on a previous post. It has been brought to my attention by one regular foe of the Church of the Orange Sky that openly calling for inconvenient verses to be "shoved under the carpet" - which were indeed my words, I beliee - is an inappropriate approach to Biblical studies.

Not so, sister! As any honest conservative scholar will admit, the Bible is chock full of seemingly inconsistent statements, in large part because it was written by a large number of people, some of whom were elitist priests, some of whom were elitist military and political leaders, some of whom were cranky anarchistic prophets, and some of whom fit somewhere in between. Thus we must "harmonize" the Bible, an ironic thing to do to "inerrant" Scriptures but actually a necessary thing to do - even conservatives agree on that! - because the Bible is in fact so unharmonious that it requires extra-special efforts to impose order upon it. The process of harmonization proceeds by burying unwanted verses under large and impressive piles of more appropriate ones, producing an intricate and often quite implausible "synthesis" which often makes even less sense than any of its component parts, then finally tying the whole mess together with confident and thunderous rhetoric and possibly some arm-waving thrown in for good measure. It is this process which I propose to undertake, knowing that in doing so I will have the full support of generations of conservative scholars who have adopted much the same methodology.

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Now, to business.

Having overawed the Israelites with his impressive fireworks at Mt. Sinai, God sits down with Moses to have a long chat about the rules. This is the first of a large number of sets of laws handed down, ostensibly via direct revelation from God to the prophet, which comprise the bulk of the remainder of Exodus as well as parts of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. After some brief instructions about how to make an altar (complete with a warning that God doesn't want to see any naked priests), God spends almost two chapters describing how people and animals are legitimate property and how you can resolve disputes that inevitably occur when the people you own get damaged in some way.

There's a tension in Exodus. On the one hand, there's some basis for the sort of rigid hierarchical social order that the nation of Israel clearly eventually adopted; on the other, there's still some remnant of awareness of the ethical implications of liberation from Egypt. Thus the laws of Exodus are a strange fusion of what is now conservative theology and liberation theology.

Implicit in these chapters is an acceptance of slavery and patriarchal rule over the household, with an assumption that people who are not free Isarelite men are eligible to be owned. God, as described here, does not seem inclined to liberate the slaves of the Israelites to the same extent that he liberated the slaves of the Egyptians. Amidst a long list of death penalties, God permits the sale of daughters, and even suggests that if a slave is married while working for you, you, not he, own his wife and children (and can therefore keep them even when you free him). All punishments are modeled on that well-known aphorism, "a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound." To this end God is sometimes surprisingly specific, among other things specifying a fine if you accidentally hit a pregnant woman and cause a miscarriage. This verse is usually used by pro-life activists to claim quite fictitiously that the Old Testament bans abortion; one may see that it is fiction because a fine clearly does not compensate for human life, and thus it follows that if God's laws really were meant to communicate that the unborn fetus is a human life, they would not prescribe a fine for the death of that fetus. Depending on how one reads this verse, it is quite plausible to argue that in the eyes of the Law a miscarriage on its own is "no serious injury." (Come to think of it, miscarriage is a really stupid word; it sounds as though you were carrying around a baby and accidentally dropped it.)

God's laws for property are also very specific, and no doubt gun-toting Second Amendment lovers will be happy to see that you have the right to kill a thief invading your home. (Those same people will doubtless be very disturbed to hear that this privilege is granted only after nightfall; if you kill a thief during the day, you are guilty of murder and must be put to death.)

On the other hand, God clearly intends to restrict the ability of his chosen people to oppress themselves and others. Israelite servants must be freed in the seventh year of their sevice (unless they choose to stay with their master for the rest of their life; apparently it's an either-or choice). You can sell your daughter into slavery, but anyone who buys her has an obligation to take care of her (the Biblical text actually says he must do so even if she "does not please the master," which might be a euphemistic reference to our first exception to the Seventh Commandment). If you beat your slaves so badly you knock out a tooth or damage an eye, you must free them by way of apology. God promises he will create sanctuary cities where criminals may flee to.

God also provides a considerable list of social and judicial responsibilities (alternatively, only the liberal writers showed up to the drafting meeting for chapter 23, and took the opportunity of the conservatives' absence to shove through some ameliorating amendments). Hilariously, my always-well-subtitled New International Version Bible starts off the section it calls "Social Responsibility" in the middle of chapter 22, with the instructions that if you sleep with an unbetrothed virgin you have to marry her, that if you see a "sorceress" you have to kill her, and that you also must kill people who have sex with animals and people who sacrifice to other gods. Social responsibility, indeed!

The "social responsibility" section actually begins at 22:21, with the admonition that you must not "mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt." The section closes at 22:9 with a repetition of this: "do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt." Sandwiched in between are a variety of social justice rules, and in many of them God explicitly sides with the poor and needy:

- if you exploit a widow or orphan, "I will certainly hear their cry. My anger will be aroused."

- if you lend money to the poor and charge them interest, or take the cloak from a poor person and do not return it, "I will hear, for I am compassionate."

- justice must be impartial, not siding with "the crowd" or otherwise showing "favoritism." Specifically, "do not deny justice to your poor people."

- you must rescue the lost or over-burdened animals of others, even if they belong to "your enemy" or to "someone who hates you."

You also aren't supposed to blaspheme against God or "curse the ruler of your people"; it's interesting and somewhat disturbing that those two are lumped together in the same commandment.

After this, God provides rules for the Sabbath - specifying that slaves and aliens must also be permitted the Sabbath, and that during the Sabbath year (i.e. the seventh year) every field be thrown open to the poor so that they may harvest it. Then there are some new festivals - three per year, one to remember the exodus from Egypt, one to celebrate the coming of the harvest, and one to celebrate the end of the harvest season. And finally, an extra rule is thrown in as an afterthought: "do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk." That's a bit of an odd one.

It would be tempting to pick and choose some laws that seem particularly useful and downplay the others. The suggestion that even your enemy's beasts of burden deserve your attention, for example, would appear to foreshadow Christ's later teaching that we love our enemies and our persecutors. The specific attention to the poor and the needy also seems useful to invoke, and actually requires considerably more social responsibility than the religious right is usually prepared to accept. Where, for example, are the laws banning interest on loans, or giving the poor legal access to farmers' fields? Instead the right takes comfort in the ideology of capitalism, suggesting that the real way to help the poor is not to force them into "dependence" upon charity but to force them to look after themselves. Whatever the merits of economic theory applied to social problems, clearly they have no meaningful relation to the laws given in Exodus.

Having said that, I am reluctant to fall into the same trap of picking and choosing useful laws. I haven't actually come across anything all that objectionable yet, but I'm anticipating doing so shortly. I find it extremely unconvincing when, for example, churches suggest that there are certain codes of moral behaviour from the Old Testament which remain relevant, while others - those relegated to the role of religious purity, etc. - may be safely chucked away. My primary problem with such a claim is that the Bible itself doesn't make any such explicit distinction, nor does it give us guidelines for the process of categorization. Inevitably what such a process ends up being is a way of justifying and legitimizing one particular group's view of what moral laws are desirable and which ones are unwanted, all wrapped up in an unconvincing theological package. I'll have to reflect more on this once we get to a section I actually find too objectionable, but in the meantime I'm going to stay noncommittal.
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The Ten Proposals: Exodus 20

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

I don't actually want to write this post. For some reason in the last commentary the Orange Sky inspired me to say I would discuss the Ten Commandments separately, and so now i must. There are, however, at least two grand ironies about conservative interpretation of the Commandments which is worth bringing up.

I also don't actually like the Ten Commandments, at least as Christianity usually treats them. Maybe they're the ideological inspiration for the rest of the laws that follow, but it's also difficult to disentangle them from the patrimonial context in which they written by the priests (the last commandment, for example, instructs that we "not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor." One wonders whether these items are listed in order of importance - should I sell my wife before I give up my house, but not before I give up my ox or donkey?

Whoever wrote Exodus doesn't actually count the Commandments, so it's interesting to see that people have subsequently recounted them. The Jews, most interestingly of all, actually use what we call the preface as their first commandment: I am the Lord your God. The Catholics lump togehter "no other gods" and "no idols," but the Protestants separate them out: "no other gods" and "don't make idols" are two separate commandments. In some ways the Catholic counting system actually makes more sense here, since the text specifically says an idol takes "the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them." I can only assume that the Protestants decided to re-number the Ten Commandments so that they can burn the Catholics for having icons without accusing them of having other gods, which would clearly be untrue. (The Catholics' counting is equally convenient for them, of course, since they can say that revering icons and idols and so on doesn't count as having other gods.)

Everyone keeps the same count for most of the rest, including the Jews, but then we get to the one on coveting and envy, which poses a clear problem, because while you could fudge on the rest and say they apply to everyone, clearly the last sentences apply only to men, or maybe to men and lesbians, I suppose. Wives, in the plain language of the commandment, do not covenant with God - rather, they are possessions of the men who covenant with God. Those who suggest we ought to be taking "God's laws" seriously and applying them to everyone, then, must take the unusual step for a Biblical literalist of actually adding rules into the Bible - specifically, that when the Bible says "you shall not covet your neighbor's wife," it actually means "you shall not covet your neighbor's husband or wife." The very concept of "coveting" implies ownership by someone else, and this ownership is not mutual, though Paul would later re-interpret marriage in 1 Corinthians to be an agreement of mutual submission and mutual ownership (and then would subsequently re-interpret it again to clarify that men were still in charge).

My second and related complaint about how the Ten Commandments are often treated today is that people somehow see them as absolute commands, always of course qualifying them - I can't count, for example, how many conservatives have confidently informed me that killing in the name of the state is perfectly okay because the Ten Commandments are only against "murder." Well, that's fair enough, but if you really wanted to interpret what "murder" meant, or "adultery" in the case of the seventh commandment" as another example, in all fairness you really ought to judge how the early Jews interpreted such concepts. This is why I didn't want to talk about the Ten Commandments separately - we haven't seen all these later qualifiers yet - but rest assured they are there. In the coming chapters and books following Exodus 20, readers will learn that "thou shalt not kill" doesn't apply to your human property (i.e. slaves, who you can kill with impunity), and there are a few other exceptions too. Adultery is an even more qualified term - the Bible makes clear you shouldn't do it, but so long as the woman isn't married (and especially if she isn't an Israelite, or is your slave), the writers add in a virtually limitless series of plausible scenarios in which you can freely have sex with her. I know a prophet in Saskatchewan who has thus proposed that the laws of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy amend the Sixth and Seventh Commandments to read "Everything goes, because boys will be boys"; or perhaps, seeing the later requirements that mistresses be financially supported, "Thou shalt not commit adultery unless you can afford it, and also you can have sex with slave girls because that doesn't count."

The Ten Commandments, whatever their original divine inspiration may have been, are communicated to us by and through a rigidly patrimonial culture which possessed, among other things, numerous forms of ownership of human beings which we now reject: ownership of wives, ownership of slaves, etc. We have to re-interpret the Ten Commandments, because we simply cannot relate to them as the original writers would have; and even the religious right knows this, because they re-interpret the Commandments too. And no one seems to regard them as a truly fixed set - the Jewish scribes spent a meaningful chunk of Leviticus and Deuteronomy writing in exceptions to the Seventh Commandment.

Two further irritations remain. First, I hate it when evangelists - it is usually evangelists - attempt to universalize the Ten Commandments and apply them to everyone. They don't apply to everyone. God gave them to the Jews and only to the Jews. Nothing in the text involves God saying "These laws are laws by which I will judge every human being and send people to hell if they don't obey them." Granted they look like very good things to do and not to do (I am personally against killing, for example), but nowhere does God claim this is a standard against which he intends to judge all of humanity. So fuck you, Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, with your asinine Way of the Master brainwashing "techniques."

Second, the Ten Commandments are not the cornerstone of English common law, any more than Christianity is the cornerstone of Western democracy. I shouldn't have to say this, but clearly it's necessary, because both statements are made routinely by the religious right. Christian activists sparked a ludicrous shitstorm a few years ago over the presence of a Ten Commandments monument in an Alabama courthouse, which was scheduled to be removed on the grounds that it violated the separation of church and state. At the time I was still frequenting Christian forums and I remember evangelicals' irrational rage at this affront to American freedom and democracy.

Any notion that the Ten Commandments actually have any meaningful relationship to our criminal legal system is of course moronic. Our laws don't ban other gods, they don't bidols, they don't ban misuse of the Lord's name, they don't protect the Sabbath, they don't require honouring mothers or fathers, they frown on but don't prohibit adultery, they only prohibit lying to the state, and they certainly don't prohibit coveting; indeed, our entire free-market system is based on the assumption that people covet. Murder and theft are the only things that the Ten Commandments and the Western legal system universally agree should be prohibited. This isn't saying much, because pretty much every culture has some rules regarding murder and theft, even if he definitions and the consequences differ. In the past a few of the other commandments were in the law too, but it's time to toss this notion that there's any inherent meaningful connection.

The fact that the Jewish law will subsequently clarify several of the commandments by writing in exceptions and limitations and interpretations, and that everyone today continues to re-interpret the commandments to fit their own particular cultural agendas, leads me to my conclusion, which is that they aren't much use as eternal and fundamental moral laws for human behaviour, and that pretty much everyone implicitly agrees with me on this, even if they don't admit it.
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God Hides from the People: Exodus 19-20

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

After Moses's father-in-law left in Exodus 18, Moses and the people reached Mount Sinai. Moses climbs the mountain to talk to God. Why are so many encounters with the divine taking place on mountains, deserts, or caves? Is it just that people on long, isolated vision quests frequently hallucinate? Does God have trouble talking down to people at sea level and prefer them to be higher? God promises to make Israel a "holy nation" if they keep his commandments, and because the Israelites are in an agreeable mood that day rather than their usual rebellious one, they agree. After a few days of preparation, during which the Israelites wash tehir clothes, abstain from sex, and apparently turn the mountain into a sacred no-go area, God returns and apparently turns Mt. Sinai into a volcano. He "descends" to the summit and calls Moses up to meet with him again. The Bible does not record what vehicle God used to make this "descent," but upon landing, he probably looked something like this:



What follows is an intriguing development. God tells Moses to back down and double-check that no one is going to try to "force their way" up the mountain in order to "see the Lord" - because if they do, they will die. Moses gently reminds God that the Israelites have already been commanded not to come up, but God insists he go down and bring Aaron back. The idea that simply seeing God will kill you is a peculiar one. It can't be because all humans are irredeemably sinful - after all, Moses is okay, and apparently so is Aaron. It is only the low and little ones who cannot see God. The senior members of the religious priesthood may see him in his glory, and no one else. God is cloistered for your own protection. Why does he do this? In Genesis, we saw repeated attempts to construct a patrimonial family-based social order, which ultimately failed in one catastrophe after another. Now we have a different hierarchical social order being created, one based on the supremacy of a segregated and privileged priesthood.

It is not mentioned in the text whether God expects this social order to work any better than the previous one, but there's good reason to wonder why it would - essentially it's reproducing on a grand scale the same principle of specially-blessed father and silent but troublesome women-and-children-and-servants.

After giving Moses the Ten Commandments, which I'll mention in a separate post, God sends Moses back down the mountain. The people are said to "tremble with fear" at God's impressive volcanic performance. They beg Moses to be their intermediary with God: "speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die." The people thus accept the new rule of the priesthood: they have willingly surrendered, if in terror, whatever privilege they might have had to speak to God directly. Moses tells them to buck up, since God is going to "come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning." This is an interesting moment, too. Does God want the Israelites to obey out of fear? I must shove this verse under the carpet before some fiery evangelical preacher finds it.
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Civil Government? Exodus 18

Chapter 18 is a bit of an odd chapter in the context of Exodus. Moses is encountering some problems, or at least some inconveniences, in governing the Israelites. He does not turn to God with these problems – indeed, perhaps he doesn’t realize until this chapter that there are problems. Instead, he turns to his father-in-law Jethro (formerly known as Reuel) of Midian. Jethro, you may recall, is a priest, although it’s still not clear a priest of whom.

Jethro finds the Israelites, bringing with him Moses’ wife and children to reunite that family. He praises God for the liberation of the Israelites: “praise be to the Lord… Now I know that the Lord is greater than all other gods, for he did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly.” He is, however, more critical of Moses. The latter has taken to acting as “judge for the people” from morning to evening, and Jethro suggests that “what you are doing is not good”: Moses will exhaust himself. There is an element of self-interest here, it’s worth noting: if Moses doesn’t have any time apart from being a judge, then he certainly won’t have any time for his wife Zipporah (that is, Jethro’s daughter) and their sons.

Jethro’s chief contribution here is the proposal of what amounts to a primitive judicial hierarchy. Moses will handle only the most serious problems of the community: he is “the people’s representative before God.” In this function, it is his duty to “teach [the people] the decrees and laws, and show them the way to live and the duties they are to perform.” Under his authority will be “capable men… who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain,” who control groups of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. They will handle “simple” cases and bring only the difficult ones to Moses. Jethro concludes that “if you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.” Moses implements the plan, and Jethro goes home to Midian.

The interesting thing about establishing this civil authority structure is that it does not come from God, but from a man, Jethro – a man who by all indications is not even an Israelite. As far as government goes, this isn’t a particularly bad scheme. If there are enough reliable Israelites to actually have judges for every ten citizens, clearly there are a fair number of reliable, “capable” men, despite the incessant grumbling in the previous chapters. On the other hand, we continue to reinforce the Old Testament vision that the people cannot handle their own affairs and require paternal supervision and leadership. Indeed, there are so many problems that Moses must appoint a judge for every ten citizens – the sort of ratio which would be surprising even in a police state. Moses’s job is to teach the people “the decrees and laws,” but either he’s not having much success or the judge system is a temporary stopgap measure. This new role – Moses the magistrate – doesn’t seem to come up ever again in the Bible.
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God's Free Food: Exodus 15-17

God has performed the first mass emancipation in written literature (that I know of, at any rate) and, in the next two chapters, sets out to provide for the Israelites. After the previous slaughters, this is strikingly non-violent: God works a number of dramatic miracles to provide the Israelites first with water, in the Desert of Shur; then manna and quail for food, in the “Desert of Sin.” These accounts again introduce to us the persistent faithlessness of the Israelites, and the joint difficulty of God and Moses in bringing them to heel. However, unlike in Egypt, here God chooses to bless the Israelites; after moving beyond the rage displayed against the pharaoh and his army, here God seems to be trying to reassure the Israelites that he is indeed concerned with their well-being.

After Moses leads the people into the Desert of Shur, they begin to run out of water; they come to a place named “Marah” but find only bitter water there. Thus begins the first iteration of a cycle which repeats over the next several chapters: the people “grumble against Moses” about their lack of necessary provisions, and Moses turns to God with the concerns. God responds by providing the means for a miracle: Moses throws a piece of wood into the water and turns it “sweet.” Here, God gives to the Israelites a rather limited covenant (at least in terms of what he agrees to provide): “If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, who heals you.” Put more briefly, it would appear: do as I say, or I will kill you as I killed the Egyptians.

After the water episode, the Israelites head into the Desert of Sin and begin to run out of food. Once again, they “grumble against Moses and Aaron,” this time regretting they had not “died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt.” At least in Egypt, “we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” God promises Moses an even more dramatic performance: he will “rain down bread from heaven” in such quantities that the people may simply collect off the ground whatever they need for the day’s rations (plus an extra day’s rations in advance of the Sabbath). Better yet, he later promises meat for dinner and bread for breakfast – specifically, quail, which come during the evening to “cover the camp.” Some of the persistently disobedient Israelites don’t bother following even these simple rules – they collect surplus food, which mysteriously rots overnight, then attempt to collect food on the Sabbath, but fail to find any. God tries to consolidate his position by instructing Moses and Aaron to preserve some of the manna in a jar: “then place it before the Lord to be kept for the generations to come.”

Leaving the Desert of Sin and heading to Rephidim, the Israelites find that they are again running out of water. Once again, “the people” complain to Moses about the lack of water and wonder why he took them away from Egypt, “to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst.” Moses once again turns to God, his staunch ally against the public: “What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.” Once again, God proposes a new miracle to prove his power to the Israelites: Moses will walk out ahead of the people, and strike a rock with his staff; afterwards, water will come out of it “for the people to drink.”

Post-revolutionary resentment isn’t necessarily uncommon. The new regime starts falling short of some of its original promises – or perhaps some promises people believed the new government made on its way to the top. People haven’t really changed, even if the political structures have. The people who used to make bread aren’t making it anymore. Order has collapsed, resources are scarce, and the thought leaps into the head: it didn’t used to be that bad, not compared to the way things are now. During the 1990s, you could sometimes find these feelings in the former Soviet bloc, after the communist social welfare structure had collapsed and the new Western-supported markets had done great favours only to a new class of investors, most of whom were merely opportunistic former communist leaders. In this case, though, the Israelites are portrayed as being particularly fickle. God kills their bosses, ships them off into retirement (admittedly via a desert), and gives them free food and water. Along the way he even carves them a dry path through the Red Sea – a remarkable feat which you would think, wrongly, would be more than enough to convince the Israelites forever that God was indeed on their side.

A final incident in ch. 17 involves a rival tribe, rather than food and water. The Israelites are attacked, while still staying at Rephidim, by the Amalekites. Who the Amalekites are and where they come from is not mentioned in the text, though we may presume they’re the descendants of the Amalek mentioned in the Genesis 36 genealogy. This Amalek is descended from Esau, father of the Edomites. Tellingly, Amalek is descended from Esau’s son Eliphaz and a concubine named Timna; since in this part of the Bible genetic heritage tends to equate to theological heritage, this is an immediate clue that the Amalekites will be trouble. And indeed they are; we aren’t told why they’ve decided to attack the Israelites, but evidently the battle was a very serious affair. Once again, though, God seizes the affair to again show his paternal hand in human events: so long as Moses holds up his hands, the Israelites win the battle, but if he lowers his staff, the Amalekites regain the upper hand. Moses afterwards celebrates by building an altar: “for hands were lifted up to the throne of the Lord. The Lord will be at war against the Amalekites from generation to generation.” There is a very touching moment when Aaron and Hur help hold Moses’s hands in the air, and I recall hearing a sermon on how this single verse illustrated our Christian duty to support one another in serving God. The inspiring lesson loses a little luster when we consider that the “support,” in this case, goes toward starting an unending holy war against a people who don’t seem to have done anything grievously wrong just yet. This story is surprisingly kind to the Israelites, on the other hand: unlike the last several episodes, here they do not grumble unceasingly but simply head out to fight.

The implicit message in these chapters seems to be much more than that God will provide – it is that God must provide, because the Israelites are really not capable of taking care of themselves. They are a feeble, impatient lot who seem to forget within a matter of days the most striking and unheard-of miracles, not just once but again and again. Moses gets along with God because he seems to be the only enlightened one: he, the leader, is apart from the mob not merely by virtue of his title but because he is a much greater man than they are. Where in Genesis it was vitally important for a strong man to lead his household (and the women constantly bickered, making this leadership a difficult task), in Exodus it is important for the prophet to lead, and everyone under him bickers. And this father figure must be eternally patient with the foolishness of his children – just as God is with the Israelites here, amazingly tolerant of their amnesiac disbelief just days after he crushed all of Egypt for the pharaoh’s own sins.
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Further Reflections on Divine Slaughter: Exodus 12-15

At least within the Judeo-Christian tradition, we often attach a great degree of spiritual significance to food. The later Mosaic law prescribed a variety of different feasts symbolizing different parts of the law; in Esther, another feast memorializes a Jewish revolt against foreign oppression. In theory, Christians share bread and wine when they meet in memory of the death and resurrection of Jesus (among some Protestants this has since been loosened to once every few meetings; among virtually all Western Christians, the “sharing” now includes only a bite-sized chunk of bread and a small sip to drink). In North America, we even have a meal that seems to celebrate little more than merely having food to eat – and it goes by the vague name “Thanksgiving.” Food gives us sustenance, and apparently offers an opportunity to “remember” times when God gave us sustenance in the past. In point of fact, we’re not “remembering” so much as “imagining,” since, even if these events actually happened, none of us were present at them, and thus we have no memories to recall. Jews and Christians aren’t the only ones – Islam, to name just one very close example, also incorporates notions of a ritual meal. The religious experience occurs despite our lack of memories.

The slaughter of the Egyptians in Exodus is an intriguing case of a ritual meal not just occurring, but being consciously constructed. Notice the elements of ritual which are carefully and systematically laid over the slaughter by God over chapters 12 and 13. It is the “Passover” – so named because God’s murdering angels, while they roam through Egypt, literally “pass over” the Jewish houses and move on to find some vulnerable Egyptians. It is to be a new beginning for the Israelites – also literally, as God declares that the night of the Passover will mark the first month of the Jewish year. In the future, it will be “a festival to the Lord – a lasting ordinance.” The Jews will symbolically shield themselves from God’s wrath through the blood of sacrificed lambs, prepare themselves by eating unleavened bread, then eat, after twilight. The Passover meal itself is quite specifically described: select only as much meat as the people present are able to eat, roast it with bitter herbs, then eat “in haste,” fully dressed for travel and carrying a staff. Later, God provides some further restrictions intended to unite the Jewish community and exclude those who were not “passed over” so: no foreigners or uncircumcised slaves may eat, no Israelite may refuse to partake, and foreigners gain the right to participate through the earlier ritual of circumcision. The discussion of the Passover closes with what could well be described as a Jewish, Old Testament analog of later Christian creeds:

“With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed every firstborn in Egypt, both man and animal. This is why I sacrifice to the Lord the first male offspring of every womb and redeem each of my firstborn sons.” And it will like a sign on your hand and a symbol on your forehead that the Lord brought us out of Egypt with his mighty hand.”

In chapter 12, the Egyptians agreed to let the Israelites leave – indeed, Pharaoh urgently called Moses and Aaron to say, “Leave my people… Take your flocks and herds, and go.” The Bible records God reasoning that his people should not be led directly to their future home in Israel, since this would mean fighting their way through the Philistines: “if they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.” This is the justification given for leading them towards the Red Sea. However, with the benefit of having witnessed the carnage unleashed on Egypt in the preceding chapters, the reader is not unjustified in suspecting that God has additional, ulterior motives in the race to the Red Sea.

God’s double intent – first to liberate the Israelites, but second to punish the Egyptians – is made manifest in his next command to Moses, telling the Israelites to turn back and camp near the sea. This, God informed Moses, would cause the pharaoh to think the Israelites were lost and confused. Once again, God promised, he would “Harden Pharaoh’s heart” toward the Israelites, and this time, “I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord.”

This tactical maneuver was not simply to elude pursuit. The next sentences reveal that Pharoah and his officials “changed their minds” after letting the Israelites go, presumably as a result of some more divine heart-hardening. The army is dispatched after the Israelites, since “we have let the Israelites go and lost their services.” The terrified Israelites, seeing the new pursuit, “cried out to the Lord” via Moses. Their leader explained that they must have faith before the onslaught, and they would receive their deliverance: “do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” God responds to the rousing speech by ordering Moses to part the sea with a gesture, letting the Israelites cross on dry land. Probably somewhat foolishly, the Egyptian forces give chase and, as their foe reaches the other side, the waters close over the Pharaoh and his army. And thus the Egyptian forces leave history, though in truth I’m not sure they were ever there, outside of the Biblical account of these events.

Two themes emerge from these events. The first is a foreshadowing of the petulant faithlessness of the Israelite masses, something that will become prevalent, indeed pervasive, in later books of the Old Testament. Under Moses’s guidance, these people have watched as the entire country of Egypt was submerged under multiple natural disasters, before a sizeable chunk of the Egyptian male population was suddenly and simultaneously murdered. Now, however, they see the Egyptian army pursuing them and turn against Moses once again: “was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt?... It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert.” Moses reassures them and evidently they are satisfied. Later, they all sing about the Lord’s victory; Moses leads the men, and his sister Miriam leads the women. Even God’s chosen people – I would say especially God’s chosen people, except that most of the non-Israelites thus far have displayed no more intelligence or foresight – are depicted as a foolish, faithless rabble in need of firm, paternal leadership.

The second theme – which relates to the first – is that as the people of Israel are in need of firm human leadership (now provided by Moses and to a lesser extent Aaron), they are also in need of a firm divine warrior. The God of early Exodus is an enraged fighter; he frees the people of Israel not simply for their liberation but to prove his own might in demolishing the land of Egypt. This God is establishing for future generations of Israelites his qualifications to be their god, and these qualifications are his ability to destroy large numbers of people and their possessions. It is a stunning and significant portrayal of the divine which seemingly bears only a peripheral resemblance to the God of later Christian experience.
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God Massacres Egyptians to “Prove” His Greatness: Exodus 6-11

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary funded by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Moses and Aaron return to Pharaoh with some impressive signs to prove their worth. Despite the earlier admiration for the “staff of God,” this time Moses's staff is largely irrelevant, having been demoted in favour of Aaron's. Moses and Aaron appear for another royal audience and warn Pharaoh that God's people must be released or the Egyptian people would suffer “mighty acts of judgement.” Aaron turns his staff into a snake – so do the Egyptian mages, but their snakes are eaten by Aaron's. The next several chapters are a sort of magic pissing contest between Aaron (and by extension God) and the Pharaoh's magicians (and by extension, presumably, whichever pagan idols they derive their power from). Aaron, again using his magic staff, turns all the water in Egypt into blood – and so do the magicians, “by their secret arts.” Aaron calls up massive numbers of frogs, which “cover the land” - and so do the magicians. Aaron finally wins out with a horde of gnats which rise from the dust all over the country, harassing men and animals alike. The magicians “could not” match this feat, and admitted to Pharaoh that “this is the finger of God.” It's odd that the magicians would say this: did they believe in God, but doubt God's support for Moses and Aaron? Do they now recognize this support? Have they come to believe in God as a result of the plagues? In either case, what is their response? Does their new faith spare them from the suffering to come?

The Pharaoh suffers the next several plagues without the support of his mages. Moses – directly now, without Aaron's support, it seems; there is no explicit explanation of why this is so – continues to strike Egypt with swarms of flies, then the death of all Egyptian livestock, then a hailstorm which destroyed the flax and barley crops, then locusts to destroy whatever vegetation the gnats hadn't already got to, and finally a three-day period of darkness which inexplicably covered all of Egypt except for “the places where [the Israelites] lived.” Amongst it all, Moses invents the first chemical weapon in history: a “fine dust” which causes “festering boils” on “men and animals.”

The Pharaoh was upset with the previous plagues but kept permitting Moses to come before him. The long darkness, apparently, is enough for him to throw in the towel: he agrees to let the Israelites go for their festival, at least initially, before commanding him to leave: “Make sure you do not appear before me again! The day you see my face you will die.” Moses agrees that this will not happen again.

God has one further plague in mind, however, in order to complete the oppression of Pharaoh: a plague which kills every firstborn male in Egypt. This one will not need besting, God explains to Moses: “after that, he will let you go from here, and when he does, he will drive you out completely. Tell the people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbors for articles of silver and gold.” By this time, the Bible suggests, Moses has already won the sympathy of “the Egyptians” as well as of Pharaoh's high officials. It is apparently only Pharaoh who persists in his resistance and resentment.

My Bible offers no editorial comment on the plagues, but in my half-dozen years as a committed evangelical I can’t recall any serious discussions – let alone sermons – about the morality of the plagues, and particularly of the last one, in which a considerable number of Egyptians die. Presumably many others also died as a result of the effects of some of the other plagues – lack of water and destroyed food crops come to mind as significant causes of death, just as drought and famine are major issues in some parts of the developing world today. Rather, it was always seen as a strident demonstration of God’s power, a judgement against the wickedness of that pagan nation and simultaneously the liberation of God’s chosen people, the Israelites. One children’s Bible lesson I just found online makes the dubious claim that God punished Egypt in order to prove that only “He” – unlike the pharaohs, say – was God, and that the Pharaoh could not protect his people against the wrath of this just God. I have a friend who believes the lessons given to children and new believers are most revealing about a particular faith – because it is here that complex concepts are simplified into what people of that faith have determined to be the core essentials or basic building blocks. If that is true here, it is a very disturbing thought.

The Biblical account tells us that the Egyptian people had actually come to sympathize with the Israelites early on in the process of the plagues, certainly before the murder of the firstborn. One could argue, I suppose, that each is being punished for their particular sins. This is essentially the argument that I have heard adopted to discuss the Israelite’s massacre of other pagan nations: the people were wicked and this is the way God chose to punish their wickedness. However, the Exodus story seems very carefully constructed to be God’s punishment of Pharaoh for his oppression of the Israelites. There is a pattern to the plagues which carries only a slight variation in each case: Moses and Aaron come before Moses to repeat their unaccepted demand to release the Israelites, they perform a miracle which causes suffering for the Egyptians but not for the Israelites, and the Pharaoh initially repents, but ultimately “hardens his heart” and refuses their request. Just before the plague on the firstborn, God explains to Moses that the slaughter will let “my wonders” be displayed in Egypt. Earlier, God had said he would “perform these miraculous signs of mine among them that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord.” God is killing Egyptians in order to punish the Pharaoh for his stubbornness, but primarily he is doing so to demonstrate to the Israelites his absolute power over human life – to paraphrase a Chinese proverb, God is killing the chickens in order to scare the monkeys. The birth of the free nation of Israel from the womb of Egypt is presaged by a mass slaughter of people intended to remind the new tribes of the peril of disobedience.

If the rightness of killing Egyptian subjects for the arrogance of their king is morally dubious, we may also question the rightness of killing that king for actions which, the text seems to imply, were not fully the result of his own free will. Between Exodus ch. 7 and ch. 11, Pharaoh’s heart is “hardened” against the Israelites a dozen times or so, sometimes by himself and sometimes by the will of God. When appointing Aaron as speaker, God had told Moses that he would “harden Pharaoh’s heart… [so that] he will not listen to you.” When the waters became blood, Exodus says only that “Pharaoh’s heart became hard.” After the plagues of flies and frogs, however, the Bible specifies that the pharaoh “hardened his heart.” This phrasing occurs again later – but so does the suggestion that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (after the plagues of boils, locusts, and darkness). The last two are particularly dubious: pharaoh had repented numerous times before and broken his word, but in the second case God uses the refusal to justify the murder of every firstborn male in Egypt, and in the first he seems to deliberately reject and reverse Pharaoh’s own repentance before God. Pharaoh had confessed to Moses that “I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you. Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the Lord your God to take this deadly plague away from me.” The Lord removed the locusts, then “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” once again. Why would God behave in such a manner? Do the lives of the people of Egypt not matter to him beyond their ability, in suffering and death, to serve as symbols of his own rage? This need to prove one’s power seems almost petty from an omnipotent deity.

Unfortunately, the question of whether God hardened his heart or pharaoh hardened his own heart is not an academic or semantic question: it has grave consequences for how we understand what is happening in the story of Exodus. The results are grisly in either case, but as I have mentioned before, there is some question about the degree to which God is manipulating events for God’s own purposes. The proposal of a religious festival in the desert was a pretext: it was proposed to incite a denial from Pharaoh, which would in turn justify the divine destruction of Egypt. In the same way, pharaoh seems at times willing to release the Israelites – and, despite God’s original intention of liberating the Israelites, God intervenes time and again to prevent the pharaoh from letting them go. If the Israelites left early, after all, God would not have the opportunity to display all of God’s awesome power and wrath in meting out punishment against the people of Egypt. The plagues deliberately build towards an awesome and terrible climax – the murder of the firstborn – and God does not want the show stolen by an inconveniently gracious pharaoh.
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Pharaoh, Pharaoh, oh baby, let my people go: Exodus 4-6

The following is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary funded by the Church of the Orange Sky.

A couple of months ago, a few of us were sitting around remembering lyrics to asinine religious children’s songs, and this line is from one of them. One of the more morally dubious ones, interestingly; the last verse jeeringly celebrates the literal “dead man’s float” being performed by Pharaoh’s massacred army. That's the story we're coming to in the next chapters, so I thought I'd point out some wholesome, childish praise songs for interested readers.

After leaving Egypt, marrying a priest's daughter (a pagan priest's daughter), and becoming a shepherd (also a recurring theme in the Old Testament), Moses sees God in the form of a burning bush. God equivocates about his identity in strikingly Platonic terms, defining himself solely by his own existence. Moses effectively bargains with God to have his brother Aaron speak on his behalf, and then he heads back into Egypt to conduct a divine insurgency.

Moses and Aaron return to Egypt as guerrillas, bringing together “the elders of the Israelites” and telling them of God's reappearance. This first meeting seems to go fairly well: the elders “believed,” and then “bowed down and worshiped.” Perhaps encouraged by this early success, Moses and Aaron then go directly to Pharaoh.

What follows is an interesting case of political and diplomatic manipulation authorized by God. Moses and Aaron tell Pharaoh that they have come with a request from “the Lord, the God of Israel”: his people must go into the desert to “hold a festival.” The trip will involve “sacrifices” and take three days. The Pharaoh is to let the Israelites go, or God “may strike us with plagues or with the sword.”

Moses is essentially proposing the first religious retreat in Judeo-Christian history – a three-day trip away from work and home to meditate in the desert. These days, we go to a hotel, a resort, or perhaps a campground; these evidently weren't available at the time, so God chose the desert. What is unclear, however, is whether God – or Moses – really believed such a retreat was going to take place, or whether the proposal was simply a pretext cooked up to justify the later suppression of the Pharaoh and liberation of the Israelites. God confessed at the burning bush that the Pharaoh would “not let you go unless a mighty hand compels you,” but afterwards he does seem to imply that the Pharaoh will ultimately permit the sacrifice. If we are to assume that God in fact sees and intends events to transpire as they ultimately do, this is a shrewd bit of political manipulation, certainly of Pharaoh and possibly of Moses as well. The retreat is a sham and a pretext: it is proposed in order to trap the Pharaoh into disobeying God, and this disobedience is then used as the justification for bringing the Israelites out of Egypt.

At this point the Pharaoh is, we may assume, Moses's legal uncle (being the son of the Pharaoh and therefore the brother, at least to some degree, of Moses's stepmother). This accounts, perhaps, for the familiarity with which they are greeted; the Pharaoh complains to Moses and Aaron not as leaders of the rebellious Israelites but as fellow elites who are, through their religious rabble-rousing, “taking the people away from their labour” and thus harming the national economy. The Pharaoh is evidently worried that the troublesome two would carry some influence with the Israelites, since he decides, in classic counter-insurgency fashion, to punish the people for the rebels' misdeeds by withholding the traditional payments (in straw) given to the Israelites for their brick-making. He reasons that the people “are lazy; that is why they are crying out, 'Let us go and sacrifice to our God.' Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.” The Israelite foremen protest directly to Pharaoh and are told much the same thing: “Lazy, that's what you are! That is why you keep saying, 'Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.' Now get to work. You will not be given any straw, yet you must produce your full quota of bricks.” Strikingly, with the exception of this last bit, the Pharaoh's work ethic seems very much like the modern Protestant work ethic. I wonder how conservative Christian capitalists would react to the Bible’s apparent criticism of this “work ethic” capitalism as a means of oppressing the faithful and the poor.

The Pharaoh's counter-insurgency seems to have some initial success: the Israelite foremen, rather than blaming the government for their new suffering, blame Moses and Aaron, telling them that “you have made us a stench to Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.” Moses seeks new guidance from the divine, complaining that despite the grand promises in the desert “you have not rescued your people at all.” God promises that he will indeed perform the promised rescue, reminding the Levite of his history with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but adding that “by my name the Lord I did not make myself known to them... I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant.” God seems to be suggesting he wants a more intimate relationship with Moses than with the patriarchs: he has revealed his name to Moses, something not done before. Moses returned to the Israelites with promises of the new gifts from God, “but they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and cruel bondage.” So God told him to go back to the Pharaoh instead – a strange decision, as Moses noted, since “if the Israelites will not listen to me, why would Pharaoh?”

God's answer this time is perplexing. Moses has again questioned God's judgement and God this time replies, apparently, with the intention of overwhelming Moses with God's impressive knowledge of human affairs. He gives them a lengthy list of heads of families: the sons of Reuben and Simeon, then a more extensive genealogy of the patriarchs of the Levites. God closes with a new command: “Bring the Israelites out of Egypt by their divisions.” Once again, Moses has no recorded response, but we may assume it was acquiescence. This was a strange move by God, but well in keeping with the revealed Biblical obsession with genealogies and censes.
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Ethnic War, Ancient Edition: Exodus 1-2

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

My memories of Exodus from reading it the last time are minimal, perhaps because I was paying too little attention at the time (it was one of those mad dashes through the Old Testament, the ones that usually peter out somewhere in Deuteronomy or Numbers.) The NKJV version I’ve just pulled off the shelf helpfully opens with the title “The Second Book of Moses Called Exodus,” which is intriguing since Moses himself does not in fact appear in “The First Book of Moses Called Genesis.” If I were still to take the Bible as the literal word of God, accepting the authorship of Moses makes a kind of sense – he is the first important figure in Hebrew history after the patriarchs of the previous book, and responsible for the creation of the bulk of the Jewish law – though really it serves no purpose, since presumably God could have dictated the history of the world to some other marginally literate individual as easily as he could have to Moses.

The picture of ethnic relations in ancient Egypt described in the beginning of Exodus – what is now “chapter 1” – describes an intriguing tension between the Egyptians and a people now known as the “children of Israel,” at least within the text – so named because they are the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob/Israel who arrived in Egypt at the end of Genesis and, via Joseph, went on to occupy privileged positions in a vastly reformed, thoroughly nationalized economy. These “children of Israel” prospered and multiplied until “the land was filled with them.” This is a considerable accomplishment, and a new pharaoh even makes the implausible claim that the Israelites have grown more numerous than the Egyptians.

A new ruler, “who did not know Joseph,” incites his people against the Israelites and effectively enslaves them, although my NKJV translation does not actually use the word – instead, it speaks of specially appointed “taskmasters” who make the Israelites “serve with rigour.” Heavy burdens were set upon the Israelites, like building new “supply cities.” This move is an intriguing one. Clearly there is more going on than that the new pharaoh “did not know Joseph.” By this time, Joseph himself must be long dead, for one thing – not only this pharaoh and his predecessors could not have known Joseph personally. Another way to take this statement would be that the new pharaoh was simply unaware of Joseph’s actions on behalf of the Egyptian royalty, which cemented the monarchy’s position in society. This, too, seems somewhat unlikely, given the importance of Joseph in Egyptian history (or at least Egyptian history as described in the Bible, something which does not necessarily correspond to the archaeological evidence as we now have it). Presumably part of the education of ancient royalty involved at least some understanding of the recent history of the bases of their power.

A more cynical political analysis suggests a possible alternative. Recall that at the end of Genesis Joseph was responsible for reforms which doubtless caused massive resentment among the Egyptian public – a permanent income tax, nationalization of property, and effective enserfment. A new government – or at least a new pharaoh – takes charge and perhaps has difficulty maintaining its stranglehold over the economy and society. The government, not the Israelites, is the one collecting the taxes, and searches for a way to distract the people from its own shortcomings by identifying an enemy. The Jews have played this role in the recent past as well, as have other ethnic and religious groups, although it is very unusual (not to mention implausible and almost certainly an exaggeration) that they would be an economically dominant majority at the time of the new repression. In this case, the Egyptians might have been particularly receptive to such a diversionary tactic given their recollection of the role Joseph had played in their subjugation. This does not provide a moral justification for the Egyptians’ actions, but it does provide an alternative understanding to the bald and repetitive story of an evil king attacking God’s people. Either way, the subjugation of the Israelites echoes their assistance in the subjugation of the Egyptians so many years before.

Having grasped the difficulty of oppressing a majority, and possessed by the sort of genocidal tendencies so common to people in the Old Testament, the pharaoh hits upon a new and novel method of reducing the Israelite population: he instructs the Hebrew midwives to kill all sons born to Israelite women. The midwives disobeyed, apparently because they “feared God.” They justified the lack of infant corpses to the pharaoh on ethnic grounds, too: “the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.” Since there are apparently only two midwives to cover the entire Israelite population (v. 15 helpfully names them for us, as Shiphrah and Puah), it is entirely understandable that they would frequently be late, whether the new mothers are “lively” or not. God rewards the midwives and the Israelites generally and they continue to “multiply and grow very mighty,” despite the fact they are apparently now in slavery. At this point one must begin to wonder how a population which is large, rich, and “mighty” could be so easily subdued and enslaved by the less numerous, weaker Egyptians. In any event, a frustrated pharaoh orders a new tactic: “every son who is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive.”

Presumably, the pharaoh expects the Israelite girls to grow up to be either exploited by or married off to Egyptian men (or perhaps he intends both). If this is true, then at least some of the gendered aspects of genocide have changed relatively little over the last three thousand years. As becomes typical of Israelite practice later on, the women are largely irrelevant to the question of bloodlines: they are a sort of reproductive investment, property which can produce new children on a fairly regular basis. It is the power of the Israelites, not their identity as Israelites, which is resented.

The marginal status of the female offspring, however, is in this unusual case an intriguing contrast to the role of the women themselves. As I noted in various cases in my commentary in Genesis on this same track, major roles are not typically played by women; and when they are, these roles are usually negative. In this case, however, the actions of the Hebrew women stand as the resistance of their community to Egyptian oppression. The marginalized Israelites do not (yet) struggle against their chains through the actions of warriors, priests, or other men of God; here, it is women who fight Egyptian repression. Their roles are still limited to reproduction, but reproduction is a decisively political activity here: the (male) Pharaoh orders the (female) midwives to kill male newborns, but either the midwives, the mothers, or both refuse to obey. God blessed the Israelites for the women's courage: “the people increased and became even more numerous,” because “the midwives feared God.” The way v. 20-21 are constructed suggests that the midwives may have chosen this profession because they themselves were barren, or at least had no children; God then rewarded them for their courage by “giving them families of their own.” Exodus 1 represents a rare case of the courage and determination of the Israelite community being represented not by a small handful of male religious and political elites but by Israelite women.

The story of Moses in Exodus 2 begins with an elaboration on the Hebrew women's acts of resistance described in the previous chapter: a Levite woman gives birth to a male child and, after hiding him for three months, puts him in a floating basket and sends him off down the Nile, in the hands of fate and (presumably) of God. It is unclear what the Levite woman expected was going to happen – the chances of a baby surviving on its own after being sent down a river being rather slim – but is understandable. In this case, Moses is curiously fortunate, being found by the unlikely saviour of the Pharaoh's daughter. Her slave girl recognizes the crying baby as “one of the Hebrew babies,” suggesting perhaps that such abandonment was commonplace. It is not impossible that the slave girl herself was Hebrew (by this time, the Hebrews having been enslaved). Moses's older sister, who apparently had followed her infant brother's progress along the Nile, then approaches and suggests she will get “one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby.” The woman she has in mind is, of course, Moses's mother. Later, Moses is given up again, this time directly to the Pharaoh's daughter, who raised him as a son. How, precisely, the Pharaoh's daughter was able to justify the sudden arrival of a new son to her father (or to her husband, if she had one) is an interesting question which the Biblical account does not bother to answer.

The role of women in this account is again significant – indeed, there are no men involved at all. Moses's mother abandons him in order to avoid discovery by the Egyptian government, with the faint hope that by putting him in a basket she might allow him to survive as the child of another family farther down the Nile. Her daughter stands on the riverbanks to watch, and later plays an instrumental role in having Moses returned to his mother. The Pharaoh's daughter rescues the infant – or more precisely, her slavegirl does so on the woman's orders. These women are not mentioned again in the Bible, except for the sister, who might be Miriam.

Once Moses has grown up, indeed, the story returns to the traditional heroic figure – the strong and protective Hebrew warrior. Moses watches an Egyptian beating a slave, and then kills the Egyptian. It's not clear what was special about this particular experience; Moses had been raised at the Egyptian court and presumably would have been aware of such goings-on for quite some time. In any case, apparently he has had enough. He is surprised the next day when he breaks up a fight between two Hebrews and is not met with gratitude or respect. Moses's reasoning in this case is a very curious matter. He is afraid because they are aware he has killed an Egyptian; he seems blind to the fact that they might be resentful of his intervention because, in their eyes, he is just one more Egyptian noble. The great revelation that Moses is both an Egyptian noble and a Hebrew Levite never seems to happen; the Pharaoh expresses no surprise at Moses's new role as the priest of the Israelites several chapters later. This is one of the most confusing and contradictory points in the narrative.

At any rate, Moses seizes the opportunity to flee Egypt and goes into self-imposed exile in Midian, where in exchange for helping a priest's seven daughters get water for a flock of sheep, he gets a hot pastor's kid as a wife (Zipporah). He seems to accept his new, diminished status, but longs for his homeland via the name of his firstborn son, Gershom – the name apparently refers to “alien,” and at the birth the father somberly notes, “I have become an alien in a foreign land.” Fortunately, his time as a political dissident-in-exile soon comes to an end.

The status of Zipporah, or more accurately of her father Reuel, is curiously vague. Zipporah is not an Israelite by birth – which would become a problem for future Israelite men, but apparently is not a serious concern yet – and it is not clear in what religious tradition Reuel serves as “priest.” Were non-Israelite religious groups serving God at this time in Biblical history? Did Moses accept the charity and hospitality of a pagan family? Significantly, the writer of Exodus does not seem to care.
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