Reading Exodus: (A Pause) Let's Talk about Reading Exodus

Over the years I have watched three films based on the book of Exodus: from The Ten Commandments, that golden-age Hollywood epic with its unabashedly religious vision; to The Prince of Egypt, which took scrupulous care to honour both Jewish and Christian (including Catholic) sensibilities; to Exodus: Gods and Kings, the blockbuster of a decade or so ago, dressed in modern psychology for a post-Christian age that has no room for miracles. Whatever one makes of their uneven quality, it is striking that all three, quite independently of one another, chose to focus on the first fifteen chapters — above all, on the visual spectacle of the ten plagues.

To some extent, this rather faithfully mirrors how the Christian community at large tends to know the book of Exodus. Whenever Exodus comes up, whenever it is read, our attention gravitates to the great set pieces of those opening chapters: Israel enslaved, the Hebrew boys slaughtered, the infant Moses rescued, the burning bush, Pharaoh's hardened heart, the ten plagues, the Passover, the crossing of the Red Sea. And after the Red Sea? Everything grows hazy… What lingers, perhaps, is the people's constant grumbling; possibly the giving of manna; and, of course, the giving of the Ten Commandments. But on the whole, these later chapters blur into one another, lacking the sharp outlines of the first fifteen. 

This phenomenon has a good deal to do with the way we normally read Scripture.

Fragment of the Book of Exodus (Coptic), 8th century.

 

Roughly 43 per cent of our Bible is narrative — storytelling, the form most of us know best. When we read the Bible, we find that books of this kind (Genesis, Exodus and Ruth in the Old Testament, say, or the Gospels in the New) are not only easier going; their characters and events stay with us more readily and stir our sympathies. That is the charm, and the gift, of narrative.

Yet precisely because stories are easy to remember, easy to take to heart, and easy to retell, the setting and wider context of a story can quietly slip away without our noticing, and its emphasis subtly shifts. And in an age ever more habituated to fragmented, short-form video, a story's original context and background are, more often than not, simply overlooked or forgotten altogether.

Our familiarity with the narrative of Exodus 1–15 is a case in point. Told and retold, the story has a way of turning into a biography of Moses (or even a legend?!) — or else into a spectacular parade of miracles, each outdoing the last…! Yet if we set these fifteen chapters back within the structure of the book as a whole, we discover that they are, in fact, only the beginning of its larger narrative. And the book itself is but one link in the greater whole of the Torah — the five books of Moses.

 

Consider first the book of Exodus on its own terms. Its 40 chapters fall broadly into two great narrative blocks — chap 1–14 and chap 16–40 — with chap 15 as the hinge that joins them. Chapters 1–14 may feel like the main drama, taut with tension and thundering with power; in reality, however, they serve chiefly to lay the groundwork for what begins to unfold from chapter 16 onwards. They introduce the principal "characters": the LORD God, Moses, the people of Israel, and — with Egypt as their representative — the gentile nations that do not know the LORD, or refuse him. At the same time, they begin, little by little, to lift the veil on the book's great theme — that the LORD is the one and only God, the God who keeps covenant and shows steadfast love — a theme whose riches the narrative goes on to unfold ever more fully as it advances.

Papyrus Segment containing Ex 40:26-38

Then, when we set the whole book of Exodus within the whole of the Torah, we discover that these first 15 chapters play yet another role — a transitional one — carrying forward the threads that Genesis had laid down: God's prophecy to Abraham concerning the destiny of his descendants, Joseph's charge that his bones be carried up to the promised land, and the steady swelling of the people of Israel. One by one these threads unfold, as the book recounts Israel's wilderness journey before their entry into the land of promise.

 

It is in that vast wilderness that the LORD God, through Moses, reveals himself further to his people — his name and his character (Ex 34:2–9; cf. Ex 3:7–22) — together with his heart's intent for them: that he would be their God, and they would be his people (see the whole of Leviticus, especially Lev 26:12). And through the giving of the law, he teaches them how to dwell with him and walk with him. And yet it is in that same long wilderness that Israel — the law of God in hand — grumbles again and again against the God who rescued them, and rebels time after time against the God who feeds and sustains them; until they look less and less like a people belonging to God, and more and more like the Egypt that enslaved them and the idol-worshipping nations around them. 

This, precisely, is one of the central themes of the Torah.

If, in reading Exodus, all we see is the pitiable plight of the Israelites and the villainy of the Egyptians; if our gaze rests only on Pharaoh's hardened heart, the horror of the ten plagues, or the spectacle of the Red Sea standing up like walls of water — then what we miss is not merely this grand theme. We miss also the compassion and forbearance of God towards humanity, and the sinfulness of the human heart — a sinfulness we can neither explain away nor break free from. And so, in our knowledge of God and of ourselves alike, we may find ourselves in the awkward position of simply marking time — standing exactly where we always stood.