Introduction to Exodus

Title and authorship

The Hebrew title is the book's first two words, these are the names Exodus 1:1, and the English title comes from the Greek word for a going out. Both are accurate, and together they describe the book better than either does alone. It opens by listing a family of seventy and closes with a nation of hundreds of thousands camped around a tent; the departure in the middle is what turned the one into the other.

The book records its own writing more often than any other part of the Torah. After Amalek, Moses is told write this for a memorial in a book Exodus 17:14. At the covenant ceremony Moses wrote all Yahweh's words Exodus 24:4. After the covenant is renewed the instruction is repeated: write these words; for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant Exodus 34:27. These are not claims made about Moses by a later hand; they are commands given to him within the narrative, and the narrative assumes they were obeyed.

The rest of Scripture reads the book the same way. The law is the book of Moses in the mouths of kings, prophets and apostles, and Jesus locates a specific paragraph of it by chapter and scene — the book of Moses, about the Bush Mark 12:26 — in an argument whose whole force depends on the passage being what it claims to be. A single author, writing within the events, is the reading the text asks for and the reading taken here.

Exodus is also the second panel of one work. It begins with the conjunction and, picks up the name list of Genesis 46, and leaves its tabernacle standing for Leviticus to fill. It cannot be read as a book with its own beginning, because it does not have one.

Date

Scripture dates the exodus itself. The temple foundation was laid in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign 1 Kings 6:1. Solomon's fourth year is fixed near 967 before Christ by the synchronisms of the divided monarchy, which places the departure from Egypt near 1446 and the events of this book between about 1526, when Moses was born, and 1445, when the tabernacle was raised.

Two other figures agree with that anchor rather than competing with it. Israel lived in Egypt for four hundred thirty years Exodus 12:40, counted to the day, which reaches back to Jacob's descent; and long afterward a judge argues from a possession of Heshbon for three hundred years Judges 11:26, a figure that only works if the conquest is early. The rounder four hundred years promised to Abraham Genesis 15:13 is the same span stated without its remainder.

A later exodus, in the thirteenth century, is widely proposed on the strength of the store city named at Exodus 1:11. The name is not the difficulty it is taken to be: cities are renamed, and a book written and copied for centuries would naturally carry the current name of a site whose older one had passed out of use. Against that stands a chronological note the text supplies deliberately, tied to a reign whose dates rest on records outside the Bible. The earlier date is followed here because Scripture states it.

The writing belongs to the wilderness years, between Sinai and the plains of Moab. The book knows the desert intimately and Canaan only as a promise.

Backgrounds

An empire at its height. The Egypt of this book is not a fading power. It is the wealthiest state in the world, its labor organized in gangs under taskmasters, its building program hungry for brick, and its throne treated as divine. Israel is put to work on storage cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses Exodus 1:11 in the eastern delta, the district Genesis calls Goshen  — good pasture, close enough to the frontier for a shepherding people to be useful and watched at once.

Brick without straw. Mud brick was made by treading Nile silt with chopped straw, molding it, and drying it in the sun; the straw binds the clay and keeps it from cracking. Withdrawing the straw while holding the quota Exodus 5:7–8 is therefore not spite alone but a precise engineering cruelty, and the foremen's protest is technical before it is moral.

A land of many gods. Egyptian religion attached deity to the river, the sun, the frog, the bull, the scarab, and above all to the king himself. This matters for reading the plagues, because the text says plainly what they are for: I will execute judgments against all the gods of Egypt Exodus 12:12. Each blow falls on something Egypt had divinized, and the last falls on the divine dynasty in the person of its heir.

A people the Egyptians would not eat with. Shepherds were an abomination to the Egyptians Genesis 46:34, which had kept Israel intact through four centuries in the delta. The contempt that preserved them as a distinct people is the same contempt that made them safe to enslave.

The wilderness. South and east of the delta the land runs to sand, then to granite. Water is the whole question, and the itinerary of this book is a list of springs — Marah, Elim, Rephidim — before it is anything else. A population of that size in that country is impossible without daily provision, which the narrative treats as the point rather than as a difficulty.

Theology and purpose

The book moves in three stages, and each one is stated in advance as a purpose clause. God will bring them out; God will take them as his own; God will live among them. Everything else serves that sequence.

Redemption. The promise given to Moses sets the pattern the rest of Scripture uses: I will bring you out... I will rid you out of their bondage... I will redeem you with an outstretched arm Exodus 6:6. Israel does not negotiate its release, fight for it, or earn it. The one act it performs is to shelter under blood Exodus 12:13, and even that is obedience to an instruction rather than a contribution.

Covenant. What follows deliverance is not payment for it. The law is prefaced by the rescue — I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt Exodus 20:2 — so the commandments are addressed to a people already free. The order is the theology: obedience is the shape of a redeemed life, never the price of one. The same order governs the offer at Sinai, where the covenant terms are put to a people who have already seen what I did to the Egyptians Exodus 19:4.

Presence. The book's destination is not Canaan, which it never reaches, but a tent. Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them Exodus 25:8, and again, more fully, they shall know that I am Yahweh their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, that I might dwell among them Exodus 29:46. Deliverance was the means; dwelling was the end. That is why the book ends where it does, with the glory settling on a finished tent rather than with an arrival.

The name. Running through all three is a self-disclosure. God gives Moses a name at the bush Exodus 3:14, attaches it to every promise in chapter six, defends it through the plagues, writes it at the head of the commandments, and finally spells out its content in the only definition of the divine character that Scripture puts in God's own mouth: merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, yet one who will by no means clear the guilty Exodus 34:6–7. Every later writer who wants to say what God is like quotes that sentence.

Additional notes

A name not known before. By my name Yahweh I was not known to them Exodus 6:3 sits beside a Genesis that uses the name from its second chapter onward. The tension is resolved by what knowing a name means in these books. Abraham heard the name; he did not see what it meant, because the promises attached to it were still unkept. Chapter six is not the introduction of a word but the redemption of one, and its whole paragraph is a list of things about to be done.

Six hundred thousand. The march is about six hundred thousand on foot who were men, in addition to children Exodus 12:37, implying a total company of perhaps two million. Some read the Hebrew term for thousand in its other sense of clan or contingent, which would give a much smaller number. The text elsewhere takes the large figure at face value — the census of Numbers repeats it in detail, and the manna, the quail and the water are narrated as miracles of scale — so it is read plainly here, with the difficulties left standing rather than solved by arithmetic.

Which sea. The Hebrew name of the water crossed in chapter fourteen means sea of reeds, and the same name is used later of the gulf at Ezion Geber, which is not a marsh. Nothing in the account allows a shallow crossing in any case: the waters stand a wall to them on their right hand and on their left Exodus 14:22 and drown an army behind them.

Pharaoh unnamed. Neither king in this book is named, though every Hebrew midwife is. The omission is consistent and is best read as deliberate.

The hardening. God says in advance I will harden Pharaoh's heart Exodus 7:3, and the narrative then reports the king hardening it himself through the first five plagues Exodus 8:15 before the phrase turns around at the sixth Exodus 9:12. The sequence is the explanation, and it is argued where it occurs.

The long repetition. Chapters 35 to 40 retell chapters 25 to 31 as accomplished fact, often word for word. Reading it as padding misses the reason: between the two lies the golden calf, and the repetition is the proof that nothing was lost.

Outline

How the book is built

Fire on a mountain, fire in a tent inclusio 3:1-40:38

• A 3:1-6 Fire in a bush on Horeb. The ground is holy, the sandals come off, and Moses hides his face.
• A′ 40:34-38 Fire in a cloud over the tabernacle. The glory fills the tent, and Moses cannot go in.

The book's first and last scenes of God's appearing are built from the same three elements, and only their location differs. At the bush there is fire that does not consume, ground made holy by the presence standing on it, and a man who may not come close — don't come close. Take off your sandals Exodus 3:5. At the end there is fire in a cloud, a tent made holy by the glory filling it, and the same man kept outside — Moses wasn't able to enter into the Tent of Meeting Exodus 40:35. The distance is unchanged; what has changed is that the fire has moved. It was on a mountain in a foreign wilderness that one shepherd stumbled across, and it is now in the middle of a camp, portable, with the whole nation watching it throughout all their journeys Exodus 40:38. That relocation is the book's argument in two pictures: God has not become approachable, but he has come to live among the people who cannot approach him, and the arrangements that make this survivable occupy the sixteen chapters in between.

The calf inside the tabernacle account chiasm 25:1-40:38

• A 25:1-31:18 The pattern given on the mountain, from the ark to the anointing oil, sealed with the Sabbath sign.
• B 32:1-35 The golden calf. The tablets are broken at the foot of the mountain they were written on.
• C 33:1-23 An angel offered instead of God himself. Moses refuses the substitute and asks to see the glory.
• B′ 34:1-35 Tablets cut again, the name proclaimed, the covenant renewed, and Moses comes down shining.
• A′ 35:1-40:38 The pattern carried out exactly, opened with the Sabbath command and closed by the glory filling it.

The last third of the book is not two lists with a story wedged between them. The two tabernacle sections are each sealed with the same commandment, and the seal is what shows the design: the instructions close with the Sabbath as a sign between me and you Exodus 31:13, and the construction opens with the Sabbath restated before a single thread is cut Exodus 35:2. Whatever else the tabernacle was for, it was never to be built at the cost of the day that preceded it.

Inside that frame the covenant is broken and remade. Israel makes a god of its own gold in chapter 32 while the pattern for God's dwelling is still being given on the mountain, and in chapter 34 the tablets are cut again and the covenant restored. At the center stands the one chapter that is neither construction nor covenant but the question both depend on: whether God will go with them at all. Moses refuses every substitute — if your presence doesn't go with me, don't carry us up from here Exodus 33:15 — and the answer he receives is what releases the building to begin. Read as a whole, the shape says that the sanctuary is not a machine for securing God's presence. It is the gift of a presence that had already been forfeited and freely restored.

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