Exodus Story Quotes

We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

With every slow thrust of his tongue, every possessive push of his hips, he damns us, the confession in his eyes narrating our story, our ill-fated fortune as star-crossed fools, sharing a merciless love neither of us can ever deny, but can never keep.

I’m keeping my love story, not because it included both martyr and sacrifice, or because it’s the story I wanted, it’s because I would never rewrite it. And I would live it all over again just for the chance to sing with him.

You see that? That big messy spiral of people, moving, trying to find God? I ask them, as the exodus unfolds once again on screen. That right there is Zion. Get there however you can.

Of course, the fact that a single biblical text can mean many things doesn’t mean it can mean anything. Slave traders justified the exploitation of black people by claiming the curse on Noah’s son Ham rendered all Africans subhuman. Many Puritans and pioneers appealed to the stories of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan to support attacks on indigenous populations. More recently, I’ve heard Christians shrug off sins committed by American politicians because King David assaulted women too. Anytime the Bible is used to justify the oppression and exploitation of others, we have strayed far from the God who brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, “out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 20:2).

The point at which God asserted his greatness to his chosen people was when he arranged the escape of the Jews from Egypt, where they were kept as slaves. One reading of the story of Exodus is that it was not so much about freeing the Israelites from slavery as about asserting God’s greatness by establishing a people beholden to him and ensuring that they—and others—were in awe of his power. Under this interpretation, the Exodus story becomes a gigantic manipulation.

I especially loved the Old Testament. Even as a kid I had a sense of it being slightly illicit. As though someone had slipped an R-rated action movie into a pile of Disney DVDs. For starters Adam and Eve were naked on the first page. I was fascinated by Eve's ability to always stand in the Garden of Eden so that a tree branch or leaf was covering her private areas like some kind of organic bakini. But it was the Bible's murder and mayhem that really got my attention. When I started reading the real Bible I spent most of my time in Genesis Exodus 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Talk about violent. Cain killed Abel. The Egyptians fed babies to alligators. Moses killed an Egyptian. God killed thousands of Egyptians in the Red Sea. David killed Goliath and won a girl by bringing a bag of two hundred Philistine foreskins to his future father-in-law. I couldn't believe that Mom was so happy about my spending time each morning reading about gruesome battles prostitutes fratricide murder and adultery. What a way to have a "quiet time." While I grew up with a fairly solid grasp of Bible stories I didn't have a clear idea of how the Bible fit together or what it was all about. I certainly didn't understand how the exciting stories of the Old Testament connected to the rather less-exciting New Testament and the story of Jesus. This concept of the Bible as a bunch of disconnected stories sprinkled with wise advice and capped off with the inspirational life of Jesus seems fairly common among Christians. That is so unfortunate because to see the Bible as one book with one author and all about one main character is to see it in its breathtaking beauty.

A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story—in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.

When Joseph leaves home on this simple fact-finding mission, he leaves for the last time. Joseph will never return to live in the land until his bones are brought back after the Exodus (Ex. 13:19). In fact, it is this aspect of Joseph’s story that warranted mention in the “Faith Hall of Fame” (Heb. 11:22). This is not a feel-good story wherein the hero returns victorious. This is a tale of redemption in which Joseph pays an unthinkable price for a purpose much greater than he.

[The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story." What do you mean?" Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists... same old, same old. It seems to me that the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.

It never ceased to amaze me how white scholars could quibble, making simple things more complicated than they really were. What is more central in the Christian Bible than the exodus and Jesus stories and the prophetic call for justice for the poor?

We tend to write Moses’ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMille’s classic, The Ten Commandments, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

In Exodus, chapter 14, Moses must lead the Jews out of Egypt and to safety by parting the Red Sea. This story teaches us a valuable lesson about how we must face the future. I want to draw your attention to two verses in particular. Exodus (14:15) reads: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell the people of Israel to march forward.’” Exodus (14:16) reads: “Lift up your rod and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it.” The thing to note here is that Moses is instructed to raise his rod to divide the sea only after telling his people to march forth into the water. The Israelites were actually in the water, some of them up to their necks, and were told to keep marching before the water split. And yet no one complained or feared drowning because the message from God was very clear: walk first into the water and the ocean will split afterwards. Had the Israelites waited around for the waters to part, they would have been waiting a long time—perhaps forever. They had to bring about their own miracle, a truth we can deduce from the peculiar order of these two verses, which is no accident as there are no accidents in Scripture. To succeed at life and business, you too must face the future as the Israelites did at the Red Sea. Get moving now. Do not wait for the bridge. Cross now and the way through will present itself.

world’s first labor story: Exodus. Pharaoh was the first bad boss, Moses was the first labor leader, and the Exodus was the first strike.

rabbis knew best. The marvelous warmth and intimacy of your ceremonies tonight! Even the little family quarrel only made things more lively. It gave the evening—well, tang. I was going to say bite, but I’d better not.” He paused skillfully for the laugh. “The little Hagada, with its awkward English and quaint old woodcuts, has been a revelation to me. I’ve suddenly realized, all over again, that I’m part of a tradition and culture that go back four thousand years. I’ve realized that it was we Jews, after all, with the immortal story of the Exodus from Egypt, who gave the world the concept of the holiness of freedom

What is necessary, Luther insisted, was an entirely different mode of thinking, an ad modum scripturae (in the manner of scripture), a fundamental change of the story. As early as his Lectures on Romans he remaks that the biblical story of the exodus had been interpreted (tropologically) to mean the exodus from vice to virtue. Now, however, it must be interpreted as the exodus from virtue to the grace of God! Grace must be the story. It is grace that determines the relationship between God, the creature, creation, and its destiny. Grace is what God is all about. Grace is what God is up to. And a graced creation is what God aims to arrive at.

the question of whether the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt was an actual event or merely part of myth and legend also remains unanswered at the moment .. alternative explanations of the Exodus story might be correct. They include the possibility that the Israelites took advantage of the havoc caused by the Sea Peoples in Canaan to move in and take control of the region; that the Israelites were actually part of the larger group of Canaanites already living in the land; or that the Israelites had migrated peacefully into the region over the course of centuries .. the Exodus story was probably made up centuries later, as several scholars have suggested. In the meantime, it will be best to remain aware of the potential for fraud, for many disreputable claims have already been made about events, peoples, places, and things connected with the Exodus. Undoubtedly more misinformation, whether intentional or not, will be forthcoming in the future.

The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

Yup. I had a crisis of trying to make sense of theistic determinism. The Exodus story. Moses goes to Pharaoh and says, “Let my people go.” And Pharaoh says, “No way.” And Moses brings a plague upon Egypt. And Pharaoh says, “Okay, I give up. You can all go.” And then, at least in the version I was raised with, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart” and made him say, “I changed my mind, nobody’s going anywhere.” So now, in comes the second plague, and Pharaoh says, “I give up.” And God intervenes again, and at the end we’re asked not only to judge Pharaoh but, while we’re at it, kill all the firstborns and the horses and whatever poor schmucks have been forced to be in the army running those chariots across the Red Sea. And justice has been served. But wait a second—God interfered. But then God judged them, and that’s very confusing. And when I was thirteen, it became crystal clear. I remember one night waking up at two in the morning and thinking, “None of that makes sense. None of it’s for real. It’s nonsense.” And I’ve been incapable of a shred of spirituality or religiosity since then.

In the penultimate stages of writing this book, the date of the great exodus from Africa may have shifted more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, following the discovery of forty-seven modern teeth in China. Then in the final stages it moved back by another 20,000 years with the detection of Homo sapiens DNA in a millennia-dead Neanderthal girl. These numbers are not much in evolutionary terms, ripples in geological time. But that is much more than the whole of written human history, and so the land continually and dramatically moves under our feet.

I’m writing a full-length novel for Reagan in the forthcoming five-book Exodus End series. So you’ll get plenty more of Trey in his next novel. I felt a lot of Trey’s story—and Reagan’s and Ethan’s—was left unfinished in Double Time. So I decided they needed a second book. Good things come to those who wait.

The exodus of this whole people from the land of their fathers is a touching sight,” Carleton wrote. “They have fought us gallantly for years on years; they have defended their mountains and their stupendous canyons with heroism; but at length, they found it was their destiny, too, to give way to the insatiable progress of our race.

IT HAS BEEN SHOWN that the story of Moses and the Exodus can be understood not as literal history or history mythologized but as myth historicized. The lawgiver motif ranks as solar and allegorical, reflecting an ancient archetype extant also in the myth of Dionysus, god of vine and wine, who shares numerous significant attributes with Moses.

Mark appears to acknowledge the reality that “no one had the strength to subdue” the demon of Roman military occupation (5: 4)—including the Jewish rebels. Yet he makes his revolutionary stance clear by symbolically reenacting the exodus story through a “herd” of pigs. With the divine command, the imperial forces are drowned in the sea. It is no accident that in the aftermath of this action the crowd, like Pilate, responds with “wonder” (thaumazein; 5: 20). To invoke the great exodus liberation story was, as it has been subsequently throughout Western history, to fan the flames of revolutionary hope (Walzer, 1986). Yet Mark realized that the problem was much deeper than throwing off the yoke of yet another colonizer. After all, biblical history itself attested to the fact that Israel had always been squeezed, courted, or threatened by the great empires that surrounded it. And the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids had only resulted in recycling oppressive power into the hands of a native dynasty, one that in turn became an early victim of a newly ascendent imperial power, Rome. Thus the meaning of Jesus’ struggle against the strong man is not reducible solely to his desire for the liberation of Palestine from colonial rule, though it certainly includes that. It is a struggle against the root “spirit” and politics of domination—which, Mark acknowledges matter of factly, is most clearly represented by the “great men” of the Hellenistic imperial sphere (10: 42).

Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian “spiritual” interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.

More serious was the misprint in an edition of 1631, which rendered Exodus 20:14 as follows: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The omission of the word “not” was speedily corrected, but not before this had caused some consternation among the Bible's readers. Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the printers of this “Wicked Bible”—as it came to be known—were fined severely for this unfortunate lapse.

Matthew has Jesus flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre not because it happened, but because it fulfills the words of the prophet Hosea: “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Hosea 11:1). The story is not meant to reveal any fact about Jesus; it is meant to reveal this truth: that Jesus is the new Moses, who survived Pharaoh’s massacre of the Israelites’ sons, and emerged from Egypt with a new law from God (Exodus 1:22).

For the Hebrew slaves of the Exodus story, a cyclical cosmos implied a repeating pattern of “good and evil” in which one side never ultimately triumphed over the other. The Egyptian cosmos could not account for slaves that escaped the “cosmic” system. But to completely break out of the cyclical conception of the cosmos in the cause of life over death was to posit an end goal of history. The Exodus paradigm of evil slavery followed by the good of freedom in God would be writ large. A directional conception of history would culminate in the ultimate, messianic triumph of good over evil. Instead of the eternal recurrence of repression, the theory went, the ultimate pattern of human history would begin from the trough of Egyptian slavery and peak with the coming of the messianic era. In this idea, alien to the ancient Greeks but central for seventeenth century Puritans, one can discern the seed of the modern idea of progress.

Moses, for example, was not, according to some interpretations of his story, the brash, talkative type who would organize road trips and hold forth in a classroom at Harvard Business School. On the contrary, by today’s standards he was dreadfully timid. He spoke with a stutter and considered himself inarticulate. The book of Numbers describes him as “very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.” When God first appeared to him in the form of a burning bush, Moses was employed as a shepherd by his father-in-law; he wasn’t even ambitious enough to own his own sheep. And when God revealed to Moses his role as liberator of the Jews, did Moses leap at the opportunity? Send someone else to do it, he said. “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?” he pleaded. “I have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and tongue.” It was only when God paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the assignment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would be the public face of the operation. “It will be as if he were your mouth,” said God, “and as if you were God to him.” Complemented by Aaron, Moses led the Jews from Egypt, provided for them in the desert for the next forty years, and brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. And he did all this using strengths that are classically associated with introversion: climbing a mountain in search of wisdom and writing down carefully, on two stone tablets, everything he learned there. We tend to write Moses’ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMille’s classic, The Ten Commandments, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

Even though this book examines a singular period of history, it reveals the manifold differences and conflicts that exist within even a small segment of one city's population. As the stories of "hot" and "cold" war experiences show, to label all the people of a country or culture as the same is a folly with potentially global consequences. This alone is a valuable lesson of the Shanghai exodus, a simple insight that bears repeating, especially when migrants and refugees everywhere are still often painted in one dismissive stroke.

The first printing of the King James Bible in 1611 included a number of printing errors. For example, a small slip in the typesetting of the description of the interior of the tabernacle led to the following reading (Exodus 28:11). And for the north side the hangings were an hundred cubits, their pillars were twenty, and their sockets of brass twenty; the hoops of the pillars and their fillets of silver. But there were probably few who noticed, let alone cared, that the pillars really bore hooks, not hoops. This error was corrected in the 1613 reprint.

There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as in molok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: “It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!” These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical “moloch,” the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses. CHAPTER 5

The violence isn’t that surprising; what’s surprising is that among all that violence are new ideas about serving and blessing and nonviolence. Here’s what I mean: Do you find it primitive and barbaric to care for widows, orphans, and refugees? That’s commanded in the book of Deuteronomy. Do you find it cruel and violent to leave a corner of your field unharvested so the poor can have something to eat? That’s commanded in the book of Leviticus. Do you think people should be set free from slavery? That’s the story of the book of Exodus. Do you think it’s good to love your neighbor? That’s commanded in the book of Leviticus.

The ritual of the blood on the lintel of the door, which protected the Israelites from the angel of death, is an apotropaic (avoidance) ritual, such that the family in question would be 'passed over' by the aforementioned denizen of death. Later Jewish and Christian ideas that amalgamated this story with ideas about the scapegoat’s providing a substitutionary remedy should not be read into the original tale. The scapegoat symbolized the removal of sin from the nation and perhaps the judging of a substitute. The blood of the Passover lamb on the door symbolized not a sacrifice for sin but rather protection from divine judgment. There is a difference.

Father Kolvenbach recounted the story of an abbot in the Middle Ages who would speak to his monks every day “on finding God, on searching for God, on encountering God.” One day a monk asked the abbot if he ever encountered God. Had he ever had a vision or seen God face-to-face? After a long silence the abbot answered frankly: no, he hadn’t. But, said the abbot, there wasn’t anything surprising in this because even to Moses in the Book of Exodus (33:19–20) God said, “You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” God says that Moses will see his back as he passed by him. “Thus,” Father Kolvenbach wrote, “looking back over the length and breadth of his life the abbot could see for himself the passage of God.

We do not want to go to the right or left,” he said, “but straight back to our own country!” A few days later, on June 1, a treaty was drawn up. The Navajos agreed to live on a new reservation whose borders were considerably smaller than their traditional lands, with all four of the sacred mountains outside the reservation line. Still, it was a vast domain, nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, an area nearly the size of the state of Ohio. After Barboncito, Manuelito, and the other headmen left their X marks on the treaty, Sherman told the Navajos they were free to go home. June 18 was set as the departure date. The Navajos would have an army escort to feed and protect them. But some of them were so restless to get started that the night before they were to leave, they hiked ten miles in the direction of home, and then circled back to camp—they were so giddy with excitement they couldn’t help themselves. The next morning the trek began. In yet another mass exodus, this one voluntary and joyful, the entire Navajo Nation began marching the nearly four hundred miles toward home. The straggle of exiles spread out over ten miles. Somewhere in the midst of it walked Barboncito, wearing his new moccasins. When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time, the Navajos fell to their knees and wept. As Manuelito put it, “We wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so.” They continued marching in the direction the coyote had run, toward the country they had told their young children so much about. And as they marched, they chanted—

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. . . . You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others. BERTRAND RUSSELL, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, AND OTHER ESSAYS ON RELIGION AND RELATED SUBJECTS SEVENTEEN EXODUS They went in bitterness and in hope.

... P doth protest to much. It would be one thing if P were merely silent about Midian. But P is hostile to Midian. Its author tells a story of a complete massacre of the Midianites. He wants no Midianites around. And he especially wants no Midianite women around. This author buried the Moses-Midian connection. We can know why he did this. Practically all critical scholars ascribe this Priestly work to the established priesthood at Jerusalem. For most of the biblical period, that priesthood traced its ancestry to Aaron, the first high priest. It was a priesthood of Levites, but not the same Levites who gave us the E text. Some, including me, ascribe the E text to Levites who traced their ancestry to Moses. These two Levite priestly houses, the Aaronids and the Mushites, were engaged in struggles for leadership and in polemic against each other. The E (Mushite) source took pains, as we have seen to connect Moses' Midianite family back to Abraham. That is understandable. E was justifying the Mushite Levites' line in Israel's history. And it is equally understandable why their opponents, the Aaronids, cast aspersions on any Midianite background. That put a cloud over any Levites, or any text, that claimed a Midianite genealogy. We all could easily think of parallel examples in politics and religion in history and today.

This, of course, gives rise to the argument of the invalidation of the Old Testament with the coming of the New, the idea being that the actions of Jesus were so antithesis to the “laws” prescribed in Exodus and Leviticus that the modern Christian should base the standards of his doctrine on the teaching of the son of their god instead. There are several large flaws with this reasoning, my favorite being the most obvious: no one does it, and if they did, what would be the point of keeping the Old Testament? How many Christian sermons have been arched around Old Testament verses, or signs waved at protests and marches bearing Leviticus 18:22, etc? Where stands the basis for the need to splash the Decalogue of Exodus in public parks and in school rooms, or the continuous reference of original sin and the holiness of the sabbath (which actually has two distinctly different definitions in the Old Testament)? A group of people as large as the Christian nation cannot possibly hope to avoid the negative reaction of Old Testament nightmares (e.g. genocide, rape, and infanticide, amongst others) by claiming it shares no part of their modern doctrine when, in actuality, it overflows with it. Secondly, one must always remember that the New Testament is in constant coherence with proving the prophecy of the Old Testament, continuously referring to: “in accordance with the prophet”, etc., etc., ad nauseum—the most important of which coming from the words of Jesus himself: “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” (Matthew 5:17) And even this is hypocritical, considering how many times Jesus himself stood in the way of Mosaic law, most notably against the stoning of the woman taken by the Pharisees for adultery, the punishment of which should have resulted in her death by prophetic mandate of the Old Testament despite the guilt that Jesus inflicted upon her attackers (a story of which decent evidence has been discovered by Bart Ehrman and others suggesting that it wasn’t originally in the Gospel of John in the first place [7]). All of this, of course, is without taking into account the overwhelming pile of discrepancies that is the New Testament in whole, including the motivation for the holy family to have been in Bethlehem versus Nazareth in the first place (the census that put them there or the dream that came to Joseph urging him to flee); the first three Gospels claim that the Eucharist was invented during Passover, but the Fourth says it was well before, and his divinity is only seriously discussed in the Fourth; the fact that Herod died four years before the Current Era; the genealogy of Jesus in the line of David differs in two Gospels as does the minutiae of the Resurrection, Crucifixion, and the Anointment—on top of the fact that the Gospels were written decades after the historical Jesus died, if he lived at all.

For a start, most books like this, rich in such expensive pigments, had been made for palaces or cathedrals. But a haggadah is used only at home. The word is from the Hebrew root ngd, “to tell,” and it comes from the biblical command that instructs parents to tell their children the story of the Exodus. This “telling” varies widely, and over the centuries each Jewish community has developed its own variations on this home-based celebration. But no one knew why this haggadah was illustrated with numerous miniature paintings, at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments. It was unlikely that a Jew would have been in a position to learn the skilled painting techniques evinced here. The style was not unlike the work of Christian illuminators. And yet, most of the miniatures illustrated biblical scenes as interpreted in the Midrash, or Jewish biblical exegesis. I turned the parchment and suddenly found myself gazing at the illustration that had provoked more scholarly speculation than all the others. It was a domestic scene. A family of Jews—Spanish, by their dress—sits at a Passover meal. We see the ritual foods, the matzoh to commemorate the unleavened bread that the Hebrews baked in haste on the night before they fled Egypt, a shank bone to remember the lamb’s blood on the doorposts that had caused the angel of death to “pass over” Jewish homes. The father, reclining as per custom, to show that he is a free man and not a slave, sips wine from a golden goblet as his small son, beside him, raises a cup. The mother sits serenely in the fine gown and jeweled headdress of the day. Probably the scene is a portrait of the family who commissioned this particular haggadah. But there is another woman at the table, ebony-skinned and saffron-robed, holding a piece of matzoh. Too finely dressed to be a servant, and fully participating in the Jewish rite, the identity of that African woman in saffron has perplexed the book’s scholars for a century. Slowly, deliberately, I examined and made notes on the condition of each page. Each time I turned a parchment, I checked and adjusted the position of the supporting forms. Never stress the book—the conservator’s chief commandment. But the people who had owned this book had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war.

We all know that there are harsh passages toward others in the Bible as well: dispossess the Canaanites, destroy Jericho, etc. But, as I said earlier, the evidence on the ground indicates that most of that (the Conquest) never happened. Likewise in the case of the destruction of the Midianites, as I described in Chapter 4, this was a story in the Priestly (P) source written as a polemic against any connection between Moses and Midian. It is a polemical story in literature, not a history of anything that actually happened. At the time that the Priestly author wrote the instruction to kill the Midianites, there were not any Midianites in the region. The Midianite league had disappeared at least four hundred years earlier. As we saw in Chapter 2, it was an attested practice in that ancient world to claim to have wiped out one's enemies when no such massacre had actually occurred. King Merneptah of Egypt did it. King Mesha of Moab did it. And, so there is no misunderstanding, the purpose of bringing up those parallels is not to say that it was all right to do so. It is rather to recognize that, even in what are possibly the worst passages about warfare in the Bible, those stories do not correspond to any facts of history. They are the words of an author writing about imagined events of a period centuries before his own time. And, even then, they are laws of war only against specific peoples: Canaanites, Amalekites, and Midianites, none of whom exist anymore. So they do not apply to anyone on earth. The biblical laws concerning war in general, against all other nations, for all the usual political and economic reasons that nations go to war, such as wars of defense or territory, do not include the elements that we find shocking about those specific cases. ... Now one can respond that even if these are just fictional stories they are still in the Bible, after all, and can therefore be regarded as approving of such devastating warfare. That is a fair point to raise. I would just add this caution: when people cherry-pick the most offensive passages in the Bible in order to show that it is bad, they have every right to point to those passages, but they should acknowledge that they are cherry-picking, and they should pay due recognition to the larger--vastly larger--ongoing attitude to aliens and foreigners. In far more laws and cases, the principle of treatment of aliens is positive.

The lack of attention to Moses’s sons here and elsewhere in the Torah—essentially nothing is said about them—needs to be explained. And the explanation is probably this: They did not amount to much. This raises the interesting issue of the difficulty many children of great people face in leading successful and satisfying lives. In a book about Moses, ‘Overcoming Life’s Disappointments’, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes about this: Sometimes the father casts so large a shadow that he makes it hard for his children to find the sunshine they need to grow and flourish. Sometimes, the father’s achievements are so intimidating that the child just gives up any hope of equaling him. But mostly, I suspect, it takes so much of a man’s [the father’s] time and energy to be a great man—great in some ways but not in all—that he has too little time left to be a father. As the South African leader Nelson Mandela’s daughter was quoted as saying to him, ‘You are the father of all our people but you never had time to be a father to me.’ Kushner relates a remarkable story he read in a magazine geared toward clergy, a fictional account of a pastor in a mid-sized church who had a dream one night in which a voice said to him, ‘There are fifty teenagers in your church, and you have the ability to lead forty-nine of them to God and lose out on only one.’ Energized by the dream, the minister throws all his energy into youth work, organizing special classes and trips for the church’s teens. He eventually develops a national reputation in his denomination for his work with young people. ‘And then one night he discovers his sixteen-year-old son has been arrested for dealing drugs. The boy turned bitterly against the church and its teachings, resenting his father for having had time for every sixteen-year-old in town except him, and the father never noticed. His son was the fiftieth teenager, the one who got away.’ Of course, this was not necessarily true of Moses’s children, but the silence of the Torah concerning his children (which is not the case with the children of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Aaron) serves as an important reminder to parents who have achieved success to be sure to make time for their children. They need to try to ensure their children feel they occupy a special place in their parents’ hearts and no matter how pressing the parent’s responsibilities he or she will always find time for them.

Jesus, then, went to Jerusalem not just to preach, but to die. Schweitzer was right: Jesus believed that the messianic woes were about to burst upon Israel, and that he had to take them upon himself, solo. In the Temple and the upper room, Jesus deliberately enacted two symbols, which encapsulated his whole work and agenda. The first symbol said: the present system is corrupt and recalcitrant. It is ripe for judgment. But Jesus is the Messiah, the one through whom YHWH, the God of all the world, will save Israel and thereby the world. And the second symbol said: this is how the true exodus will come about. This is how evil will be defeated. This is how sins will be forgiven. Jesus knew—he must have known—that these actions, and the words which accompanied and explained them, were very likely to get him put on trial as a false prophet leading Israel astray, and as a would-be Messiah; and that such a trial, unless he convinced the court otherwise, would inevitably result in his being handed over to the Romans and executed as a (failed) revolutionary king. This did not, actually, take a great deal of “supernatural” insight, any more than it took much more than ordinary common sense to predict that, if Israel continued to attempt rebellion against Rome, Rome would eventually do to her as a nation what she was now going to do to this strange would-be Messiah. But at the heart of Jesus’ symbolic actions, and his retelling of Israel’s story, there was a great deal more than political pragmatism, revolutionary daring, or the desire for a martyr’s glory. There was a deeply theological analysis of Israel, the world, and his own role in relation to both. There was a deep sense of vocation and trust in Israel’s god, whom he believed of course to be God. There was the unshakable belief—Gethsemane seems nearly to have shaken it, but Jesus seems to have construed that, too, as part of the point, part of the battle—that if he went this route, if he fought this battle, the long night of Israel’s exile would be over at last, and the new day for Israel and the world really would dawn once and for all. He himself would be vindicated (of course; all martyrs believed that); and Israel’s destiny, to save the world, would thereby be accomplished. Not only would he create a breathing space for his followers and any who would join them, by drawing on to himself for a moment the wrath of Rome and letting them escape; if he was defeating the real enemy, he was doing so on behalf of the whole world. The servant-vocation, to be the light of the world, would come true in him, and thence in the followers who would regroup after his vindication. The death of the shepherd would result in YHWH becoming king of all the earth. The vindication of the “son of man” would see the once-for-all defeat of evil, the rescue of the true Israel, and the establishment of a worldwide kingdom. Jesus therefore took up his own cross. He had come to see it, too, in deeply symbolic terms: symbolic, now, not merely of Roman oppression, but of the way of love and peace which he had commended so vigorously, the way of defeat which he had announced as the way of victory. Unlike his actions in the Temple and the upper room, the cross was a symbol not of praxis but of passivity, not of action but of passion. It was to become the symbol of victory, but not of the victory of Caesar, nor of those who would oppose Caesar with Caesar’s methods. It was to become the symbol, because it would be the means, of the victory of God.14

Three months after Partition, when Acharya Kripalani (president, Indian National Congress) visited Sindh he noted that, ‘There was only a slight exodus of the Hindus and Sikhs from Sindh. It did not suffer from any virulent fanaticism. To whatever faith the Sindhis belonged, they were powerfully influenced by Sufi and Vedantic thoughts

These parallel lines are central to his mature thinking and foundational for what would later become Christian theology. First, there was Israel’s own story. According to the prophets, Israel’s story (from Abraham all the way through to exile and beyond) would narrow down to a remnant, but would also focus on a coming king, so that the king himself would be Israel personified. But second, there was God’s story—the story of what the One God had done, was doing, and had promised to do. (The idea of God having a story, making plans, and putting them into operation seems to be part of what Jews and early Christians meant by speaking of this God as being “alive.”) And this story too would likewise narrow down to one point. Israel’s God would return, visibly and powerfully, to rescue his people from their ultimate enemies and to set up a kingdom that could not be shaken. “All God’s promises,” Paul would later write, “find their yes in him.” 14 Saul came to see that these two stories, Israel’s story and God’s story, had, shockingly, merged together. I think this conviction must date to the silent decade in Tarsus, if not earlier. Both narratives were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, Temple and new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day.

Exodus 7:8–13 relates the story of Moses and Aaron changing their staff into a serpent.8 This activity by the Hebrew leaders is an attack on Pharaoh and the Egyptians, and it strikes at the very heart of Egyptian belief. In the first place, on the front of Pharaoh’s crown was an enraged female serpent/cobra called a uraeus. The Egyptians believed this serpent was energized with divine potency and sovereignty. It was considered the very emblem of Pharaoh’s power; it symbolized his deification and majesty. “When Moses had Aaron fling the rod-snake before Pharaoh, he was directly assaulting that token of Pharaonic sovereignty—the scene was one of polemical taunting. When Aaron’s rod swallowed the staffs of the Egyptian magicians, Pharaonic deity and omnipotence were being denounced and rejected outright. . . . Yahweh alone was in control of the entire episode.” 9

Israel’s story involves a number of stages or contexts.13 Stage #1: Ancestral wandering clan (mishpachah): Genesis 10:31–32 Stage #2: Theocratic people/nation (‘am, goy): Genesis 12:2; Exodus 1:9; 3:7; Judges

I cry, beg and plead for my freedom but as long as I refuse to educate myself, I'll never enter the Promised Land that was promised to Abraham. Jesus is the Passover Lamb, sacrificing himself to help us pass over the oppression of this slavery. It's a throwback story in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. My people listen to me; the Lord keeps his promises pass a thousand generations to eternity. Metaphysical theology, give Yahweh what's His to enter the land flowing with milk and honey. Righteousness is what makes He which is Him in me and I am as He is as we are one, it's a double edged sword, it's supreme knowledge for those who call out to the Lord.

Forty, that is, gives a new lease on life, and this is how the number consistently appears in the sacred books that came out of the Middle East. The duration of the great flood waited out in Noah’s ark, the years of Israelite wandering in the desert after the exodus, the nights Moses spent on Mount Sinai, the days and nights Jesus spent in the wilderness—all forty, the number signifying a time of struggle and displacement in preparation for a new beginning

The course of history was changed by the fasting of God’s people. The stories of God’s mighty grace through fasting are many. We could tell the story of Moses on Mount Sinai fasting forty days as he received the Law of God that would not only guide Israel for more than 3,000 years, but would become the foundation of Western culture as we know it (Exodus 24:18; 34:28). Or we could tell the story of how the Jews fasted for Esther as she risked her life before King Ahasuerus and turned the plot against Israel back on Haman’s head (Esther 4:16). Or we could tell the story of Nehemiah’s fasting for the sake of his people and the city of God in ruins, so that King Artaxerxes granted him all the help he needed to return and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1:4).

We have seen a movement from many deities to two to one. Whether you take that movement to be fact, mythology, or theology, it is the story of how we got to where most (Western) religions are now. And, as I said, it even defines where atheism is at. Have you heard the old joke about the Jewish man who was left on a desert island for years? When a ship found him, they saw two large huts that he had built on a hill. They asked him what they were. He said, "That one's my synagogue." ... And they asked him what the other hut was. He said, "That's the synagogue I don't go to!" (You can change this to churches or any house of worship you like when you tell the joke.) So we hear people say, "Do you believe in God?" But we do not generally hear people say, "Do you believe in the gods?" The religion that atheists don't go to is monotheism--by default. Or, better: by history. ... I have read and heard it said many times that monotheism has done more harm than polytheism. The claim is that monotheism is exclusive--"If my belief is right, then everybody else's belief must be wrong"--so monotheists are more likely than polytheists or atheists to exclude, persecute, and purge others. We can admit there is some logic to that claim, but still the evidence of history goes both ways. Polytheists and atheist nations and empires have done their share of atrocities. I would not want to take a side in a depressing debate over which has done more horrible things. My task here has not been to argue that monotheism is higher or lower than other ideas. It has just been to track how it came about and to recognize that it succeeded. Monotheism won. One won.

Importance of Moses and Elijah (Matt. 17:3). Moses (Exodus 34) and Elijah (1 Kings 19) both had experiences of encountering God on Mount Sinai. Jewish belief at the time of Jesus expected the appearing of a Moses-like figure (from Deut. 18:15, 18) and an Elijah-like figure (from Mal. 4:5). Jesus identifies John the Baptist with Elijah (Matt. 17:11–13), and he himself is the prophet like Moses. This is perhaps indicated by the voice from heaven that says, “Listen to him” (Matt. 17:5; Mark 9:7; Luke 9:35)—the same instruction as given in connection to the prophet to come in Deuteronomy 18:15. The intertestamental book 4 Ezra indicates that a sign of the end of the age is that people will see those who were taken up and did not taste death (6:25–26). In all these ways, the appearance of Moses and Elijah indicated the coming of the kingdom of God.

Lost in the telling of our story is the suffering of the people of Egypt for the stubbornness of their pharaoh.

The proof that the ancient Egyptians did not know where 'ZamZam' was located is from the biblical story of Moses when he fled to Arabia (i.e., Midian) after killing an Egyptian. Exodus 2:15 tells us about Pharaoh intending to kill him and yet he couldn't find his trace after having escaped to the location of the well in the holy valley. The word 'well' in that verse comes with a definite article referring to the same location mentioned in Genesis 16:14 which is linked to Ishmael's story, and hence, 'ZamZam'.

She was tired of her sister thinking they had to test everybody. Exodus thought she was bad enough to go up against anybody. Jen

The Bible reads like a collection of books about people caught up in exodus and exile. It is a book that shows the destruction of imperialism and war. It shows how innocents suffer. The climax of the book is the suffering innocent saviour crucified on a tree. But, God is not done there, it is also a story of resurrection, redemption, and hope. It is the story of people with good news to share by words and action. It is counter-culture and more relevant now than some may realise. In an age of wars and rumours of war, an age of refugees in exile and mass exodus, it speaks of the need for love and compassion. The early followers of Jesus were famous for love and not hate. So while the extremists, the religiously ignorant, the politically cold, the divisive nationalists and the greedy arms dealers fuel the world's problems, and beat the war drums, let us the people of new birth be lights in the darkness and voices in the wilderness. Let us live and sing the song of love, for truly His banner over us is love. It is to that beat we march and in His name, not the gods of hate and war, but the God of love, the Prince of Shalom (peace). Soli Deo Gloria. Amen

there is a man who is mentioned in the Book of Exodus who is named “Nahshon.” And when Moses calls on God to part the Red Sea, as this version of the story goes, it doesn’t automatically part. Instead, everyone stands there wondering why nothing is happening. But then Nahshon steps out into the water. First one step. Then another. The water gets up to his ankles, up to his knees, up to his hips and shoulders. And finally, when it is up to his nose, the water finally parts. I like that telling of the story because I believe that God could have parted those waters in one fell swoop. I believe that the Israelites could have seen the shore and known that they were going to be safe from the get-go. But I believe that sometimes God asks us to show a little bit of faith, and a little bit of commitment. Sometimes God wants us to be a Nahshon, and so God lets us get nose-deep in the waters. That’s not because God is toying with us, or being sadistic. Instead, that’s because God is preparing us for something better. God is using our faith and our hope to shape us and to teach us that our actions, our responses, matter too. The name “Nahshon” is sometimes used to mean “an initiator.” That’s what he did that day. He took the initiative and started the crossing. And there are some who push this text even further and say that even after he got nose deep, and even after the sea started to part, it was a gradual process. The people took one step, and a little more of the sea parted. And then another, and it parted more. And another, and another, trusting that if they just took the next right step, God would show them the next place after that. And eventually, God would lead them to dry ground. When you think about it, that’s what the journey of faith is like. We don’t get to see the end. We don’t get to see dry land on our first step. But sometimes we get to see just enough to know where to take the next right step. And then we step out in faith believing that God won’t leave us stranded, and that the waters will not overpower us. We step out believing that God will make a way.

Against exploitation of human and nonhuman life, the Exodus story’s earthly and earthy focus—the rootedness of home in the earth—signifies that political liberation without ecological liberation is not only insufficient but also deficient and ultimately unacceptable.

The switch from “let my people go” to “let my people live” means that liberation is more than a response to oppression. Africana life and hermeneutics include a response to oppression, and so accord with epistemological and hermeneutical force of “let my people go.” The power and future of liberation—the power to transform unformed futures into formed futures—depends on making sure that those narrative lacunae speak, and that they speak not so much as perfectly designed stories with only occasional detours but as resilient voices that regenerate and produce new life and life-forms.

The political story cannot stand, survive, or be meaningful without the ecological story. Exodus is epistemologically and materially grounded in the earth, for survival and flourishing. But the exodus earth is more than a sire or stage of political liberation; the earth is a participant and subject to the story.

Thus framed the first narrative lacuna, the first release of communal tears, in this storied journey is that the oppressive Pharaoh did not know Joseph. What it is about Joseph that this Pharaoh—only the latest in a succession of Pharaohs within the political institution—did not know is unclear and unstated. But far as epistemological amnesia screams for narrative and interpretive attention. His amnesia is corrosive to the communal and interpret of existence of the Hebrews. And it is from that abyss that the exodus-motif begins to birth Exodus-story.

[...] Pharaoh offered to let Israel go but said, “Only you shall not go very far away” (Exodus 8:28). To allow for changes, but only partial ones, is still an effort to control God’s people. This strategy usually works well with those who know it’s right to worship God but who are still holding on to something. Such people can often be convinced that fully surrendering their lives to God in worship is too extreme. Consider what happened to the woman who prepared Jesus for His burial by pouring costly ointment over Him—ointment worth a whole year’s income. Everyone but Jesus thought it to be excessive and extreme. But Jesus honored her by stating that the story of her extravagant worship would be told wherever His story was told. What others thought to be excessive and extreme, God considered reasonable. The only true worship is extreme worship, and only extreme worship brings extreme results—transformation.

I'm keeping my love story, not because it included both martyr and sacrifice, or because it's the story I wanted, it's because I would never rewrite it. And I would live it all over again just for the chance to sing with him.

I was a woman who'd been unearthed by deception, lies, lust, and love, whose essence was shrouded by life-changing secrets, full of stories I could never, ever tell. In keeping me safe, in architecting my future, they'd left me to wither and rot with those secrets.

The confession in his eyes narrating our story, our ill-fated fortune as star-crossed fools, sharing a merciless love neither of us can never keep.

Kids?” Paxton started shaking her head. “We are not having kids! We aren’t even together! You are trippin’.” “If you say so,” I replied with a shrug. We rode in silence for a little while. Paxton would look over at me and shake her head occasionally, but I didn’t give a damn. We were together, in a whole relationship. If I had to kill every nigga that she went on a date with until she realized that, then I was cool with that, too. I wasn’t even going to hide that shit, either. I’d kill them in front of her if need be.

Mrs. Littlejohn, I’m just the kind of nigga you would want to stand in front of Hitta,” I said, smirking. “That tough shit she into doesn’t scare me. She has only been tough because she’s never had a nigga let her be soft.” “And you’re the one that can?

she asked with a smirk, and I nodded. “We’ll see.” “You know my granddaddy taught me to pray, right?” I asked her with a shrug. “Well, let me tell you, I have been praying for a woman like your daughter for a long time. She’s my prayer manifested.

Call it archaic, but I think confession is liberation. It is easy to think that in injustice only the oppressed have their freedom to gain. In truth, the liberation of the oppressor is also at stake. Whether it’s the privilege we’ve inherited or space we’ve stolen, what began as guilt will mutate into shame, which is much more sinister and decidedly heavier on the soul. It doesn’t just weigh on the heart; it slithers into the gap of every joint, making everything swollen and tender. We learn to walk differently in order to carry the shame, but then we become prone to manipulate things like nearness and connection just to relieve our own swelling. When wounders, finally becoming exhausted of their dominion, dismantle their delusion of heroism or victimhood and begin to tell the truth of their offense, a sacred rest becomes available to them. You are no longer fighting to suspend the delusion of self. You can just lie down and be in your own flawed skin. And as you rest, the conscience you were born with slowly begins to regenerate, and your mobility changes. You walk past the shattered porch light without your nose to the ground. You can look your father in the eyes. You realize there are other ways to move in the world. It’s not only relief, it’s freedom. Truth-telling is critical to repair. But confession alone—which tends to serve the confessor more than the oppressed—will never be enough. Reparations are required. To expect repair without some kind of remittance would be injustice doubled. What has been stolen must be returned. This is not vengeance, it’s restoration. Maybe you know the verse that says if someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and bare your left cheek to them too. But before all that, Exodus says eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burn for burn. Payment, consequence. Any injustice demands something of us. But the only thing more healing than forcing someone to pay is when a person chooses to pay by their own conviction. I have always wondered why Christ had to die. If we needed saving, if wrath was to be had, couldn’t God just snap his fingers or send a great wind or blink and have everything wrong made right again? Why is it nothing but the blood? Nothing else? This will always be strange to me. But if it’s true, the law is cosmic and eternal. Maybe it’s written into everything, and even God themself is not too bold to undo the way things were meant to be. Maybe they needed to show us what the most tragic and noble reparation could look like, the sacrifice of life itself, so we might learn the courage to choose to make repairs when our moments come. But some will die in their cowardice.

Where America's WWII generation is often lauded as its greatest, the Chinese contemporaries of that generation deny any claims to such superlatives. Especially when China's 5,000 year history spans hundreds of generations. Nevertheless, this particular demographic defined by exodus and liberation, possesses the greatness that they share with all who survived the savagery of war, social upheaval, violent extremism, and the desperate scramble to find safe haven anywhere.

There are many lessons to be learned from refugees and migrants that can contribute to the understanding needed to navigate the global tectonics to bring people together, not drive them into flight.

Certainly, what was true for the refugees and exiles of Shanghai remains true for people fleeing catastrophe in contemporary times. Whether these migrants are driven from Syria, Myanmar, Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, or too many other places. These refugees have all faced the agonizing choice of whether to stay, or to flee.

I moved to Triple Falls a teenager, wanting nothing more than to challenge myself, to give in to my wild side, and create some stories to tell. By the time I stood in my new apartment in Athens that night, I was a woman who’d been unearthed by deception, lies, lust, and love, whose essence was shrouded by life-changing secrets, full of stories I could never share and never, ever tell.

Then you shouldn’t be fighting to stay. You should be running.” “I would, except you left the best part out of your story.” He draws his brows and shakes his head. “Don’t.” “Us. That’s the best part. Our part.

Is this really what you want? You want me to leave? You want me out of your life?” “Did you hear a word I said?” “Every single one.” “Then you shouldn’t be fighting to stay. You should be running.” “I would, except you left the best part out of your story.” He draws his brows and shakes his head. “Don’t.” “Us. That’s the best part. Our part.

We don't ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

Most historians, even many religious leaders, have discounted the story of Exodus as a myth, a moral lesson rather than a historical reality. As support for this stance, skeptical archaeologists point to the lack of Egyptian sources in documenting any series of plagues or a mass exodus of slaves, especially within the time frame indicated in the Bible.

According to the Exodus story, millions of escaped slaves were traumatized and tortured in the desert for four decades by Yahweh playing all manner of scary tricks and mind games on them. If the tale were true, such behavior would be condemnable as the practice of a bizarre and anti-human cult with an evil god. If the “chosen people” were so “stiff-necked” that they needed 40 years of being terrorized and abused in the desert, while alternately astonished by mind-bending miracles, one wonders why the all-powerful God would choose them in the first place.

Paul Ricœur has two terms that neatly sum up this difference between modern contracts and God’s covenants.12 Contracts obey a logic of equivalence, a regime of strict justice in which unerring calculation determines the just measure of commitment in each case. It is the logic of the transaction and of the market, a reciprocal paradigm in which debts must be paid in full, but no more. The logic of equivalence belongs to a view of the world in which every gift is a trojan horse that requires reciprocation sooner or later: “They invited us round for dinner and baked their own dessert; we will have to do the same!” It is the ethics of a Derrida who ruefully acknowledges that “for there to be gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter-gift, or debt.”13 This is an impossible standard that leads him to conclude that the pure gift is impossible and could not even be recognized as such: gifts always fall back into economies of debt sooner or later, a grim reality that leads Terry Eagleton to remark “one would not have wished to spend Christmas in the Derrida household.”14 The contractual logic of equivalence is the logic of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is a human logic. God’s covenants, by contrast, operate according to a logic of superabundance, a lavish, gracious, loving paradigm of excess. God walks between the animal parts alone; the exodus rescue precedes the Sinai law; Christ lays down his life in the new covenant in his blood. This is the logic of the “how much more” of the Pauline epistles (Rom 5:9, 10, 15, 17; 11:24; 1 Cor 6:3; 2 Cor 3:9) and the letter to the Hebrews (Heb 9:14; 10:29; 12:9), of going beyond the call of duty, beyond what is right and proper, beyond what could reasonably be demanded on a ledger of credit and debt. The logic of superabundance replaces the fear and submission of Hobbes’s Leviathan or the tyranny of Rousseau’s general will with the love and sacrifice of Christ. It is the logic of grace and the gift. It is a divine logic. The

A pattern is taking shape in these verses. A version of the terrible events of thirteen years ago seems to be happening again, but in reverse. Thirteen years ago, Joseph was first stripped of his clothes and then thrown in a pit; now, he is first taken out of a “pit,” and then given new clothes. And it is not just the order in which the events occur that is reversed; their significance is reversed, as well. Last time around, Joseph was thrown into a pit, and now he is pulled out of one. Last time around, Joseph was stripped of clothes; now he’s getting new ones. The pattern of reverses continues. The next thing Pharaoh does is the reverse of something that happened thirteen years ago, before Joseph was thrown in a pit, and before he was stripped of his new clothes. Here’s how the text describes the event: And Pharaoh sent for Joseph (Genesis 41:14) The opposite of being brought close to someone, is being sent away from someone. And that’s exactly what happened to Joseph before he was stripped of his clothes: He was sent away from Jacob. His father had sent him to go check on his brothers. That event—his father’s decision to send him—was the first in a series of terrible dominoes that culminated in Joseph’s sale into slavery. It was the initial step toward that first “pit.” Now, that whole disastrous chain of events would be redeemed. Instead of a man sending him away toward a pit, another man would now bring him close, after pulling him out of a “pit.” That man was Pharaoh. Through this pattern, the Torah may well be telling us something about the relationship Pharaoh is beginning to create with Joseph. Pharaoh is acting out a precise inverse of Jacob’s role in this story. Whatever disappointment Joseph might have felt toward his own father—How could you have sent me away? Where were you when I was stripped, and begging to be taken out of the pit?—it is all being redeemed by the actions of Pharaoh, who will be a father-in-exile for him. Thirteen years ago, his father sent him away. Now, a new father will bring him close.

the Torah wasn’t written to be merely a history book. Instead, the Torah is meant to be a guidebook. That is what the name Torah implies: it teaches. It guides.[79] Sometimes the Torah guides by telling us laws. Sometimes it guides by telling us stories about our past. The stories are relevant not just because they once happened. They are relevant because, like law, they can help shape us into our best possible selves.

The story of Jacob’s burial, in the end, is the story of two heroes. The first is Joseph, who risked everything to bury his father according to his wishes. He risked the loss of power, prestige—and perhaps most of all, his good standing in the eyes of Pharaoh. But the second hero, unlikely as it may seem, is Pharaoh himself. He resisted the urge to impose upon the venerated Jacob an exclusively Egyptian identity. He allowed Jacob to be who he was—Israelite, not Egyptian—and still he and the populace would cherish him; still he and Egypt would regard Jacob as royalty. They would accord him all the honor of a king, notwithstanding Jacob’s rather public decision that Canaan was his true home. The humility evinced by Pharaoh’s stance is nothing short of remarkable.

The stories of Jacob’s burial and the Exodus really do converge; their essential theme is one and the same. In each, a grand procession was supposed to take place, to honor Father the way Father wanted to be honored. The only difference between the stories lies in which father we are talking about. In the Jacob story, we’re talking about a procession honoring an earthly father. In the Exodus story, the procession honors the Heavenly Father.

What is the same in every human being and doesn't change? [...] That you exist. The words we use to express this concept are "I am." "I" is the pronoun we use to reference the self. "Am" is the verb that references a state of being. "I am" indicates self-awareness of being. In the space between all words, all thoughts, all memories, what do you know with certainty? "I exist and I am aware of it." When stating, "I am", all self-aware beings are referring to an identical experience. [...] No matter one's age or life history, "I am" - the awareness of being - is a shared phenomenon. [This is] the part of you beyond your story. Think of "I am" like the vast open sky. Any words that follow "I am" are clouds. They arise within the sky, temporarily changing the appearance of it, but they have no effect on the sky's basic existence. Who are you beyond your story? You are the open sky my friend - the presence and expression of an immense Awareness that knows it exists. Because this is a shared presence, it's more fitting to refer to this as the Absolute Self (with a capital S) as opposed to the temporary, limited sense of "my" self with a story. [...] In the Bible, in the Book of Exodus, the story goes that when Moses asked for God's name, the first response he received was, "I AM that I AM." So we have the Absolute "I AM" that is everywhere, all-knowing, and all-powerful. And we have over seven billion relative beings also claiming "I am." The difference between relative awareness and Absolute Awareness is the individual stories or exeriences that arise in the one I AM Awareness, like clouds in the sky. The Self is the sky. The selves are the clouds. You are not apart from the sky. You are intimately part of it as a self-aware expression fo self-awareness.

did the black exodus force the South to face itself in ways no one could ever have thought possible?

The best-known leader at the start of it, Booker T. Washington, was vehemently against abandonment of the South and strongly discouraged it. Frederick Douglass, who saw it coming but died before it began, was against the very thought of it and considered an exodus from the South “a premature, disheartening surrender.

Interesting evidence of the essential link between Yahweh and copper metallurgy is provided by the story of the first 'encounter' between Moses and Yahweh on Mt Horeb, near the 'burning bush' (Exod. 3), where it is related that Moses is involved in the mission to deliver the sons of Israel from Egyptian tyranny. It is also stressed that Moses had to perform a 'prodigy' in order to demonstrate that he acts in the name of Yahweh (Exod. 4.5). This prodigy is depicted as the reversible transformation of a matteh into a nahash (Exod. 4.2-5). The term matteh is generally understood as designating a wood-made staff, but this meaning is probably secondary. From Isa. 10.15 and Ezek. 19.13-14 it appears that a matteh was formerly a copper scepter hung up on a wooden staff.&sup32; The term nahash is generally translated as 'serpent'. However, the closeness existing in Hebrew between nahash ('serpent') and nehoshet ('copper') suggests that nahash may also designate copper.&sup33; Accordingly, the prodigy performed 'in the name of Yahweh' becomes the transformation of a copper artifact (matteh, the scepter) into melted copper (nahash, the serpent). It is interesting to notice that such a 'prodigy' (occuring not so far from the camp of Jethro the Kenite) happens after Moses threw his matteh on a hot source, the 'burning bush', which may be a poetic evocation of live charcoal. If the reversible matteh-nahash conversion is considered in the book of Exodus as a specific sign of Yahweh, this implies that this deity was intimately associated with copper melting, at least in the period prior to the Israelite Alliance. (pp. 395-396) from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404 [32]: The term matteh is explicitly used to designate the wooden staff in Exod. 17.16-23. But the initial meaning is revealed in Isa. 10.15, when it is asked, 'Shall the axe vaunt itself over the one who wields it, or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it? As if a rod should raise the one who lifts it up, or as of a staff should lift the one who is not wood!' It a matteh cannot be hung up without a wooden staff, it is clear that it is not the wooden staff itself but something that is fitted with it. Furthermore, in his lamentation about the destruction of Israel, Ezekiel mentions the fact that the staff supporting the matteh will burn and will provoke a qeyna (Ezek. 19.13-14), a term designating the smelting of copper (and by extension its melting). This strongly suggests that the matteh is a copper-scepter. In some cases, traces of wood have been found in the inner space of the scepter, confirming that such items were probably borne upon wooden staffs. [33]: The term nahash is also used to designate copper in languages closely related to Hebrew (Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic). In the book of Chronicles, the term nahash is used once to designate copper: Ir Nahash was a town founded by a descendant of Celoub (Caleb), a clan of metalworkers (1 Chron 4.11-12), so that it designates the town where copper was smelted or worked.

Interesting evidence of the essential link between Yahweh and copper metallurgy is provided by the story of the first 'encounter' between Moses and Yahweh on Mt Horeb, near the 'burning bush' (Exod. 3), where it is related that Moses is involved in the mission to deliver the sons of Israel from Egyptian tyranny. It is also stressed that Moses had to perform a 'prodigy' in order to demonstrate that he acts in the name of Yahweh (Exod. 4.5). This prodigy is depicted as the reversible transformation of a matteh into a nahash (Exod. 4.2-5). The term matteh is generally understood as designating a wood-made staff, but this meaning is probably secondary. From Isa. 10.15 and Ezek. 19.13-14 it appears that a matteh was formerly a copper scepter hung up on a wooden staff.&sup32 The term nahash is generally translated as 'serpent'. However, the closeness existing in Hebrew between nahash ('serpent') and nehoshet ('copper') suggests that nahash may also designate copper.&sup33 Accordingly, the prodigy performed 'in the name of Yahweh' becomes the transformation of a copper artifact (matteh, the scepter) into melted copper (nahash, the serpent). It is interesting to notice that such a 'prodigy' (occuring not so far from the camp of Jethro the Kenite) happens after Moses threw his matteh on a hot source, the 'burning bush', which may be a poetic evocation of live charcoal. If the reversible matteh-nahash conversion is considered in the book of Exodus as a specific sign of Yahweh, this implies that this deity was intimately associated with copper melting, at least in the period prior to the Israelite Alliance. (pp. 395-396) from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404 [32]: The term matteh is explicitly used to designate the wooden staff in Exod. 17.16-23. But the initial meaning is revealed in Isa. 10.15, when it is asked, 'Shall the axe vaunt itself over the one who wields it, or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it? As if a rod should raise the one who lifts it up, or as of a staff should lift the one who is not wood!' It a matteh cannot be hung up without a wooden staff, it is clear that it is not the wooden staff itself but something that is fitted with it. Furthermore, in his lamentation about the destruction of Israel, Ezekiel mentions the fact that the staff supporting the matteh will burn and will provoke a qeyna (Ezek. 19.13-14), a term designating the smelting of copper (and by extension its melting). This strongly suggests that the matteh is a copper-scepter. In some cases, traces of wood have been found in the inner space of the scepter, confirming that such items were probably borne upon wooden staffs. [33]: The term nahash is also used to designate copper in languages closely related to Hebrew (Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic). In the book of Chronicles, the term nahash is used once to designate copper: Ir Nahash was a town founded by a descendant of Celoub (Caleb), a clan of metalworkers (1 Chron 4.11-12), so that it designates the town where copper was smelted or worked.

In the past, scholars have focused overly much on subtle distinctions between purported J and E documents interwoven with each other throughout the Pentateuch, distinctions so subtle, in fact, that many, if not most, pentateuchal specialists no longer see them. Meanwhile, [...] it is becoming increasingly clear that there is another more obvious and important set of divisions between sources of the Pentateuch, that is, the divisions separating the major non-Priestly sections from each other: primeval history, Jacob, Joseph and Moses-exodus stories. (David M. Carr essay, p. 159)

Over the two centuries before Jesus, the celebration had taken on quite a bit of Greek Socratic (Hellenistic) influence, which suited Jewish social tradition quite nicely, so what had begun as the recitation of a story had morphed into almost a question and response ritual. On the morning of Preparation Day for the celebration, the head of the household took a lamb to The Temple for slaughter. Then, he would bring the meat home so that it, together with the other prescribed ritual foodstuffs, could be properly prepared. Eventually, when it was time for the meal, those gathered would be called to table for a joyous repast. But the feast included an important ritual. Someone at table would query those gathered, following an informal script that revolved around four questions that not only told the great Story of Exodus, but also applied it to the participants’ present lives. So we might imagine: “This is the story of our slavery, and today we are enslaved…” “We wandered for forty years in the arid desert, and today we find that we are wandering, unable to make a decision…” “But at last we arrived in the Promised Land, and we’re planning … this year, God-willing.” Followed by, “Since then we have been committed to making ourselves and our people thrive in God’s promise of this Land—and look around this table and see the kernel of the community that needs our love, every day.” From this deep annual ritual and the understandings flowing from it, we can well imagine how this core metaphor became a spiritual springboard for every Hebrew’s journey with God—a journey of freedom and liberation, one with four sequential paths that continually repeated in the lives of every individual, and in the life of the community. So there is the key—and it is a far-reaching link, indeed. The explanation for early Christians’ natural comfort with being Followers of The Way was specifically and profoundly rooted in their Jewish traditions and almost certainly, the principal of fourness, in ancient rituals from prehistory. The sequence was well-known to them, and the road well-marked. Yet, as Christians did in so many other ways, they expanded the journey from that of their predecessors, pushing beyond the liberation of a single tribe and outer freedom from an oppressive Pharaoh. Christians took the framework of freedom and crafted an identifiable, cyclical inner journey of transformation available to everyone, incorporating the living reality of Jesus the Christ. And soon, The Way came to be understood by early Christians as the ongoing gradual process of transformation into the image of the eternal Christ in whom they believed they were already made.

The exodus from the flood valley of the Nile, the end of foreign enslavement, was presented by the Bible writers as the condition of becoming fully Israelite.

The fact is, happily, that human society could not be made to correspond exactly to the theoretic structure that the cult of kingship had erected. Too much of common everyday life escapes effective supervision and control, to say nothing of coercive discipline. From the earliest times on there are indications of resentment, defiance, withdrawal, escape: all celebrated in the classic story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. Even when no collective retreat proved possible, the daily practices of the farm, the workshop, the marketplace, the hold of family ties and regional loyalties, the cults of minor gods, tended to weaken the system of total control.

Interesting evidence of the essential link between Yahweh and copper metallurgy is provided by the story of the first 'encounter' between Moses and Yahweh on Mt Horeb, near the 'burning bush' (Exod. 3)... ...Moses had to perform a 'prodigy' in order to demonstrate that he acts in the name of Yahweh (Exod. 4.5). This prodigy is depicted as the reversible transformation of a matteh into a nahash (Exod. 4.2-5). The term matteh is generally understood as designating a wood-made staff, but this meaning is probably secondary. From Isa. 10.15 and Ezek. 19-13-14 it appears that a matteh was formerly a copper scepter hung up on a wooden staff. The term nahash is generally translated as 'serpent'. However, the closeness existing in Hebrew between nahash ('serpent') and nehoshet ('copper') suggests that nahash may also designate copper. [The term nahash designates copper in Ugaritic, Aramaic, and Arabic. In 1 Chron. 4.11-12, Ir Nahash is founded by Caleb, a clan of metalworkers, and designates it as a place of copper smelting/working.] Accordingly, the prodigy performed 'in the name of Yahweh' becomes the transformation of a copper artifact...into melted copper. ...If the reversible matteh-nahash conversion is considered in the book of Exodus as a specific sign of Yahweh, this implies that this deity was intimately associated with copper melting, at least in the period prior to the Israelite Alliance. (pp. 395-396) (from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404)

A local director had teamed up with ESPN to tell a story about the Baltimore Colts Marching Band, and the film came out in October of 2009. The 30 for 30 documentary entitled The Band That Wouldn’t Die was about how the band stayed in existence for 12 years after the team’s painful midnight exodus to Indianapolis and how they eventually became the Marching Ravens.

The Exodus scenes were filmed in the sand dunes of Guadalupe, California, and DeMille transported hundreds of Orthodox Jews from New York, because he believed that “in appearance and in their deep feeling of the significance of the Exodus, they would give the best possible performance as the Children of Israel.” But on their first day on set, the extras were forced to fast because the commissary served ham for dinner.

Thus, metaphors reshape perception. For example, when the Gospel of John presents Jesus as saying, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:51a), the message jolts his hearers, who are looking for him to play the role of Moses by providing them with miraculous bread to eat (6:30–31). Jesus’ striking response refuses the identification with Moses and posits instead a metaphorical conjunction between himself and the manna that fed the Israelites in the wilderness. The metaphor quickly takes a gruesome turn when Jesus goes on to say, “[T]he bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” and affirms that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life” (6:51b, 54a). At one level, the metaphorical shock induces the reader to confront the scandal of John’s claim that “the Word became flesh.” (Indeed, the statement that the Word became flesh strikingly illustrates the power of metaphor to “mutilate our world of meanings” and create a new framework for perception.)13 On another level, the metaphor leads the reader to make the imaginative connection between the Exodus story and the church’s Eucharist, with the flesh of Jesus as the startling common term. The hearer of such a metaphor is confronted by two options. We can take offense at this jarring conjunction of images, as did those disciples who went away murmuring, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (John 6:60). Or, alternatively, we can “understand” the metaphor. To “understand” it, however, is to stand under its authority, to allow our life and perception of reality to be changed in light of the “ontological flash”14 created by the metaphorical conjunction, so that we confess with Peter, “Lord, to whom [else] can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (6:68).

To try am fully, evil needs to victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned." 9 "in the Christian tradition, condemnation is an element of reconciliation, not an isolated independent judgment, even when reconciliation cannot be achi Pp ved. So we condemn most properly in the act of forgiving, and the act of separating the doer from the deed. That is how God in Christ condemned all wrongdoing." 15 "...unhealthy dreams and misdirected labors often become broken realities." 42 "...the story (of Christianity) frames what it means to remember rightly, and the God of this story makes remembering rightly possible." 44 "...peace can be honest and lasting only if it rests on the foundation of truth and justice." 56 "Seekers or truth, as distinct from alleged possessors of truth, will employ 'double vision'- they will give others the benefit of the doubt, they will inhabit imaginatively the world of others, and they will endeavor to view events in question from the perspective of others, not just their own." 57 "Those who love do not remember a persons evil deeds without also remembering her good deeds; they do not remember a person'a vices without also being mindful of their own failings. Thus the full story of wrongdoing becomes clear through the voice of love..."64 "...the highest aim of lovingly truthful memory seeks to bring about the repentance, forgiveness, and transformation of wrongdoers, and reconciliation between wrongdoers and their victims." 65 "And healing of the wrong without involving the wrong tour, therefore, can only be partial. To complete the healing, The relationship between the two needs to be mended. For Christians, this is what reconciliation is all about. Reconciliation with the wrongdoer completes the healing of the person who suffered the wrong. 84 Page 113: "Christ suffered in solidarity...what happened to him will also happen to him." "The dangers of this memory reside in its orientation not just to the past but also to the future." 113 "But let us beware that some accounts of what it means for Christ to have died on behalf of the ungodly...negates the notion of his involvement as a third party." 113 "Christian churches are communities that keep themselves alive- more precisely, that God keeps alive- by keeping alive the memories of the exodus and the passion." 126 "...but often they (churches) simply fail to incorporate right remembering of wrong suffered into the celebration of holy Communion. And even when they do incorporate such remembrance, they often keep it neatly sequestered from the memory of the passion. That memory becomes simply the story of what God has done for us wrongdoers or for a suffers, while remaining mute about how we ourselves remember the wrongs. With such stopping short, suffered wrongs are remembered only for God to comfort us in our pain and lend religious legitimacy to whatever uses we want to put those memories. No wonder we sometimes find revenge celebrating its victory under the mantle of religiously sanctioned struggle for the faith, for self protection, for national preservation, for our way of life- all in the name of God and accompanied by celebration of the self sacrificial love of Christ!" 127 "Communities of sacred memory are, at their best, schools of right remembering - remembering that is truthful and just, that heals individuals without injuring others, that allows the past to motivate a just struggle for justice and the grace-filled work of reconciliation." 128 Quoting Kierkegaard: "no part of life out to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it at any moment he wants to; on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he can remember it at any moment." 166

We have seen that the nations will be brought to worship Yahweh through a restored Israel. Israel, according to Isaiah 40–55, would be restored by an act of divine grace in a second exodus and by means of an individual who embodies the nation’s identity and destiny. Israel’s story is one of judgment and mercy, destruction and salvation, exile and restoration, death and then life. The story of the nations in the Old Testament is parallel to Israel’s—divine judgment followed by divine mercy mediated somehow through the Servant of Yahweh.

Exodus and resurrection, the most dramatic divine interventions in history, both declare that there is a grace-filled power loose in the world that far outstrips our greatest human ambitions and can quiet our deepest human fears. We enter into the work of cultural creativity not as people who desperately need to strategize our way into cultural relevance, but as participants in a story of new creation that comes just when our power seems to have been extinguished. Culture making becomes not just the product of clever cultural strategy or the natural byproduct of inherited privilege, but the astonished and grateful response of people who have been rescued from the worst that culture and nature can do.

leviticus is the direct continuation of what precedes it at the end of Exodus, and the narrative at the end of Leviticus continues directly into Numbers. Ch 1 takes up the story from the time the divine Presence enters the Tabernacle, on the first day of Nisan (the first month, in the spring) in the year following the exodus (Exod. ch 40). From within, God calls to Moses and imparts to him, in a series of encounters (Lev. chs 1–27), His laws and commandments. Since Numbers begins on the first day of ʾIyar (the second month) in the same year (Num. 1.1), it emerges that the entire book of Leviticus covers but one month.