Exodus: The God Who Hears Slaves

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Tradition says Moses. Like Genesis, it appears to combine older sources, edited into its final form much later.

When: The story is set in Egypt. Those who take it as history usually place it in the 1200s BC, though a literal reading of 1 Kings 6:1 puts it in the mid-1400s BC. The book reached its final form in the 500s or 400s BC.

Where it fits: Right after Genesis. Jacob’s descendants are slaves in Egypt, and the book follows them out to Mount Sinai, where they receive the Law. The story runs straight on into Leviticus and Numbers.

Where I quote it: The burning bush (Mark 12:26, quoting Exodus 3:6). The commandments (Mark 10:19; Mark 7:10). “An eye for an eye” (Matthew 5:38, quoting Exodus 21:24). The blood of the covenant (Mark 14:24, echoing Exodus 24:8). The manna (John 6:31–32).

If you only read three chapters: Exodus 3, Exodus 20 and Exodus 22.

Words to Know

Pharaoh — the title of the king of Egypt. Exodus never tells you his name.

Passover — the spring festival that remembers the night of the escape from Egypt, when death “passed over” the houses marked with a lamb’s blood.

The LORD — when your Bible prints LORD in capital letters, it stands for God’s own name, four Hebrew letters that my people stopped saying aloud out of reverence.

Manna — the bread-like food that appeared on the ground each morning in the desert.

Pledge — something a poor borrower handed over as security for a loan, often his only cloak.

The Book in Brief

Exodus begins long after Genesis ends. Jacob’s descendants have grown into a great people in Egypt, and a new Pharaoh, afraid of them, makes them slaves. Then he orders every Hebrew baby boy thrown into the river. One mother hides her son in a basket among the reeds. Pharaoh’s own daughter finds him, raises him as her son, and names him Moses.

Grown up, Moses kills an Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew, and flees to the land of Midian, where he marries and keeps sheep. There God speaks to him from a bush that burns but is not burned up, tells him God’s own name, and sends him back to Egypt with his brother Aaron.

Pharaoh refuses, so in chapters 7 to 12 God strikes Egypt with plagues: water turned to blood, frogs, lice, flies, sick livestock, boils, hail, locusts and darkness. Each time, Pharaoh’s heart is hardened. The tenth plague is the death of the firstborn. The Israelites eat lamb and flat bread, with the lamb’s blood on their doorposts, and death passes over their houses. That night Pharaoh lets them go. Then he changes his mind and chases them to the sea with his chariots. The waters part, Israel crosses on dry ground, and the sea closes over the Egyptian army. Moses and the people sing a song of victory, and Miriam, Aaron’s sister, leads the women in dancing.

In the desert the people complain about water and food. God sends quail, water from a rock, and manna, a bread-like food that appears on the ground every morning except the Sabbath. Israel fights off the Amalekites, and Moses’ father-in-law Jethro advises him to share the work of judging.

In chapter 19 they reach Mount Sinai. God comes down on the mountain in fire, smoke and thunder, and in chapter 20 speaks the Ten Commandments. Chapters 21 to 23 add laws about slaves, injuries, property, loans, festivals and fair treatment of the poor. In chapter 24 the people promise to obey, Moses seals the covenant with blood, and he climbs the mountain for forty days.

Chapters 25 to 31 are God’s instructions for a great tent where God will live among the people, and for its priests. But in chapter 32, while Moses is still on the mountain, the people demand that Aaron make them gods, and he makes a golden calf. Moses comes down, smashes the stone tablets and destroys the calf. He pleads with God not to abandon the people, and in chapter 34 the covenant is renewed on new tablets.

In the last six chapters the people build the tent exactly as commanded. A cloud covers it, and God’s glory fills it.

On the last night of my life, I ate with my friends during Passover week. The gospels do not agree on whether it was the Passover meal itself or the night before.¹ They agree on the festival.

Passover is the story of this book. My people told it at that table every year: we were slaves in Egypt, and God brought us out.

That night I took a cup and said, This is my blood of the new covenant (Mark 14:24). Every man at that table had heard the blood of the covenant before. When Moses sealed the covenant at Sinai, he threw blood on the people and said, Look, this is the blood of the covenant, which the LORD has made with you (Exodus 24:8).

I was not inventing a new religion that night. I was standing inside the oldest story my people had.

Go deeperHow my people kept Passover in my day

In my day Passover was not only a meal at home. It began in the Temple. The Law allowed the Passover lamb to be sacrificed only at the place God would choose (Deuteronomy 16:5–6), so on the afternoon before the feast, households and groups of friends from the whole country brought their lambs to the Temple court in Jerusalem.

The Mishnah, the first written collection of Jewish law, describes the scene. The worshipers came in three shifts. The gates were closed behind each shift. Priests caught the blood in bowls and passed it from hand to hand to the altar, while the Levites sang the Hallel, the psalms of praise numbered 113 to 118 in your Bible.² Josephus, a Jewish historian of the first century, says that once, at a Roman governor’s request, the priests counted the animals and came to about 256,000, with at least ten people sharing each one.³ His numbers are surely too high, but they tell you how full the city was.

That night the lamb was roasted and eaten with flat bread and bitter herbs. The Mishnah says that even the poorest man in Israel must recline at the table that night, the way free people ate, and must be given four cups of wine, even if it comes from the charity fund. A son asks his father why this night is different. The father tells the story, from slavery to freedom. “In every generation,” it says, a person must see himself as if he himself came out of Egypt.⁴

The Mishnah was written down around the year 200, long after the Temple was gone, and scholars still debate how much of its order for the meal was already followed in my lifetime.⁵ But Mark says that after our supper, When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives (Mark 14:26).

The midwives

Exodus opens with a population problem. A new king in Egypt sees that the Hebrews are many, and he is afraid of them. So he works them as forced labor, building his supply cities (Exodus 1:8–11). When that does not work, he orders the Hebrew midwives to kill every boy at birth.

Two of the midwives refuse. Their names are Shiphrah and Puah (Exodus 1:15–17).

Look at what the book does there. The most powerful man in the world is never named. He is just “Pharaoh.” The two women who disobeyed him are named, and their names have been read aloud for well over two thousand years.

Matthew tells my birth with this story in mind. In his telling, King Herod orders the boys of Bethlehem killed, and my family escapes to Egypt and comes back out of it (Matthew 2:13–18). Matthew wanted you to see Moses behind me. No writer of the time mentions that massacre, not even Josephus, so you should know that historians argue about it.⁶

God hears

Then comes the line that holds the whole book together.

I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. I have come down to deliver them (Exodus 3:7–8).

The God of Exodus is not the god of Pharaoh. Pharaoh’s gods sat on his side. This God hears slaves, and comes down on their side.

That is the God I grew up with. When you wonder why I spent my time with the people I did, start here.

The name

At the burning bush, Moses asks God’s name. The answer is I AM WHO I AM (Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew can also mean I will be what I will be. Then God gives the name itself, the four letters YHWH (Exodus 3:15).

By my time, my people no longer said that name aloud, except for the priests in the Temple. When they came to it in the reading, they said Adonai, “my Lord.” That is why your Bible prints LORD. The form “Jehovah” is a mix of the four letters with the vowels of Adonai. It was spread in English by William Tyndale in the 1500s, and nobody in my world ever said it.⁷

John remembers me saying, Before Abraham came into existence, I AM (John 8:58). Anyone who knew Exodus would have heard the bush in it.

Go deeperHow God’s name was written, and how its sound was lost

The oldest certain example of the four letters outside the Bible was carved by an enemy. Around 840 BC, Mesha, king of Moab, the king you can meet in 2 Kings 3, set up a black stone boasting of his wars against Israel. He says he captured the Israelite town of Nebo, took the vessels of YHWH from it, and dragged them before his own god, Chemosh. The stone was found in 1868 at Dhiban, in what is now Jordan. The next year local tribesmen broke it into pieces, but a paper impression had already been taken, and the stone was put back together. It is now in the Louvre in Paris.⁸

By the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, copied in the last centuries before me and in my own century, scribes handled the name with great care. Some wrote a whole scroll in ordinary Hebrew letters but switched to the old Hebrew alphabet for the four letters of the name, so that it stood out on the page. Others wrote four dots in its place. Some early Greek translations did the same, dropping the name in Hebrew letters into the middle of the Greek.⁹

Hebrew was written without vowels, and once the name was no longer spoken, its sound was forgotten. The form scholars use today, Yahweh, is a careful reconstruction. Part of the evidence comes from Greek writers. In the 400s, Theodoret, a bishop in Syria, wrote that the Samaritans, who kept the five books of Moses as their scriptures, pronounced the name Iabe.¹⁰ Most scholars accept Yahweh as close to the original. No one can be completely sure.

The God of the living

I quoted the burning bush once, to win an argument about the dead.

The Sadducees, the priestly party, did not believe in the resurrection. They may have given the five books of Moses a higher place than the rest of the scriptures.¹¹ So when they came to mock me with a riddle about a woman married seven times, I answered them from Moses.

Haven’t you read in the book of Moses, about the Bush, how God spoke to him, saying, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Mark 12:26–27).

God did not say he had been their God. He spoke as their God now, and Matthew spells it out: I am (Matthew 22:32).

Did it happen?

You deserve an honest answer, so here it is.

No Egyptian record mentions Hebrew slaves leaving Egypt, the plagues, or an army lost in the sea. The book says about six hundred thousand men left on foot, besides children (Exodus 12:37). That would mean two million people or more crossing the desert for forty years, and the desert has kept no trace of them.

The first time the name Israel appears outside the Bible is on an Egyptian stone set up around 1208 BC. A pharaoh boasts that he wiped out a people called Israel in Canaan.¹²

So most historians think the exodus story grew from something much smaller, perhaps the memory of a group that escaped from Egypt, which became the story of the whole people. Some scholars defend more of it. Nobody can prove the numbers.

What is certain is what the story did. It taught a whole nation to remember itself as former slaves. And the law in this book is built on that memory.

Go deeperWhat archaeology says about Israel’s beginnings

Three kinds of evidence come up whenever historians argue about the exodus.

The cities. Exodus says the Hebrews built Pharaoh’s storage cities, Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11). Raamses is usually identified with Pi-Ramesses, the great capital that King Ramesses II built in the Nile delta in the 1200s BC. Since the 1960s Austrian and German teams, among them Manfred Bietak’s, have dug up its remains at the modern village of Qantir and the nearby mound of Tell el-Dab‘a. That is one reason many people date the exodus to his reign. Others answer that the name was remembered for centuries, so a later writer could still have used it.¹³

The stone. The stone that first names Israel was found in 1896 by the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, in the ruins of the funeral temple of King Merneptah, the son of Ramesses, at Thebes. Most of it celebrates a victory over the Libyans. Only near the end does it turn to Canaan, naming the towns of Ashkelon, Gezer and Yenoam, and then Israel. The towns are written with the sign for a foreign land. Israel is written with the sign for a people. So by about 1208 BC there was a people called Israel in Canaan, but not yet a kingdom with cities.¹⁴

The villages. Around 1200 BC, about two hundred and fifty small farming villages appeared in the hill country of Canaan, where few people had lived before. One thing about them stands out: their rubbish heaps have almost no pig bones. Most archaeologists think the people who built them, the first Israelites, came largely from inside Canaan.¹⁵

Some scholars think a small group really did come out of Egypt and brought the story with them. They point out that several men of the priestly tribe of Levi have Egyptian names, such as Moses, Hophni and Phinehas, while the other tribes do not. Phinehas comes from an Egyptian name meaning “the Nubian.”¹⁶

The law starts with freedom

When God gives the Ten Commandments, the first words are not a rule.

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage (Exodus 20:2).

Every commandment after that is addressed to people who used to be slaves. Do not go back to it. Do not do it to anyone else.

When a rich man asked me how to inherit eternal life, I gave him the commandments: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, honor your father and mother. And among them I put one more: Do not defraud (Mark 10:19). That is not one of the ten. It most likely recalls the law against cheating a worker out of his wages.¹⁷ I said it to a rich man.

The laws about the poor

After the Ten Commandments comes a long block of laws, chapters 21 to 23. Most people skip it. Read it.

Some of it will shock you. It regulates slavery instead of ending it. It says that if an owner beats his slave and the slave survives a day or two, the owner is not punished, for the servant is his property (Exodus 21:20–21). I am not going to hide that from you. It is there.

But in the same block:

You shall not wrong an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt (Exodus 22:21).

You shall not take advantage of any widow or fatherless child. If you take advantage of them at all, and they cry at all to me, I will surely hear their cry (Exodus 22:22–23).

If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be to him as a creditor. You shall not charge him interest (Exodus 22:25).

And then this:

If you take your neighbor’s garment as collateral, you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin. What would he sleep in? It will happen, when he cries to me, that I will hear, for I am gracious (Exodus 22:26–27).

That was real. Archaeologists found a broken piece of pottery from about six hundred years before me, with a letter on it from a field worker. His supervisor had taken his cloak, and he was begging an official to make the man give it back.¹⁸

When I said, If anyone sues you to take away your coat, let him have your cloak also (Matthew 5:40), the people listening knew exactly which law was being used against them.

An eye for an eye

The same chapters contain eye for eye, tooth for tooth (Exodus 21:24). It was older than Moses. The laws of the Babylonian king Hammurabi have it too.¹⁹

It was meant as a limit. It meant only an eye for an eye, no more. It stopped a feud from turning into a massacre.

I took it one step further. You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” But I tell you, don’t resist him who is evil (Matthew 5:38–39). The law limited revenge. I asked you to give it up.

Go deeperThe stone that holds Hammurabi’s laws

Hammurabi ruled Babylon from about 1792 to 1750 BC. His laws survive on a black stone pillar more than seven feet tall. At the top, Hammurabi stands before the sun god, the god of justice. Below are about 280 laws. Some six hundred years after it was carved, a king of Elam, in what is now Iran, carried the pillar off as plunder to his capital, Susa. French archaeologists dug it up there in the winter of 1901 and 1902. It stands today in the Louvre in Paris.²⁰

In Hammurabi’s laws, an eye for an eye depends on who you are. If a free man puts out the eye of another free man, his own eye is put out. If he puts out a commoner’s eye, he pays a fixed amount of silver. If he puts out a slave’s eye, he pays half the slave’s price.²¹ Exodus treats a slave’s eye differently again: If a man strikes his servant’s eye, or his maid’s eye, and destroys it, he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake (Exodus 21:26).

Other laws are strikingly close. Both collections deal with an ox that gores a man to death. Both say the owner is not to blame the first time, and is to blame if the ox was known to gore, he had been warned, and he did nothing (Exodus 21:28–32).²¹

Scholars have argued about this since the pillar was found. Most think Israel’s lawgivers drew on a long tradition of law shared across the ancient Near East, passed on in courts and scribal schools. In 2009 the scholar David P. Wright went further. He argued that the writer of the laws in Exodus 21 to 23 worked directly from a copy of Hammurabi’s laws, and revised them. Others are not convinced.²²

Bread for one day

In the desert, the people are hungry, and God sends manna. Every morning it is on the ground. Everyone gathers what they need. He who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack (Exodus 16:18). Anyone who tried to store it overnight found it full of worms in the morning (Exodus 16:20).

That is an economy where nobody can hoard.

When I taught my friends to pray Give us today our daily bread, every one of them knew the manna story. John remembers a crowd bringing it up to me directly, and my answer that the true bread from heaven was more than food (John 6:31–35).

The golden calf

While Moses is on the mountain, the people get tired of waiting. They melt down their gold and make a calf, and they say, These are your gods, Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:4).

Notice that. They did not think they were leaving God. They thought they were giving God a shape they could see and hold, a shape made of their own gold.

Centuries later, a king of the northern kingdom set up two golden calves and used almost the same words (1 Kings 12:28). Every age makes its calf, and it is usually made of money.

What God says God is

After the calf, God passes in front of Moses and says who God is:

The LORD! The LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth (Exodus 34:6).

My people repeated that line more than any other sentence about God. It turns up again in the Psalms, in Joel, in Nehemiah, and in Jonah, where the prophet throws it back at God in anger, because God forgave his enemies (Jonah 4:2).²³

Merciful. Gracious. Slow to anger. That is the God of the book of Exodus describing himself. Hold it up against anyone who tells you otherwise.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Exodus 22:21–27.

You will find: laws protecting the stranger, the widow, the orphan and the poor borrower, each with a reason attached.

Then read Exodus 1:15–22. Find the names of the midwives. Then try to find Pharaoh’s.

The Short Version

• Exodus is the Passover story, and I died during Passover week.
• Its God is the one who hears the cry of slaves and comes down on their side.
• No outside record confirms the exodus as told, and the numbers cannot be literal. The memory it created shaped a whole people.
• The law begins with “I brought you out of the house of bondage,” and it protects the stranger, the widow, the orphan and the poor borrower.
• The book also regulates slavery instead of ending it, and it does not hide that.