Other analyses
Zipporah, a woman, is also a circumciser. That in itself is remarkable, as feminist scholars have pointed out. Moreover, her decisive action is reminiscent of those of other women in the narrative, including the midwives Shiphrah and Puah, who thwart Pharaoh’s decree to kill all the newborn males; Moses’s mother and sister, who arrange his rescue; and even Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopts him. We should also note that Miriam, curiously identified as Aaron’s sister but not Moses’s (but see Num. 26:59), and also as a prophet, leads a victory song (Exod. 15:20–21). The words that she and the other women chant—” Sing to Yahweh, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” are the opening of the longer song earlier attributed to Moses and the Israelites (Exod. 15:1); could it be that Miriam was the author of the entire song, but that it was later attributed to Moses? Feminist scholars have appropriately pointed to these passages as an important counter to the prevailing patriarchalism of the Bible and of its interpretation.
Another type of analysis, sometimes called canonical because it treats the Bible in its final form rather than just exploring the history of its formation, connects the brief episode of the circumcision with the final plague in Exodus 11–12. In that event Yahweh is again a deity who kills at night, and again death is averted by a sign of blood, this time that of a lamb. Another example of this kind of canonical or contextual analysis on an even larger scale connects Moses with Noah. The Hebrew word for the boat that Moses’s mother makes for him is the same word used for Noah’s ark in Genesis 6–8, and these are the only two places where the word in used in the Bible. Like Noah’s ark, Moses’s boat is waterproofed (Gen. 6:14; Exod. 2:3, although different words are used). The narrator thus links Noah, who saved the human species from the waters of the Flood, with Moses, the human savior of the Israelites, whose survival in water anticipates the event at the sea that occurs in Exodus 14.
The narrative and history
As with the preceding book of Genesis, and as will continue to be the case until well into 1 Kings, there is no direct link between the persons and events described in Exodus 1–15 and nonbiblical sources. In the abundant texts from ancient Egypt, there is no mention of Moses or Aaron, nor of plagues, nor a killing of the firstborn, nor the drowning of Pharaoh’s army. Now absence of evidence is not, as Carl Sagan put it, evidence of absence, and it is at least possible that, as is often true of the ancient Egyptians and other powers throughout history, defeats were simply not recorded. But there is no evidence.
The biblical account in Exodus is also tantalizingly vague. Who was the Pharaoh who began the persecution of the Hebrews, as the Israelites are often called in these chapters? Who was his successor, with whom Moses and Aaron had dealings? Both are unnamed. If the biblical writers had identified one of these pharaohs, we would know at least when they thought the events they narrate occurred. But they do not, and so, even if we presume that there is a historical kernel to the events, we cannot date them with certainty.
Two principal dates for the Exodus have been proposed. The earlier, in the sixteenth century bce, has been suggested since antiquity, connecting the Exodus with the expulsion from Egypt of dynasties of non-Egyptian origin known as the Hyksos. But there are problems with this, including the lack of references to Egypt as a political power in the succeeding books of Joshua and Judges, which according to this date would be set in a period when Egypt exercised direct control over the land of Canaan. A majority of modern scholars, although by no means all, prefer a date in the mid-thirteenth century bce, during the long reign of the Pharaoh Rameses II (1279–1213). This is at best an educated guess, based on parallel lines of evidence that do not intersect.
Nor is the geography clear. Few of the many places named in Exodus 1–15 can be identified with any probability. It is likely, although by no means certain, that the cities Pithom and Rameses reportedly had built by the Hebrew slaves (Exod. 1:11) are the modern sites of Tell er-Retabah and Tell ed-Dab’a in the eastern Nile Delta, the same region where both Genesis and Exodus place the Hebrews. The body of water that the Israelites crossed safely and in which, according to some accounts, the Egyptians were drowned, is traditionally translated “Red Sea.” The Hebrew term here (yam suf) can be used for the western arm of that sea, the Gulf of Aqaba or Eilat (1 Kings 9:26). But yam suf literally means “sea of reeds,” and so many scholars identify it not as the Red Sea but as one of several smaller shallow lakes or wetlands between the Nile Delta and the northern Sinai Peninsula. This view is supported by a somewhat prosaic tradition of the event at the sea, in which the escaping slaves, on foot, were pursued by the Egyptians, in chariots, but the chariots got stuck in the mud (Exod. 14:24–25).
5. The geography of the Exodus from Egypt.
The narrative and myth
Scholars have often identified various plagues, such as hail, locusts, and cattle plague, as natural occurrences. But the point of the narrative is that they are not natural but supernatural, that is, caused by Yahweh. This is evident, for example, in the restriction of the plagues of cattle disease, hail, and darkness to the Egyptians, with the Israelites unaffected (Exod. 9:6, 25–27; 10:23). In other words, these are mythical events.
The mythical dimension of the narrative is evident not just in many details but also in its overarching plot, in which Yahweh’s direct intervention controls events. The contest between Moses (and Aaron) and Pharaoh (and his magicians) is also a contest between Yahweh and the Egyptian deities, a contest in which Yahweh ultimately defeats them, as he predicts: “I will pass judgment on all the gods of Egypt” (Exod. 12:12)—so it seems that Yahweh is not (yet) a monotheist himself! Thus, after the escape, the hymn asks the rhetorical question “Who is like you, O Yahweh, among the gods?” (Exod. 15:11)—Yahweh has proven his superiority to all other deities.
The account of the event at the Sea of Reeds makes use of the widespread tradition of the defeat of the primeval sea by the storm god. Yahweh the storm god blows with his wind, through his nostrils (Exod. 15:8, 10), and defeats his enemy. But in the Exodus use of the myth, the enemy is not the chaotic primeval sea but Pharaoh and his army, and the sea is an instrument in that victory. Still, there are allusions to the earlier myth: as in the battle before creation, the divine wind blows the sea back, and the dry land appears as the waters are divided (Exod. 14:21; compare Gen. 1:2, 9).
In other biblical accounts of the Exodus, the mythology is explicit. Thus, a poetic summary of the event relates that “when Israel went from Egypt … the sea looked and fled … at the presence of the Lord” (Ps. 114:1, 3, 7), just as in the ancient combat myth the primeval waters cowered before the storm god. Similar language is used in Psalm 77:
When the waters saw you, O God,
when the waters saw you, they writhed;
the very deep trembled.
The clouds poured out water;
the skies thundered;
your arrows went everywhere.
The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind;
your lightnings lit up the world;
the earth trembled and shook.
Your way was through the sea,
your path, through the mighty waters;
yet your footprints were unseen.
You led your people like a flock
by the hand of Moses and Aaron. (Ps. 77:16–20)
Still later, an anonymous sixth-century bce prophet explicitly connected the primeval combat with the Exodus, moving seamlessly from the defeat of the sea dragon, here called Rahab, to the Exodus:
Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea,
the waters of great Deep;
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the ransomed to cross over? (Isa. 51:9–10)
The Exodus in biblical tradition
Because of both the lack of any historical evidence and the use of mythological language, it
is impossible to say what actually happened. Was there one Exodus, or several? Was it a relatively small group of slaves who managed to escape, or several million? Did the event (or events) take place in the mid-second millennium, or later? We cannot answer these questions.
Yet the Exodus pervades biblical tradition. It is the paradigmatic event—the crossing of the Jordan River as the Israelites entered the Promised Land is explicitly linked to the crossing of the Sea of Reeds (Josh. 4:23), and, much later, the return from exile in Babylon in the sixth century bce will be understood as a new Exodus (Isa. 43:15–21). Moreover, the Passover, one of ancient Israel’s—and subsequently, Judaism’s—primary religious observances, although originally a composite agricultural festival, was from an early stage understood as a reenactment and commemoration of the Exodus.
Given its thematic presence throughout the Bible, the Exodus is unlikely to be just fictional. Rather, embedded in the many literary and mythological embellishments is an authentic historical memory of an event that the participants, probably a small group of runaway slaves, identified as the decisive action of their god on their behalf. That event, celebrated in song, in ritual, and in narrative, gave them an identity that against all odds they have maintained to this day. It was a formative event, making them who they were—the people Yahweh had chosen as his “treasured possession” (Exod. 19:3).
Because of the importance of the Exodus, laws, rituals, institutions, and other aspects of Israelite society were linked to it. To take just one example, the Ten Commandments are viewed as their response to what Yahweh had done for them: “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exod. 20:1).
This probe into Exodus 1–15 illustrates the complexity of biblical traditions. Almost every biblical text is composite in the sense that unlike modern works it was not written once and then considered complete; rather, a text was subject to constant modification, variation, commentary, elaboration, expansion, and other types of addition and editing as writers from later generations continued to add their insights.
At the same time, the Exodus narrative also illustrates the intersection of history and myth. For the biblical writers, Yahweh was the primary actor in history—as modern scholars have put it, he was the “lord of history,” although that is not a biblical phrase. Whatever happened was ultimately Yahweh’s doing; the challenge was to fathom exactly what he was doing and why. Or, as we have put it more academically above, history had a mythical dimension.
Chapter 6
“Keep my commandments”: biblical law
According to the book of Exodus, following their escape from Egypt the Israelites headed toward Mount Sinai, where they arrived after a two-month journey. There Yahweh appeared to them with all the manifestations of the storm god—“thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud” (Exod. 19:16), and in a series of speeches to Moses gave the Israelites their laws. One of the meanings of the word torah is “law,” and much of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, consists of divinely given laws—according to early Jewish scholars, 613 in all.
Most of these laws are found in three major collections. They are often called codes, as are other ancient Near Eastern legal collections, of which a dozen are known. But that term is somewhat misleading, since these collections are not comprehensive, like the Code of Justinian or the Napoleonic Code, nor are they cited in records of judicial proceedings. Yet the general ethic of the biblical collections is often found in other parts of the Bible, such as the prophets and the book of Proverbs, and so it is likely that the collections reflect actual legal practice.
The three principal collections are the Covenant Code in Exodus 20:22—23:19, the Holiness Code in Leviticus 17–26, and the Deuteronomic Code in Deuteronomy 12–24. Although the first and the third especially overlap considerably, there are also many differences of detail. On the basis of these similarities and differences we can reasonably conclude that there was a consistent legal tradition in ancient Israel, but with both regional and chronological variants.
6. The upper part of the stela that contains the Code of Hammurapi, the most well-known ancient nonbiblical collection of laws, dating to the eighteenth century BCE and found in Susa, in modern Iran, in 1900. The sun god Shamash, on the right, is shown giving to King Hammurapi insignia of royal power. In the text immediately beneath the image, Hammurapi tells how the gods had made him king “to make justice prevail in the land… to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.”
The Covenant Code
Laws are windows into a society—its principles of organization, its values, and its ideals. Let us examine the Covenant Code as a sample of ancient Israelite law. It is probably the oldest of the several biblical legal collections, dating perhaps as early as the end of the second millennium BCE. It contains laws dealing with marriage, property, slavery, theft, assault, loans, perjury, various forms of homicide, and criminal negligence. Interspersed with these civil and criminal matters are also religious obligations and prohibitions. The laws are formulated in two distinct ways. Some are case-specific, beginning with a conditional clause: “If [or when]… then…” Others are more absolute, like the Ten Commandments, giving a general command or prohibition and often beginning with “Whoever.…” or “You shall (not)…”
An example of case law
If a man allows a field or vineyard to be grazed over, or lets livestock loose to graze in someone else’s field, he shall make restitution from the best of his field or the best of his vineyard. If fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that stacked grain or standing grain or [grain growing in] the field is consumed, the one who started the fire shall make full restitution. (Exod. 22:5–6)
There are other ways that a neighbor’s field could be damaged or his crop ruined, possibilities that this case-specific law does not include; perhaps it deals only with the most frequent, while establishing the general principle that restitution is to be made for culpable negligence.
The society that these laws depict is primarily a rural, agricultural one, where the inhabitants live in houses, presumably clustered in villages or towns. The crops grown include grain, grapes, and olives, and the domesticated animals mentioned are oxen, donkeys, sheep, goats, and dogs. It is thus the typical Mediterranean economy—ancient and modern—but not really appropriate for a group of runaway slaves camped at the base of a mountain in the semi-arid wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. These laws must come from a later period when the Israelites were already settled in the Promised Land, and like much other material that the narrative connects with the revelations at Mount Sinai, the collections of laws have been anachronistically inserted into that context.
In the society presupposed by the laws of the Covenant Code there is apparently no centralized political organization, in contrast to the later Deuteronomic Code, which refers to the king (Deut. 17:14–20). Judicial procedures were probably handled at a local level, although there are no unambiguous references to actual judges in the original Hebrew of the Covenant Code. The Deuteronomic Code is more explicit; in it, even though there was some centralized government, many cases were still resolved locally, as Deuteronomy 16:18 makes clear: “You shall appoint judges and officials throughout your tribes, inall your gates… and they shall render just decision for the people.”
Examples of general law
Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death. Whoever kidnaps a man, whether he has been sold or is still held in possession, shall be put to death. Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death. (Exod. 21:15–17)
You shall not allow a female sorcerer to live. (22:18)
You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk. (23:19)
Some cases, however, could not be resolved—as when there was conflicting testimony with no evidence to support one side over the other. In such cases, appeal was made to local religious authorities, who used other means to reach a decision.
Values
> The laws of the Covenant Code depict a stratified society. Men—fathers and husbands—were the heads of the family, with absolute authority over their households. They controlled women, especially daughters, who could be sold as slaves, and whose value was dependent upon their virginity: if an unmarried daughter was seduced, then the seducer had to make restitution to her father for what was essentially her diminished value.
It was also a society in which slavery was an accepted institution. There were strict laws concerning the treatment of slaves—some fairly arbitrary, such as that punishing an owner whose slave dies immediately after a beating but not one whose slave dies a day or two later (Exod. 21:20–21); some even cruel, such as the requirement that a slave’s wife and children acquired during a limited term of slavery (probably as a way of paying off a debt) belonged to the owner when the slave was set free, or, if the slave was unwilling to leave his family behind, he could agree to become a slave for life (21:2–6); and some from our perspective relatively enlightened—given the very existence of slavery—such as the emancipation of a slave who had been abused by his owner (21:26–27).
The Old Testament_A Very Short Introduction Page 6
