The Exodus

by Richard Elliott Friedman

  43. Genesis 22:14 has Elohim yir’eh (4QGen-Exoda) for MT Yahweh yir’eh. But we attribute this verse to RJE, which can use either term. Numbers 23:3 has Elohim (so does Greek) for MT Yahweh (4QNumb). But we attribute this verse to E, which could use either word at this point in any case.

  44. Thomas Römer, “The Name Israel,” in The Invention of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 72–73; originally published in French as L’Invention de Dieu, Éditions de Seuil, 2014.

  45. David Noel Freedman, “The Name of the God of Moses,” in Freedman, Divine Commitment and Human Obligation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 87; Norman Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A SocioLiterary Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), p. 224.

  46. See F. M. Cross, “Yahweh and El,” in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, pp. 44–75.

  47. W. Randall Garr, “The Grammar and Interpretation of Exodus 6:3,” Journal of Biblical Literature 111 (1992): 385–408.

  48. That, too, may be why the Song of Deborah includes the name of Yahweh and twice identifies Him as “God of Israel” even though the Song of Deborah does not mention the Levites. (It also calls him “the one of Sinai,” which may share whatever history lies behind calling him Yahweh, or it may refer to someplace other than the place where the Levites had converged, which in their earliest source [E] is called Horeb, not Sinai. See Chapter 4.) Perhaps the Levites were still in Egypt, and our text of the song is an adaptation of a song that originally did not name Yahweh, just as J telescoped the name back in its prose accounts. Or perhaps the Levites had arrived and had taken up their priestly rather than tribal identity, teaching that Yahweh is Israel’s God, but as priests they were not subject to the tribal military muster. Or perhaps it is precisely the Levites who are the singers of the Song of Deborah. The prose narrator attributes it to Deborah and Barak themselves, but that has always been recognized to conflict with the fact that the song speaks to Deborah and Barak in second person (Judges 5:7, 12). I formulated my thinking on the appearance of the name of Yahweh in the Song of Deborah through illuminating conversations with Alexa J. Friedman.

  49. Scott B. Noegel, “The Egyptian Origin of the Ark of the Covenant,” IETP, p. 236.

  50. Frank Cross, “Yahweh and ’El,” in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, p. 44.

  51. Mark Smith, The Early History of God, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 33.

  52. Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 687–88, writes: “In Israel, the major participants in YHWH cults and the disseminators of its myths may have been groups of manics and clans of Levites.” See also p. 657.

  53. Michael Homan, To Your Tents, O Israel! (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 111–15.

  54. A photograph of the carved image of Rameses’ tent appears together with a parallel artist’s rendering of the Tabernacle in “The Exodus Is Not Fiction: Interview with Richard Elliott Friedman,” in Reform Judaism (Spring 2014): 6. My rendering of the Tabernacle appears in WWTB, pp. 174–82; in “The Tabernacle in the Temple,” Biblical Archaeologist 43 (1980); and in the “Tabernacle” entry in the ABD, vol. 6, pp. 292–300.

  55. Scott B. Noegel, “The Egyptian Origin of the Ark of the Covenant,” IETP, pp. 223–42. Cf. Exodus 25:10–22.

  56. Genesis 17:10–14, 23–27; 21:4; Leviticus 12:1–3.

  57. Jeremiah 1:1; Ezekiel 1:3. Their connections to the Levite priestly houses and to the D and P texts is laid out in WWTB, pp. 125–27, 146–49, 168–70. See also The Bible with Sources Revealed, pp. 14–17.

  58. See Propp, Exodus 1–18, pp. 218–20, 233–38; and Friedman, Commentary on the Torah (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), comment on Exodus 4:24 (pp. 184–85); Martin Noth, Exodus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962, translated from the German Das zweite Buch Mose, Exodus, 1959), pp. 49–50; Moshe Greenberg, Understanding Exodus, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013), pp. 94–96; and the interpretations of the rabbinic commentators Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Sforno on these verses.

  59. See the discussion in Friedman and Dolansky, The Bible Now, pp. 93–95.

  60. Judges 18:30.

  61. Joshua 5 also tells the story of a circumcision of the Israelites when they arrive at the promised land. Joshua 5:9, worded like the Dinah episode, says, “Today I’ve rolled the disgrace of Egypt off of you.” I understand this section of the book of Joshua to be part of the J source. This was also the understanding of earlier generations of biblical scholars. Today, most scholars no longer identify this or other Joshua accounts as J. I disagree with them, and I gave the evidence for this in The Hidden Book in the Bible (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998). For here, though, we need only agree that, whether this story is J or some other source, nothing in it points to a Levite author, as opposed to most of Joshua 14–22, which has visible priestly language and concerns.

  62. R. G. Hall, “Circumcision,” ABD, vol. 1, p. 1025; Jack Sasson, “Circumcision in the Ancient Near East,” Journal of Biblical Literature 85 (1966): 473–76.

  63. Gary Rendsburg, “Moses the Magician,” in IETP, pp. 243–56.

  64. Except the “drowning,” which is in the Song of the Sea. Even in this case, P has the sea “covering” the Egyptian army in the middle of the sea and “not one of them was left,” which certainly indicates drowning all of them, while J has them fleeing toward the sea and God “overthrows” them in the midst of the sea, and then Israel sees Egypt dead on the shore,” which is less specific.

  65. Exodus 1:11. Graham Davies, “Was There an Exodus?” in John Day, ed., In Search of Pre-exilic Israel (London: Clark, 2004), pp. 28–30; Baruch Halpern, “The Exodus and the Israelite Historians,” Eretz Israel 24 (1993): 92; Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, p. 451; Manfred Bietak, “On the Historicity of the Exodus: What Egyptology Today Can Contribute to Assessing the Biblical Account of the Sojourn in Egypt,” IETP, pp. 24–25, 31; James Hoffmeier, “Which Way out of Egypt? Physical Geography Related to the Exodus Itinerary,” IETP, pp. 105–6; William Dever, “The Exodus and the Bible: What Was Known; What Was Remembered; What Was Forgotten?” IETP, p. 403.

  66. Exodus 1:14.

  67. Exodus 5:6–16.

  68. Exodus 5:18–19.

  69. Halpern, “The Exodus and the Israelite Historians,” p. 92.

  70. Pithom and Rameses in 1:11 is E in my reckoning, though I recognize that others have identified it as J. Propp weighs the evidence in this passage for making either a J or an E identification (Exodus 1–18, pp. 126–27). Brickmaking in 1:14 is P in practically everyone’s reckoning (Driver, Noth, Propp, Baden, and myself). Straw for bricks in 5:6–16 and imposed quotas in 5:18–19 are E. Here, too, I recognize that many scholars have seen Exodus 5 as J. Again, Propp weighs the evidence for both J and E (pp. 250–51); in the end he favors E, as I do. So to summarize: for those who identify some of these items as J, this shows the plausibility of the biblical account; and for those who, like me, have seen them all as E or P, they also add to the evidence of the Levite connection in the exodus.

  71. James Hoffmeier, Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 245. Even more cautiously, we should distinguish that Halpern’s formulation of the point was more properly about historiography, that is, the forces that affected the writers, than about history, that is, the proofs of what happened. See Halpern, “The Exodus and the Israelite Historians,” p. 93.

  72. In both my identification of the sources and William Propp’s, at which we arrived independently, these accounts in Exodus are from E and P (Propp, Exodus 1–18; Friedman, WWTB, p. 250; The Bible with Sources Revealed, pp. 126–33). The D source refers to it too in Deuteronomy 4:34; 6:21–23; 7:18–19; 21:2; 26:8; 29:1–2; 34:10. Many other scholars have identified the E passages here as coming from some other source, usually J, but no one to date has offered any refutation of Propp’s or my identifications or reasoning. And the consistency of these identifications with all the other evidence here for the Levite connection may furth
er support the identification. See note 83 below.

  73. Later, in the book of Numbers, in the J spies story, Moses says to God, “And Egypt will hear it, for you brought this people up from among them with your power.” Moses never refers to slavery, Pharaoh, or plagues, but only to the fact that they left. The closest it comes is when God says, “all of these people, who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness.” But that is nonspecific about the signs and whether they occurred in Egypt proper or on the journey and in the wilderness, and it does not mention the exodus itself.

  74. The identifications of the Bible’s sources that I (and others) had made in the past now came to fit with the identification of the Levites as the people of the exodus. And this, in return, confirmed those identifications of the sources as correct. This is not circular reasoning. It is a puzzle coming together. It is two mysteries pointing to a mutual solution.

  75. In the law of the goring ox, the penalty is different if the victim was a slave than if the victim was a free person (Exodus 21:28–32).

  76. Exodus 21:26–27.

  77. Exodus 21:20–21. See the comment on this avenging of a slave’s death in R. E. Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, comment on Leviticus 19:18, p. 381.

  78. Deuteronomy 21:10.

  79. Exodus 20:2; Deuteronomy 5:6.

  80. Exodus 20:10; Deuteronomy 5:14.

  81. Exodus 34:21. On Exodus 34:14–26 containing the J text of the Ten Commandments, see Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed, p. 179. Cross too attributes the core of this passage to J, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, pp. 85–86. Likewise Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, trans. B. Anderson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972; original German edition Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1948), pp. 31, 271; Carpenter and Harford-Battersby, The Hexateuch, p. 135; Ronald E. Clements, Exodus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 220–21; Baruch Halpern, From Gods to God (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), p. 30; Alan W. Jenks, The Elohist and North Israelite Traditions (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), p. 39; Propp, Exodus 19–40, p. 150; Georg Fohrer, Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968; German edition, 1965), p. 69. Joel Baden, in J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), p. 169, argues against the identification of this passage as a J Ten Commandments. Whether he is right or wrong (in my view, the latter), he still acknowledges that these verses are part of J, whether they were written on Decalogue tablets or not. So the point here, that J does not include slaves in a Sabbath command, remains in his reading as well. In a later book, Baden changed the J attribution of these verses and said rather that they were the work of a later compiler (Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch [New Haven: Yale, 2012], pp. 224, 276n., 126). Again I think that he is mistaken, but in any case, for the present issue, this still leaves J with no concern for slaves by any reckoning of this passage. The same goes for Albrecht Alt (Essays on Old Testament History and Religion [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967], p. 151n.), and all others who regarded the passage in Exodus 34 as a later compilation, still leaving J with no concern for slaves.

  82. Exodus 22:20; 23:9 (E); Leviticus 19:33–34 (P); Deuteronomy 10:19 (D). Commandments to love the alien and to treat an alien the same as one’s own people also occur in Exodus 12:49; 20:10; 23:12; Leviticus 16:29; 17:8, 10, 12, 13, 15; 18:26; 19:10; 20:2; 22:18; 23:22; 24:16, 22; 25:35; Numbers 9:14; 15:14, 15, 16, 26, 29, 30; 19:10; 35:15; Deuteronomy 1:16; 5:14; 10:18, 19; 14:21.

  83. Propp, Exodus 1–18, p. 128. Most blatantly, Isaiah 14:1 says, “and the alien will be joined to them.” The Hebrew word that is commonly translated there as “will be joined” is nilwāh, which is cognate to the word levi (lwy). And the very name Levi is explicitly connected to this verb meaning to be joined or attached in the naming of Levi (yillāweh) in Genesis 29:34 (J) and in the attachment of the Levites (yillāwû) to the Priests in Numbers 18:2 (P). See the entry on the root lwh in Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, Charles Briggs (BDB), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, p. 530.

  84. Review by Glen A. Taylor of Jack Lundbom’s Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/9357_10328.pdf.

  85. English translation by John Wilson, ANET, pp. 376–78; see Avi Faust, “The Emergence of Iron Age Israel: On Origins and Habitus,” IETP, p. 469. The situation is further complicated by the (controversial) fact that the name is given the Egyptian determinative for a people rather than a (settled) land. The debate on this is summarized, with references, by Faust, IETP, pp. 478–79.

  86. Halpern has 1207, Malamat 1208.

  87. Malamat, The History of Biblical Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 60.

  88. Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, p. 60.

  89. Most recently Manfred Bietak of the University of Vienna expressed this view in “Exodus Evidence: An Egyptologist Looks at Biblical History,” Biblical Archaeology Review 42:3 (May/June, 2016): 37.

  90. Shishak (corresponding to Pharaoh Sheshonk I) in 2 Chronicles 12:2–9; 1 Kings 11:40; 14:25. Necho (corresponding to Pharaoh Necho II) in 2 Kings 23:29.

  91. Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, p. 65.

  92. Carol Meyers, Exodus, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 33–34.

  93. “Whoever supplied the geographical information that now adorns the story had no information earlier than the Saite period (seventh to sixth centuries B.C.).” Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, p. 409.

  94. Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, p. 68.

  95. Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, pp. 65–71.

  96. Friedman, WWTB, pp. 61–79; and The Bible with Sources Revealed, pp. 18–21.

  97. So when Redford and others say that our lengthy and detailed account of Moses, in all his roles, is late, either exilic or post-exilic, meaning sixth century or later (Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, p. 418), they likewise have to at least mention the fact that those accounts are in sources written in classical, PRE-exilic Hebrew. See Robert Polzin, Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Biblical Hebrew Prose (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1976); Gary Rendsburg, “Late Biblical Hebrew and the Date of P,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 12 (1980): 65–80; Ziony Zevit, “Converging Lines of Evidence Bearing on the Date of P,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 94 (1982): 502–9; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 3–13; “Numbers, Book of,” ABD, vol. 4, pp. 1148–49; Avi Hurvitz, “The Evidence of Language in Dating the Priestly Code,” Revue Biblique 81 (1974): 24–56; A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel (Cahiers de la Revue Biblique; Paris: Gabalda, 1982); “Continuity and Innovation in Biblical Hebrew—The Case of ‘Semantic Change’ in Post-exilic Writings,” Abr-Naharaim Supp. 4 (1995): 1–10; “The Usage of שש and בוץ in the Bible and Its Implication for the Date of P,” Harvard Theological Review 60 (1967): 117–21; Ronald Hendel, “‘Begetting’ and ‘Being Born’ in the Pentateuch: Notes on Historical Linguistics and Source Criticism,” Vetus Testamentum 50 (2000): 38–46; Jan Joosten, “The Distinction Between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew as Reflected in Syntax,” Hebrew Studies 46 (2005): 327–39. A recent attempt to challenge the work on linguistic dating was Ian Young, Robert Rezetko, with the assistance of M. Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts: An Introduction to Approaches and Problems, 2 vols. (London–Oakville: Equinox, 2008); it was thoroughly rejected in the review by Jan Joosten, Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford in Babel und Bibel (2011); and by Professor Ronald Hendel of UC Berkeley in “Unhistorical Hebrew Linguistics: A Cautionary Tale,” http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/hen358022.shtml. Essays that address their claims critically appear in Cynthia Miller-Naudé and Ziony Zevit, eds., Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew (Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, 2012).

  98. Amos 9:7.

  99. James Hoffmeier wrote in “‘These Things Happened’—Why a Historical Exodus Is Essential for Theology,” in J. Hoffmeier and D. Magary, eds., Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).

  100. Joel Baden, “The Violent Origins of the Levites: Texts and Tradition,” in Mark Leuchter and Jeremy Hutton, eds., Levites and Priests in Biblical History and Tradition (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 103–16. I have even heard it suggested that the Levites might be a remnant of the warlike Hyksos dynasty that had once ruled Egypt. This would require a substantial amount of proof, to establish that these people survived the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt, remained for some three hundred years, and then, for an unknown reason, made an exodus, became known as Levites, and then immigrated to Israel.

  101. Numbers 18:21–24. “And to the children of Levi, here, I’ve given every tithe in Israel as a legacy in exchange for their work that they’re doing. . . . It is an eternal law through your generations. And they shall not have a legacy among the children of Israel, because I’ve given to the Levites as a legacy the tithe of the children of Israel that they will give to Yahweh as a donation. On account of this I’ve said to them: they shall not have a legacy among the children of Israel.”

  Deuteronomy 14:28f. “At the end of three years you shall bring out all the tithe of your produce in that year and leave it within your gates, and the Levite will come, because he doesn’t have a portion and legacy with you . . . and they shall eat and be full.”

  102. Judges 17:7–13.

  103. Deuteronomy 33:10. The song identifies the Levites as both priests and teachers (33:8–10).

  104. Leviticus 10:11.

  105. On the antiquity of this credo, see Gerhard von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966; original German edition Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1958), pp. 3–5.