The Egyptian army mobilized, the Pharaoh set off in hot pursuit.
They caught up with the fugitives near the shores of the Red Sea. The children of Israel, understandably, were ‘sore afraid’. Trapped as they were, with the deep waters before them and the angry Egyptians behind, they took out their anxieties on Moses, the apparent author of their present danger. ‘Because there were no graves in Egypt,’ they asked him (14, 11), ‘hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?’
A Way Through the Water
But Moses, with God’s backing, told them that they were not to fear. Instead, they watched awestruck, while he ‘stretched out his hand over the sea’ (14, 21):
The Red Sea parts, at Moses’ command, so he can lead his people through to freedom, a moment of huge symbolic significance in the Jewish story. The scene is imagined here by Vasilii Alexandrovich Kotarbinsky (1849–1921).
And the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.
So, with Moses and Aaron leading them, the children of Israel set off across the strip of seabed that, by God’s miraculous power, had opened up before them. Even now, the Egyptians wouldn’t give up their pursuit: they drove their chariots down across the shore and into the muddy corridor between the waves. They were not going to let the children of Israel slip so easily from their grasp.
‘And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen ...’
EXODUS 14, 28
God was watching from heaven, though, ‘through the pillar of fire and of the cloud’ (14, 24), and he was not going to allow his people to be caught and killed. He took the wheels from the Egyptians’ chariots (14, 25), ‘that they drave them heavily’, then, as the Egyptian generals decided that it was perhaps time to turn and flee, he told Moses once again to raise his hand over the waters:
And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them: there remained not so much as one of them (14, 28).
But the children of Israel emerged unscathed, euphoric – and finally convinced of the greatness of their God. Miriam, the prophetess – the sister of Moses and Aaron – took up a timbrel (a small hand-drum), we are told (15, 20): ‘and all the women went after her with timbrels and with dances.’ As the people exulted in their deliverance, Miriam led them in their celebrations: ‘Sing ye to the Lord,’ she cried (15, 21), ‘for he hath triumphed gloriously.’
As the last of the Israelites make it safely ashore, the pursuing army of the Pharaoh is engulfed by the rising Red Sea waters. The German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder painted this picture in 1530.
‘I will rain bread from heaven for you,’ said God (16, 4) to a desperate Moses, and so he did. In this fifteenth-century painting we see the joyous Israelites collecting the miraculous manna as it falls.
An Arid Shore
The jubilation was short-lived. Had they avoided drowning only to die of thirst? ‘They went three days in the wilderness, and found no water’ (15, 22). Reaching one oasis, at a place called Marah, they went down excitedly to drink, but found its waters far too bitter for human consumption (15, 24). Again, the people turned on Moses. Fortunately, God told him of a tree whose wood, when thrown into the water, made it sweet.
Moses strikes the barren rock and water gushes forth – a godsend for the Israelites. They would have been too thirsty to contemplate the wider symbolic implications, though in hindsight the suggestion of phallic fertility can’t easily be ignored.
Eastward they journeyed, past the wells of Elim and on into the ‘wilderness of Sin’. Not an allegorical name, or a metaphor of any kind, but a geographical location (albeit now uncertain, but apparently somewhere between the oasis settlement of Elim and the Sinai). Food was running low, and the children of Israel were restive. ‘Behold,’ said the Lord to Moses (16, 4), ‘I will rain bread from heaven for you.’ And, he added, ‘at even’ – that is, in the evening – ‘ye shall eat flesh’ (16, 12):
And it came to pass, that at even the quails came up, and covered the camp; and in the morning the dew lay round about the host. And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, this is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.
Scholars have speculated for centuries over what this ‘manna’ might have been: the silky froth from a seedpod of some desert plant; the secretions from some insect; some fibrous fungus. Others have been happy enough to accept that this really was just ‘manna from heaven’ – a miraculous and utterly unaccountable gift from God. Either way, it was to save their lives, not just now but in the rest of their wanderings: they were, says Exodus, to eat manna as their staple for the next 40 years.
His conference with the Lord on Mount Sinai now concluded, Moses appears here in what is surely his most iconic form, as the bringer of the tablets; the bearer of God’s law, the Ten Commandments.
Water was always a problem. One day, when once again the children of Israel were growing restive and resentful, God told Moses to take his rod and strike a rock he showed him. Before the watching Israelites, Moses struck the stone and water came streaming forth (17, 6). Another sign of God’s favour towards his chosen people.
Showdown on Sinai
In the meantime, they pressed on into Midian, where Moses was reunited with Jethro, his father-in-law (18, 70), who advised him on setting up a hierarchy of leaders through which to rule what was now a big and potentially wayward nation. Soon after – in the third month after their first flight from their Egyptian bondage – they found their way into the Sinai desert. They made camp at the foot of Mount Sinai. ‘On the third day, in the morning’, the Book of Exodus tells us (19, 16):
There were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled.
Moses lined his people up at the bottom of the mountain while the trumpet blast grew louder. Some portentous moment was clearly impending:
Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly (19, 18).
A CODE FOR LIVING
THE BIBLE DOESN’T at this point give God’s injunctions any special name – the title ‘Ten Commandments’ comes later, at Deuteronomy 5, 4. They’re not even presented as a list here – although a few more snappy ‘Thou shalts’ do take this form. The early ones are positively wordy in the justifications they offer for themselves: they’re as much explanations as they are commandments.
It’s important, in this context, to remember just how unfamiliar – even counterintuitive – the idea of monotheism would have been to an ancient people like the earliest Jews. The first four commandments (so almost half the total) in their different ways are all concerned with ensuring that the believer will give God his due. Only then does the ‘Decalogue’ address those sorts of rulings that the modern reader might have expected to come first: those that facilitate the smoother (and, of course, more ethical) running of human society.
• I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
• Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath …
• Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain …’
• Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant �
�� For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day.
• Honour thy father and thy mother.
• Thou shalt not kill.
• Thou shalt not commit adultery.
• Thou shalt not steal.
• Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
• Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour,s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
Hence the suggestion by some scholars that an actual volcanic eruption may have been taking place, though this seems an unnecessarily literal-minded view of what are surely more convincingly seen as the seismic stage effects appropriate to a divinity’s descent to earth. ‘And the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai,’ the account continues, ‘and the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mount.’ He stayed there for 40 days and nights while God gave him the rules he wanted the Jewish people to make the centre of their moral lives. He also gave him detailed instructions as to the offerings that were to be made to him, as well as (in chapters 25–6) the Ark of Covenant in which his sacred treasures were to be carried while they were on the march, and the Tabernacle or tent – a sort of travelling temple – they were to construct.
‘And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire.’
EXODUS 32, 20
THE SMALL PRINT
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS are really no more than a summary of the scores of orders that, according to Exodus, God gave Moses in the course of their confabulation atop Mount Sinai. While some of these simply reiterate the contents of the Commandments, perhaps spelling out the appropriate punishments – ‘And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death’ (21, 17) – others help fill out the detail of what ultimately amounts to something like a comprehensive code of law.
Encountered now, over 2000 years on, many of course seem culturally alien. Often, it’s the specificity of the order that takes us aback. ‘If fire break out, and catch in thorns, so that the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, or the field, be consumed therewith; he that kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.’
Many ‘make sense’ to us – at least at the instinctive level. Whatever our views on capital punishment in the modern-day context, for example, most of us can relate to the revulsion underlining the rule that ‘Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death’ (22, 19). If we’re liable to be less comfortable with the command that ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ (22, 18), we can at least recognize that historically people have often lived haunted by genuine terror of the powers of witchcraft, and that these fears have often been reflected in cruel punishments.
Sometimes, a stricture that begins by seeming pleasingly humane can take an unexpected turn. It seems only fitting, for example, to see that a master who hits and kills his servant should suffer punishment (21, 20) – that, if the servant survives, he should remain unscathed because he or she is his master’s property, not so much (21, 21). Likewise, the ruling that a thief should have to make restitution for what he steals seems admirably sensible. But it’s a shock to see that, if he can’t afford to give that restitution, the cost should be made up from his own sale into slavery (22, 2).
The Golden Calf
Exodus hasn’t so far painted a particularly impressive portrait of the Chosen People. The ‘Children of Israel’ seem children indeed – whiny and resentful in their attitudes to Moses, the man who’d given them leadership in their escape from Egypt; ungrateful towards the God who’s rescued them. Why would they be different now?
The Jews availed themselves of Moses’ absence on Mount Sinai by making Aaron create a golden calf for them to worship. Such relapses into paganism recur regularly in the Old Testament, reminding us how new the idea of monotheism was.
Descending from the mountain after his lengthy meeting with God, Moses arrived at his people’s camp to find that they’d spent the time growing disenchanted with his leadership – and, more damagingly, with the authority of God. While their creator had been warning Moses against the necessity of avoiding ‘graven images’, they had been bullying his brother Aaron into making them idols – gods they could follow in Moses’ place. Reluctantly, he had complied, collecting all the gold they had about them – in earrings and other jewellery – and melting it down to make a grandiose ‘god’, a golden calf.
Moses, coming down the mountain bearing God’s Commandments, set in tablets of stone, saw his people chanting and singing around this monstrous statue (32, 19). Throwing down the tablets in disgust, he broke them – but the calf he ‘burnt … in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it’ (32, 20). He had the people build their Tabernacle, as God had demanded, and expiate their guilt for a rebellion that may in hindsight be seen symbolically as that last inglorious fling with paganism that was to confirm the Jews in their adherence to the Laws of Moses and their God.
As imagined by the French engraver Gustave Doré in 1866, a furious Moses smashes the stone tablets containing the ten commandments that God has given him. God’s law prevails, but the tablets are broken and (symbolically) have to be renewed.
A sort of proto-temple, erected by the Israelites on Moses’ instructions to provide a cover for the Ark of Covenant and for all its attendant rites, the original Tabernacle was – quite literally – a tent.
Keeping it Clean
The Book of Leviticus describes the rules laid down by God for the sort of ritual offerings that were to be made in the Tabernacle and the rules that were to govern the lives of the Jews and of their priests. Many of Leviticus’ strictures simply echo rulings we already encountered in the Book of Exodus. Often, though, there is more detail here. Here, then, along with prescriptions for worship, are the taboos to be observed in eating: ‘All that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers’ (11, 10); ‘the vulture, and the kite after his kind … the little owl, the cormorant, and the great owl’ (11, 14), for example. More famously, there is the prohibition against ‘the carcases of every beast which divideth the hoof, and is not clovenfooted, nor cheweth the cud’ (11, 27). Even carrying such carcases was a source of deep uncleanness. Other marks of uncleanness were the sores that stemmed from diseases such as leprosy. Leviticus goes into great detail about how the potential contamination from sufferers was to be contained. Women, Eve’s successors, were another potent source of impurity. Even so, they were deemed still more unclean at some times than at others (15, 19):
This fragment of Leviticus from an ancient Torah scroll was found by a Bedouin herdsman in a cave at Nahal Arugot, in the West Bank, in 2004. It dates from the time of the last Jewish revolt against Roman rule, c. 135 BCE.
MISMATCHED RELATIONSHIPS
LEVITICUS 18, 22 is often cited as the definitive biblical prohibition on homosexuality – and it’s true, the passage doesn’t leave much room for doubt:
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination.
No mention is made of womankind lying with womankind, although some of those modern Christians who are so determined that we take the prohibition on male homosexuality at literal face-value would have us read this verse more figuratively in ruling out lesbian relations too.
Just to be absolutely clear, Leviticus follows up with a reiteration in chapter 20, verse 13:
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
But then, as liberal commentators have gleefully reminded us in recent years, Leviticus is uncompromising in its condemnation of the eating of shellfish – without having mobilized any great crusade by the Christian Right. As for what it sees as mismatched relations, it has something of a mania on this theme (19, 19):
Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy fi
eld with mingled seed; neither shall garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.
And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean; every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean. And whosoever toucheth any thing that she sat upon shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
Never just a code of conduct, the Law was intrinsic to Jewish identity. The reverence in which the Book of Leviticus was held is evident in this stunningly-decorated frontispiece, made by fifteenth-century Jews in Portugal, in a time of persecution.
The man who touched a woman in such a state might be deemed ‘unclean until the even’, but if he had sexual relations with her he had rendered himself unfit for society (20, 18):
And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood; and both of them shall be cut off from among their people.
All purity, perhaps, was ultimately moral. Leviticus is unforgiving in its attitude to adultery, for example, going well beyond the ‘Thou shalt not …’ of the Exodus commandment (20, 10):
And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
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