Introduction

As the long historical narrative of the Five Books of Moses moves from the patriarchs to the Hebrew nation in Egypt, it switches gears. The narrative conventions deployed, from type-scenes and thematic key words to the treatment of dialogue, remain the same, but the angle from which events are seen and the handling of characters are notably different. Genesis ended with the death, and the distinctly Egyptian mummification, of Joseph. Exodus begins with a listing of the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt, thus establishing a formal link with the concluding chapters of Genesis in which a more detailed list of the emigrants from Canaan (46:8–27) is provided. The rapid enumeration here of the sons of Jacob is concluded by a notation of the formulaic number of seventy said to constitute the Hebrew migration from Canaan to Egypt, and this is followed by a restatement of the death of Joseph—a device that biblical scholars call “resumptive repetition,” whereby, after an interruption of narrative continuity, a phrase is repeated from the point at which the narrative broke off (the phrase here is “And Joseph died”) in order to mark the resumption of the story. In this second report of Joseph’s death, however, the focus is not on the mummy in the coffin but on the dying out of a whole generation, which thus propels us forward in historical time (four centuries, according to God’s prophetic revelation to Abraham in Genesis 15) to a moment when beney yisraʾa el, the sons of Israel (or Jacob), have swelled to a people, the Israelites, which is the meaning of that Hebrew phrase from now on in the narrative. Instead of the sharply etched individuals who constituted a family in all its explosive dynamics in Genesis, we now have teeming multitudes of Israelites whose spectacular prolificness introduces to the story the perspective of the whole wide world of creation announced at the beginning of Genesis: “And the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land [the Hebrew word also means “earth,” as in Genesis] was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7).

In keeping with this new wide-angle lens through which the characters and the events are seen, the narrative moves from the domestic, moral, and psychological realism of the Patriarchal Tales to a more stylized, sometimes deliberately schematic, mode of storytelling that in a number of respects, especially in the early chapters of the book, has the feel of a folktale. At the beginning of the story, Pharaoh is referred to several times as “the king of Egypt” rather than by his Egyptian title, which was used in Genesis and will become his set designation as the story goes on. This has the effect of casting him as the archetypal evil king (one who kills babies) in a folktale confrontation between the forces of good and of evil. Other folktale elements are evident: the many thousands of childbearing Hebrew women are attended to, in the charming schematic simplicity of a folktale, by just two virtuous midwives; in a folkloric motif that has been profusely documented in many traditions of the ancient Near East and elsewhere, the future hero is threatened with death by the evil king and is saved by being hidden and then rescued. The betrothal type-scene of the young woman encountered at the well in a foreign land, which in the instances of Rebekah and (the absent) Isaac and of Rachel and Jacob was pregnant with intimations of the character and the future relationship of the two people involved, here has undergone a certain stylization. Aspects of Moses’s subsequent career as national leader are adumbrated, but there are no indications about his future relationship with Zipporah, and her character is not in the least at issue. Indeed, it is only here that the young woman at the well is multiplied into seven young women, Zipporah and her six sisters, a move that diminishes her individuality while recasting the encounter between the future spouses as a meeting between one man and seven maidens, according to the sanctified formulaic number.

The general rule in Exodus, and again in Numbers when the story continues, is that what is of interest about the character of Moses is what bears on his qualities as a leader—his impassioned sense of justice, his easily ignited temper, his selfless compassion, his feelings of personal inadequacy. Alone among biblical characters, he is assigned an oddly generic epithet, “the man Moses.” There may be some theological motive for this designation, in order to remind us of his plainly human status, to ward off any inclination to deify the founding leader of the Israelite people, but it also suggests more concretely that Moses as forger of the nation and prince of prophets is, after all, not an absolutely unique figure but a man like other men, bringing to the soul-trying tasks of leadership both the moral and temperamental resources and the all-too-human weaknesses that many men may possess. In regard to our experience of the character and the story, all this means that “the man Moses” remains somewhat distanced from us, that we never get the sense of intimate acquaintance with his inner life and his distinctive traits of personality that we are so memorably afforded in the stories of Jacob and Joseph.

There is a certain correlation between the distancing of the central character and the distancing of the figure of God in Exodus (a procedure that, again, is continued into Numbers). God in Genesis, as one detects in a glimpse of Him in the Garden story and as one can see quite clearly in His encounter with Abraham in Genesis 18, walks about the earth looking very much like a man—indeed, being easily mistaken for a man until He chooses to reveal His identity—and at some points engaging a human being in what is clearly represented as face-to-face conversation. God in Exodus has become essentially unseeable, overpowering, and awesomely refulgent. Barriers to access accompany Him everywhere, just as they will be instituted architecturally in the tripartite structure of the sanctuary that He orders the Israelites to build. The first manifestation of God’s presence to Moses is in the anomaly of the fire burning in a bush without consuming it, and then the divine voice enjoins Moses, “Come no closer here,” and proceeds to speak to him without being in any way visible to him. Fire, which betokens potent energy and which is something one cannot touch without being hurt or destroyed, is the protective perimeter out of which God addresses Moses and the Israelites throughout the story: all of Mount Sinai will be smoking like a firebrand, with celestial fireworks of lightning and thunder crackling round its peak, when God reveals the Ten Commandments to Moses. Later, as we shall see, Deuteronomy, for its own theological reasons, will pick up and dramatically amplify this image of a barrier of fire around God at the defining moment of revelation. God in Exodus has become more of an ungraspable mystery than He seems in Genesis; and as He moves here from the sphere of the clan that is the context of the Patriarchal Tales to the arena of history, His sheer power as supreme deity and His implacability against those who would thwart His purposes emerge as the most salient aspects of the divine character.

Exodus, like Genesis, is made up of two large panels, though they are notably different in nature from the two panels that constitute Genesis. The first unit, running from chapter 1 through chapter 20, is a grand narrative sweep that culminates in what is, at least in national-historical and theological terms, the great climax and point of reference of all biblical literature—the revelation through Moses to Israel of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. There are, one should note, legal passages along the way in chapters 12 and 13 regarding the spring rituals of the paschal offering and the Festival of Flatbread as well as the dedication of the firstborn, but these are to a large degree integrated into the general narrative, coming as they do when the first Passover rite is observed in Egypt and when the Israelite firstborn have been spared while Egypt’s are stricken. This narrative is one of national triumph after the most painful abjection, although the triumph is complicated by the fact that it concludes with the imposition of a set of imperatives that for the Israelites will prove to be a great challenge to obey.

The narrative is organized around three thematically defined spaces: Egypt, the place of bondage; the wilderness, a liminal space where freedom will be realized and new obligations incurred, where a tense struggle between leader and people will play out as part of the initiatory experience of nationhood; and the promised destination of the Exodus from Egypt, the land that remains beyond the horizon of this book. Egypt is associated with water, almost everything there being linked with its central waterway, the Nile, where baby Moses is saved from drowning and where the Ten Plagues begin; and a barrier of water must be crossed to effect the escape of the Israelites, with that very water then drowning the pursuing Egyptian hosts as they had sought to drown the Israelite infant boys. The wilderness is, antithetically, a zone of parched dryness—arid sand and rugged rock formations, where the people more than once desperately thirst for water and are dependent on its miraculous discovery. The shepherd Moses first encounters God in the wilderness on a mountain later called Sinai (a name perhaps meant to recall seneh, the Hebrew word for “bush”) but in this episode referred to as Horeb, which as the twelfth-century Hebrew exegete Abraham ibn Ezra shrewdly saw, means “dryness” or “parched place.” God appears to Moses through a token of supernatural burning on the mountain of the parched place. He will then lead the Israelites through the wilderness with a pillar of fire by night that banks down to a pillar of cloud by day. The culmination of this narrative in the Sinai epiphany, as we have already noted, will make the mountain itself incandescent and rake the sky around its summit with divine fire. The climax of this whole story is a set of lapidary legal injunctions, but they are in no way anticlimactic for being that. Framed as a series of imperatives in the second-person singular and thus addressing every man and woman of the Israelite nation, they express the keenest sense of urgency, much like the urgency in dialogue between human characters that marks many of the dramatic high points of biblical narrative elsewhere. Later, in the episode of the Golden Calf, we learn that God has incised the ten imperative utterances on two tablets of stone (32:15–16), but here no mention is made of writing. The omission is dictated, I think, by a desire to convey the potent immediacy of God’s speech to Israel through Moses: “And God spoke these words, saying” is the formula pointedly used to introduce the Decalogue.

Finally, beyond well-watered Egypt and the burning desert where uncanny fires flare, the new Israelite nation is repeatedly told of a third space, a land flowing not with water but, hyperbolically, with milk and honey. This utopian space will be beyond reach for forty years, and in a sense it can never be fully attained. When the twelve spies enter it on a reconnaissance mission in Numbers, they confirm its fabulous fecundity, but ten of the twelve also deem it unconquerable, calling it “a land that consumes its inhabitants.” As the biblical story continues through Numbers and Deuteronomy and ultimately on to the history of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, the land flowing with milk and honey will begin to seem something like the Land of Cockaigne of medieval European folklore, a dream of delighted, unimpeded fulfillment beyond the grating actualities of real historical time. Treated with poetic hyperbole by the Prophets, it will eventually generate eschatological visions not within the purview of these early books of the Bible.

It is the second large panel of Exodus that is likely to cause perplexity for a good many modern readers. After the riveting narrative of liberation and revelation, the second half of the book, with the exception of the Golden Calf story (chapters 32–34), is devoted to legal material—first a code of criminal and tort law, with some ritual injunctions at the end (chapters 21–23), which is often referred to by scholars as the Book of the Covenant, and then the elaborate instructions for the building of the Tabernacle (chapters 25–31), instructions that will be carried out, more or less word for word, just as one would expect, after the resolution of the confrontation over the Golden Calf (chapters 35–40). Readers attached to the notion of story are bound to find these seventeen chapters of laws and architectural instructions something of a letdown, but one must assume that the ancient writers and their audience had different ideas about literary unity and about how story related to law.

The Book of the Covenant could be understood as a detailed extension of the Decalogue, but the Tabernacle passages pose more of a problem. The easiest explanation for this lavishing of attention on the construction of the Tabernacle is that it reflects the professional interests of the Priestly writers who were responsible for the bulk of this material. That explanation seems plausible enough, but it is too simple a way of stating the case. An analogy between the two-panel structure of Exodus and the complementary interaction between the two versions of the Creation story in Genesis may be helpful. The Priestly editors of Genesis had inherited J’s old story (beginning in chapter 2, the middle of the fourth verse) full of dynamism and danger, in which the acts of creation are represented in powerfully concrete anthropomorphic terms. This story, one may infer, represented a strong set of traditional truths for the editors, but truths that had to be complemented by a different perspective on the same events. And so, before the first human male shaped out of clay and Eve built from his rib and the seduction by the serpent, the Priestly writer placed his own magisterial version of creation, in which the world is called into being through a succession of divine speech-acts and in which everything proceeds in harmonious order, registered in the balanced cadences of the stately prose, from the first day to the seventh, coming to a formal conclusion in the primordial sabbath. The first half of Exodus is a compelling story, punctuated, as some scholars have proposed, by certain epic gestures, that moves from enslavement to liberation to epiphany. It is also a story marked by danger, doubt, and what looks like a national destiny of endless trouble. Moses the future leader barely escapes being murdered as an infant; kills a man, an act that compels him to flee Egypt; harbors grave doubts about his capacity for the daunting mission God imposes on him; and on occasion is angry, impatient, almost despairing in his leadership. The Israelites on their part can scarcely bring themselves to trust Moses and Aaron when the two brothers come to lead them out of slavery, and once in the wilderness, the people will repeatedly prove to be recalcitrant in a long series of backslidings or “murmurings,” both in Exodus and in Numbers. The crowning instance of these episodes of rebellion is the incident of the Golden Calf, carefully introduced between the instructions for the building of the Tabernacle and the carrying out of the instructions.

The Tabernacle, I would suggest, was imagined by these writers as a vision of perfectly orchestrated harmony, enacted through the meticulous crafts of architecture, weaving, dyeing, wood carving, and metalwork—an implementation by human artisans, following divine directives, of the sort of comprehensive harmony figured in the Priestly account of creation. After the tense story of rupture and recrimination of national experience in history, the Priestly writers, themselves intimately associated with a realm of ordered ritual, provide an elaborately imagined representation of the beautiful ordering of sacred space, a zone of choreographed repetition set off against the unsettled peregrinations of the Wilderness generation. The satisfaction this material gives its audience is not story but pageantry: the splendor of the many-colored textiles displayed along the walls of the Tabernacle, the bronze loops on which they are hung, the wrought precious metals and inlaid gems of the various ritual implements. When at the end of all the building we are told, “And Moses completed the task” (40:33), we hear a significant echo of “And God completed on the seventh day the task He had done” (Genesis 2:2). Human labor, scrupulously following a divine plan, creates an ordered space that mirrors the harmony of God’s creation. But the concluding image of the book is the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night that leads the Israelites on their march through the wilderness. On that long way, more trouble awaits them, as readers will discover when the narrative resumes in Numbers.