The Exodus is the founding myth of the Israelites whose narrative is spread over four of the five books of the Pentateuch (specifically, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The term "exodus" refers to the major event that takes place in the first half of the Book of Exodus: Israel’s exodus from Egypt.
This article delves into the events related in the Bible, recounting the journey of Moses and the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to their liberation and the establishment of a covenant with God.
Moses Receiving the Law on Mount Sinai by David Roberts
The Story of the Exodus
In the first book of the Pentateuch, the Book of Genesis, the Israelites had come to live in Egypt in the Land of Goshen during a famine, under the protection of an Israelite, Joseph, who had become a high official in the court of the Egyptian pharaoh. The pharaoh becomes concerned by the number and strength of the Israelites in Egypt and enslaves them, commanding them to build at two "supply" or "store cities" called Pithom and Rameses (Exodus 1:11).
The pharaoh also orders the slaughter at birth of all male Hebrew children. One Hebrew child, however, is rescued and abandoned in a floating basket on the Nile. He is found and adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, who names him Moses.
Read also: Why Moses Fled
Grown to a young man, Moses kills an Egyptian he sees beating a Hebrew slave, and takes refuge in the land of Midian, where he marries Tzipporah, a daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro. According to Ezekiel 20:8-9, the enslaved Israelites also practised "abominations" and worshiped the gods of Egypt.
Meanwhile, Moses goes to Mount Horeb, where Yahweh appears in a burning bush and commands him to go to Egypt to free the Hebrew slaves and bring them to the Promised Land in Canaan. Yahweh also speaks to Moses's brother Aaron, and the two assemble the Israelites and perform miraculous signs to rouse their belief in Yahweh's promise.
Moses and Aaron then go to Pharaoh and ask him to let the Israelites go into the desert for a religious festival, but he refuses and increases their workload, commanding them to make bricks without straw. Moses and Aaron return to Pharaoh and ask him to free the Israelites and let them depart.
Pharaoh demands Moses to perform a miracle, and Aaron throws down Moses' staff, which turns into a tannin (sea monster or snake) (Exodus 7:8-13); however, Pharaoh's magicians are also able to do this, though Moses' serpent devours the others.
The Ten Plagues
After this, Yahweh inflicts a series of Plagues on the Egyptians each time Moses repeats his demand and Pharaoh refuses to release the Israelites.
Read also: Unmasking the Pharaoh
Moses is commanded to fix the first month of Aviv at the head of the Hebrew calendar. He instructs the Israelites to take a lamb on the 10th day, and on the 14th day to slaughter it and daub its blood on their doorposts and lintels, and to observe the Passover meal that night, the night of the full moon.
In the final plague, Yahweh sends an angel to each house to kill the firstborn son and firstborn cattle, but the houses of the Israelites are spared by the blood on their doorposts. Pharaoh finally casts the Israelites out of Egypt after his firstborn son is killed.
The Ten Plagues of Egypt
The Exodus and the Red Sea
Yahweh leads the Israelites in the form of a pillar of cloud in the day and a pillar of fire at night. However, once the Israelites have left, Yahweh "hardens" Pharaoh's heart to change his mind and pursue the Israelites to the shore of the Red Sea.
The Israelites begin to complain, and Yahweh miraculously provides them with water and food, eventually raining manna down for them to eat. The Amalekites attack at Rephidim, but are defeated. Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, convinces him to appoint judges for the tribes of Israel.
Read also: Moses and the Exodus
The Covenant at Sinai
Yahweh establishes the Aaronic priesthood and detailed rules for ritual worship, among other laws. However, in Moses's absence the Israelites sin against Yahweh by creating the idol of a golden calf. As punishment Yahweh has the Levites kill three thousand of the Israelites (Exodus 32:28), and Yahweh sends a plague on them.
The Israelites now accept the covenant, which is reestablished; they build a tabernacle for Yahweh, and receive their laws. Yahweh commands Moses to take a census of the Israelites and establishes the duties of the Levites.
Yahweh commands Moses to send twelve spies ahead to Canaan to scout the land. The spies discover that the Canaanites are formidable, and to dissuade the Israelites from invading, the spies falsely report that Canaan is full of giants (Numbers 13:30-33).
The Israelites refuse to go to Canaan, and Yahweh declares that the generation that left Egypt will have to pass away before the Israelites can enter the promised land. The Israelites will have to remain in the wilderness for forty years, and Yahweh kills the spies through a plague except for the righteous Joshua and Caleb, who will be allowed to enter the promised land (Numbers 13:36-38).
Wanderings in the Wilderness
The Israelites come to the oasis of Kadesh Barnea, where Miriam dies and the Israelites remain for nineteen years. To provide water, Yahweh commands Moses to get water from a rock by speaking to it, but Moses instead strikes the rock with his staff, for which Yahweh forbids him from entering the Promised Land.
Moses sends a messenger to the king of Edom requesting passage through his land to Canaan, but the king refuses. The Israelites then go to Mount Hor, where Aaron dies.
After Moses prays for deliverance, Yahweh has him create a brazen serpent, and the Israelites who look at it are cured (Numbers 21:8-9). The Israelites are soon in conflict with various other kingdoms, and king Balak of Moab asks the seer Balaam to curse the Israelites, but Balaam blesses them instead.
Some Israelites begin having sexual relations with Moabite women and worshipping Moabite gods, so Yahweh orders Moses to impale the idolators and sends another plague. The full extent of Yahweh's wrath is averted when Phinehas impales an Israelite and a Midianite woman having intercourse (Numbers 25:7-9).
Yahweh commands the Israelites to destroy the Midianites, and Moses and Phinehas take another census. Moses then addresses the Israelites for a final time on the banks of the Jordan River, reviewing their travels and giving them further laws. Yahweh tells Moses to summon Joshua to lead the conquest of Canaan.
The Adoration of the Golden Calf by Gustave Doré
Historical Perspectives and Scholarly Interpretations
Most mainstream scholars do not accept the biblical Exodus account as history for a number of reasons. Most agree that the Exodus stories were written centuries after the apparent setting of the stories.
Scholars argue that the Book of Exodus itself attempts to ground the event firmly in history, reconstructing a date for the exodus as the 2666th year after creation (Exodus 12:40-41), the construction of the tabernacle to year 2667 (Exodus 40:1-2, 17), stating that the Israelites dwelled in Egypt for 430 years (Exodus 12:40-41), and specifying place names such as Goshen (Gen. 46:28), Pithom, and Ramesses (Exod.
Despite the absence of any archaeological evidence, according to Avraham Faust, "most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core" made up of a probable reconstruction of an Exodus based on similar collective memories, with biblical scholar Kenton Sparks referring to it as "mythologized history".
Faust specifies that the result of his assessment is unlikely if it is solely based on either Egyptian presence in Late Bronze Age Canaan or the foreign Hyksos rulers of Egypt, and rules out Midian human activity "which cannot help in dating the Exodus" in identification of the proto-Israelites.
Agreeing in treating the expulsion of the Hyksos "not as related to the flight of a group of slaves[,]" Manfred Bietak points out that the portrayal of the Hyksos as a ruling elite with a background in trade and seafaring conflicts with the biblical portrayal of the Israelites as oppressed in Egypt.
Most scholars posit that a small group of Egyptian origin may have joined the early Israelites, and contributed their own Egyptian Exodus story to all of Israel. Many other scholars reject this view, and instead see the biblical exodus traditions as the invention of the exilic and post-exilic Jewish community, with little to no historical basis.
Lester Grabbe, for instance, argues that "[t]here is no compelling reason that the exodus has to be rooted in history", and that the details of the story more closely fit the seventh through the fifth centuries BCE than the traditional dating to the second millennium BCE. Some scholars also hold that the Israelites originated in Canaan and from the Canaanites, although others disagree.
Evidence from the Bible suggests that the Exodus from Egypt formed a "foundational mythology" or "state ideology" for the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The northern psalms 80 and 81 state that God "brought a vine out of Egypt" (Psalm 80:8) and record ritual observances of Israel's deliverance from Egypt as well as a version of part of the Ten Commandments (Psalm 81:10-11).
The Books of Kings records the dedication of two golden calves in Bethel and Dan by the Israelite king Jeroboam I, who uses the words "Here are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt" (1 Kings 12:28). Scholars relate Jeroboam's calves to the golden calf made by Aaron of Exodus 32.
Both include a nearly identical dedication formula ("These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt", Exodus 32:8). This episode in Exodus is "widely regarded as a tendentious narrative against the Bethel calves".
Egyptologist Jan Assmann suggests that event, which would have taken placec. 931 BCE, may be partially historical due to its association with the historical pharaoh Sheshonq I (the biblical Shishak). Stephen Russell dates this tradition to "the eighth century BCE or earlier", and argued that it preserves a genuine Exodus tradition from the Northern Kingdom, but in a Judahite recension.
Russell and Frank Moore Cross argue that the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom may have believed that the calves at Bethel and Dan were made by Aaron. Some of the earliest evidence for Judahite traditions of the exodus is found in Psalm 78, which portrays the Exodus as beginning a history culminating in the building of the temple at Jerusalem.
A Judahite cultic object associated with the exodus was the brazen serpent or nehushtan: according to 2 Kings 18:4, the brazen serpent had been made by Moses and was worshiped in the temple in Jerusalem until the time of king Hezekiah of Judah, who destroyed it as part of a religious reform, possiblyc. 727 BCE.
In the Pentateuch, Moses creates the brazen serpent in Numbers 21:4-9. The revelation of God on Sinai appears to have originally been a tradition unrelated to the Exodus.
Scholars broadly agree that the publication of the Torah (or of a proto-Pentateuch) took place in the mid-Persian period (the 5th century BCE), echoing a traditional Jewish view which gives Ezra, the leader of the Jewish community on its return from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation.
Many theories have been advanced to explain the composition of the first five books of the Bible, but two have been especially influential. The first of these, Persian Imperial authorisation, advanced by Peter Frei in 1985, is that the Persian authorities required the Jews of Jerusalem to present a single body of law as the price of local autonomy.
Frei's theory was demolished at an interdisciplinary symposium held in 2000, but the relationship between the Persian authorities and Jerusalem remains a crucial question. The second theory, associated with Joel P.
Manetho, also preserved in Josephus's Against Apion, tells how 80,000 lepers and other "impure people", led by a priest named Osarseph, join forces with the former Hyksos, now living in Jerusalem, to take over Egypt. They wreak havoc until the Pharaoh and his son chase them out to the borders of Syria, where Osarseph gives the lepers a law code and changes his name to Moses.
There is general agreement that the stories originally had nothing to do with the Jews. Erich S.
Commemoration of the Exodus is central to Judaism, and Jewish culture. For Jews, the Passover celebrates the freedom of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt, the settling of Canaan by the Israelites, and the "passing over" of the angel of death during the death of the first-born.
Passover involves a ritual meal called a Seder during which parts of the exodus narrative are retold. In the Hagaddah of the Seder it is written that every generation is obliged to remind and identify itself in terms of the Exodus.
The Christian ritual of the eucharist and the holiday of Easter draw directly on the imagery of the Passover and the Exodus. In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently associated with motifs of the Exodus.
The Gospel of Mark has been suggested to be a midrash on the Exodus, though the scholar Larry J. Perkins thinks this unlikely. Mark suggests that the outpouring of Jesus' blood creates a new covenant (Mark 14:24) in the same way that Moses' sacrifice of bulls had created a covenant (Exodus 24:5).
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reverses the direction of the Exodus by escaping from the Massacre of the Innocents committed by Herod the Great before himself returning from Egypt (Matt 2:13-15). Other parallels in Matthew include that he is baptized by water (Matt 3:13-17), and tested in the desert; unlike the Israelites, he is able to resist temptation (Matt. 4.1-3).
The Gospel of John repeatedly calls Jesus the Passover lamb (John 1:29, 13:1, 19:36), something also found in 1 Peter (1 Pet 1:18-20), and 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 5:7-8). Biblical scholar Michael Graves calls Paul's discussion of the exodus in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8 and his comparison of the early church in Corinth to the Israelites in the desert "[t]he two most significant NT passages touching on the exodus".
John also refers to Jesus as manna (John 6:31-5), water flowing from a rock in the desert (John 7:37-9), and as a pillar of fire (John 8:12). The story of the Exodus is also recounted in the Quran, in which Moses is one of the most prominent prophets and messengers.
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