Exodus Pt 2

 

  

 

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It All Starts With

A Burning Bush

 

At the end of Chapter 2, Moses has fled Egypt to avoid prosecution for murder, gotten himself married to a nice young woman name of Zipporah and had a son they name Gershom; the Israelites have cried out to God for help against their Egyptian taskmaster and God has taken notice of them.

 

Which brings us to Chapter 3 and one of those familiar Bible Stories many of us recall either from Sunday School or the David Steinberg routine on his “Disguised as a Normal Person” LP: Moses and the Burning Bush. I’ll try to stick at least a bit closer to the version in the New Revised Standard Version than Mr. Steinberg does in his hilarious comedy routine. But it’s easy to see how he was inspired.

Anyway…

Moses is in Midian, tending to a flock of sheep belonging to his father-in-law Jethro, when he spots a bush on fire. Entertainment of any variety being at a premium to a shepherd, he goes over to check it out and is surprised to see that the bush is not being affected in any way by the flames, kind of like the ceramic logs in a gas fireplace, although we can be confident he didn’t make that connection. Then, when the voice of God comes out of the bush, his curiosity is really piqued and he tries to get even closer, but God tells him to take his sandals off first on account of it being holy ground. This is where Steinberg has a bit of fun with the idea that God gleefully exclaims “Got another one!” when Moses scorches his bare feet, but we’re not going to go there.

Just to make sure Moses knows who he is talking to, God identifies himself as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”, which causes Moses to cover his face out of fear of looking God of all those important ancestors in the face. As there isn’t anything in the next few verses to indicate otherwise, it seems Moses keeps his eyes covered for the rest of their conversation. But as God does most of the talking it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

First God tells Moses that the Israelites are having a rough time in Egypt, and he has a plan to get them out of there. Not only that, but he will lead them to a land of milk and honey that is currently inhabited by some undeserving Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites who probably have no idea that an eviction notice is in their future. The person he wants to make the arrangements with Pharaoh for this emigration from Egypt is, you guessed it, Moses.

Moses is none too keen on the plan and he starts to come up with reasons why he’s not the right man for the job. Reason one being he thinks it very unlikely the Israelites will believe him if he comes strutting back home with some story about being appointed by God to lead them out of Egypt. What if they ask him God’s name, just to make sure he’s not working for one of the less reliable deities? This is where God delivers one of his signature lines, a real corker that the author delivers in all upper case,

“I AM WHO I AM. Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.”

One must admit it is simple, catchy, memorable, especially when delivered in the sort of rolling, thunderous voice one would associate with burning but not consumed bushes. Give it a try and see how it rolls off the tongue. “I AM WHO I AM!” See? Sounds impressive. But then if you step back and reread that bit it’s unclear as to whether the name is supposed to be “I AM” or “I AM WHO I AM”, if you see what I mean. But Moses, eyes closed, feet warm, and possibly wondering what the sheep are getting up to while he’s being distracted, likely doesn’t have the presence of mind at the time to inquire further. Fortunately, God gives him more to work with.

“Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.”

That should answer any questions the elders back home have about the authenticity of his commission.

God repeats his milk and honey promise and tells Moses that he wants him to go to Pharaoh and ask for permission to take the Israelites three days’ journey out of town to worship God. God says that Pharaoh is unlikely to agree to this unless he is “compelled by a mighty hand”. He promises to supply said mighty hand “and strike Egypt with all my wonders that I will perform in it; after that he will let you go.” And then he says the Israelites should knock on the doors of their Egyptian neighbors and ask for any gold, silver, and fine fabrics laying around the house and expect it all to be forked over with no objections because “I will bring this people into such favor with the Egyptians.”  

(Possible Spoiler Alert and Personal Quibble) We all know that the “wonders” God is alluding to is a series of plagues involving frogs, boils, locusts and other inconveniences that will affect not just Pharaoh but darned near everyone in Egypt. So why in the world would the Egyptian people cheerfully hand over their family heirlooms to the folks they could with complete justification blame for their water turning to blood and all their firstborn children dying? Or does “into such favor” mean something other than what it sounds like to us, like “The Egyptians will give you anything, just to see the backside of your donkey heading into the East.”?

Moses still isn’t crazy about being recruited into the job, and Chapter 4 opens with him once again trying to beg out of the job.

“But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me,”

God, who I’m thinking isn’t too happy at what could be considered a mild form of insubordination, keeps his cool and has Moses do a couple of simple things with his staff and his hands that turn into nifty feats of legerdemain. “See?” he says. “With me on your side you can turn your staff into a snake and back to a staff, and your hand a nasty leprous white and back to glowing with health. That’ll convince ‘em. And if all else fails, I’ve got this one where you turn water into blood. No, you don’t need to do it now, but trust me, it never fails.” (I’m paraphrainge)

But Moses isn’t done trying to weasel out. He claims a lack of eloquence, saying he is “slow of speech and slow of tongue” (not a paraphrase). God, getting just a little testy at this resistance, reminds Moses who he is speaking with. “Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.” (Also, not a paraphrase. I think it should be pretty easy to spot the difference by now, so these parenthetical asides are being retired unless I think one is really necessary.)

Moses isn’t ready to give up yet and he just flat out says,

“O, my Lord, please send someone else.”

But once God sets his mind on bringing someone into the company, he’s usually stubborn about getting his way, so he tells Moses he can have his brother Aaron, a charter member of the Goshen Chapter of Toastmasters, do the actual public speaking for him. God will tell Moses what to tell Aaron to say and that should be the end of the discussion, don’t make me have to step out of this bush, if you know what I mean?

Moses takes the assignment. He asks his employer/father-in-law for some personal time to visit the extended family in Egypt, and heads out with his wife, their sons (notice the plural here, so Gershom now has at least one sibling), a donkey, and, of course, his magical staff, and turns toward Egypt. On the way he gets some additional details from God about what to expect. For one thing, he should expect Pharaoh to be difficult about the whole thing and the reason Pharaoh is going to be difficult is because God will “harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.” When this happens, Moses (through brother Aaron I suppose) is to tell Pharaoh that since God considers the Israelites his firstborn, if Pharaoh won’t let them go God will kill Pharaoh’s firstborn son.

This is what I like to call Old Testament diplomacy.

Then, in verses 24-26, we have a little scene that, although I’ve read it over more than a few times, I just don’t quite get what is going on. Here it is verbatim. See what you think.

24  On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the LORD met him and tried to kill him. 25  But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!”  26  So he let him alone. It was then she said, “A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.”

So God tried to kill Moses and was thwarted by a foreskin? Or was it Gershom (or Gershom’s brother?) God snuck up on with bad intent because he hadn’t been circumcised yet and Zipporah took away his motive just in time? What’s all this about being a bridegroom of blood? And what was going through Moses’ mind when his wife was dabbing at his feet with a freshly amputated foreskin?

Let’s wrap up this chapter.

Chapter 4 ends with Moses meeting up with Aaron and the two of them making their case for abandoning the Land o’ Goshen to the elders and general population, who find their arguments convincing.

 

Next up I will try my darndest to get us through the plagues in one piece.

 

 

*The Mission at Santa Barbara. Pretty, isn't it? There's a nice rose garden nearby.

 

 

 

Exodus Pt. 1

 

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It's All About Moses

Quick reminder. If you want to catch up on Genesis, just click on the link to the right and it'll take you to all thirteen installments. It may sound like a lot, but honestly it's an easier read than the source material.

When last we met, Joseph had just passed away, but before he did he anticipated quite correctly that the cushy Goshen shepherding gig couldn't last forever--after all they were just renters--and so he made the Israelites swear that when they picked up and moved, they would put him in a nice piece of rolling luggage and take him with them.

    And with that we move on to Exodus, Chapter 1, which begins with a real grab the reader sort of opener. In other words, we are once again told who the sons of Jacob are, all twelve of them, just in case we hadn't been taking notes earlier. And then we are told that they had done the fruitful and multiplying thing and had filled the land and prospered and generally were doing alright for themselves in The Land O' Goshen.

    But as any good writer will tell you, a story can't just have good times in it, a bit of hardship and conflict are needed. A reversal of fortunes is a good way to go if you want to keep the reader's interest. Sure enough, in verse 8 we learn that the Pharaoh who had been chums with Joseph had either died or retired, or ran up against term limits, because "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph." That can't be good for the people of Goshen, aka the Israelites, aka the Hebrews**.

    The new Pharaoh riles up the natives against the renters and pretty soon things get to be pretty warm for the Israelites. Pharaoh sends taskmasters who impose tasks and bitter service in mortar and brick and other kinds of difficult, unfulfilling work. Ruthlessness is involved. The Pharaoh even tries to get the two Hebrew midwives in charge of all of the Goshen births to kill baby boys, but they outsmart him by simply not doing it. So he modifies his order to be more specific: all baby boys are to be tossed in the Nile.

    This brings us to Chapter 2 and another one of those Famous Stories from the Bible They Teach in Sunday School, kind of: Moses and the Bullrushes and the Pharaoh's Daughter. Actually, I didn't see anything about bullrushes specifically, but it seems to me that's the way it is presented in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and I love that book, so I probably just filled that word in myself. In any case, we learn that Moses' unnamed mother, who is married to an unnamed man of the house of Levi, hides her newborn son, also currently unnamed, for three months, apparently hoping the Pharaoh will ease up on the whole toss 'em in the river decree, but when that doesn't happen she tries to abide by the spirit, if not the letter, of his decree by fashioning a fairly watertight little basket for her little boy and setting it amongst the reeds in the water. It would be nice to know what she was hoping to accomplish with this, but as so often seems to be the case here we are left to either speculate or shrug and move on.

    As we all remember from Sunday School, Pharaoh's daughter happens to come down to that section of the river for a bit of aquatic recreation at just the right time, and as she is splashing about under the watchful eyes of her attendants, she spots the floating basket, hears the plaintive cries of the abandoned infant, and, being a young woman of tender heart, decides not to leave him bobbing among the reeds, even though she correctly surmises that said infant is one of the Hebrew tikes her daddy has been trying really hard to eliminate lately. And wouldn't you know it, Moses' aunt on his daddy's side, who had been lingering around to see how things would develop after his mama placed him in the water, approaches Pharaoh's daughter brave as can be and offers to find a suitable Goshen woman to nurse the child until he is old enough to, you know, join the Pharaoh's household, which is where all of us, even in Sunday School, should have been shaking our heads and muttering "like that's a good idea." Of course, the woman she has in mind to do the nursing is her sister-in-law, Moses' birth mama.

    Pharaoh's daughter, anxious to get back to paddling around in the refreshing and male child strewn waters of the Nile, agrees to this plan in verse nine. In verse 10 we read, "When the child grew up, she (meaning his actual birth mother) brings him to Pharaoh's daughter, just as promised, and she takes him as her son. She names him Moses, "because" she said, "I drew him out of the water." Whether "grew up" means on solid food now or a young fellow in his late teens or something in between we don't know.

    No word on how the sudden introduction of a new member of the family is explained to Pharaoh. But maybe he just had other things on his mind at the time and was too distracted to notice an extra place set at the family dinner table.

    Before you know it, Moses, all grown up now, gets a closeup view of the forced labor still being imposed on the Hebrews, which are described as "one of his kinsfolk", so it seems either Pharaoh's daughter has clued him into his heritage or he has surreptitiously subscribed to Ancestry.com but somehow he knows he is adopted and. So when he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew it upsets him and he kills the Egyptian and then buries him in the sand, which seems to me to be a temporary sort of fix, but maybe I watch too many murder mystery shows. Then, the next day he takes another walk and sees two Hebrews quarreling and he tries to settle things between them. But the Hebrew who was in the wrong (we're told) tells Moses to get lost or he'll tell the authorities about the body in the sand, which proves my point about the incompatibility of sand and corpses when discretion is wanted.

    Moses leaves town. Already being in Egypt he can't escape to Egypt, so he goes to Midian, which is I have no idea where. But wherever it is the local priest has seven daughters and one of them, name of Zipporah, looks pretty good to Moses and before you know it Moses and Zipporah are wed. They have a son in short order and name him Gershom.

    Time passes and by and by the nasty Pharaoh dies, but the oppression of the Israelites doesn't get any better. So they try to get God's attention, and, as we come to the end of Chapter 2, "God remembered*** his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them."

  In Exodus Pt. 2 we will try to make our way through a burning bush, learn what God likes to be called (sort of), and introduce the character of Aaron, brother to Moses. There may even be a magical staff and some bricks.

*Horseshoe Bend by Page, Arizona.

**If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time the term "Hebrew" is used. If I am mistaken it is not the first time. Anyway, "Hebrew" and "Israelite" seem to be interchangeable at this point.

***I realize being God is the ultimate multitasking job, but he does seem to leave "His People" hanging for long periods of time before he remembers them.

Reset

 

If I Might Try Your Patience...

...in the service of what I hope will be The Greater Good.

    As the well under a dozen of you who have been so kind as to follow our Reading The Bible adventure here so far may have noticed, I am a novice in the world of blogging. And as such I am trying to learn from my mistakes. Today I am trying to address Basic Organization.

    When I set out on this project, I quite foolishly thought that I would be able to devote one post to each of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, and all it took was Genesis to prove me wrong as wrong can be. Fourteen installments including one for "takeaways" for that one book, and it could have easily been twice that number if I very consciously hadn't tried to rein myself in.

    You are welcome.

    In any case, as the Pages started to pile up it seemed to me that they would easily get out of hand before we got to Lamentations or even Song of Solomon, which, by the way, I am very much looking forward to.

    And so, a new format is being introduced. Each installment will be a Post. Posts will be archived in Pages that will contain the accumulated installments for each book, so even with this change we're going to end up with at least sixty-six pages.

    If you decide you want to be alerted when a new installment is available all you need to do is to "follow" the blog. If you want to catch up or review, just find the page for the book you're interested in.

    Thank you for your understanding and support.

Welcome and What's Going On Here Anyway?

For quite some time I have been aware that if I want to consider myself anywhere close to being well read, which I do, I need to add more of the classics to my Yes, I've Read That One list. Not that I am completely lacking in that regard. Dickens, Twain, Hawthorne, Whitman, Thackeray, R.L. Stevenson, Austen, Steinbeck, Tolkien, Melville, Richard Armour (look him up, great stuff), Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Ibsen, David Foster Wallace, Harvard Lampoon--you get the idea--they have all been a part of my life for decades. But one classic, in fact the one that consistently takes the Top Spot when it comes to most copies in print every single time they take that particular census, is one I've only ever dipped into, the equivalent of a toe in the stream, never actually diving in to read cover to cover.

    This puts me in the vast majority of those who were raised in the Christian church, whether it be Mainstream Protestant (whatever that means), Roman Catholic, Evangelical, or Unitarian. It also potentially puts me, and those like me, at the mercy of folks who make it a point to present themselves as not only believers but well versed (no pun intended) in the content contained in the Bible. It also puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to truly understanding and appreciating the literature and art and music and history that has been shaped in ways big and small, positively and negatively by The Good Book.

    So here I am, ready to remedy the situation, approaching my task in the best way I know how, as a reader of a book that so many have and continue to maintain contains the indisputable Truth. But I'm not interested in pursuing all manner of outside references to see what scholars current and past have had to say about this book, I'm going to read it in it's most universally accepted contemporary version and see what, if it has anything, to say to me without outside interference. My entries here will be my honest impressions of what I am reading.

    My original intention was to create an entry per book, but that got kiboshed at the starting gate when it became obvious that Genesis was going to need more than one entry. Way more. So let's just say that each book will get however many entries I feel I need and each installment should be easily readable by most folks in ten minutes or less. My source text will be the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, which I understand is as close as we're gonna get to a universally accepted version of this oft translated/revised/reworked Literal Word of God and which besides is the version I happen to have on hand. If I do find myself inspired to add another version I can tell you it won't be the one currently being hawked by a certain combover for $59.99 + S&H.

    I am not approaching this project with any premeditated motives outside of intellectual enlightenment. I'm not looking for some sort of reawakening of my faith, but neither will I reject any movement in that direction. I'm also not looking to discredit or debunk. It is not my intention to take a strictly satirical, wise-ass or "oh yeah?" skeptics approach, although readers here will soon learn that my writing style can lean in the direction of wise-ass at times. If what I read sends me in a particular direction that's the direction I will go. I want to read it as a book, recognizing that it has a history like no other book, but as a book nevertheless. If anything, I will be trying to come at it from a sort of editorial point of view, making believe I have a late draft in hand and the author(s) has solicited my feedback.

Within each entry I may try to address certain topics. Like...

• How long is it? For example, Genesis, which I am currently completing my notes on, is somewhere around 35,000 words, most of them being names of the descendants of Ham. 
• Is there an overall theme or structure that is easily discernible? For example, Genesis seems to be an interminable but frustratingly incomplete genealogy going from Adam to Joseph, son of Jacob of Ladder fame.
• Does it tell a good story or stories?
• Do the stories make sense?
• Are the characters interesting?
• Are they role models?
• Are they scoundrels?
• Would I lock the door if I saw them coming down the street?
• Do they have cool or maybe unfortunate names?
• Does it contain any obvious contradictions, either within itself or with anything that has come before? Obviously I won't be able to spot contradictions that pop up later, so if something in Habakkuk contradicts something in Song of Solomon I'll do my best to catch it, but if the issue is with something coming up in Haggai I'm out of luck. Until I get to Haggai, that is, if I miss it then that's my bad.
• Did it make me laugh? Or cry? Or throw my hands up in utter despair? Or reach for something easier to make heads or tails of, like Finnegan's Wake?
• Do I have any completely subjective quibbles with punctuation?
• Did I learn anything/become inspired to be a better person because of what I read?
• On the other side of the coin, did it convince me (profoundly but temporarily) that humankind is, and always will be, a lost cause, and so what's the point of picking up Max's poop when we take a walk?
• But mostly I will address what the text inspires me to address.

    I make no promises as to how much time will elapse between entries, as I have no way of knowing how much time and effort each of these 39 (Old Testament) + 27 (New Testament) books will take. But come heck or high water (a nod to Noah) I intend to get through the whole thing and issue reports along the way. If you stick with me maybe both of us will learn something, who knows? If it's just me, I will still count it a victory as I have every intention of learning something about this most central and consequential of volumes.