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Exodus
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Exodus is the second book of the Jewish Torah and of the Christian Old Testament. It tells how Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Mountain of God Sinai. There Yhwh, through Moses, gives the Israelites their laws and enters into a covenant with them, by which he will give them the land of Canaan in return for their faithfulness. The book ends with the construction of the Tabernacle.
According to tradition, Exodus and the other four books of the Torah were written by Moses in the latter half of the 2nd millennium BC.
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Exodus is the second book of the Jewish Torah and of the Christian Old Testament. It tells how Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Mountain of God Sinai. There Yhwh, through Moses, gives the Israelites their laws and enters into a covenant with them, by which he will give them the land of Canaan in return for their faithfulness. The book ends with the construction of the Tabernacle.
According to tradition, Exodus and the other four books of the Torah were written by Moses in the latter half of the 2nd millennium BC. Modern biblical scholars see it reaching its final textual form around 450 BC.
Title
The English name of the book is derived from the , exodos, "departure"; its name in the Hebrew Bible is ???? "Shemot".
Summary
Bondage in Egypt
Pharaoh, fearful of the Israelites' numbers, orders that all newborn Hebrew (Israelite) boys be thrown into the Nile. A Levite woman saves her baby by setting him adrift on the river in an ark of bulrushes. Pharaoh's daughter finds the child, and names him Moses, and brings him up as her own. But Moses is aware of his Hebrew origins, and one day, when grown, kills an Egyptian overseer who is beating a Hebrew man, and has to flee into Midian . While herding the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro on Mount Horeb, Moses encounters Yahweh in a burning bush, who tells him to return to Egypt and lead the Israelites into Canaan, the land promised to Abraham.
Moses returns to Egypt, and God instructs him to appear before Pharaoh and inform him of God's demand that he let God's people go. Moses and his brother Aaron do so, but Pharaoh refuses. God causes a series of plagues to strike Egypt, but Pharaoh does not relent. God instructs Moses to institute the Passover sacrifice among the Israelites, and kills all the firstborn children and livestock throughout Egypt. Pharaoh then agrees to let the Israelites go. Moses explains the meaning of the Passover: it is for Israel's salvation from Egypt, so that the Israelites will not be required to sacrifice their own sons, but to redeem them.
Journey through the wilderness to Sinai
The Exodus begins. The Israelites, 600,000 men plus women and children and a mixed multitude,with their flocks and herds, set out for the mountain of God.
Pharaoh pursues the Israelites,and Yahweh destroys Pharaoh's army at the crossing of the Red Sea. The Israelites celebrate their deliverance with the Song of the Sea. They continue their journey, but immediately begin to complain about the lack of food and speak with longing of Egypt, and so Yahweh sends them quail and manna. At Rephidim, he provides water miraculously from the rock of Meribah. The Amalekites attack the Israelites, and Yahweh orders an eternal war against them. The Israelites arrive at the mountain of God, where Moses' father-in-law Jethro visits Moses; at his suggestion Moses appoints judges over Israel.
At Sinai: Covenant and laws
The Israelites arrive at the mountain of God. Yahweh asks whether they will agree to be his people, and the people accept. The people gather at the foot of the mountain, and with thunder and lightning, fire and clouds of smoke, and the sound of trumpets, and the trembling of the mountain, God appears on the peak, and the people see the cloud and normally means voice, but a few verses earlier (Exodus 19:16) it has been used to mean "thunder", in the context of the thunder and lightning from the mountain. It is therefore not clear exactly what "beqol" means here. The implication of Exodus 20:18-19 is that the people hear only thunder and trumpets and for this reason appoint Moses as their mediator with God: "And the people saw the thunder and the lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking...And they said [to Moses], "You speak with us, so we may listen, but let God not speak with us or we will die." Some translations therefore have "thunder" instead of "voice". Moses and Aaron are told to ascend the mountain. God pronounces the Ten Commandments (the Ethical Decalogue) in the hearing of all Israel.
Moses goes up the mountain into the presence of God, who pronounces the Covenant Code, (a detailed code of ritual and civil law), and promises Canaan to the Israelites if they obey. Moses descends and writes down Yahweh's words and the people agree to keep them. Yahweh calls Moses up the mountain together with Aaron and the elders of Israel, and they feast in the presence of Yahweh. Yahweh calls Moses up the mountain to receive a set of stone tablets containing the law, and he and Joshua go up, leaving Aaron in charge. Yahweh appears on the mountain "like a consuming fire" and calls Moses to go up, and Moses goes up the mountain.
Yahweh gives Moses instructions for the construction of the tabernacle so that God can dwell permanently amongst the Israelites, as well as the priestly vestments, the altar and its appurtenances, the ritual to be used to ordain the priests, and the daily sacrifices to be offered. Aaron is appointed as the first High Priest, and the priesthood is to be hereditary in his line. Then Yahweh gives to Moses the two stone tablets containing these instructions, written by God's own finger.
Aaron makes a golden calf, which the people worship. God informs Moses and threatens to kill them all, but relents when Moses intercedes for them. Moses comes down from the mountain, smashes the tablets in anger, and commands the Levites to massacre the disobedient. Yahweh commands Moses to make two new tablets on which He will personally write the words that were on the first tablets. Moses ascends the mountain, God dictates the Ten Commandments (the Ritual Decalogue), and Moses writes them on the tablets.
Moses descends from the mountain, and his face is transformed, so that from that time onwards he has to hide his face with a veil. Moses assembles the Israelites and repeats to them the commandments he has received from Yahweh, which are to keep the Sabbath and to construct the Tabernacle. "And all the construction of the Tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting was finished, and the children of Israel did according to everything that Yahweh had commanded Moses", and from that time Yahweh dwelt in the Tabernacle and ordered the travels of the Israelites.
Composition
There is no single, universally accepted theory regarding the origins of Exodus; instead various theories are currently advanced placing it in a variety of different periods ranging from the 2nd millennium BC to the period after 300 BC. Jews and Christians have traditionally understood the Torah to have been written by Moses. The most well-regarded scholarly theory, the documentary hypothesis, describes Exodus as comprising three sources, combined c 400 BC.
The traditional belief in both Jewish and Christian circles was that Moses was the author of all five books of the Torah. This theory is still advanced by Orthodox Jewish and evangelical Christian scholars but is not considered viable by mainline scholars.
According to the documentary hypothesis, the Yahwist source (J) provides the main narrative of Exodus, supplemented by the Elohist (E). The priestly editors (c 400 BC) reworked the JE source and added substantial material, such as the description of the tabernacle in chapters 35-40.
19th century biblical criticism concluded that the Torah was composed of four originally independent documents, known as the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source. Of these the Elohist is identified as uniquely responsible for the episode of the golden calf, and the Priestly source as uniquely responsible for the chiastic, and monotonous, instructions for creating the tabernacle, vestments, and ritual objects, and the account of their creation. The poetic Song of the sea, and the prose Covenant Code, both in Exodus, were identified as smaller independent works embedded in the main documents. In 1878 Julius Wellhausen, in his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, argued that the Priestly source was the last to be composed, in the 6th century BC, and his formulation became the consensual view.
The southern Jahwist source promotes Aaron, the progenitor of the southern, Aaronite priesthood. Meanwhile, it portrays Moses in a less flattering light. The northern Elohist denigrates Aaron as instigating worship of the golden calf. It also includes the Covenant Code, incorporated from an earlier source.
Scholars disagree over whether the sources were written documents. Documentary approaches such as Wellhausen's classic formulation see it as an act of redaction, in which an editor (usually seen as Ezra) took the four sources - a 9th century Yahwist, 8th century Elohist, and 6th century Priestly source (the Deuteronomist is not present in Exodus) - and combined them with minimal changes. Thus Richard Elliott Friedman's The Bible with Sources Revealed (2003) is a modern documentary hypothesis more or less identical with Wellhausen but accepting Yehezkel Kaufmann's dating of the Priestly source to the early 7th century. By contrast, John Van Seters and Rolf Rendtorff see the Torah as a process of progressive supplementation in which generations of authors added to and edited each other, although Van Seters sees the final author as a late, 5th century, Yahwist, Rendtorff as a Priestly school. R. N. Whybray, whose The Making of the Pentateuch (1987) was a seminal critique of the methodology and assumptions of the documentary hypothesis, has proposed that the creation of Exodus and the Torah was the action of a single author, working from a host of fragments. The only areas of agreement between these views is that the terms "Yahwist", "Priestly" and "Deuteronomist" do have some meaning in terms of identifiable and differentiable content and style, and that the final Torah emerged in the 5th century BC.
A minority view is the so-called Biblical minimalism school, which holds that the Torah is a very late composition, created in the 4th century BC or even later.
Themes
The central theme of Exodus is Israel's relationship with God: initiated by divine will (God initiates the action at each stage, from the Burning Bush to the epiphany at Sinai), it is to be maintained by their faithfulness to the covenant began with Noah and expanded with Abraham in Genesis, and now brought to a climax at Sinai.
Exodus also shows the importance of genealogy in the Tanakh: Israel is elected for salvation because it is the firstborn son of the Lord, descended though Shem and Abraham to the chosen line of Israel/Jacob. (The theme of election by birth will later narrow still further, to the line of David, the descendant of Judah).
The goal of the divine plan as revealed in Exodus is a return to man's state in Eden, so that the Lord could dwell with the Israelites as he had with Adam and Eve: in Exodus, he dwells with Israel through the medium of the Ark and Tabernacle, which together form a model of the universe. Israel is thus the guardian and also the object of God's plan for mankind. That so much of the book (chapters 25-31, 35-40) is spent describing the plans of the Tabernacle, demonstrates the importance it played in the life of the Israelites. It was God's regular, permanent means of being with them, and gave them communion with him.
See also
- The Exodus
- Moses
- Tabernacle
- Weekly Torah portions in Exodus: Shemot, Va'eira, Bo, Beshalach, Yitro, Mishpatim, Terumah, Tetzaveh, Ki Tisa, Vayakhel, and Pekudei
- Film adaptations of the Book of Exodus
External links
Online versions and translations of Exodus
Jewish translations
- (Jewish Publication Society translation)
- Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan's translation and commentary at Ort.org
- translation with Rashi's commentary at Chabad.org
- (Original Hebrew - English at Mechon-Mamre.org)
Christian translations
Other links
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