2. moses, prince of egypt

The Bible with Dr. Bill Creasy

Exodus

Lesson #2

Moses, Prince of Egypt

(Exodus 1: 1 -22)

Review

In Lesson #1 we examined ancient Egypt, in particular the Egypt that is the setting for the Book of Exodus. Egypt from the time of Joseph until the time of Moses was a dazzling culture, the most advanced and prosperous civilization on the face of the earth.

Based on internal consistency with the overall biblical narrative, we set the date of the Exodus at 1446 B.C., squarely within Egypts 18th Dynasty, and we identified the dramatis personae of the story as:

Thutmose I (1526-1508)the Pharaoh who drowned the Hebrew babies;

Princess Hatshepsut (1504-1482)the Princess who saved Moses.

Thutmose III (1482-1450 B.C.)the Pharaoh of the persecution;

Amunhotep II (1450-1425 B.C.)the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

Review, cont.

In addition, we examined the historicity of the Exodus as it is presented in Scripture, recognizing that although the story is set at a particular time and place in history with real people as primary characters in the story, the Exodus is first and foremost a work of literature, the story of redemption writ on an grand scale, the story of Gods interaction with humanity as viewed through the lens of a living faith tradition.

Preview

In Lesson #2 we witness the plight of the enslaved Israelites and we meet Moses, one of the great characters of Scripture. Born to a Levite couple, Pharaohs daughter saves him from the infanticide ordered by her father. Ironically, Moses is adopted by Pharaohs daughter and brought up in the household of Pharaoh, a prince of Egypt.

In Acts 7: 22, Stephen tells us that Moses was educated [in] all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in his words and deeds. Moses had been groomed and positioned for leadership in Egypt, perhaps as a great statesman, politician or general.

Preview, cont.

Then at 40 years old, in a moment of righteous indignation and astoundingly poor judgment, Moses throws it all away by killing an Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew slave. His crime discovered, Moses flees Egypt, a wanted criminal, running all the way east to the backside of the desert in the land of Midian. There he goes off the grid for the next 40 years, working as a shepherd, the lowliest of occupations.

Psalm 90 is ascribed to Moses, and in it he writes: Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty, if we are strong (Psalm 90: 10). To any objective reader Moses has reached the end of his life, a total failure.

Exodus 1: 1-7

[And] these are the names of the sons of Israel who, accompanied by their households, entered into Egypt with Jacob:

Ruben, Simeon, Levi and Judah;

Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin;

Dan and Naphtali; Gad and Asher.

The total number of Jacobs direct descendants was seventy. Joseph was already in Egypt.

Now Joseph and all his brothers and that whole generation died. But the Israelites where fruitful and prolific. They multiplied and became so very numerous that the land was filled with them.

Exodus 1: 1-7, cont.


Exodus begins in the Hebrew language with, [And] these are the names of the sons of Israel . . .. Two things are important about this beginning. First, [And] these are the names . . . suggests that Exodus continues Genesis; it is the next chapter in an on-going story; it is notfrom a literary perspectivea separate, independent book. The first word in the Hebrew text is And (the particle waw), suggesting a direct, unbroken continuation of the Genesis narrative.



Second, the Hebrew phrase benay Israel means literally the sons of Israel. Many modern translations render this phrase the Israelites, missing the subtle distinction that the people who come out of Egypt are Gods sons who must be taught by their father and who must grow in their relationship with him. Throughout the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy), Gods covenant people are consistently called the sons of Israel. As Robert Alter points out in The Five Books of Moses (p. 307), the masculine plural form of the Hebrew ben (the word used here) also means children, but it is clear here and in Genesis 46 that only the male offspring make up the seventy who emigrate to Egypt; hence, the correct translation sons. Nevertheless, the connotation of children suggests that the Israelites are in the early stage of their relationship with God and that they have much to learn as they grow up.



Ruben, Simeon, Levi and Judah; (4)

Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin; (3)

Dan and Naphtali; Gad and Asher.(4)

Notice how the eleven sons are listed in two sets of four, with a set of three in the middle, giving a formal symmetry to the list. Nicely done!

The total number of Jacobs direct descendants was seventy.

Literally, And all these persons springing from the loins of Jacob were seventy persons . . .. Springing from the loins is, as Robert Alter points out, a euphemistic metonymy for testicles. The imagery is extremely vivid and very earthy, ending with the symbolic number 70, a number suggesting Jacobs prodigious fertility, resulting in fulfillment and completion.


. . . the total number of Jacobs direct descendants was seventy. Joseph was already in Egypt.

Joseph was already in Egypt takes us back to Genesis 37: 1 50: 26, the Jacob/Joseph story, the concluding panel of the Genesis triptych, reinforcing the continuity of the narrative introduced with the opening [And] these are the names of the sons of Israel . . . in verse 1.




Literally, And Joseph died, and all his brothers with him, and all that generation. When we left Joseph at the end of Genesis, we left him alone in a coffin in Egypt. Here, his brothers and all that generation join him in death. Mentioning the death of Joseph here links back to the last phrase in Genesis, an example of resumptive repetition, in which after an interruption of narrative continuity, the narrative is resumed by repeating the phrase where the interruption began.




We have already alluded to Jacobs prodigious fertility in verse 3. Here, we might translate more literally: And the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land [same Hebrew word as the earth in Genesis 1] was filled with them.

Exodus 1: 7 echoes Genesis 1, the creation story: just as God created all that is in Genesis 1, so he creates the Israelite nation in Exodus 1. As Jacob was prodigiously fertile, so are the sons of Israel prodigiously fertile.

In one deft and carefully designed movement, Exodus 1: 1-7 reaches back into Genesis 1, ripples all the way through Genesis 50: 26 (the last phrase in the last verse of Genesis) and produces an extraordinarily tight narrative continuity between the two books.

This is exquisite craftsmanship on the part of our author!

If we look back on Genesis 12-50 (the main body triptych: the Abraham/Isaac; Isaac/Jacob; and Jacob/Joseph stories) we find that our narrative draws uniquely human portraits of each character, very specific in detail, tone and texture. The chapters read in many ways like a riveting, melodramatic novel.

In Exodus these precisely drawn characters expand into a generic people numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Once again, as Robert Alter observes:

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.

(The Five Books of Moses, p. 300)

Pharaoh morphs from a unique individual in the Joseph story to the generic king of Egypt in Exodus, the archetypical evil king who kills babies.

Two virtuous midwives tend to legions of childbearing Hebrew women who are described as animals who quickly squat down and give birth, even before the midwives arrive.

Moses, the future hero, is threatened with death by the evil king and is saved by being hidden and then rescued and reared by a virtuous woman (recall the same motif in Matthew when the evil king Herod orders the killing of all the babies in Bethlehem. Jesus is taken to Egypt where he is hidden, then rescued after Herods death and raised by a virtuous woman, Mary).

Examples

We see such folkloric parallels to the Exodus story in literature as early as 2300 B.C., in the legend about the great Sargon, king of Akkad:

Sargon the Mighty, king of Akkad am I.

My mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not . . .

My mother, the high priestess, conceived me, in secret she bore me.

She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.

She cast me into the river which rose not [over] me.

The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water.

Akki, the drawer of water, [took me] as his son [and] reared me.

While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me [her] love.

And for [many] years I exercised kingship.

(ANET, p. 119)

Examples, cont.

In Exodus even God himself morphs from the anthropomorphic figure in Genesis, who walks in the Garden with Adam and Eve and has dinner and a debate with Abraham, into the mysterious figure of I am who speaks from within a burning bush and is wreathed in smoke and fire atop a thunderous and incandescent Mt. Sinai.

Unlike in Genesis where God walks among his people, in Exodus God is remote, mysterious and enormously powerful, wreaking havoc on Egypt, slaying all the firstborn of the Egyptians and warning the Israelites not to approach his mountain or else he will break out against them (19: 24) and they will all perish instantly.

As the main body of Genesis is built on the tripartite structure of the Abraham/Isaac, Isaac/Jacob, Jacob/Joseph stories, so is Exodus built on three thematically defined spaces:

Egypt as a place of bondage

(Its space is associated with water: the central waterway of the Nile, where Moses is saved and the ten plagues begin; and the Red Sea, through which the Israelites must pass and in which the Egyptian army is drowned.);

2)The Wilderness

(Its space is associated with parched dryness and fire: sand and jagged rock formations make up its landscape, where the people desperately thirst for water; Mt. Sinai, spewing divine fire; the pillar of fire that protects and guides the Israelites through their wilderness wanderings); and

3)The Promised Land

(Its space is associated with milk and honey: situated beyond well-watered Egypt and the burning, fiery desert, it is a Land that remains just over the horizon, a Utopia that is not fully realized until Revelation 21-22, the conclusion of our Scriptural narrative).

The first words of Exodus[And] these are the namesis the Hebrew title of the book, Shmot (= Names). Exodus is the title used by St. Jerome in his fifth-century A.D. Latin translation, and it is derived from the Greek words ek, meaning out and hodos, meaning road: out-road, or Exodus. So, let us begin our journey!

Egypt at the Time of Exodus

Land of Goshen

Via Maris

(Main Trade Route into Egypt)

The Hebrews came into Egypt during

the Hyksos period, the time of foreign chiefs.

They have now multiplied prodigiously

and they occupy the land of Goshen.

If Egypt is invaded again, the invaders will come

from the north, down the Via Maris, and they will

encounter the enslaved Hebrews, who will

doubtless support the invaders.

As Exodus opens, the Hebrews have

become a serious national security threat

to Egypt.

Birthing Stool, Kom Ombo Temple, Egypt.

Photography by Ana Maria Vargas

William Blake. The Compassion of Pharaohs Daughter (pen, ink and watercolor over pencil), 1805. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

She named him Moses

We read in Scripture that when Pharaohs daughter found the child She named him Moses; for she said, I drew him out of the water (Exodus 2: 10).

Moses is not a Hebrew name, it is Egyptian, meaning son of the water. In Egyptian hieroglyphs a wavy line means water, and it is pronounced moo, while the figure of a duck means son of, and it is pronounced, sa. Put together, the two wordsmoo-sagive us Moses, son of the water.

The three elements here are: 1) the sun disk representing Ra the sun god; 2) the duck, which means son of; and 3) the bowl, representing the land. Translated, the hieroglyphs mean son of Ra, master of the land.

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Here is an example of hieroglyphs taken from the Philae Temple in Aswan, Egypt using both words.

The four elements here are: 1) the snake, meaning his majesty; 2) the triangle, give; 3) the wavy lines, water; and 4) the bowl, the land. Translated, the hieroglyphs mean, Give to his majesty, master of the land, the purified waters.

Photography by Ana Maria Vargas

Geography of Egypt

Sahara Desert

Sinai

Peninsula

Nile River

Red Sea

Mediterranean Sea

Midian

Questions for discussion and thought

Although written as a separate, independent work, Exodus is tightly linked to Genesis, producing a single, continuous narrative. How is this accomplished?

How does Genesis foreshadow the enslavement of the Hebrews in Exodus?

What elements in Exodus characterize the work as folktale?

Exodus 2 contains a wonderful example of irony. What is it?

At the end of Exodus 2, how would you characterize Moses?

Copyright 2014 by William C. Creasy

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2. moses, prince of egypt

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