Essentials of Exodus - Lesson 1

01 Ess Exodus-Imes

I'm Dr. Carmen Imes, and I am Associate Professor of Old Testament at Biola University. My main area of research is the book of Exodus. I've been writing a commentary on Exodus for the past six years, which is almost finished, and I am so excited to share with you some of what I think are the biggest insights that have come to me as I've immersed myself in this book.

I actually wrote my master's thesis and my doctoral dissertation on Exodus, so I've been immersed in the book of Exodus just about every day for the past 15 years or so, and I am not even a little bit tired of it. It's just a book that keeps on giving so many insights in this book. I'm convinced that it is just the heart of our faith and that if we want to know who we are or whose we are as Christians, if we want to know why we're here, we have to go back to Exodus because this is where God reveals himself most fully and in all of his redemptive and even punitive nature, and it's where we find out what it means to follow God and be part of his covenant community.

So I'm really excited that you're joining me for this course as we look at a book that's really been significant culturally, historically. It's been the center of major movements of faith. We're going to begin by talking just a little bit about the historical, cultural setting of the book of Exodus because you might be curious about it.

This is not where the real payoff comes. When we get into the theological themes, that's where it gets really fun, but just by way of orientation, there's two kinds of questions for us to answer regarding the date of the book of Exodus. One is when did the Exodus happen, and then when was the book written that describes the event that happened? The more I study the book of Exodus, the more convinced I am that these things happened, that the events described are plausible, that they fit in ancient Egyptian context, and I hope to show you some reasons why I think that's the case, but also that this book was not a much later reflection on something that happened a long, long time ago so that it takes on a kind of fictional mythic quality, but that it actually reflects some of the realities of an ancient context that wouldn't have been known later.

So if you were going to write a historical novel, you could research a time period, and you could try to tell the story so that it's plausible about an ancient context, but there are probably going to be things you get wrong, things that stick out, just like trying to film a movie, you know, an old Wild West movie, and then in one of the scenes you notice, oh, somebody's wearing a watch, and like they shouldn't have a watch yet, or something's a little bit out of place, and the more I study Exodus, the more I see that the vocabulary, the geography, the way of life, like all of these things actually fit in ancient Egyptian context. So there are two major theories about when the Exodus happened. So there's the 15th century date and the 13th century date, which is to say the 1400s or the 1200s BC, and scholars are divided on which is the better place to anchor the Exodus on the Egyptian calendar.

It's difficult because Pharaoh is never named in the book, and because there are place names, and there are realities that would kind of work in different periods. So one group of scholars who hold to the early date in the 1400s rely very heavily on a couple of verses in the Bible that give a length of time. So 1 Kings 6.1 talks about the length of time from the Exodus until the time that Solomon started building the temple.

And if you take that number at face value, that puts us back in the 1400s because it says in the 480th year after the Israelites came out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, the second month, he began to build the temple of Yahweh. That's pretty simply like we know when Solomon built the temple. We know when he lived.

So if you do the math backwards, it puts us at about 1440 BC. But some scholars are skeptical that this number should be taken as a journalistic or chronological number. And they think it's perhaps because it's such a nice round number, 480 years, that maybe this is a stylized number that's indicating 12 generations that are 40 years each.

And a typical generation is actually shorter than that. Most people start having babies before they turn 40. And so an actual generation would be closer to 25 years each.

So if you take those 12 generations and recalculate, it gives us a date in the 1200s. So there are evangelical scholars who have a high view of scripture that hold either of these dates. You'll find either one in study Bibles or in sermons.

And honestly, I don't think this is the most important question for us to solve. But I wanted to let you know that this is the debate out there. What I find most compelling about the Book of Exodus I've already mentioned.

Now, this is an AI-generated image. A friend of mine asked ChatGPT or some AI generator, give me a mural of the story of the Bible. And this is what AI generated.

And you can see right off the bat, there are things that don't belong in this picture. There's all kinds of things wrong with it. But the steamship, the truck, there are horses with five legs.

There are people whose faces aren't in the right places. There are lots of things wrong with it. But right off the bat, you see, oh, this can't be the story of the Bible because it's including machinery that wasn't invented yet.

And so, as I mentioned a moment ago, what's striking to me about Exodus is that I've yet to come across something in Exodus that actually doesn't fit the ancient context. So, the book itself does not tell us who wrote it. We have these two options of when it might have happened.

Clearly, some time has elapsed because we have things like genealogies that give the next generations in it. So, clearly, it's not like the blow-by-blow account where someone's taking notes as they're traveling through the desert. But it does seem to reflect that ancient context.

One of the things that we notice is that there are Egyptian words being used in the book of Exodus as loan words that only were used during a pretty narrow window of time in Egypt and then stopped being used. So, if somebody 800 years later was like, I really think we need an origin story. I want to make up a story that gives us a sense of coherence.

They would not have used the words that are in the book of Exodus because these are words that even Egyptians weren't using anymore. On the other hand, there are phrases used that then need to be explained, which indicates that either some time has elapsed or that somebody's updated the text later for the sake of readers who don't know these words anymore. So, as an example, at the end of Exodus 16, talking about manna, verse 35 says, the Israelites ate manna 40 years until they came to a land that was settled.

They ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan. That tells us this is being written after they get to Canaan, but probably when it's still vivid in their memories. But then it says, and Omer is one-tenth of a Nephi, which is interesting because it's letting us know that the people hearing this story as it's first being told already are using a different system of measurement.

They don't know what an Omer is anymore. You get that in Exodus, and then it drops out. That's not a unit of measurement used later.

So either we have somebody writing from Canaan pretty early on about the Exodus, or we have them writing early on, and then later somebody tucks in this little definition like, by the way, this is what this means for those of you who aren't familiar. So we have some clues. The book itself never tells us who wrote it.

Tradition says that Moses wrote it, and it's very plausible that Moses was literate because he grew up in an Egyptian household, being raised in the palace, probably trained in the literature of the Egyptians, as Stephen says in his sermon. We have at least two places where God tells Moses in the book to write something down, but we never have a place in the book where God tells Moses to sit down and tell the whole story. So if we're just going on the most conservative basis, just on what the text says, we're limited to saying, okay, this looks to be like an early text, an early story of what God did on Israel's behalf.

Moses was involved in writing at least some of it, and these stories seem to have been collected and codified pretty early on in Israel's history to tell the story of what God has done. Now, I want to share with you some of the really cool ways that the Bible reflects its Egyptian context, and the one reason why this is cool to me is because a lot of critical scholars will tell you that Exodus was invented some 800 years later as an origin story for Israel, and if it was invented years later, then you would expect the parallels, if there are any cultural parallels, you'd expect them to come from Mesopotamia rather than from Egypt, because 800 years later, they're engaging with the Assyrian empire or the Babylonian empire, and they're trying to define themselves over and against the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But what we find, in fact, is so many Egyptianisms in the book that just really seems striking to me.

So I had the opportunity to travel to Egypt two years ago, so this would be the like January of 2024, and I was blown away by how many things I saw on the walls of temples and tombs that reminded me of the book of Exodus. So I want to share some of those with you. This is a scene from my very favorite tomb.

Do you all have a favorite tomb? My favorite is the tomb of Req Muray. Req Muray was the vizier of a pharaoh in the Middle Kingdom, or sorry, New Kingdom Egypt. A vizier is like a prime minister.

It's like kind of running the nation and overseeing all its industries, and he was very proud of the fact that he oversaw so many different industries. So the walls of his tomb have these like banners of different occupations, and you can see it's like a comic book. Reading it, you can see what they did step by step to build furniture, to make statues, to build monuments, to tan leather, to make instruments, and to make mud bricks.

So this scene from the tomb of Req Muray shows the process of making mud bricks, and it matches what we find in the text of Exodus about what the Israelites were asked to do by Pharaoh. So here's a redrawing of this part of it so that you can see that they would draw water from a pond, they would pour it onto the dirt or mud, and they would stomp around through the mud to work in the piece, the bits of straw. Those bits of straw over time would begin decomposing, and as they decomposed, they would release a chemical into the mud that would make it harden and be like, instead of being crumbly, like when you're a kid and you build a mud sandcastle or whatever sandcastle or build something out of mud, it just crumbles after it dries.

But these bricks wouldn't crumble because they had the benefit of the chemical that was released from the straw. So after mushing it around for a while with their feet, they would carry the mud to the guy who puts it in a mold, and then they dump these molds out in the sun. So what you see here is not a stack of bricks, but rows of bricks laying out in the sun to dry.

Then they would be collected and stacked, and you can see a guy with a measuring instrument to see whether they've reached their quota for the day. And once they've reached their quota and they have their bricks, then those bricks are brought to a building project, and they're put to service in building a temple or a storage facility or whatever. Now the book of Exodus tells us that the Israelites built store cities for Pharaoh.

This is in chapter one, verse 11. And the word store cities is miskanot, which has a wonderful like sound play with the name of the tabernacle that they're later going to build. So Pharaoh asks them to build miskanot, and Yahweh asks them to build a mishkan.

So miskanot, mishkan has the same, almost the same consonants. But what are mishkanot? What are store cities? I got to see some of them from a hot air balloon. So this is an aerial view of the temple of the funerary temple of Ramses II.

And this is not where the Hebrews lived, so I'm not telling you that they built this particular storage area. But what you see in the center of the screen is the remnant of the temple itself, which was basically dismantled and the bricks were reused in other places. But all around it are these narrow, kind of long, narrow looking things that are actually dome-shaped ceilings on long storage facilities.

And the idea is that Pharaoh is going to store up as much stuff as he can before he dies in these storage containers, so that after he dies, his priests can continue to give him offerings and worship him, because after he dies, he will be deified. So this is probably what the Israelites are building up north, the equivalent of these storage facilities where grain and olive oil and different supplies are going to be stocked up so that Pharaoh can be worshipped as a god. And so the book of Exodus, we can already see here the shift that's going to happen.

They go from serving Pharaoh so that he can be worshipped, to serving Yahweh so that he can be worshipped in the tabernacle. So they're building for one master, and they begin building for another master at the end. So that storage facility in the upper right is right there in the picture.

So I did the hot air balloon tour, and then we got to go on foot and see it for ourselves and see what it is we were looking at. So many things. The papyrus basket that Moses' mother makes to put him in the water, the sandals that they wore, that's what papyrus plants were used for in Egypt, and the papyrus plants grew abundantly on the shores of the Nile.

One of my favorite things that happens in Exodus is that God continually refers to himself as being the one with the strong arm. And this is significant because if you search for this phrase, a strong hand or an outstretched arm, throughout the book, throughout the whole Bible, you find that it's almost only used in relation to Egypt and the defeat of Pharaoh. And Pharaoh has this as one of his favorite titles.

So for over 3,000 years, the favorite pose that pharaohs liked to be pictured in on their temple walls was having a mace in one hand, grabbing their enemies by the scruff of their hair, and getting ready to clobber them in the head. And this strong hand and outstretched arm is what shows Pharaoh's military might that he's conquered his enemies. And God says, let me show you who has a strong arm.

So he refers to himself as the strong armed one. In this particular picture on the left, there's actually a caption in hieroglyphs that says, Pharaoh, the strong armed one. So this is the title used for himself.

And God says, nope, that one's mine. So this is one of many, many things that God does in Exodus to show Pharaoh that he's really God and Pharaoh is not. Another place that in Egyptianism, I think, comes into play is during the plague narratives, it repeatedly speaks of Pharaoh's heart being hardened.

In our English Bibles, it talks about Pharaoh having a hard heart. In the Hebrew Bible, there's three different words used to describe what happens to Pharaoh's heart. And those three words, two of them are relatively synonymous.

They're almost the same meaning. And it's that his heart became firm. And the third is that his heart became heavy.

And translators don't render it like that in English, because if we talk about having a heavy heart, it means we're sad. But for an ancient Egyptian to have a heavy heart means they are guilty of injustice. So throughout the plagues, God is repeatedly strengthening or making firm Pharaoh's heart so that he has the courage to do what he's freely decided to do.

But then what he does to his own heart is make it heavy. And I think this is based on a very famous scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, known as the Weighing of the Heart. So in this scene, you see the man on the left, here's a drawing of it as well.

The man on the left, Hunefer, he's the dead guy. And after they died, Egyptians believed they would go through a kind of challenge course in the underworld, where they have to prove their fitness to live forever. And so as they go through this challenge course, they're demonstrating, I'm worthy to be alive forever in the underworld.

So this challenge is from Spell 125 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. So Hunefer's being led by one of the Egyptian gods, Anubis, the god of the underworld, the one with a jackal face. He's led up to a weighing scale.

And on the left side of the scale is his heart in a little jar. And on the right side is a feather representing Maat. And Maat is an Egyptian concept.

It's not a Hebrew word. It's an Egyptian word that means, it's hard to translate, but it means something like harmony, order, justice, peace. Like a king's job is to maintain Maat, to have a realm that is all in order where everyone can flourish and no injustice is being done.

But if you disrupt Maat, then your heart will weigh more than the feather. And that will mean you've been guilty of injustice. And if that is the case, the little creature that's kind of crouching on the other side of the scales on meat will gobble up your heart and then you'll be dead, dead.

So you don't get to live forever in the underworld. It's like the Egyptian concept of annihilationism. You'll just be dead, dead.

So there's another god there, Thoth, who's taking notes to see how he does on each of these challenges. So when God refers to Pharaoh's heart as having been made heavy or that Pharaoh made his heart heavy, in an Egyptian context, this is likely meant to communicate, look Pharaoh, you are making choices to contradict what Yahweh has decreed and what he desires. And by doing so, you are disrupting order and harmony and justice, and you are guilty and you will not have a happy ending.

So God is addressing Pharaoh in terms that would have made sense in that context. And we see this scene over and over again in tombs and on scrolls. This one is in a temple in a workman's village near the tombs of the pharaohs.

Another image we get in the early chapters of Exodus is the staff. So Moses throws his staff down and it becomes a snake. And both of those objects, the staff and the snake, are symbols of royal authority in Egypt.

So you can see this coffin of King Tut. He's holding a shepherd's staff and a flail across his chest. The shepherd's staff shows him to be a shepherd of his nation.

And then he has a snake right on his forehead symbolizing lower Egypt. So there's a snake and a vulture, and those symbolize upper and lower Egypt. So he rules over or shepherds the people of the snake.

And so for Moses to turn his staff into a snake, and then for his snake to gobble up the snake of Pharaoh is a way of saying, you don't have as much power as you think you do. God is really showing him to be illegitimate and to be weak in the face of Yahweh. Another set of really cool parallels is between the throne tent of Ramses II and the tabernacle.

Now, if you're a quick study, maybe you're thinking, wait, Ramses II, he would be the Pharaoh of the Exodus if it was a late date. And you'd be right. Ramses II would be the Pharaoh of the Exodus if it happened in the 1200s.

And so many scholars today are, there's been kind of a gradual shift of people moving from the early to the late date as we learn more and more about Ramses II, and we see chronologically how that fits. So I myself lean towards that late date. So if Ramses II is the Pharaoh of the Exodus, then it's very interesting that God asks his people to build a tabernacle that mimics the portable tent, throne tent, that Ramses uses when he goes out to war.

So this is an example comparing the proportions of the two tents. And we see this on lots of different walls. I think there are something like eight different places where Pharaoh has built a monument and he's drawn his war tent on the walls so that people don't forget how great he is.

If God is mimicking this, it's his way of saying, I'm the one who should be worshiped, not Ramses. Another set of parallels is with garden imagery in the temple. So you might be familiar with Israel's tabernacle and how there's pomegranates on the robe of the high priest.

There's cherubim, like these winged protectors on the walls. There's all kinds of sparkling gemstones, just like the gemstones in the Garden of Eden. There's this beautiful blue and purple cloth over their heads in the tabernacle with the lights of the lamp stand and the smell of incense.

Well, all of the temples of Egypt are designed like gardens. And so garden imagery, I forgot to mention that the candelabra, the menorah inside Israel's tabernacle is shaped like an almond tree with branches and buds and calyxes, all sorts of different parts of the almond flower. So when you walk into an Egyptian temple or tomb, it's got all kinds of imagery like that as well.

All the pillars are in the shape of organic material, either papyrus plants or lotus plants. And they're enormous, as you can see, in proportion to the people. These are really, really big pillars.

Some of the ones in the Hypostyle Hall here on the right hand side of the Luxor, sorry, the Karnak Temple in Luxor, they would take 12 people arm to arm to go around them. They're just enormous. You could fit a hundred people standing on the top of some of these pillars.

That's how big they are. It's a little bit like, I tell my students that when you walk into an Egyptian temple, it's like you're suddenly in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and you've been shrunk, and like the blades of grass and the flowers are like enormous around you. But that's the feeling that they wanted you to have when you walked in.

I feel small, the gods are big, and I don't, you know, I'm taking a posture of humility in this place. They're rooftops. If the, for the ceilings that we have remaining from ancient Egyptian temples, they're often blue with stars patterned into it, like the night sky.

Some of the furniture of the tabernacle is clearly Egyptian, Egyptian style. So, and to have an arc with carrying poles, these Egyptians loved making boxes out of wood, and they were the only culture that made wooden boxes and overlaid them with gold, with gold sheeting, and put them on carrying poles. And so the Ark of the Covenant fits really well in this context.

In fact, you can kind of date on the calendar when this particular kind of box was being made. And only the elite people were rich enough to have furniture like this, boxes like these. So it would have, it would have been a status symbol, but every temple had a box with the idol of their god on the top, and they would parade them through the streets at festivals.

So for Israel to have a box representing the presence of God carried on poles would have fit exactly that context, but it was saying something dramatically different, because instead of having an idol on the top of the box, there was an empty space right where the idol should be. And instead of an idol, there are two winged protectors, two cherubim. Most Egyptian portrayals of a deity had winged protectors around it.

Here's some examples from different Egyptian art. There's always two winged creatures around the pharaoh and around the deity. And so to have these two winged creatures on top of the Ark with nothing in between them would indicate this represents the presence of God, but apparently God doesn't want to be represented by an idol.

And why, why not represent God by an idol? Because he's already chosen humanity to represent him. He doesn't want to be represented by wood or stone. Here's another example of a throne with winged protectors on either side.

And sure enough, in the Ark, sorry, in the tabernacle, in the sanctuary, there are, there's a curtain with cherubim on it, and then an Ark with cherubim on top. Those winged protectors were right at home in the ancient world. Egyptian temples had offering tables.

These offering tables were throughout showing the perpetual offerings being made to the deity. And in Yahweh's tabernacle, there's a table with 12 loaves of bread representing the 12 tribes of Israel bringing their offerings to God. Egypt was known for its production of fine linen.

And the high priests, the high priest and all of the priests are wearing linen garments. And the word for their linen garments is the Egyptian word for linen, not the word for linen that gets used later in Canaan. This is by the way, King Tut's underwear from his tomb.

He went into the afterlife very prepared with 135 pairs of underwear. One really remarkable thing about the interior of Egyptian temples is that the closer you get to the most holy place, you start to see images of Pharaoh and the deity face to face, like having intimate communion. And what do we get when we pass through the wilderness and make it to Mount Sinai and they build the tabernacle? We have a whole chapter showing Moses face to face with God on the mountain, which is precisely what we would expect in the most intimate part of the book.

Why did they make a golden calf? Well, there's all kinds of bull deities in Egypt and surrounding cultures, but we see these all over Egypt. We don't have to get them from Canaan or from Mesopotamia. When they build a gold bull, they're trying to be like the nations.

They're trying to show the strength of God. The bull would have been the most virile and dangerous and powerful animal that they had in their possession. So what does all of this tell us about the book of Exodus? A couple of takeaways.

First of all, Exodus fits its ancient context. It fits very plausibly in an Egyptian context. The more I learn about Egypt, the more Exodus makes sense to me.

Yahweh used the language conventions and imagery of Egypt to communicate effectively. Sometimes my students will be concerned about these parallels and they'll say, well, why doesn't God just start fresh? Why is he using Egyptian stuff? Well, anytime we communicate, if we want people to understand us, we have to start with what they already know and build on that. And God is starting with the symbols that they know.

And he's saying, now look at me, not at Pharaoh or the gods of Egypt. Finally, Yahweh co-opted the symbols of Egypt to demonstrate his superiority to Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt. This is his way of saying, I am the supreme one.

You're to worship me and serve me and not Pharaoh and not the gods of Egypt. So that's a taste of this book. As we enter in, we're reading a book that is an exercise in cross-cultural communication.

We're going back in time. We're entering a world where people's language and values and fears are different than ours. So because it's a cross-cultural experience, the more we can learn about that ancient context, the more it will help us see what God is up to in the book.