Exodus: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture

By Douglas K. Stuart

THE NEW AMERICAN COMMENTARY is for the minister or Bible student who wants to understand and expound the Scriptures. Notable features include:* commentary based on THE NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION;* the NIV text printed in the body of the commentary; * sound scholarly methodology that reflects capable research in the original languages; * interpretation that emphasizes the theological unity of each book and of Scripture as a whole; * readable and applicable exposition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BH Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 15, 2006
• ISBN: 9781433672590

Book preview

To

John Pressey

gifted pastor and evangelist enthusiastic student of Exodus

Editors' Preface

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God's Word does not change. God's world, however, changes in every generation. These changes, in addition to new findings by scholars and a new variety of challenges to the gospel message, call for the church in each generation to interpret and apply God's Word for God's people. Thus, THE NEW AMERICAN COMMENTARY is introduced to bridge the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This new series has been designed primarily to enable pastors, teachers, and students to read the Bible with clarity and proclaim it with power.

In one sense THE NEW AMERICAN COMMENTARY is not new, for it represents the continuation of a heritage rich in biblical and theological exposition. The title of this forty-volume set points to the continuity of this series with an important commentary project published at the end of the nineteenth century called AN AMERICAN COMMENTARY, edited by Alvah Hovey. The older series included, among other significant contributions, the outstanding volume on Matthew by John A. Broadus, from whom the publisher of the new series, Broadman Press, partly derives its name. The former series was authored and edited by scholars committed to the infallibility of Scripture, making it a solid foundation for the present project. In line with this heritage, all NAC authors affirm the divine inspiration, inerrancy, complete truthfulness, and full authority of the Bible. The perspective of the NAC is unapologetically confessional and rooted in the evangelical tradition.

Since a commentary is a fundamental tool for the expositor or teacher who seeks to interpret and apply Scripture in the church or classroom, the NAC focuses on communicating the theological structure and content of each biblical book. The writers seek to illuminate both the historical meaning and contemporary significance of Holy Scripture.

In its attempt to make a unique contribution to the Christian community, the NAC focuses on two concerns. First, the commentary emphasizes how each section of a book fits together so that the reader becomes aware of the theological unity of each book and of Scripture as a whole. The writers, however, remain aware of the Bible's inherently rich variety. Second, the NAC is produced with the conviction that the Bible primarily belongs to the church. We believe that scholarship and the academy provide an indispensable foundation for biblical understanding and the service of Christ, but the editors and authors of this series have attempted to communicate the findings of their research in a manner that will build up the whole body of Christ. Thus, the commentary concentrates on theological exegesis while providing practical, applicable exposition.

THE NEW AMERICAN COMMENTARY's theological focus enable the reader to see the parts as well as the whole of Scripture. The biblical books vary in content, context, literary type, and style. In addition to this rich variety, the editors and authors recognize that the doctrinal emphasis and use of the biblical books differs in various places, contexts, and cultures among God's people. These factors, as well as other concerns, have led the editors to give freedom to the writers to wrestle with the issues raised by the scholarly community surrounding each book and to determine the appropriate shape and length of the introductory materials. Moreover, each writer has developed the structure of the commentary in a way best suited for expounding the basic structure and the meaning of the biblical books for our day. Generally, discussions relating to contemporary scholarship and technical points of grammar and syntax appear in the footnotes and not in the text of the commentary. This format allows pastors and interested laypersons, scholars and teachers, and serious college and seminary students to profit from the commentary at various levels. This approach has been employed because we believe that all Christians have the privilege and responsibility to read and seek to understand the Bible for themselves.

Consistent with the desire to produce a readable, up-to-date commentary, the editors selected the New International Version as the standard translation for the commentary series. The selection was made primarily because of the NIV's faithfulness to the original languages and its beautiful and readable style. The authors, however, have been given the liberty to differ at places from the NIV as they develop their own translations from the Greek and Hebrew texts.

The NAC reflects the vision and leadership of those who provide oversight for Broadman Press, who in 1987 called for a new commentary series that would evidence a commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture and a faithfulness to the classic Christian tradition. While the commentary adopts an American name, it should be noted some writers represent countries outside the United States, giving the commentary an international perspective. The diverse group of writers includes scholars, teachers, and administrators from almost twenty different colleges and seminaries, as well as pastors, missionaries, and a layperson.

The editors and writers hope that THE NEW AMERICAN COMMENTARY will be helpful and instructive for pastors and teachers, scholars and students, for men and women in the churches who study and teach God's Word in various settings. We trust that for editors, authors, and readers alike, the commentary will be used to build up the church, encourage obedience, and bring renewal to God's people. Above all, we pray that the NAC will bring glory and honor to our Lord who has graciously redeemed us and faithfully revealed himself to us in his Holy Word.

SOLI DEO GLORIA

The Editors

Author's Preface

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The commentary format is only one way for scholars to address biblical research, but it continues to be a popular one. As a result, more and more commentaries continue to appear, along with other books and a wealth of periodical literature, from all points of the theological spectrum, on every part of Scripture. So much is this the case that no commentary can now do justice to all the published viewpoints or even to summarizing all the published approaches to the issues in a given text, without actually risking losing the opportunity to speak to the reader in a focused, coherent, helpful fashion. It has been a real joy for me to be able to contribute to the New American Commentary. It is a scholarly endeavor, with the highest standards, but it doesn't leave the reader bewildered with so much interaction with secondary, critical literature that the chance to learn from what's going on in the inspired text ends up becoming what is secondary. In this volume I have tried not to avoid, but to subordinate purely interscholarly interests to the far more important interests of the pastors, missionaries, evangelists, and other workers who will, I hope, find this book a helpful guide to their use of Exodus in Christian ministry.

I am very grateful to the dozens of students in my advanced Hebrew classes at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary over the years, whom I forced to plow through the original text of Exodus and its textual variants during the writing of this commentary. They are great scholars in their own right and were rigorous in helping me seek to arrive at the linguistic precision necessary for understanding many passages.

In addition I am very grateful to many dozens of students in my Exodus class at First Church, Boxford, Massachusetts, who spent an hour every Sunday with me for many years studying Exodus. Some Sundays we spent several weeks on a single verse, and other Sundays we actually sped up enough to make it through two or three verses! Their relentless questions and well-pondered insights are reflected in various ways throughout this commentary.

By now my wife and eight children are very used to all the time I put into writing books, and even my grandchildren are now getting used to it. Gayle, my wife, encourages me in all the things I do, even though she could do many of them better than I. Her own amazing productivity in God's work is always an inspiration to me, as I know it is to others as well.

It is also a pleasure to thank Ray Clendenen and all the team involved in the production of the NAC. That a world-class scholar like Ray should put so much time and energy into helping those of us who produce these commentaries to get them into the best shape, and do it with such an encouraging and supportive spirit, is an evidence of God's goodness.

Bradford, Massachusetts

Easter, 2006

Abbreviations

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Bible Books

Commonly Used Sources

Contents

Introduction

I. Israel's Egyptian Oppression and God's Choice of a Deliverer (1:1–2:25)

II. Moses' Call, Commission, Challenge (3:1–7:7)

III. Eleven Signs of Yahweh's Sovereignty: The Ten Plagues: Judgment on the Gods of Egypt (7:8–11:10)

IV. The Passover and the Exodus (12:1–13:16)

V. The Wilderness Journey to Sinai (13:17–19:25)

VI. Covenant Law (20:1–31:18)

VII. Rebellion, Renewal, and Fulfillment of God's Instructions for the Tabernacle (32:1–40:38)

Selected Bibliography

Reconstructions

Ark of the Covenant

Tabernacle

Map

Route of the Exodus

Exodus

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INTRODUCTION OUTLINE

1. Structure

2. Historical Issues

3. Text

4. Authorship

5. The Theology of Exodus

(1) Theology of Exodus: Salvation, Freedom from Bondage

(2) Theology of Exodus: Real Knowledge of God

(3) Theology of Exodus: A Covenant People

(4) Theology of Exodus: A Promised Land

(5) Theology of Exodus: The Limited Presence of God in Israel's Midst

(6) Theology of Exodus: Representing an Invisible God by Visible Symbols

(7) Theology of Exodus: The Necessity of Law

(8) Theology of Exodus: The Necessity of Following God

(9) Theology of Exodus: Only One God Has Any Real Power

INTRODUCTION

1. Structure

The book of Exodus is bifid in composition, meaning that its material is presented to the reader in two main parts. A first part tells the story of God's rescue of the people of Israel from Egypt and his bringing them to Mount Sinai (chaps. 1–19), and a second part describes his covenant with them, made as they encamped at Mount Sinai (chaps. 20–40). Many possible subdivisions are found within these two major halves of the book (as, indeed, this commentary takes note of), but it is hard to miss the basic division of stories of Israel on their way to Sinai and accounts of God's covenant provision for them (including confirmations of and threats to that covenant relationship) after they are there.¹ Exodus may thus be divided into two broad topics: (1) deliverance of a group of people from submission to their oppressors to submission to God and (2) the constitution of that group as a people of God. Put another way, Exodus is about rescue from human bondage and rescue from sin's bondage.² Yet another way to think of the two parts of the book is through the idea of servitude: in Egypt, Israel was the servant of pharaoh; at Sinai they became God's servants.

An important qualification must be made to any statement about the structure of Exodus: the book itself is not a separate, independent work but a subsection of what has virtually always been understood as a five-part work, the Pentateuch.³ Exodus follows closely on Genesis, so that Exodus 1 constitutes not the beginning of an entirely new work but the beginning of a new section of a larger work that has yet other sections. Likewise, Exodus 40 hardly brings to a conclusion the major written enterprise Moses had in mind for his audience but concludes only the portion that brings the reader to the point that the tabernacle is built and ready for use as Israel's worship center. When we speak of the structure of Exodus, therefore, we must remember that it is a substructure—the bigger picture is that of the first five books of the Bible, one integral part of which is the section we call Exodus.⁴

Bifid composition of books is a rather common biblical phenomenon. Sometimes the two parts of a book are organized so that they contain almost the same amount of material, as in the close balance between Ezekiel 1–24, which deals with predictions of the fall of Judah and Jerusalem, and Ezekiel 25–48, which reveals God's plans for the future after that great turning point in Israel's history. In other places the division may be more for convenience, allowing the approximate halving of the length of an otherwise substantial scroll (as in 1, 2 Samuel, 1, 2 Kings, 1, 2 Chronicles, and possibly even Ezra-Nehemiah). Bifid books are also sometimes divided into a first part that establishes some sort of situation and then a second part that shows the consequence of what has been established. This is exemplified in the bifid book of Joshua. It contains in chaps. 1–12 the story of the conquest of the land of Canaan (establishing general control of the promised land), and in chaps. 13–24, the story of the division of that land among the tribes (a consequence of being able to control the land). This is somewhat parallel to the situation in Exodus, where the first part (chaps. 1–19) establishes the freedom from human enemies by God's gracious deliverance, and the second part (chaps. 20–40) provides the consequence of that freedom: the opportunity to become God's people and adhere to his covenant requirements.

Other examples of bifid composition may also be noted. Isaiah is arranged with a more chronological focus in that its first part (chaps. 1–33) contains mainly oracles intended to explain the coming demise of Israel and Judah up to 586 BC, whereas chaps. 40–66 present the more distant focus of hope for a renewed relationship with God after the unleashing of the covenant curses by way of the great Babylonian exile. This, too, is at least partly parallel to the organization of Exodus, since the focus of the first part of Exodus precedes chronologically the focus of the second part.⁵ Even New Testament epistles are often bifid; in fact, all of Paul's are, to one extent or another. He tended to write his letters beginning with theological exposition and ending with paraenesis, or put more simply, beginning with doctrine and ending with duty, and the two sections are usually roughly balanced.⁶

By no means is bifid composition a wooden method. It is simply a general organizing principle, useful in a primarily oral culture, where the grouping of materials into two discernible blocks helped people keep that material in mind by associating the various contents within either half of the book with like contents in that same half. There is no reason to think that bifid composition has some sort of great advantage over other patterns (such as the prologue-dialogue-epilogue structure of Job, or the acrostic-chiastic structure of Lamentations, or the threefold woe-weal pattern of Micah, or the six disputations of Malachi). Like those alternative patterns, bifid composition is just a convenient structural device. Within the broad parameters of a bifid biblical book, any number of subcategories and special, particular elements may be found. Thus Isaiah may include several prophecies in chaps. 1–33 that point toward the time after the fall of Jerusalem, prophecies that could, in other words, have been placed in chaps. 40–66; and he can also include (although we cannot tell if the decision was his or that of an inspired editor) descriptions of his interaction with Jerusalem and its king in chaps. 34–39 as a kind of hinge linking the two main parts of the bifid structure. In Exodus, Moses included some narrative within the mainly legal/covenant half (e.g., the story of the ratification of the covenant in chap. 24 or the story of the breaking of the covenant in chap. 32) when so doing suits the purpose of informing the reader of how important or how difficult it was for the Israelites fully to agree to and to honor the covenant they had been graciously provided by their God. Moses also included some law within the earlier, pre-Sinai covenant part of the book, since it pleased God to start revealing that law (e.g., regarding the Passover) at the time of the first occasion of observing it (see comments on chap. 12).

Getting out of Egypt and to Sinai safely constitutes the first great theme of the book, found in the first section of the two-part work. Getting to know God's covenant will makes for the second great theme, including the revelation of how he wishes to be worshiped, as indicated especially by the tabernacle focus of chaps. 25–40.

2. Historical Issues

In the case of most matters described in Exodus, scant corroborating evidence exists⁷ by which a historian, regardless of his or her bias, could confirm or deny the historicity of the biblical accounts.⁸ For example, the pharaoh under whose (probably distant and perhaps ever unwitting) protection Moses was raised,⁹ the pharaoh who sought to kill Moses, and the pharaoh of the exodus are not named. This may be a literary device on Moses' part, a way of reducing the greatest man in the greatest national power of the day to a mere office via a somewhat generic title.¹⁰ Similarly, we cannot (at least not convincingly for most people) pinpoint the date of the exodus by reference to firmly established evidence from Egypt. Moreover, the route of the exodus, including the location of Mount Sinai itself, remains debatable. In this commentary we have accepted the evidence, debated as it is, for a fifteenth-century exodus¹¹ and the location of Mount Sinai as Jebel-Musa, in the modern Sinai Peninsula, rather than, as others have argued, for a thirteenth-century exodus and, in the opinion of some, a strictly Midianite (northwest Saudi Arabian) location for Mount Sinai. We don't argue the case for any of these conclusions definitively (as if anyone could); we rest our case on the careful arguments of others, comforted by the fact that our ignorance of the exact modern locations for places mentioned in Exodus does not in itself change either the message of the book or the confidence we may have in its historical reliability.¹²

We also take seriously the description of the rapid increase of the Israelite population in northeast Egypt,¹³ the Egyptian population control plan that involved killing male infants, the descriptions of Moses' access to Pharaoh in spite of his being a mere slave-class representative from the Egyptian point of view, the plagues, the national (and international¹⁴) escape from Egypt followed by a determined pursuit of chariot-mounted Egyptian troops, and the miraculously enabled encampment of the people at Mount Sinai, a place that otherwise did not have (and to this day does not have) a water supply capable of supporting so many thousands, let alone an active volcano.¹⁵ All of these events, and others, have been thought unlikely or impossible by various writers and commentators, but in this commentary we seek consistently to show their reasonableness and, indeed, likelihood, albeit without as much outside evidence from beyond the text of Exodus as we would find it convenient to possess were it to exist or eventually be discoverable.¹⁶

Our position is that the pharaoh who did not know about Joseph (see comments on 1:8) was a native Egyptian Pharaoh newly in power sometime after the overthrow of the Hyksos occupiers, the Hyksos having been the Asiatic conquerors of Egypt under whose domain the Israelite Joseph, another Asiatic, had been promoted to prominence.¹⁷ In Genesis, Moses preserved the Joseph story in considerable detail, in part, we surmise, because it explains so much of the history of the people he had been called by God to lead to the promised land, the people who constituted his original audience for Genesis as well as Exodus.¹⁸ The kinds of data assembled and analyzed especially by Hoffmeier and Currid have validity, we judge, and their general approach has, accordingly, influenced the outlook of this commentary.¹⁹ Nevertheless, it is the overall believability of Moses' narrative, surviving all these years and inspiring and encouraging people with great power still today, that will convince the reader, we expect, of the general historicity of the book and specifically of the events described in it.²⁰ Our purpose in this commentary has been less to repeat the arguments of those who have taken up the challenge to defend the historical accuracy of Exodus as to show the reasonableness of everything in the account—explaining as best we are able the cogency of the presentation and the historically realistic nature of the actions and speeches as they unfold. The reader will be our judge as to whether or not or to what extent we have succeeded in this.

3. Text

The text of the book of Exodus is on the whole rather well preserved in the Masoretic tradition, which is the tradition that all modern English translations are based primarily on. In all likelihood, the reason for this good state of preservation textually is the work of Ezra. He quite probably brought back from Babylon to Jerusalem in 458 BC a carefully preserved and well-edited copy of at least the Pentateuch and Former Prophets, if not many or most other parts of the Old Testament in Hebrew.²¹ For Ezra, as for many generations of Israelites before him, Exodus was revered as holy Scripture, and the care with which it was preserved stems from this reverence.²² The book's text was, of course, copied many dozens of times thereafter before it came into the form now known as the MT (Masoretic Text)²³ and exemplified by the most commonly used manuscript from that tradition, the Leningrad Codex of AD 1008.²⁴

The Septuagint (LXX) confirms the vast majority of MT readings, and in a relatively few places, also some longer readings. This comports with what can generally be said of the Pentateuch and Former Prophets: the LXX of these books is not expansionistic, but rather the MT of these books tends now and again to be haplographic, that is, characterized by omissions that shorten the overall text slightly. Most of these omissions are minor; none has, in our opinion, any significant meaning-changing bearing on the interpretation of the book of Exodus or any full passage therein. Sometimes the Qumran (Dead Sea Scrolls, also called Q or DSS) evidence helps resolve textual questions, but in only about fifty places²⁵ are the Qumran readings lengthy enough and at the same time different from the MT to make possible the use of the Qumran readings as legitimate comparison texts in establishing the theoretical original wording of Exodus. Rarely, evidence from Jerome's Vulgate or the Syriac Peshitta or the Aramaic Targum of Exodus will shed significant, independent light on a text option, though these often enough do add some weight to what the LXX and/or Qumran readings will already have brought to the attention of the textual analyst.

We have not hesitated in this commentary to bring to the reader's attention textual issues as they bear, even theoretically, upon the interpretation of a given passage. But we also have not hesitated to omit mention of routine textual matters, the resolution of which simply would reinforce an MT reading or cannot be definitively resolved against an MT reading. Where a variant reading in one of the ancient versions might be thought important, we have tried to evaluate the importance thereof but have, again, done so selectively so as not to expand the commentary into something that it is not, that is, a technical-critical commentary giving constant attention to textual issues large and small, consequential and inconsequential.²⁶ All in all, happily, the text of Exodus is rather well preserved.

4. Authorship²⁷

Moses had nearly thirty-nine years to write Exodus. When he did so during that time period between the Israelites' departure from Sinai and his death and exactly how many days or weeks he spent doing so is impossible to reconstruct. We may reasonably conjecture that the first audience for whom he wrote was the second postexodus generation, the one that had grown up in the wilderness during the days described in the book of Numbers. He would have written the book for them as that generation was preparing to enter the promised land as a reminder of who they were and what their origins (i.e., the events and instructions their parents had experienced) had been and what was required of them in the covenant God had made with their parents. If these conjectures are correct, Exodus would have been produced in writing sometime near the end of the forty-year period after the Israelites left Egypt and before they entered Canaan, that is, when Moses himself was nearing the end of his life.²⁸ Exodus describes events that took place mainly over a period of about eighty-one years (i.e., starting with the time from Moses' birth as described in 2:1ff. to the time of the completion of the tabernacle as described in 40:1–35, when Moses was about eighty-one years old). It also gives the background of the Israelites' sojourn in Egypt, reviewing the story of how the Israelites settled in Egypt more than four centuries before Moses' birth, and provides as well a small bit of foreground, in 40:36–38, describing how the glory cloud of God moved spatially relative to the tabernacle to lead the Israelites through the wilderness, something that could have taken only a few weeks or months to establish as a pattern but a phenomenon that was in fact experienced by the people all during the wilderness wanderings of that roughly forty-year period.²⁹

Style Variety and Source Analysis

A substantial philosophical and methodological distance lies between those following the traditional approach, who regard Moses as the author of Exodus, and those who believe that the book was produced partly after the introduction of the monarchy in Israel (i.e., not until at least the tenth-ninth centuries), partly another century or so thereafter (i.e., sometime in the ninth or eighth century) and partly after the Judean exile (i.e., essentially during the late sixth and/or fifth century BC).³⁰ Since this gulf affects basic issues in the interpretation of the book, a brief review of some aspects of the difference may be in order here. It will hardly serve the reader's purpose for us to give more than an overview of the older antitraditional approach, especially since many scholars have moved away from it and there are now a variety of competing viewpoints on the authorship of the Pentateuch.³¹

One popular school of biblical scholarship holds to the Documentary Hypothesis, the theory that the book of Exodus is the product of three very different authors: J, a theological genius who produced most of the narrative portion of Exodus sometime around the ninth century BC in Judah, E, a northern theologian who added to this narrative from sources and perspectives available to him when he wrote sometime around the eighth century, and P, a school of priests writing after the Judean exile, that is, mainly in the sixth and/or fifth century BC in Judah, who generated most of the legal materials that dominate the second half of the book. Many different theories exist as to who put these sources together, but just as the sources themselves are anonymous, so is (are) their editor(s).

The arguments for and against this hypothesis and its reliance on what is typically called either source criticism or source analysis are many and have been widely published. One consideration that has not been much discussed, however, is the interrelationship between the preference for style variation in ancient Israelite writing and the criterion of vocabulary preference that has been a foundational means of differentiating sources by those who hold to the Documentary Hypothesis.

Source analysis rests in considerable measure on perceived vocabulary differences among the three major sources since style cannot be discerned except by the analysis, in one way or another, of vocabulary.³² For example, the theoretical J source is alleged to use exclusively or virtually exclusively the proper name Yahweh for God, whereas the E source uses Elohim instead. This is only one example. In fact, a considerable variety of vocabulary words are alleged to be pointers to their respective sources. But are these sorts of vocabulary variations really what source critics think they are? Was it the case that a given ancient author—or copyist—would have used a single given word for a single given concept consistently, without variation, whenever he or she wrote about that concept? If such were the case, the Documentary Hypothesis might at least try to claim some credence since it could indeed be said to have measurable means of tracing the marks of its various sources. But did such consistency actually occur? Did ancient Israelite writers have such limited vocabularies that they were incapable of routinely employing synonyms (variant vocabulary) for a given concept? Or did they perhaps have such a commitment to rigidity of verbal expression that they were prevented from using alternative vocabulary words as a matter of policy?

In fact, the contrary situation appears to be true. In ancient Israel there were four demonstrable indications of a preference for variety in written expression rather than of desire for stylistic consistency. (1) If there were two different ways of spelling a word, the Israelites chose to preserve both spellings as valid and to include both of them frequently in any document. Thus with regard to spelling (orthography), ancient Israelites had no commitment to consistency of style but rather the free use of alternative spellings was regarded as not only proper but desirable.³³ (2) In the case of common expressions, a similar phenomenon can be observed. Where variation was possible, it apparently was not avoided but preferred. Alternative ways of forming a given multiword expression were employed commonly so that both alternatives were preserved. Thus in the case of repeated phraseology in prose contexts, there was no commitment to consistency of style but rather the free use of alternative formulations was regarded as not only proper but desirable.³⁴ (3) With regard to variation in grammatical forms, a similar phenomenon is observed. If there existed two different ways of saying something, even in the case of a common verb form, both ways were used so as to preserve both in the common discourse.³⁵ Again the preference clearly appears to have been for inclusion of variety rather than for consistency of one form if two existed. (4) The Masoretic system of Kethib-Qere represents a fourth indicator of the tendency in past times to preserve variants rather than to select one option and to employ it consistently—a tendency that extended into the medieval period when the Masoretes worked. This system arose from a desire to include, not merely side-by-side but actually within the same word, two variant readings rather than to select one. The Masoretes provided the consonants of one text option and the vowels of another. They indicated their preferred reading but did not omit the reading they regarded as inferior—they simply did not vocalize it.

A first question that must be answered by a source critic is this: If these various indications of a preference for preservation of variety rather than of consistency existed in the ancient world, is not variety of vocabulary an instance of the same phenomenon rather than an indication of multiple authorship? Indeed, might it not follow that the expectation of a commitment—by reason of vocabulary paucity or vocabulary rigidity—to consistent vocabulary usage in sources was in fact only apparent and not real since it would run counter to the demonstrated tendency for variety and against consistency in these other analogous components of ancient Hebrew literary style? A second question would be: Why do source critics routinely attribute remarkable consistency to their theorized sources in the use of style and vocabulary and then attribute almost complete inconsistency to their theorized redactors, to whom are ascribed the tendency to combine portions of material from their sources freely and, to be blunt, sloppily?³⁶

Our conclusion, then, is that Moses was following the popular tendency of ancient literary convention in employing varying vocabulary forms and orthography. Clearly he was not preserving variant textual readings since these would not have existed until after the manuscript copying and recopying had produced over time variants of his autograph of the five-book grand epic of Israel's early history and law that he wrote under God's controlling inspiration.³⁷

At several points in the Pentateuch, Moses described himself in the third person³⁸ as the author of what he had written. For example, he mentioned how he was told by God to write down the story of the Israelite encounter with the Amalekites at Rephidim (Exod 17:14). He also described at various points his being instructed to write down the law as given him from God (Exod 24:4; 34:1,27–28; Deut 31:9,24). He mentioned as well his requirement from God to write down at God's dictation the so-called Song of Moses (Deut 31:19–22, referring to the song in chap. 32). These references to Mosaic authorship are substantial. Deuteronomy 31:24 says, for example, that Moses wrote in a book the words of this law from beginning to end. This can mean nothing less than a claim that he wrote all of Deuteronomy, though it may very well imply all of the law from Exodus 20 onward.³⁹

We could not reasonably expect Moses to say any more by way of authorship claims than he said.⁴⁰ In the ancient world, authors did not normally make any statement within their works of their authorship of those works, just as is almost always the case in the modern world.⁴¹ The fact that Moses actually stretched the boundaries of this practice and referred to his authorship within the works we call the books of the Pentateuch probably represents a special attempt to lend authority to those works from within rather than merely via a title or superscription. Moses wrote during the wilderness years after the exodus from Egypt for the benefit of all Israelites who needed to know the full story of their national history—especially the new generation born in the wilderness as well as those from other ethnic groups (Exod 12:38) who joined Israel as a result of the plagues and who would have been virtually ignorant of most of Israelite history.

5. The Theology of Exodus

In Exod 6:6–8 God lays before the Israelites an outline of what he is doing for them and a definition of how they are to think of themselves in relation to him:⁴²

Therefore, say to the Israelites: I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD.

These three verses can be understood to more or less sum up the theological message that Moses was required to relay to the Israelites, and, we submit, that the reader is expected to recognize as the principal statement of the theology of the book. We will review each of these themes briefly below and then introduce some subthemes as well.

(1) Theology of Exodus: Salvation, Freedom from Bondage

I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment (Exod 6:6).

So-called liberation theology often misunderstands Exodus.⁴³ The book is not about liberation in general or about political and religious freedom in particular, but about deliverance from bad servitude to good servitude. The Israelites served ( abad) abad) him instead.⁴⁴ It was not a question of needing freedom from being under the control of a national leader; it was a question of a good, divine national (and universal) leader rescuing his chosen people from a bad, human national leader. The threat of bondage to a hostile great power is one of the curses of the Old Testament. Once the Israelites arrived at Sinai, they were reminded of the horrors of servitude to those who would oppress them if they failed to keep Yahweh's covenant.⁴⁵ The generation that followed the exodus likewise faced the prospect that disobedience to the rules graciously and protectively revealed in the divine covenant would lead to oppression under enemies who would conquer and enslave the chosen nation.⁴⁶

In the New Covenant, bondage to the greatest power, sin, and its consequence, death, constitutes the last enemy.⁴⁷ But this is not merely a New Covenant concept. Sin is whatever offends God, and sin is an enslaver. But this slavery can be escaped—not by skill or cunning but by changing masters from sin to God.⁴⁸ This comes about not by human initiative but by God's gift, to which humans can only respond.⁴⁹ In Exodus, likewise, freedom from bondage is accomplished only by God. The Israelites are portrayed as having no chance whatever to save themselves. God must make the demands (Let my people go!); the people on their own, with or without Moses, would never have dared even asked. Moreover, God makes those demands through his chosen representative Moses so that the people cannot take credit for having thought up the idea themselves. Not only so, but when the people were reconfronted with the possibility of being opposed by the Egyptians, they became afraid. Indeed, later in the wilderness, when the going became hard, some of them actually rationalized their way to thinking that they were better off in Egypt than free from it.⁵⁰ People need both a Savior and a Lord. They cannot do without either. Exodus reveals God as for Israel and for all who will join Israel, as many did upon seeing his mighty acts unleashed against the Egyptian oppressors.⁵¹

(2) Theology of Exodus: Real Knowledge of God

Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians… . I am the LORD (Exod 6:7–8).

The repetition of the statement I am the LORD is unmistakably a way of God's repeatedly emphasizing his self-disclosure to his people. How can they obey and be benefited by a God whom they only vaguely understand, whose characteristics and will for them are clouded by ignorance on their part? But if his people can actually understand him, that is, be fully aware of his covenant stipulations and therefore know what to do to please him and receive his favor, they can actually live in relationship with him so that their own lives are influenced directly and constantly by his. A whole new order of existence beckons from this divine promise.

Most often the people in Exodus have contact with God by representative only; it is Moses who has the personal connection to and interaction with God, not the Israelite people, but he does so on their behalf, not his own. Exodus also shows how the high priest will represent the people in his actions of worship ritual so they can be assured of access to the (limited) presence of God and the benefits of that close proximity to eternal and universal sovereignty.⁵² Sometimes in Exodus, God shows his personal interest in his people through more than just one representative, as instanced by the way the elders confirmed the Sinai covenant in his presence (24:9–11). At other times they are known by name to him, as the ephod's breastpiece bears their tribal names, symbolic of their membership in his family, before him. And individual Israelites can be singled out for service⁵³ by way of example, suggesting a personal knowledge by God of the people and a personal, not just corporate, knowledge of each of the people by God.

What does a knowledge of God provide? The reformer Melanchthon said it well: "Hoc est Christum cognoscere: beneficia euis cognoscere" (To know Christ is to know his benefits). It is not an emotive matter; it is a reception into a family whose paterfamilias is God himself, loving and benefiting in all full appropriateness the people he has made his own in covenant.⁵⁴ That is what gets underway in the book of Exodus, not by anything Israel can do for itself but because of God's kindly seeking to adopt to himself a people, consistent with his oft-repeated earlier promises.⁵⁵

(3) Theology of Exodus: A Covenant People

I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God (Exod 6:7).

When God first demanded that the Egyptian Pharaoh let Israel leave Egypt, he referred to Israel as my … people. Again and again he said those famous words to Pharaoh, Let my people go.⁵⁶ Pharaoh may not have known who Yahweh was,⁵⁷ but Yahweh certainly knew Israel. He knew them not just as a nation needing rescue but as his own people needing to be closely bound to him by the beneficent covenant he had in store for them once they reached the place he was taking them to himself, out of harm's way, and into his sacred space.⁵⁸

To be in the image of God is to have a job assignment. God's image⁵⁹ is supposed to represent him on earth and accomplish his purposes here. Reasoning from a degenerate form of this truth, pagan religions thought that an image (idol) in the form of something they fashioned would convey to its worshipers the presence of a god or goddess. But the real purpose of the heavenly decision described in 1:26 was not to have a humanlike statue as a representative of God on earth but to have humans do his work here, as the Lord's Prayer asks (your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, Matt 6:10).

Although the fall of humanity as described in Genesis 3 corrupted the ability of humans to function properly in the image of God, the divine plan of redemption was hardly thwarted. It took the form of the calling of Abraham and the promises to him of a special people. In both Exod 6:6–8 and 19:4–6 God reiterates his plan to develop a people that will be his very own, a special people that, in distinction from all other peoples of the earth, will belong to him and accomplish his purposes, being as Exod 19:6 says a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Since the essence of holiness is belonging to God, by belonging to God this people became holy, reflecting the character of their Lord as well as being obedient to his purposes. No other nation in the ancient world ever claimed Yahweh as its God, and Yahweh never claimed any other nation as his people. This is not to say that he did not love and care for other nations⁶⁰ but only to say that he chose Israel as the focus of his plan of redemption for the world.

In the New Testament, Israel becomes all who will place faith in Jesus Christ—not an ethnic or political entity at all but now a spiritual entity, a family of God. Thus the New Testament speaks of the true Israel as defined by conversion to Christ in rebirth and not by physical birth at all. But in the Old Covenant, the true Israel was the people group that, from the various ethnic groups that gathered at Sinai, agreed to accept God's covenant and therefore to benefit from this abiding presence among them (see comments on Exod 33:12–24:28). Exodus is the place in the Bible where God's full covenant with a nation—as opposed to a person or small group—emerges, and the language of Exod 6:7, I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God, is language predicting that covenant establishment.⁶¹

(4) Theology of Exodus: A Promised Land

I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD (Exod 6:8).

Since the time of the Patriarchs it had been the hope of Israel to occupy a land of its own—not because the idea had occurred to Abraham and his family and then had taken on a life of its own but because God revealed it as his intention and reiterated it to each successive generation.⁶² In Exodus that divine promise becomes the basis for an expectation of deliverance from Egypt,⁶³ which constitutes the beginning of a great journey undertaken by a whole people with all their possessions, including their livestock, to relocate to that new land, one described metaphorically as flowing with milk and honey,⁶⁴ so right and proper would it be for them.

In Egypt the Israelites were a noncitizen gang of slaves without any land of their own or any human hope of having one. But God had not abandoned his covenant plans for them⁶⁵ and led them forth by a mighty hand from the domination of the earth's greatest superpower, not merely to a wilderness existence but to a place of permanent settlement, hymned predictively by Moses in 15:13–17. Thus already at Sinai, lest they become complacent there, God ordered them well in advance to prepare to leave;⁶⁶ and they, in turn, pleaded repeatedly with him to accompany them on the journey, lest it be a journey without blessing to a place without rest.⁶⁷ One very big part of their preparation for the trip was the construction of the tabernacle. Without it they would not have had proper housing for the symbols of God's (limited) presence among them or a place to gather for the corporate worship he told them he would accept from them when they rendered it. Thus most of chaps. 25–40, more than a third of the book of Exodus, is occupied by accounts of the tabernacle. It had to be made just right, and that included being made fully portable so that it could be broken down and transported whenever God led his people on a new leg of their journey toward his promised land. It likewise had to be easy enough to set up that they could erect it and use it for worship promptly upon arriving at a stopping place anywhere in the wilderness. The tabernacle was therefore a tent, not a temple, a portable worship center, not a fixed emplacement for worship. The Israelites of Exodus were a people on the go, not a people who had yet arrived at their ultimate destination.

They knew that they would eventually be given a land they did not deserve, where none of them had in fact ever lived, a land seen by their distant ancestors but not by any of the people of Israel alive at the time of the Exodus. Yet the place had been designed by God to be their home. To occupy it they would have to dispossess the people groups that currently lived there, a task far beyond their own abilities unless God should deign to take upon himself the task of driving out the inhabitants. This is exactly what he promised to do,⁶⁸ and until the validity of that promise was absolutely certain via reiteration after the great covenant-breaking sin of chap. 32, the Israelites were genuinely afraid to invade the promised land.⁶⁹ It was the land of their dreams, but it made sense to go there only if it was also Yahweh's land, where he would abide in their midst.

(5) Theology of Exodus: The Limited Presence of God in Israel's Midst

'Do not come any closer,' God said. ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground’ (Exod 3:5).

Put limits for the people around the mountain and tell them, ‘Be careful that you do not go up the mountain or touch the foot of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death’ (Exod 19:12).

Aaron and his sons must wear them whenever they enter the Tent of Meeting or approach the altar to minister in the Holy Place, so that they will not incur guilt and die. This is to be a lasting ordinance for Aaron and his descendants (Exod 28:43).

Almost all commentaries, Bible dictionary articles, and study Bibles speak at least generally of the theme of the presence of God as a hallmark of Exodus. But the idea of God's presence is often articulated at least somewhat inaccurately in such sources. What most of them fail to note adequately, if at all, is that Exodus carefully presents not so much the concept of the presence of God as that of the limited presence of God.

The situation may be summarized this way: God shows himself to his covenant people by symbols behind barriers. He does not fully disclose himself in the manner that New Covenant believers look forward to as one of the great joys of heaven. Rather, he puts symbols of himself (a visible brilliance associated with his glory; the gold-surfaced ark of the covenant) behind barriers that keep his people from direct access even to those symbols, let alone to the very God of gods that they symbolize. These barriers include such things as distance (God normally comes to the top of Mount Sinai while the people are strictly forbidden to go anywhere above the base of the mountain), darkness (God usually appears within a thick, dark cloud that conceals most of his glory and through which no human eyes can penetrate), and the tabernacle itself (with its layers of thick curtains and hide covers, its special floor-to-ceiling curtain shielding the ark from view by everyone, even priests). When the tabernacle was disassembled and its component parts carried, the ark was elaborately wrapped in its shielding curtain so that it could not be seen by anyone.⁷⁰ What this means is that, with the exception of the high priest annually,⁷¹ no Israelite saw the ark once it had been constructed and placed in the tabernacle. The Israelites believed there was an ark on faith: what they saw carried as they traveled was something wrapped in layers of curtain and hide out of which poles protruded; they never saw the ark or its contents under any conditions. God symbolized his presence by that most holy object, the ark, but he kept it hidden from his people by barriers at all times.

It is usual for commentators to point out that the tabernacle design provides a way of thinking about three levels of the presence of God—as indicated by the closest (the holy of holies and the ark within it), the next closest (the holy place), and the third closest (the tabernacle courtyard). To these may be added the level of Israel as a whole. At this fourth level, the presence of God continues to be an important, sometimes dominant, issue: God is regularly with the whole people, protecting them (the pillar of cloud/fire was a benefit of divine presence to them but a danger for the Egyptians); he is their covenant God in a way he is not to other nations (Exod 19); the people can worship him even when they are in the camp (so 33:7–11); and his willingness to go with them (or not) in their wilderness travel and conquest of the promised land becomes the dominant question for the nation (chaps. 33–34) after the sin of idolatry described in chap. 32. Thus Israel in general, as a people, constitute a fourth region of presence to Yahweh, not as intense as the other three represented by the tabernacle design or shown in Moses' close encounters with Yahweh either at the Tent of Meeting or at the tabernacle or atop Mount Sinai. Indeed, one could also speak of a fifth level of the presence of Yahweh, outside Israel, when Yahweh made himself known to other people in their own territories, as he did with the Egyptians in his encounters with them, or in Canaan, when he attacked and drove out the inhabitants of the land in accordance with his promise to do so in Gen 15. Note that Exod 15 speaks of his sanctuary, which can be Zion but seems in the context to refer generally to all of the promised land—certainly a fifth level of presence from the point of view of the levels of presence experienced at Sinai. These five levels are not described per se in the book or delineated and explained generally in the Bible. Recognizing them is merely a matter of convenience for us as we try to understand the logic of the issue of the divine presence—a human way of categorizing the material of the book of Exodus. It is not a revealed pattern or system inherent in the pages of the text itself.

What must be kept in mind is that holiness does not happen because God's people are gathered all together in one place but occurs because God is in a place, regardless of whether his people are there also. The ancient pagan notion of the presence of gods derived from the assumption in paganism that the gods could (collectively, not individually) do virtually anything but feed themselves. Therefore it was generally thought that unless people were regularly feeding a god (i.e., bringing food offerings to shrines devoted to him), that god would not hang around those people; in other words, gods gravitated to those places, and only those places, where food was sent up to them via sacrifice.⁷² In the New Covenant, however, it is possible to