Forty Years in the Wilderness: Moses Leads the Bible's Lost Generation

By Sue Sandidge

The escape from Egypt is the pivotal event in the Old Testament. Through it God gave his people their freedom. For forty tumultuous years God and Moses and a chronically rebellious people suffered and fought and established the foundations of a legal system and a system of ethics that changed the world. The Old Testament reminds us that we must never forget the Exodus, or we will forget who we are. And as we learn about the Exodus, we learn who we are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 22, 2005
• ISBN: 9781453583470

Sue Sandidge

Sue Sandidge is the author of King David in the Valley of the Shadow of Middle Age; Tell Joshua: The Wars of the Judges; and I Will Bring You Back: The Story of Jacob, His Sons, and His God. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and holds an M.A. from Tufts University and a Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Shoreview, Minnesota.

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Copyright © 2005 by Sue Sandidge.

Cover art: Michelangelo’s Moses (1513-1516) captures the inner turmoil of a powerful man caught between compassion, despair and rage.

Library of Congress Number: 2005904171

ISBN : Hardcover    978-1-4134-9549-2

ISBN : Softcover      978-1-4134-9548-5

ISBN : Ebook          978-1-4535-8347-0

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CONTENTS

Psalm 78

Introduction

Chapter 1

Egypt

Getting to Exodus

Bridging the Gap

Akhenaten

The Nineteenth Dynasty: Enter Ramses I

The Great Egotist

Chapter 2

The Slave Times

Moses Tries Social Activism

Moses in Midian

A Long Talk with a Burning Bush

The Bridegroom of Blood

The Authors of the Pentateuch: Joining Up With Brother Aaron

Chapter 3

The Miracle of the Plagues

The First Try

The Second Try

The Plagues Begin

The Last Plague

The Passover

The Miracle at the Red Sea

The Song of Miriam

Chapter 4

Into the Wilderness

Rephidim

Attack of the Amalekites

Jethro Gets Moses Organized

Chapter 5

Mount Sinai

The People Reach Mount Sinai

The Ten Commandments

All Those Laws

Confirming the Covenant

Forty Days and Forty Nights on the Mountain

How Soon We Forget: The Worship of the Golden Calf

Chapter 6

Down from Sinai

Moses Sees God’s Back

Replacing the Two Tablets

The Transfiguration of Moses

Chapter 7

The New World Religion

The Tabernacle

The Ark

The Priests

Consecrating the Tabernacle

Aaron, Father of Four, Becomes a Father of Two

Chapter 8

The Wilderness Years: The Great Failure of Will

The Census

On the Road Again

Snow-White Miriam

Spying Out Canaan

A Stoning

The Rebellion of Korah

A Rebellion about the Last Rebellion

A Sign from God: Aaron’s Flowering Rod

The End of the Time at Kadesh

The Waters of Contention

Chapter 9

Conquest East of the Jordan

The Death of Aaron

The First Battle

Nehushtan

Marching North

War with the Amorites

The Redactor’s Other Version of the Conquest

The Oracles of Balaam

The Heresy of Peor

Holy War Against Midian

The Census: Counting a New Generation

The Daughters of Zelophehad: A Point of Law

Moses Names His Successor

Keeping the Land of the Amorites

Our Editors

Chapter 10

Deuteronomy: The Last Words of Moses

The Deuteronomistic Historian

The First Speech of Moses: Remembering the Journey

The Second Speech: Curses and Blessings and the Shema

The Third Speech: Moses Challenges the People to Choose Life

The Fourth Speech: Commissioning Joshua

The Song of Moses

The Blessing of Moses

The Death of Moses

Chapter 11

The Laws

The Book of Exodus: Blood and Sacrifice

The Book of Exodus: The Covenant Code

The Book of Leviticus: The Scapegoat

The Book of Leviticus: The Holiness Code

More From the Holiness Code: The Blessings and the Curses

The Book of Numbers: Redeemed by the Levites

The Book of Numbers: Trial by Ordeal

More From Numbers: The Ashes of the Red Heifer

The Book of Deuteronomy: The Call for Righteousness

Justice and Only Justice

The Lord Will Gather You Home Again

Chapter 12

Epilogue

Glossary

References

Appendix

Timeline of Authors and Events

The Pharaohs of Egypt

18th Dynasty—Family Tree of Akhenaten

19th Dynasty—Family Tree of Ramses the Great

The Rebellions

Family Tree of the Patriarchs

Family Tree of Jacob

Family Tree of Priests

Family Tree of Giants

Authors of the Pentateuch

Author Differences

Story Differences

Religious Differences

To all the Miriams who have danced for joy.

To all the Aarons who have shared the long journey.

To all the Moseses who have shone with light.

To all the Jethros who have taken strangers in.

To all the Zipporahs who have bravely gone where life has taken them.

To all the Jochebeds who have protected their children.

To all the Gershoms born to strangers in strange lands.

To all the Joshuas who have showed us how to live with courage.

To all the Calebs who have wholly followed the Lord.

To all the Historians who have vowed that the past would not be forgotten.

To all the Egypts we have left behind.

To all the Red Seas we have crossed by the grace of God.

To all the Mount Sinais where heaven and earth have met.

To all the wanderers in the wilderness who have journeyed by faith.

To all the highways that have led us home.

To all the Jordan Rivers we dream of crossing.

And the people of Israel ate the manna forty years, till they came to a habitable land; they ate the manna, till they came to the border of Canaan.

Exodus 16:35

Psalm 78

O my people, hear my teaching; listen to the words of my mouth.

I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter hidden things, things from of old—

what we have heard and known, what our fathers have told us.

We will not hide them from their children; we will tell the next generation

the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done.

He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel,

which he commanded our forefathers to teach their children,

so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born,

and they in turn would tell their children.

Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds

but would keep his commands.

They would not be like their forefathers—a stubborn and rebellious generation,

whose hearts were not loyal to God, whose spirits were not faithful to him . . .

He did miracles in the sight of their fathers in the land of Egypt in the region of Zoan.

He divided the sea and led them through; he made the water stand firm like a wall.

He guided them with the cloud by day and with light from the fire all night.

He split the rock in the desert and gave them water as abundant as the seas;

He brought streams out of a rocky crag and made water flow down like rivers.

But they continued to sin against him, rebelling in the desert against the Most High.

They willfully put God to the test by demanding the food they craved.

They spoke against God, saying, "Can God spread a table in the desert?

When he struck the rock, water gushed out, and streams flowed abundantly.

But can he also give us food? Can he supply meat for his people?"

When the Lord heard them, he was very angry; his fire broke out against Jacob,

and his wrath rose against Israel, for they did not believe in God or trust in his deliverance.

Yet he gave a command to the skies above and opened the doors of the heavens;

he rained down manna for the people to eat, he gave them the grain of heaven . . .

In spite of all this, they kept on sinning;

in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.

So he ended their days in futility

and their years in terror . . .

Yet he was merciful; he forgave their iniquities

and did not destroy them.

Time after time he restrained his anger

and did not stir up his full wrath.

He remembered that they were but flesh,

a passing breeze that does not return.

How often they rebelled against him in the desert and grieved him in the wasteland!

Again and again they put God to the test; they vexed the Holy One of Israel.

They did not remember his power—the day he redeemed them from the oppressor,

the day he displayed his miraculous signs in Egypt, his wonders in the region of Zoan.

He turned their rivers to blood; they could not drink from their streams.

He sent swarms of flies that devoured them, and frogs that devastated them.

He gave their crops to the grasshopper, their produce to the locust.

He destroyed their vines with hail and their sycamores with sleet.

He gave over their cattle to the hail, their livestock to bolts of lightning.

He unleashed against them his hot anger, his wrath, indignation and hostility—

a band of destroying angels.

He prepared a path for his anger; he did not spare them from death

but gave them over to the plague.

He struck down all the first-born of Egypt, the first fruits of manhood in the tents of Ham.

But he brought his people out like a flock; he led them like sheep through the desert.

He guided them safely, so they were unafraid; but the sea engulfed their enemies.

Thus he brought them to the border of his holy land, to the hill country his right hand had taken.

He drove out nations before them and allotted their lands to them as an inheritance;

he settled the tribes of Israel in their homes.

Introduction

Things start small in the Bible, and success does not come easily. Things start with sibling rivalry: ten older brothers are so consumed with jealousy of their younger brother that they sell him into slavery. But their younger brother, Joseph, becomes the second most powerful man in a great empire. Hundreds of years later, in that great empire, Egypt, things start small when a slave baby is born. That baby grows to become a prince of Egypt and the emancipator of his people. His people, too timid to fight for a land of their own, live out their lives in the desert as landless nomads. Their principal products are whining and ingratitude. But these timid, landless passive aggressives rear a new generation in the desert: a generation that Joshua leads in a successful five-year-long military campaign. This desert-born generation gains the homeland its parents only dreamed of.

The escape from Egypt is the pivotal event of the Old Testament. As we read the Old Testament we find it referred to dozens of times. The Bible tells us: follow this ritual of Passover, and remember that your ancestors were slaves in Egypt. Show hospitality to the wanderer and welcome the stranger, for when you left Egypt you too were wanderers and strangers. Never harvest every scrap of your crop, but leave a bit on the ground to be gleaned by the widow and orphan, for in Egypt you too were once widows and orphans. Most importantly, never forget that God gave you your freedom and your land, and that you owe him everything. If an Israelite forgets the escape from Egypt, he forgets who he is.

One of the most charming features of the biblical writers is their openness concerning the many flaws of their ancestors. There is not a human sin, up to and including human sacrifice and sex with sheep, which the biblical writers do not attribute to their very own ancestors. Reverence and miracles have their place in the Bible, but so do scandal, cowardice, panic and stupidity. Moses led real people, not saints, out of Egypt, and both Moses and God himself were sometimes at a loss as to how to deal with them. Moses occasionally gave up completely and wailed to God, I give up, kill me now, you’d be doing me a favor. God discovered that even he, the Master of the Universe, was not stronger than the human will, and he could not make people obey if they did not want to. More than once God made Moses what God must have thought was a very fair offer: I will kill this boneheaded lot of sinners, leaving only you and your family alive, and I will start over with only your family, and maybe this time I can get it right. And Moses, more than once, talked God out of disposing of the very people who were driving him (Moses) crazy.

The Bible is full of magic and mystery, as is life. I live in Minnesota, about as far north as you can go and still be in the United States, and in late summer I see the beautiful yellow monarch butterflies dancing in the garden. Then fall comes, the nights grow cool, and one day the monarch butterflies disappear. They leave and migrate all the way to Mexico, and not just to Mexico but to a particular grove of trees in Mexico. I used to wonder how the butterflies got all the way to Mexico on their tiny fragile wings. Then I learned that each migration cycle involves five generations of butterflies. Three generations of monarchs live out uneventful lives, enjoying the milkweed plants that grow in the north in warm weather. Then the cold winds of fall come, and one day the fourth generation flies a thousand feet or so up into the sky and hitches a ride on the thermal winds—the invisible highways that migrating birds also use to carry them south. Those who survive the trip find their way to the Mexican forest where their ancestors spent the previous winter. They spend the winter there, and in the spring the next generation mounts the skies and lets the winds carry them home to the northern fields they have never seen, where their children will live (Halpern, Four Wings and A Prayer, 2001).

And we ask, how does each generation know its place in this chain? Is there genetic encoding that tells a butterfly which generation it is a part of, and whether to fly, and in which direction? Are there genes which become active only one generation in five? Or are there genes which interact with time and place, knowing what must be done in each situation?

Human generations pose similar mysteries. Each generation has its own task, and the success or failure of one generation never assures the success or failure of the next generation. Cowards have reared warriors, and the faithless have reared the faithful, and slaves have reared free men. The opposite is also true. Each generation has its own appointment with destiny and its own relationship with God. Each generation must decide how much it will follow in the footsteps of its fathers and how much it will strike out in new directions.

The Bible tells us that God moved in history when he led the Israelites out of Egypt. In its story of the Exodus the Bible introduces us to heroes: Moses, one of the world’s all-time great leaders; his older brother Aaron, Israel’s first high priest; his sister Miriam, a great woman in her own right; Joshua, Israel’s first great military leader and Moses’ successor; Caleb, the fearless and faithful warrior.

The Exodus story also introduces us to villains. Pharaoh, with his hard heart, is the most obvious villain, but there are others. Some of the villains we meet are external enemies, but most of them are not. Most of them are Israelites. What drives Moses, and at times God himself, to despair is the mulish opposition of God’s own people. Human nature has not changed in three thousand years, and we sometimes cannot help wondering why God, who can do anything, did not create human beings who were easier to get along with. But, as we have said, the world is full of mysteries.

One of the grandest scenes in the Bible is the scene in which Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt. We visualize a whole people walking away from slavery toward freedom, walking from a foreign land to a land that will be their own. Joyously the freed slaves start out for Canaan, which is only, if they could have taken the main caravan route, a two-week journey away.

It is a gorgeously theatrical scene, but we know something that the Israelites, on the day that they marched out of Egypt, did not. We know that the trip they started that day did not take two weeks or even a month. It took forty years, the biblical span signifying a generation. Of the people who left Egypt that day, only two of the adult generation—the people over twenty years of age—lived to set foot on Canaan’s soil. Moses did not. His brother Aaron did not. His sister Miriam did not. Almost all of the adults leaving Egypt on that happy day spent the rest of their lives out on the desert. They never found a permanent home. Eventually, one by one, they died there, out in the desert, and no one remembers where they were buried. And God, whom they rebelled against time after time, was happy to see them dead.

A generation born in slavery, living in rebellion against God, and dying homeless—it is not much of an epitaph. Yet this generation of Israelites was one of the most important groups of people who ever lived. Their story takes up most of the first five books of the Bible, which Christians call the Pentateuch and Jews call the Torah. Without this generation, there would have been no Jewish religion. Without the Jewish religion, there would have been no Christianity. Everything they were became us. They are encoded deeply in our cultural DNA, far too deeply to ever wash out.

Many Jews have not found this a cheerful thought. Judaism is the spiritual ancestor of Christianity, but Judaism is far from a proud parent of its strange descendant. Jesus himself once shared this perspective. Many biblical commentators have concluded that Jesus saw himself primarily as a Jew taking Judaism to the next level—which made him extremely unpopular with his fellow Jews, who perceived no need to take Judaism to a new level and who were in fact deeply committed to Judaism as they knew it. Because of his rather parochial viewpoint Jesus spent a lot of time with Jews arguing about religion—that is, Judaism—and comparatively little time with Gentiles, whose opinions were clearly worthless. Jesus was a dissident within his culture, but he lived his life inside his culture, not outside of it. There is a subtle but profound difference between living as an outsider inside a culture and living as an outsider outside a culture. Despite his many criticisms of the Jews and Judaism Jesus never considered running off to become a Gentile.

Jesus spent his life in Israel among his fellow Jews, but he did take a trip, once, out of Israel. Perhaps it was a vacation to the seacoast, away from the intense demands of his career. He went to Phoenicia, the land of Tyre and Sidon (Matthew 15:21). At this time the Romans had made Phoenicia a part of Syria. There were few Jews there, and Jesus could expect to be left alone.

But he was not left alone. A Canaanite woman followed him relentlessly, begging him to cure her daughter, who was possessed by a demon.

Jesus ignored her. He explained to his disciples,

I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.

Matthew 15:24

Jesus said, in other words: We don’t have to worry about the Gentiles. Out of Israel we’re off duty. Dealing with these people is not our job.

But ignoring the woman did not work. The woman threw herself before Jesus and begged him to help her. In one of the harshest statements the Bible attributes to Jesus, he told her, What you ask is not right. One does not take one’s children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.

Equating this woman’s demon-possessed daughter with a dog was brutal. The Jewish people despised dogs as unclean animals, carriers of disease, creatures which lived on garbage and would eat unclaimed corpses if they could get them. The word dog was also a euphemism for Canaanite male temple prostitute, possibly because of the similarity of position assumed during sexual intercourse. When a Jewish man referred to someone as a dog, the message of contempt was unmistakable.

But love of her daughter drove the woman on. The insult did not seem to surprise her; in fact, she had a comeback. The woman said, Yes, this is true, but a dog can beg for his food. A dog may eat the crumbs that fall from his master’s table.

And something happened that almost never happened. Jesus, one of the world’s great religious minds, was bested in argument by this anonymous Gentile woman. He saw that she was right. He changed his mind. Jesus said, Great is your faith. I grant your request. Your daughter is healed (Matthew 15:21-28).

The Canaanite woman of great faith saved her daughter, and she accomplished something else as well. Never again did Jesus display unthinking contempt for the world’s Gentiles. He did not go out and evangelize to them—that job would come later, to Paul and to others—but neither did he refuse them. They too could be his followers and be healed by his love. Jesus realized that he was wrong to deny the Canaanite woman and her daughter a place at the rich spiritual feast he had prepared.

The Old Testament, likewise, is a rich spiritual feast. It is a table set for others, but it offers much to us as well. Let us join our spiritual ancestors, back around 1300 BCE, and see if this is not so.

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Chapter 1.

Egypt

Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will bring you back.

Deuteronomy 30:4

Our story begins around 1300 BCE, a very long time ago. The era archaeologists call the Bronze Age was drawing to a close. The entire world contained only about 120 million people—less than presently live in the United States alone. In what would one day be Greece, the Trojan War was still a hundred years away. In what would one day be Italy, Rome would not be founded for another 550 years. The human race was, by modern standards, very much in its infancy.

We might imagine that in a world so lightly populated most people, most of the time, could simply stay out of each other’s way, but the contentious nature of the human race has rarely permitted this. Around the Mediterranean Sea three great empires arose, and each of these great empires sought world domination. The world they sought to dominate was, of course, not the world encompassed by the entire globe, but the world they knew—the world around the Mediterranean Sea.

In the first empire the Mycenaeans lived in the area that would one day be Greece, a land full of bays and islands and inlets; as much as any people that ever lived, they were born to the sea. In the second empire the Hittites ruled what is now Turkey. The Hittites controlled a large chunk of Mediterranean seacoast and relentlessly pushed southward, trying to control more. The third empire is the one in which our story begins.

The third empire was Egypt. Because of its geography Egypt was really not one country but two: Upper Egypt, the long narrow band of fertile land created by the Nile River as it flowed northward toward the Mediterranean Sea, and Lower Egypt, the wide low Delta where the Nile spread out, fanlike, and emptied itself into the Mediterranean. The king of Upper Egypt wore a white crown, and the king of Lower Egypt wore a red crown. At the times in Egypt’s history when one ruler ruled the Two Lands, he wore a double crown—a red crown and a white crown fitted together—to show his double royalty.

Geography had favored the Two Lands of Egypt, Upper and Lower. Egypt was both wonderfully fertile and easily defended. The fertility, of course, came from the Nile River. The land bordering the Nile, covered by rich black soil, was called the Black Land. The fertile Black Land of the Nile Valley was surrounded on all sides by natural barriers. Broad desert, called the Red Land, stretched out to the east and west, presenting a formidable obstacle to would-be invaders. To the south of Egypt stood the impenetrable jungles of Africa. The Nile originated somewhere back in those jungles, but a series of roaring cataracts made the southern Nile impassable. No invading army could come up the Nile from the south. To the north of Egypt was the Mediterranean, a huge sea on which few dared to travel, and on which no one had transported an army—yet.

Secure in its fortress-like geography, Egypt created one of the world’s great cultures. By the time of Moses the Egyptians—the rich ones, at least—had already created monuments to themselves that stand to this day. 1300 BCE, the era of Moses, may sound like an ancient era, but ancient as that date may sound, by then the great pyramids that Egypt is famous for were already old. The glory years of the pyramid builders, the years of building immense stone pyramids designed to outlast time itself, were around 2600 BCE-2100 BCE. The pyramids that followed the glory years, the ones build between 2000 BCE and 1600 BCE, were also magnificent structures, but by comparison with the earlier pyramids they were cheaply built, using, not stone from distant quarries, but sun-dried mud bricks produced locally. These mud bricks, unlike the stone of earlier pyramids, eventually crumbled into rubble. By the time Moses was born, around 1300 BCE, the era of pyramid building in Egypt was over. The pharaohs of Moses’ time, Seti I and Ramses II, were buried not in pyramids, but in great rock tombs dug into the cliffs of the Valley of the Kings near Thebes.

The Egyptians were not only great builders but also great embalmers. The bodies they have left us are the best preserved in the world. We can only imagine what the leaders of Israel of that time looked like; we can never really know. But if we want to know what the Egyptian pharaohs Seti I and Ramses II looked like, we can go to the Cairo Museum and see for ourselves. Their preserved bodies are right there.

Of all the mummies of Egyptian royalty that have survived to the present day, the handsomest is that of Seti I. Seti I’s mummy is remarkable for its proud, noble, calm demeanor. Seti I looks just the way a great ruler of men should look. If a man can look this good after he has been dead for over 3000 years, we can only imagine how awe-inspiring he must have been in life. Seti I is important for our story, for it is possible that Seti I was the pharaoh whose daughter adopted a slave baby named Moses.

Those who question the historical truth of the Bible have pointed out, correctly, that the historical records of the Egyptians make no note of this slave baby, or of any slaughter of slave babies, or of any Exodus of slaves. We should remember, though, that complete historical veracity was not a goal of Egypt’s rulers, who firmly believed that writing, like architecture, had been invented primarily to further their goals of personal self-glorification. Egypt’s rulers were not above destroying monuments to their predecessors, nor were they above rewriting inscriptions already in existence in a way that claimed their predecessors’ victories and monuments as their own. They were not above telling tall tales about themselves, and the court histories of Egypt are full of stories in which Egypt’s exalted rulers are described as performing all sorts of improbable feats. For example, according to court history, Amenhotep II (1453-1419 BCE) trained his horses so well that they did not sweat, even when galloping; he could outrun anyone in Egypt; and no one had the strength to draw his bow (Mertz, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs, p. 202). Descriptions of battles between Egypt and its adversaries followed a story formula in which cowardly advisors invariably urge caution, but the fearless ruler invariably boldly leads his soldiers to glorious victory. Statues of Egypt’s fearless leaders portray them as the handsomest of men, surrounded by the most beautiful of women. Egypt’s rulers claimed to be gods on earth, and they set a standard for blowhard braggadocio that has rarely been rivaled outside of the Harvard Law School. To expect that the Egyptian pharaohs would make records of their problems with the help is to seriously misunderstand their nature.

If the Egyptians are not necessarily to be believed, why should we believe the writers of the Bible? It is a fair question. Certainly there are reasons not to believe them. One reason: the description of the Exodus and of the forty years in the wilderness that we find in the Bible is not an eyewitness account. It was written by several different writers, none of whom were there, and all of whom lived 400 to 800 years after the events they wrote about. These writers of Israel took their stories from oral traditions that had been passed down in their families for hundreds of years. The original stories undoubtedly changed as they passed from storyteller to storyteller. Another reason: there is no way to independently verify the biblical stories of Exodus and wilderness. We cannot even definitely identify the locations of many of the places referred to in the stories.

To a great extent we have to trust our biblical writers, and so the question is, can we trust them? Or were they simply people intent on glorifying their ancestors and determined not to let facts get in the way of a good story? To answer this question, we must say that if the writers of the first books of the Bible were intent on glorifying their ancestors, they had a strange way of going about it. They recorded, in Genesis, how their founding ancestor Jacob stole his brother’s birthright and how he and his father-in-law Laban cheated each other when dividing up the sheep. They recorded how most of Jacob’s sons, their ancestors, plotted to kill their brother, the great Joseph. In Exodus they recorded how their ancestors were faithless and cowardly, and how God and Moses despaired of them. These are not the kind of stories that an Egyptian pharaoh—or most other human rulers—would have allowed to be written about his ancestors.

The psychologist Sigmund Freud wrote a book, Moses and Monotheism, in which he discussed the fact that the literary lies the Bible is accused of telling are the exact opposite of the literary lies most humans have told throughout history. Consider, for example, the Bible’s claim that Moses was the son of a slave, adopted by a princess. The usual adoption story involving a great man claims the opposite: that the great man was born into a royal family but was somehow misplaced and raised by peasants. As an adult, the misplaced prince attained to the rightful place of which he was cheated as a child. According to Freud, these adoption stories are fantasies intended to support the great man’s claim to a royal title. Freud held that the supposed adoptive family was generally the great man’s real family, and that the story of adoption was made up to justify his ascent to a throne. The story proved that the great man was born royal and that the people who originally appeared to be his relatives were really not. The Bible’s story of Moses, of course, turns this useful literary lie on its head. The Bible says that the truth was that Moses was the son of a slave, and that the lie was that he was a prince of Egypt. Now, maybe this story is a lie. Maybe Moses really was an Egyptian prince, and he told this lie to legitimize his bid to lead the people of Israel. If so, it is an unusual lie, the exact opposite of everyone else’s lies. Perhaps in telling this story the biblical writers were creating a literary fiction. Then again, perhaps they were telling the truth.

In the Bible the book of Genesis ends with the death of Jacob and the death of Joseph. Both died wealthy and honored, after seeing their dreams fulfilled. As is recorded in my book, I Will Bring You Back: The Story of Jacob, His Sons, and His God, Jacob survived numerous disasters, most of his own making, and ended his life living comfortably in Lower Egypt, the fertile Delta, under the protection of his son Joseph. When Jacob died, Joseph gave him an upper class, executive-style funeral. Jacob’s body was embalmed, and all Egypt went into official mourning for seventy days. At the end of this mourning period Joseph organized a vast caravan, consisting of Jacob’s enormous extended family, a cadre of Egyptian royalty, and a division of Egyptian charioteers, which took Jacob’s body back to Canaan and buried him in his family’s ancestral tomb. No previous Israelite, not even founding father Abraham, had such a production made of his funeral. Later, Joseph himself died. His body, like that of his father’s, was embalmed and placed in a coffin. Unlike his father, Joseph was buried in Egypt. Before he died Joseph asked his brothers to take his body with them when the day came that they returned to Canaan, so that his final resting place would be in Canaan, the land of his birth. Joseph’s brothers promised him that one day his body would rest in Canaan.

The book of Genesis ends with congratulations all around. Joseph, who entered Egypt as a slave, had risen to be Egyptian prime minister, second in power only to Pharaoh himself. Joseph had saved Egypt from famine. He had reconciled with his brothers. He had brought his entire family to live in the Delta, one of the finest agricultural areas in the world. His grieving father, who had thought he was dead, had rejoiced to find he was alive, and had spent the last years of his life basking in his son’s reflected glory. God had blessed Jacob and Joseph, and all had ended well for them and their tribe.

It is a wonderful happy ending, but it is not the end of the story of Israel. When the Bible takes up the story of Israel in its next book, Exodus, our heroes are in more trouble than they ever got into in Genesis. No longer are they powerful or prosperous or blessed. All their good fortune is gone. In fact, they are slaves.

Getting to Exodus

Between the death of Joseph described at the end of the book of Genesis and the birth of Moses described at the beginning of the book of Exodus, three hundred years passed. The pharaoh Joseph served was long dead. Joseph himself had been long forgotten at the royal court. A new pharaoh, one who

knew not Joseph

Exodus 1:8

ruled Egypt. Avaris, the capital city of the Delta where Joseph served his pharaoh, was now called Ramses. The descendants of Joseph and his brothers lived in the Delta, not as free shepherds, but as slaves, laboring on the Egyptians’ interminable building projects. They were treated like animals, and because they grew numerous Pharaoh planned to thin the herd: he ordered his soldiers to kill all the boy babies born to them. Their children were to be slaughtered, and they were helpless to prevent it.

The abrupt change from the grand life of Joseph portrayed in Genesis to the abased life of slavery portrayed in Exodus stuns us. What has happened, we ask. How did everything go so horribly wrong?

To answer that question we must go back into Egypt’s history, back before the time of Joseph. Let us go back to the middle of the Bronze Age, to approximately 1640 BCE. Egypt was going through a rough patch.

As we have said, Egypt was blessed with excellent natural defenses. Under normal circumstances, it was a very difficult country to invade. But Egypt fell into a time of weakness and disunity. The country divided itself into a patchwork of small territories, each determined to go it alone. Perhaps Egypt’s wonderful successes in the past convinced each of its territories that there was no real outside danger to fear and thus no need for alliance with each other. If so, this proved to be an overly optimistic assessment of the situation.

We have mentioned that Egypt was really two Egypts: Upper Egypt, the long strip of land adjoining the Nile River, and Lower Egypt, the rich Delta lowlands. In the Delta, one black day, invaders appeared. These invaders are known to history as the Hyksos. The Hyksos were a potpourri of Semites from the lands to the east of Egypt. The name Hyksos has been variously translated as Shepherd Kings, Kings from Foreign Lands, and Avenging Angels. The Hyksos had a weapon that Egypt had not previously seen: the horse and chariot. A unified Egypt could have beaten the Hyksos back, but a squabbling Egypt could not. In 1640 BCE the Hyksos captured the Delta and made Avaris, the Delta’s greatest city, their capital. Upper Egypt remained in the hands of the native Egyptians, who had finally found a common goal: driving out the Hyksos.

Many commentators believe that the pharaoh whom Joseph served was a Hyksos. The first three Hyksos pharaohs were named Sheshi, Yakubher and Khyan (Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs, p. 93), and one of them could have been the pharaoh of Joseph. A man of Semitic extraction, whose family may have originated somewhere in the vicinity of Canaan, this Hyksos pharaoh would have been much more likely to see Joseph’s virtues than a native-born Egyptian pharaoh would have been. A foreign-born pharaoh would also have been more likely to welcome Joseph’s family, fellow Semites, to Egypt, and to see them as potential allies against the restive native population.

Joseph, brilliant as he was, did not improve this tense situation. Genesis, Chapter 47, describes how Joseph averted famine and enriched his pharaoh—and made the native Egyptians despise him.

We recall that the seven years of famine were preceded by seven years of plenty. During each of those seven years of plenty, Joseph arranged for the storage of one-fifth of the harvest. When the seven years of famine came and the crops failed, Egypt had enough grain in storage to avert famine. But Joseph did not give away this grain. He sold it.

First, he sold the grain for money. This worked for awhile. Finally, though, the natives had spent all their money on grain. They had no money; Joseph and the pharaoh had it all. The natives could no longer buy grain.

The natives went to Joseph and said, Give us food, or we will die before your eyes. We have no more money.

Joseph replied, Bring me your livestock. I will sell grain in exchange for your livestock, if you have no money.

So the natives brought Joseph their livestock. They lost their sheep and goats, their cattle and donkeys to Joseph. They lived through another year. The famine continued.

The next year the natives went to Joseph and said, We are revealing no secret when we tell you that all we have left are our bodies and our land. If we die and no one tends our land, what good is that going to do you? How will empty, untilled lands enrich great Pharaoh? For food we will sell you our land and become your bondsmen.

So Joseph bought the land from the natives and paid for it with the stored grain. The farms and estates that had been privately owned by Egyptians became the property of the pharaoh. Egyptians who had been free men and property owners became indentured servants, working the land that used to be their own for its new owner.

Joseph gave Pharaoh’s new bondsmen seed so that they could plant new crops. Joseph decreed that the Egyptians could keep four-fifths of the new crops for themselves, but they owed Pharaoh one-fifth of each crop.

The fury of the native Egyptians can be imagined. True, Joseph had saved Egypt from starvation. The Egyptians were still alive. But from the Egyptian perspective, Joseph had taken crops produced by the Egyptians and used them to force the Egyptians into indigence. To get the food they themselves had produced, the native Egyptians had to give Joseph their money, their livestock, their land, and their freedom.

The Hyksos, like so many other foreign conquerors, did not run a contented country. In the Delta, which they controlled, and in Upper Egypt, which they did not control, the native population devoted its free time to plotting the Hyksos’ demise. The native Egyptians had found a cause which united them.

Faced with these strong emotions, the Hyksos did not consider conciliation. In a famous letter now in the British Museum, the fourth Hyksos ruler, Apepi I, complained to Upper Egypt’s ruler Seqenenre Tao that he was being kept awake at night by the roaring of the hippopotami in Upper Egypt’s capital, Thebes. Since Thebes was 500 miles from Avaris, this could not have been literally true, and was possibly Apepi I’s Bronze Age way of telling his fellow pharaoh that he was as annoyingly noisy as a hippo and should shut up (Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs, p. 95-96).

Seqenenre Tao did not shut up. He went to war. He was in all likelihood killed in a battle against the Hyksos. We know he died violently, because his mummy, which is now in the Cairo Museum, shows that he received five major blows to his skull, any one of which could have been fatal. His son Kamose took up the fight. Kamose survived only three years. Another son of Seqenenre Tao, Ahmose I, became Upper Egypt’s new pharaoh. Ahmose I devoted the last half of his 25-year reign to the expulsion of the Hyksos. After many bitter years of fighting, Ahmose I drove the Hyksos out of Egypt.

In control once more, the native Egyptians took revenge on the hated Hyksos. In 1552 BCE the Egyptians destroyed Avaris, the Hyksos’ royal city. They obliterated, as best they could, every physical sign that the Hyksos had ever existed.

From the Egyptian perspective, Ahmose I was a great hero. After a hundred years of Hyksos rule, Ahmose I had driven the hated foreign conquerors out of the Delta and had united the Two Lands. He founded what historians call the Eighteenth Dynasty and began the 500-year-long era that historians call the New Kingdom. Most human achievements fade with time, but Ahmose I is still considered a wonderful success.

The Israelites, however, undoubtedly saw matters somewhat differently. Their lives were ruined. Those who survived Ahmose I’s conquest—and we may guess there were many who did not—were made slaves. Life was going to be very bitter for a long long time.

Bridging the Gap

As we have said, there is a gap of about three hundred years between the end of the book of Genesis and the beginning of the book of Exodus. Genesis closes with the death of Joseph, around 1600 BCE, and Exodus opens in the time of Moses, around 1300 BCE. From the perspective of the Israelites, nothing much happened during this interim time. They became slaves, and they remained slaves. There is a saying, not in the Bible, that if you are a sled dog, unless you are the lead dog, the scenery never changes. The Israelites were not the lead dogs, and so perhaps, for them, the scenery never changed.

The Egyptians, however, were lead dogs, doing all sorts of amazing things. Ahmose I was succeeded by his son, Amenhotep I. Amenhotep I was succeeded by Tuthmosis I, a military man who joined the royal family by marrying Ahmose I’s daughter, who was confusingly also named Ahmose. Tuthmosis I also married Ahmose’s sister, the princess Mutnefert. Tuthmosis I ruled for only six years before he died, leaving the throne to Tuthmosis II, his son by Mutnefert. Tuthmosis II married his half-sister Hatshepsut, who was the daughter of Tuthmosis I (his father) and Ahmose (his father’s wife and mother’s sister). Hatshepsut, the Great Royal Wife, produced no son, but Tuthmosis II did father a son with Isis, a concubine. When Tuthmosis II died, this son, Tuthmosis III, still a boy, was proclaimed pharaoh. Hatshepsut, his stepmother and aunt, served as his regent and guardian. (See Appendix, Eighteenth Dynasty—Family Tree of Akhenaten for a diagram of these family relationships.) The death of Tuthmosis II set the stage for one of Egypt’s most famous royal soap operas.

Hatshepsut took over in the way that sometimes gives stepmothers a bad name. She considered herself king of Egypt and did everything a king would do, right down to having herself portrayed in royal art as a man, wearing the usual false beard. Boarding schools had not been invented, so she shipped her stepson Tuthmosis III off to join the army. While Hatshepsut and Senenmut, her royal steward and close personal friend, ran the empire from the luxurious royal palace, the hapless concubine’s son Tuthmosis III was generally camped out with the troops in Syria, Lebanon, or some other remote outpost of the Egyptian Empire.

After fifteen years of this, Hatshepsut died and Tuthmosis III became pharaoh. Tuthmosis III had actually learned a great deal growing up in the army, and later historians called him the Napoleon of Egypt (Peter A. Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs, p.109) because of his many successful military campaigns. His personal feelings towards his late stepmother may be surmised from the fact that he ordered the destruction of every monument and inscription that bore her hated name. Some of these statues and inscriptions to the glory that was Hatshepsut have survived, buried under the rubble that Tuthmosis III consigned them to. Many other have no doubt been lost to us as her stepson desired.

Tuthmosis III was succeeded by his son, Amenhotep II. Amenhotep II was succeeded by his son, Amenhotep III. After a long and conventionally successful reign, Amenhotep III left his powerful and prosperous empire to his sensitive, creative son, Amenhotep IV. And once again life in the royal court became royal soap opera. Amenhotep IV was a spiritual, nonmaterialistic man, not at all the sort of man one might imagine attaining the ultimate power position in one of the world’s great empires. He was the closest thing to a religious prophet that an Egyptian royal family ever produced. Had he been born an Israelite his wisdom might have been preserved and appreciated, and he might have gotten his own book of the Bible, or at least a few chapters. Sadly, his world was not ready for him. Amenhotep IV brought Egypt spiritual enlightenment, and Egypt returned it to the store and demanded a refund.

Akhenaten

Amenhotep IV is known to history as the Great Heretic. In a polytheistic empire he declared himself a monotheist. The name Amenhotep meant Amun is pleased (Clayton, p. 100) and was a tribute to Amun, the premier god in the Egyptian pantheon. The name Amenhotep thus testified to its bearer’s support of conventional Egyptian religion. Amenhotep IV, however, jumped the fence, theologically speaking. He declared himself a worshiper of only one god, the sun, or Aten, and to advertise this fact he changed his name to Akhenaten, which means servant of the Aten.

Everything about Akhenaten was different. Statues of previous pharaohs invariably portrayed them as chiseled exemplars of physical perfection. Statues of Akhenaten portray a man whose body is not only not perfect but a bit weird, with rounded, effeminate breasts and buttocks, a narrow, horsey face, and a lantern jaw. Commentators have wondered if Akhenaten suffered from a pituitary disorder such as Frohlich’s syndrome or from a genetic disorder such as Marfan’s syndrome. This improbable-looking pharaoh decreed that Egypt would henceforth practice monotheism, and that its one god, the sun or the Aten, would be worshipped through the intercession, not of the priests, but of the pharaoh Akhenaten himself. The reaction of the priests of Amun at receiving this Bronze Age equivalent of a pink slip can be easily imagined.

Akhenaten moved the royal court out of Thebes. On a previously uninhabited site on the east bank of the Nile, he established a new royal city he called Akhetaten. Here flourished a kind of art Egypt had never seen before. Previous conventional Egyptian art was stiffly stylized, formal, and predictable. In conventional Egyptian paintings plants stood neatly in rows, horses charged fearlessly into battle, and pharaohs stood triumphant before vanquished foes. In contrast, the art of Akhetaten was gentle and naturalistic. In this city’s paintings plants could be seen swaying in the breeze; horses could be seen idly scratching their itchy spots; and the pharaoh and his lovely wife Nefertiti could be seen at home, playing with their six adorable daughters, while the sun disk, or Aten, reached down to bless them with rays that ended in small hands that symbolized life. Artistically, grandiosity was out, and family values were in.

Akhenaten was not as interested in ruling the world as Egyptian pharaohs traditionally were. He delegated ruling-the-world duties to his prime minister Ay, who was his wife Nerfertiti’s father, and to the general Horemheb, who was the husband of another daughter of Ay, Mutnodjme. To keep things even more in the family, Akhenaten married three of his own daughters—including the truly remarkable one named Ankhesenpaaten, by whom he fathered yet another daughter.

When Akhenaten died he was succeeded by a nine-year-old boy named Tutankhaten. How Tutankhaten achieved this distinction is not clear. Possibly he was Akhenaten’s son, but it seems strange that Akhenaten would have allowed himself to be portrayed in paintings as the sonless father of daughters if he actually did have a son—any son. Tutankhaten’s right to the throne was strengthened by his hasty marriage to the late Akhenaten’s daughter and wife, Ankhesenpaaten, who was already a grown woman and mother.

The young Tut ruled in name only. Prime minister Ay and general Horemheb, who had run Egypt for Akhenaten, were still in charge. With Akhenaten gone, Egypt reverted to its old ways. The new city of Akhetaten was abandoned, and the royal court moved to Memphis. Egypt abandoned monotheism and the worship of the Aten, and the priests of Amun were back in business at their old stands. The new king and his Great Royal Wife changed their names to reflect the new shift in power. Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun, and Ankhesenpaaten became Ankhesenamun.

Tutankhamun is one of the most famous of the Egyptian pharaohs. Oddly, he owes his fame in the modern world to his obscurity in his own. When Tutankhamun died at the age of seventeen no tomb fitting for a pharaoh had yet been built for him, so he was buried in a tomb that was originally intended for someone else, possibly for the prime minister Ay. The tomb was too small for a pharaoh, but the royal mourners, evidently feeling that they could substitute quantity for quality, stuffed it with every fine article imaginable. A number of these fine articles, including the sarcophagus that held Tut and the canopic jars that held his viscera, had originally been commissioned for use by others, and these articles had to be recut to remove the original inscriptions and to replace them with inscriptions to the glory of Tut. Compared to the stately resting places of his predecessors, Tut’s tomb was a hasty and inadequate piece of work, what carpenters call a cob job.

Which is what saved it. Every other pharaoh’s tomb was robbed repeatedly. Tut’s little tomb was not. Buried under the tons of rubble dumped on it when the magnificent tomb of Ramses II (about whom we will say a great deal more later) was carved into the nearby rock, Tut’s tomb was lost and inaccessible for millennia. Not until 1922 did archaeologists drag the boy-king out into daylight to dazzle the world.

Tut’s death left