Dig Even Deeper

Unearthing Old Testament Treasure

Andrew Sach, Andrew Sach and Richard Alldritt, Richard Alldritt

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781844744329
• eBook ISBN:
  9781844746422
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

What does an Old Testament book have to say to us in the twenty-first century?
Discover the message of a Bible book for yourself by using tools which help you 'dig deeper'. In the authors' own words, 'We want to share with you why we think it means what it does, how we came to our understanding of the verses, what discoveries we made. Rather than a Hollywood movie, this is going to be more like the how-they-made-the-movie footage.'
'I have never seen a burning bush, have never suffered a plague of boils (even as a seventeen-year-old the acne wasn't that bad), have never parted my bathwater and walked through the middle, have never been to Mount Sinai, let alone heard God speaking from thunder on the top of it, ' says Andrew Sach. 'What possible relevance does the book of Exodus have to me?'
We set about discovering the message of a Bible book for us today using various tools (first introduced in Dig Deeper). The Repetition tool helps us to see that God's name is a big deal. The Context tool shows us why it was important to beat the Amalekites. The Quotation/Allusion tool uncovers a miniature garden of Eden where we least expect one. And so on.
Rather than a Hollywood movie, this is more the how-they-made-the-movie footage that you get in the DVD extras. As well as showing you the treasure, we want you to grow in your ability to unearth such treasure for yourself in other Bible books.

Beatings

Exodus 1 - 2

Does God have amnesia?

In April 1975 the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia. During their four-year reign of terror it is estimated that somewhere between 1.4 and 2 million Cambodians died from disease, starvation or torture. Pol Pot systematically executed anyone he felt might pose a threat to his regime. His paranoia extended to anyone with an education – simply wearing glasses marked you out as a potential target for the death squads. Many teachers were killed, many doctors, many Christians.

This leaves people asking why. Why does God allow people, especially his people, to suffer in this way? Is he too weak to stop it? Does he even care? Those are the kind of questions that God’s people would have been asking in Exodus 1 – 2.

Even though the book of Genesis had a happy ending (Joseph is mates with the king of Egypt and negotiates shelter for the twelve tribes of Israel during a severe famine), it only takes a few verses at the start of Exodus for things to turn sour. Joseph dies; there’s a change of government; and there’s a dramatic shift in immigration policy. Overnight Goshen, the area housing the Israelite refugees, turns into a labour camp.

Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses...So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.

(1:11, 13–14)

But the brutality of the Egyptian regime doesn’t end there. An official memo arrives at the maternity ward of Goshen General Hospital ordering the termination of all male Israelite children. By the end of the chapter, the whole population is instructed to drown Israelite boys in the river. Today we call it ethnic cleansing. It’s Auschwitz and Belsen in the 1940s; Cambodia in the 1970s; Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s; the Democratic Republic of Congo as we write. A humanitarian disaster with an absent God in a remote heaven who does nothing. Or so it seems.

And so the end of chapter 2 comes as a bit of a relief:

During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.

(2:23–24)

God has been suffering two chapters of amnesia, but a king’s funeral triggers his memory. Finally he wakes up and is about to do something.

But that can’t be right, can it?

An interpretation of the Bible that makes God look like someone with amnesia? It can’t be right. We must have got the wrong end of the stick somehow. There must be more going on. You’re reading this book because you want to ‘dig deeper’, and you’re probably eager to get your hands dirty with some Bible tools. If ever there was a need to look more closely at a passage, this is it.

Using the Structure tool, we noticed that Jacob pops up at the beginning and the end of our section. The book opens in 1:1 with a reference to ‘the sons of Israel who came...with Jacob’ (he actually gets mentioned twice here, because ‘Israel’ and ‘Jacob’ are two names for the same person). And the section closes in 2:24 with a reference to the ‘covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob’. We realized that, like a pair of bookends, these two allusions to Jacob’s family tree enclose the whole section.

Jacob’s family is so important in the Old Testament that the writer assumes we will see the significance immediately. If you don’t, and the secret is still hidden from you, then it may be time for the next tool:

Quotation/Allusion tool

Read Genesis 12:1–2, 7. What does God promise Abraham?

Read Genesis 26:3–4. What does God promise Isaac (Abraham’s son)?

Read Genesis 28:3–4. What does God promise Jacob (Abraham’s grandson)?

So when the author of Exodus says that God ‘remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob’, what kind of things is he intending to bring to mind?

God and Pharaoh step into the ring

Once you’ve done the background work in Genesis you’ll start seeing the holes in the amnesia theory. It seems that 2:24 isn’t so much a statement of the next thing that happened in chronological sequence (the king died...then God remembered) as a summary of the whole of the action so far. In a subtle, behind-the-scenes way, God has been remembering his promises to Jacob’s family all along.

We’ve made it a rule that we’re not allowed to tell you the answers to the Dig Deeper exercises, but you’ll forgive us if we break it just this once. Hopefully you saw something in Genesis about God wanting Jacob to have a big family – ‘be fruitful and multiply’, ‘as numerous as the stars in the sky’ – that kind of thing. God wants the population to go up. Pharaoh on the other hand is wary of the military threat posed by Israel’s increasing numbers (1:9–10). He wants the population to go down. Read from the start of chapter 1 again, with this in mind, and you will see things a little differently.

God and Pharaoh step into the ring. The bell goes. Round 1.

God gets off to a strong start in verse 7. Before you know it Israel is fruitful and multiplying. But Pharaoh is quick out of the red corner and announces his first counter-blow. Oppress the Israelites with forced labour! When they finally get home to their wives they’ll think of nothing but sleep!

Pharaoh’s wild swing missed the mark. The taskmasters increase the workload, but unexpectedly it only increases the activity between the sheets: ‘the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread’ (1:12). The bell sounds the end of Round 1, and the king of Egypt is already nursing a cut lip.

Round 2 begins and Pharaoh decides to play dirty with the help of (OK, so this stretches our boxing metaphor a bit) some midwives. Fortunately these women fear the LORD (verse 17) more than they fear Pharaoh and refuse to kill the baby boys. When interviewed later, they get away with an excuse so bad that you know God must be involved:

Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.

(1:19)

If you’re confused about why the midwives receive God’s approval for telling such a blatant porky when the Bible generally commends truthfulness, we’d really recommend the discussion by John Frame in The Doctrine of the Christian Life.1 The author of Exodus doesn’t dwell on these thorny ethical issues; his point is simply that the population continues to climb. At the end of Round 2 Pharaoh is sitting in his corner, looking decidedly punch-drunk.

Round 3 opens with Pharaoh out of control, fists flying in all directions. ‘Drown every Israelite boy,’ he cries (verse 22). This time, instead of telling us about the population as a whole, the narrator zooms in to explain how one particular family dodges the blow...

It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to raise a child in the knowledge that an execution squad is prowling the streets looking for him. He wakes during the night, and you hurry to muffle his cries. You bury the nappies in the garden in case the secret police are going through the rubbish. We’re told this particular mum kept her baby hidden for three months; it must have seemed like years. Eventually she runs out of options and hides him among the reeds by the river bank. Pharaoh had ordered that the babies be thrown in the Nile, and she can manage little better – the only difference is a little papyrus basket (2:3).2

This is the time to get out the Translations tool. If you have a KJV or NKJV Bible to hand, or you look at the footnote in the TNIV (all of these translations and more are available online at www.biblegateway.com), you will find that the papyrus basket is called an ‘ark’. That sounds familiar of course, and before long we’re using the Quotation/Allusion tool again to see if this has got anything to do with Noah’s famous boat. We dutifully re-check the Noah account, and there we discover that his ark had to be waterproofed with pitch (Genesis 6:14), a procedure very similar to that used to waterproof the floating cot here in Exodus.

I (Andrew) ought to come clean and admit that I only spotted this because we had to learn the Hebrew word for ‘ark’ at Bible college. At the time I was a bit put out: learning the word for a rare type of boat mentioned in only two Bible stories seemed to take our vocabulary learning to unnecessary extremes. I’m now chuffed of course, because in God’s providence it’s helping me write a book on Exodus years later! It’s always a good idea to check multiple translations because occasionally you’ll pick up something cool like this for yourself.

The baby Israelite is saved through an ark, of all things. Why? Presumably because the God who’s at work behind the scenes wants us to discern his hand in it. You might say that salvation-by-ark is something of a signature move! Even as Pharaoh tries to drown babies, God saves them. At the close of Round 3 it looks as if Pharaoh’s close to throwing in the towel.

Round 4 is the slapstick round. It’s not so much boxing as WWE. Pharaoh’s daughter discovers a cute Hebrew baby among the reeds, but her clucking-hen tendencies are in conflict with her princess tendencies – princesses don’t change nappies! As luck would have it, a passing Israelite girl (strategically positioned elder sister) has the phone number of an excellent nanny (strategically positioned mother) to whom the princess offers a generous financial package. So let’s just summarize: the baby that Pharaoh wanted to kill is now being raised by Moses’ own mother at the expense of Pharaoh’s daughter. God really is taking the mick.

Did you notice that we don’t find out the name on the birth certificate until right at the end? It’s Moses. But before we get into the sea-parting, stone-tablet-carrying activities for which he is later famous, his childhood teaches us that God is faithful. Behind the scenes God keeps his promises to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. Pharaoh (not for the last time) is confounded.

Does Moses really stuff things up?

If promise-keeping is the big theme, the next episode comes as a bit of a shock. It doesn’t seem to fit. Everything that was going so well seems to go so wrong.

I mean, you can guess God’s plan can’t you? A Hebrew baby raised in the royal household. As he grows up, it would have been Pharaoh pushing the buggy around the Pyramids. You can imagine Moses as an eight- or nine-year-old sitting on Pharaoh’s knee asking his ‘granddad’ why people had to be so mean to the slaves. You can imagine Pharaoh’s heart softening. You can smell a diplomatic solution just around the corner.

So why oh why does Moses have to stuff it all up?

One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

(2:11–12)

Yes, well done Moses. Nice one. So now the Israelites don’t trust you (2:14), and Pharaoh wants to kill you (2:15), and you have to run away to Midian, some 200 miles away. How exactly are you planning to rescue the Israelites from there?!

So God has a plan, but even he can’t foolproof it against the actions of a muppet like Moses. And so God ends up frustrated, sitting in heaven saying ‘bother’, shaking his head and going back to the drawing board to try to think up Plan B.

But that can’t be right, can it? An interpretation of the Bible in which God’s plans look as precarious as a Jenga tower in the advanced stages of the game? It can’t be right.

Apart from theological common sense, the other thing that showed us we’d got the wrong end of the stick was the Quotation/Allusion tool. This is useful not only when the Exodus passage alludes back to something earlier in the Bible (as with the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob example), but also when a later Bible writer alludes back to Exodus. In this case there are two relevant New Testament texts: Acts 7:23–29, 35 and Hebrews 11:24–26. Neither attaches any blame to Moses. Stephen (in Acts) points the finger at the Israelites for failing to trust Moses’ leadership, while the writer of Hebrews tells us that Moses was acting ‘by faith’ when he chose to identify himself with the Israelite oppressed.

And so the Quotation/Allusion tool sends us back into the Exodus text, armed with the perspective that Moses is acting faithfully. To be honest, we puzzled over this. We couldn’t see it at first. Even with all the tools, understanding the Bible isn’t always easy, and you have to pray and ponder and pray. In the end the solution we found most satisfying came from a commentary: Moses’ seemingly crazy actions in chapter 2 are actually a sneak preview of what God is about to do through him in chapters 3 – 15. If you look closely you can see the rescue plan in miniature.

(Commentaries are worth their weight in gold when you get into a tight spot, but they can also lead you badly astray. Check out the appendix on ‘Commentaries, copying and catastrophe!’ for a few health warnings.)

Actions of Moses	Actions of God
One day, when Moses had grown up...he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people (2:11).	Then the LORD said, ‘I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt’ (3:7). ‘I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them’ (3:9).
He struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand (2:12).	‘I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast’ (12:12). At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt (12:29).
The shepherds came and drove them away, but Moses stood up and saved them, and watered their flock (2:17).	Thus the LORD saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians (14:30).
They said, ‘An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of t...

Table of contents

• Andrew Sach and Richard Alldritt
• Dig Even Deeper
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Beatings
• Bush
• Plagues
• Passover
• Water
• Whingeing
• Father-in-law
• Fear
• Case law
• Covenant
• Tabernacle
• Calf
• Cleft
• Tabernacle
• Appendix 1:
• Appendix 2:
• Appendix 3:
• Notes