Exodus and Leviticus for Everyone

John Goldingay

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780664233761
• eBook ISBN: 9781611640854
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Following on the heels of the successful New Testament for Everyone commentaries by N. T. Wright, John Goldingay, an internationally respected Old Testament scholar, authors this ambitious Old Testament for Everyone series. Covering Scripture from Genesis to Malachi, Goldingay addresses the texts in such a way that even the most challenging passages are explained simply. Perfect for daily devotions, Sunday school preparation, or brief visits with the Bible, the Old Testament for Everyone series is an excellent resource for the modern reader. This third volume in Goldingay's series presents a rich overview of the action-packed book of Exodus and is an excellent guide to Jewish law as presented in the book of Leviticus.

EXODUS 1:1–14
Picking Up the Story

¹So these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob; they came each with his household: ²Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; ³Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; ⁴Dan and Napthali; Gad and Asher. ⁵Counting every person of those who came forth from Jacob’s body, they were seventy, Joseph being in Egypt. ⁶Joseph died, as did all his brothers, and all that generation, ⁷but the Israelites—they were fruitful and they teemed; they grew numerous and very, very strong. The country was full of them.

⁸A new king arose over Egypt who did not recognize Joseph. ⁹He said to his people, “Now. The Israelite people are more numerous and stronger than us. ¹⁰Come on, let’s act sensibly with them so they do not become numerous, and when war comes even join together with our enemies and fight against us or go up from the country.” ¹¹So they set work supervisors over them to keep them down with their labors, and they built store cities for Pharaoh, Pithom, and Rameses. ¹²But as they kept them down, so they became numerous and were fruitful. And they came to be in dread of the Israelites. ¹³So the Egyptians made the Israelites serve with harshness. ¹⁴They made their lives hard with tough serfdom, with mortar, bricks, and every form of serfdom in the open country. Every form of the serfdom they had them undertake was with harshness.

As I write in the month of May, the TV series are running down or working their way to the kind of cliffhanger I referred to in the introduction, hoping to keep us in suspense for the fall: “Get out of that problem/threat”! One or two long-running series are rumored to be nearing their end, and there is some speculation about how the next year will be able to tie up the loose ends. “Does anyone believe that the scriptwriters have any clue how to bring it to an end?” one reviewer asked about a particularly involved series. You can often guess the kind of thing that needs to happen; the question is how the story will get there. When the president got shot at the end of the first season of West Wing, did we think he might die? At the end of the season, did we not assume that Josh and Donna would endup together? In the meantime, however, the next season will need to answer questions raised by the previous one, and will begin by giving new, inattentive, or forgetful viewers flashbacks to what has previously happened.

Like those flashbacks, the first paragraph in Exodus summarizes the end of Genesis, mostly in Genesis’s own words. The continuity is indicated by the “so” with which the book begins. Jacob’s sons are divided into groups according to their mothers.

In describing the Israelites as fruitful, teeming, and numerous, Exodus also reminds the audience of the beginning of the entire series, Genesis 1. There, God commissioned the creation to do that. Israel has done it; it has experienced the creation blessing on a stupendous scale. Describing the people as filling the country further underlines the point, because God’s creation commission included filling the earth; in Hebrew “earth” and “country” are the same word. Exodus adds a verb that did not come in Genesis. The Israelites became very, very strong. That worries the Egyptians, but the Israelites have become an important part of their work force and economy; they want to hold onto them. Their relationship with them is now a little like that of Britain’s with India. Britain would have liked to hold onto India, but the tail got too big for the dog. You can try suppression, but in the long run it doesn’t work.

Like the arrival of a new presidential administration, a change in the Egyptian dynasty means members of the old staff or government or court lose their positions. Joseph perhaps came to Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty, whose kings included Akhenaten and the childless Tutankhamen. After a coup or two a new dynasty started in the 1290s with Rameses I and his son Seti I, one of whom might have been the Pharaoh who didn’t recognize Joseph. The disordered conditions of the transition from one dynasty to another would provide a plausible background for the Egyptian government doing some tightening up. Seti’s successor Rameses II (Rameses the Great) is famous for his building projects, and one can imagine these being undertaken by conscript labor with foreign groups such as the Israelites constituting more than their fair share of the labor force. We don’t know where Pithom was, but Pi-Rameses was one of the most impressive of Rameses’s building projects.

Fixing the story’s historical background involves using circumstantial evidence. No sources outside the Old Testament mention Joseph, the Israelites, or Moses. If you are inclined to think the Old Testament is unlikely to have invented the story from scratch (as I am), then you will set the story in this context. If you are not so inclined, you may see it as “just a story” and think it misguided to try to set it in a context at all.

EXODUS 1:15–2:10
How to Resist the Authorities

¹⁵The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives (one of whom was named Shiphrah, the second Puah), ¹⁶“When you are delivering the Hebrew women, look at the stones. If it is a son, kill him, but if it is a daughter, she may live.” ¹⁷But the midwives revered God and did not do as the king of Egypt told them; they let the boys live. ¹⁸The king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing and let the boys live?” ¹⁹The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, because they are lively. Before the midwife comes to them, they give birth.” ²⁰God dealt well with the midwives, and the people grew numerous and strong. ²¹Because the midwives revered God, he made households for them. ²²Then Pharaoh ordered all his people, “Every son who is born you shall throw into the Nile, but every daughter you shall let live.”

^2:1A man from the household of Levi went and took to wife a Levite woman. ²The woman became pregnant and bore a son, and she saw he was lovely. She hid him for three months ³but could not hide him any longer. So she got a papyrus container for him, tarred it with tar and bitumen, put the boy in it, and put it in the reeds by the bank of the Nile. ⁴His sister stood at a distance so she would know what would happen to him. ⁵Pharaoh’s daughter came down to bathe in the Nile, while her girls were walking on the bank of the Nile. She saw the container in the midst of the reeds and sent her maidservant, and she got it. ⁶She opened it and saw the child. There, the boy was crying, and she felt sorry for him, and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” ⁷His sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and summon you someone from the Hebrew women who is nursing, so she can nurse the child for you?” ⁸Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go!” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. ⁹Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse him for me. I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. ¹⁰When the child had grown, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She called him Moses, and said, “Because I ‘pulled him out’ from the water.”

Booker T. Washington was born in slavery but was later the first principal of a Negro college in Tuskegee, Alabama, and was sometimes called the president of Black America. There is a story about a black lawyer fleeing from a lynch mob and coming to Washington’s door. Washington gave him protection and helped him escape, but then denied helping the man. His lie may have saved the college campus from destruction and saved other people from being lynched.

The Old Testament’s attitude to telling the truth is similar to the one implied by this story. Your mother used to tell you that the Ten Commandments require you to tell the truth, but they don’t. They do require you to give true witness in court, but that is a more vital matter. Perjury can cost someone his or her life; stealing a cookie probably won’t. Demanding the truth is a way we parents try to control our children, and we use the Ten Commandments to that end. The Old Testament sees truth telling as part of a broader truthful relationship. Where there is a truthful relationship between people, telling the truth is part of that relationship. Where there is no truthful relationship, it does not isolate truth telling as an obligation. Where powerful people are oppressing powerless people, the powerless are not obliged to tell the truth to their oppressors. (So I tell my students, only semi-jokingly, that I am under greater obligation to tell them the truth than they are to tell me the truth.) Revering authorities should be a way of revering God, but when the authorities are requiring murder, all bets are off. You give God what belongs to God as well as giving Caesar what belongs to Caesar. People can pay with their lives for revering God rather than the authorities, but on this occasion God honors that stance, an encouragement to other people faced with their choice.

Specifically, women who are expected to kill their own babies or someone else’s babies are not expected to cooperate. In the movie I’ve Loved You So Long, Juliette Scott-Thomas plays a woman who killed her child because she could no longer live with the suffering that its illness was causing it. While she serves time for her crime, she subsequently declares, “The worst prison is the death of a child. You never get out of it.” Pharaoh wants to put the Hebrew midwives and the Hebrew mothers into that prison. Like Genesis, the women in the exodus story show that they are not people you can assert too much headship over.

Telling us the midwives’ names makes them real people; they are not just anonymous functionaries. They are people who revere God. Exodus knows them by name; we know them by name; God knows them by name. We will later discover the names of Moses’ parents and his sister; they too are real people (see Exodus 6:20; 15:20). It is less important for the representatives of the Egyptian court to be so. Not naming them suggests that they are subordinate to the story. They will have plenty of prominence in Egyptian records, which make no mention of the Israelites. The Old Testament has a different scale of values; it is not Pharaoh and his daughter who count. Pharaoh is someone the newspapers think is important and powerful, yet he can be defeated by three or four women.

Letting the baby girls live also hints at his incompetence (the “stones” may be the birth stool on which a woman knelt when giving birth). Killing the baby boys reduces the size of any potential Israelite fighting force but also reduces the size of the potential Israelite work force; letting the girls live means they can bear many more offspring. Further, his own daughter turns out to be the means of frustrating his strategy. The womanly instincts that prompt the midwives, the mother, and the sister also prompt the princess’s actions. If being brought up in the palace equipped Moses for his later role, the Bible never makes that point. If anything, being brought up in the palace is a temptation, not an asset (cf. Hebrews 11).

Pharaoh recognizes that wisdom is important in managing his empire and anticipating its problems, but he does not manifest such wisdom. Egypt had a reputation for its system of higher education and the resources it had gathered for trainingpeople in administration, yet the system totally fails it. At the moment of crisis, the people with insight are the women who have no trouble pulling the wool over Pharaoh’s eyes and the women who devise a simple plan for pulling the wool over his daughter’s eyes (though maybe she is a willing accomplice). The midwives revere God; implicitly, the mother and the sister trust God. Revering and trust are part of wisdom.

In Egyptian, Moses’ name means “son” (it is an element in names such as Tutmoses, “Son of [the god] Tut”), but it is nicely similar to a rare Hebrew verb meaning “pull out.”

EXODUS 2:11–25
From Guerrilla to Fugitive

¹¹During that period, when Moses had grown, he went out to his kinsfolk. He saw them at their labors and saw an Egyptian striking down a Hebrew man, one of his kinsfolk. ¹²He turned this way and that, saw that there was no one, and struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. ¹³He went out the next day and there—two Hebrew men were fighting. He said to the one in the wrong, “Why do you strike down your fellow?” ¹⁴[The Hebrew man] said, “Who made you the man who is an official and an authority over us? Are you thinking of slaying me as you slew the Egyptian?” Moses was afraid. He said, “Then the matter has become known!” ¹⁵Pharaoh heard about this matter and sought to slay Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and lived in Midian. He lived by a well.

¹⁶Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came and drew water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock, ¹⁷but shepherds came and drove them away. Moses got up and rescued them, and watered their flock. ¹⁸They came to their father Reuel, and he said, “How have you been so quick to come back today?” ¹⁹They said, “An Egyptian man saved us from the shepherds. He actually drew water for us as well and watered the flock.” ²⁰He said to his daughters, “So where is he? Why did you leave the man? Call him so he can have something to eat.” ²¹Moses agreed to live with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah as wife. ²²She bore a son and he called him Gershom, because (he said) “I have become an ‘alien’ in a foreign country.”

²³During that long period the king of Egypt died, and the Israelites groaned because of their serfdom. They cried out, and their cry for help because of their serfdom went up to their God. ²⁴God listened to their lament, and God was mindful of his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. ²⁵God saw the Israelites. God acknowledged it.

There is a special kind of irregular verb (popularized by the British TV series Yes Minister) that describes the same action differently according to who speaks and who is being referred to. A well-known example is “I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pig-headed.” Another might be “I am decisive; you are hasty; he is impetuous.” Personally, I am decisive, but I have friends who would call me impetuous. Some are people who avoid being in the car when I am driving. I make decisions and act quickly. The publishers raised an eyebrow or two when I said I would write a thousand words a day for The Old Testament for Everyone series. Decisiveness is not necessarily a strength; you may just make bad speedy decisions.

These first stories about Moses make clear that he was decisive, hasty, and impetuous. His heart was in the right place, but that can be a mixed blessing. Clearly his adoption did not mean he was unaware of his ethnic identity, nor did he come to share the official Egyptian attitude to Hebrew or Israelite serfs. He takes decisive action, which he intended to be circumspect action, but in that respect he failed, as he discovers when acting the same way the next day.

It does not make him abandon his decisiveness; it is part of his personality. You cannot simply give up aspects of your personality. Subsequently he does not s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by this Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Exodus 1:1–14 - Picking Up the Story
• Exodus 1:15–2:10 - How to Resist the Authorities
• Exodus 2:11–25 - From Guerrilla to Fugitive
• Exodus 3:1–10 - It Was an Ordinary Working Day
• Exodus 3:11–4:17 - Vocation
• Exodus 4:18–23 - On Rendering to Caesar
• Exodus 4:24–31 - The Migrant Returns
• Exodus 5:1–6:1 - Whose Service Is Perfect Freedom
• Exodus 6:2–7:13 - My People—Your God
• Exodus 7:14–8:7 - The Nine Natural Disasters
• Exodus 8:8–32 - Praying for the Enemy
• Exodus 9:1–21 - Knowledge and Acknowledgment
• Exodus 9:22–35 - Pharaoh Flip-Flop
• Exodus 10:1–29 - More Prayer, More Flip-Flop
• Exodus 11:1–10 - Knowing and Acknowledging Again
• Exodus 12:1–27 - Anticipatory Celebration
• Exodus 12:28–13:16 - The 3 a.m. Scream
• Exodus 13:17–14:31 - One Kind of Fear Turns to Another
• Exodus 15:1–21 - Moses and Miriam Sing and Dance
• Exodus 15:22–17:7 - Surviving in the Wilderness
• Exodus 17:8–18:27 - The First Enemy and the First Convert
• Exodus 19:1–25 - Two Kinds of Preparation for Meeting God
• Exodus 20:1–21 - A Rule of Life
• Exodus 20:22–22:14 - Coping with Crises
• Exodus 22:15–23:19 - You Know the Feelings of an Alien
• Exodus 23:20–33 - How to Get into the Promised Land
• Exodus 24:1–18 - Seeing God
• Exodus 25:1-26:30 - How to Build a Church—I
• Exodus 26:31–27:21 - How to Build a Church—II
• Exodus 28:1–29:37 - How to Ordain a Priest
• Exodus 29:38–30:37 - How to Start and End the Day
• Exodus 31:1–18 - The First Spiritual Gifting
• Exodus 32:1–29 - How to Pray for Rebels
• Exodus 32:30–33:11 - How to Check Things Out with God
• Exodus 33:12–23 - Rock of Ages Cleft for Me
• Exodus 34:1–26 - Now I Will Seal a Covenant
• Exodus 34:27–40:38 - The Magnificent Presence
• Leviticus 1:1–2:16 - Giving to God
• Leviticus 3:1–4:35 - Enjoying Fellowship and Gaining Cleansing
• Leviticus 5:1–6:7 - Making Reparation
• Leviticus 6:8–7:38 - Being Grateful, Keeping a Promise, Being Generous
• Leviticus 8:1–10:20 - Ordination and Disaster
• Leviticus 11:1-12:8 - You Are What You Eat
• Leviticus 13:1–14:57 - Distinguishing Life from Death
• Leviticus 15:1–33 - Sex and Taboos
• Leviticus 16:1–34 - The Expiation Day
• Leviticus 17:1–18:30 - The Life Is in the Blood
• Leviticus 19:1–18 - Be Holy as I Am Holy
• Leviticus 19:19–20:27 - Improving on Creation
• Leviticus 21:1–22:33 - Some Responsibilities of Priests
• Leviticus 23:1–24:9 - How to Celebrate
• Leviticus 24:10–23 - An Eye for an Eye
• Leviticus 25:1–26:2 - The Jubilee
• Leviticus 26:3–46 - Promises and Warnings and Promises
• Leviticus 27:1–34 - Human Promises
• Glossary