Exodus

Let My People Go

Daniel Berrigan

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781556351051
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270380
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The prophets exhort us to defend the poor; but we lionize the rich. They assure us that chariots and missiles cannot save us; yet we seek refuge under their cold shadow. They urge us to forgo idolatry; but we compulsively fetishize the work of our hands. Above all, the prophetic Word warns us that the way to liberation in a world locked down by the spiral of violence, the way to redemption in a world of enslaving addictions, the way to genuine transformation in a world of deadened conscience and numbing conformity, is the way of nonviolent, sacrificial, creative love. But neither polite religion nor society is remotely interested in this--which is why Jesus had to "translate" and "midwife" the prophetic insights for his companions in their historical moment. Dan has done the same for us in ours. As this reading of Exodus attests, he has a keen eye for both text and context, and exegetes both with his life. Thus does he help us shed our denial, connect the dots, and move from our pews to the streets.--from the foreword by Ched Myers

Exodus 1–3

My attempt at transcending scholarship is simply a literary critic’s final reliance upon her or his own sense of a text, or what I have called the necessity of misreading. No critic, whatever her or his moldiness or skepticism, can evade a Nietzschean will to power over a text, because interpretation is at last nothing else.1

—Harold Bloom, American literary critic

A passion; to make the text mine.

Better, by assumption, maybe by impertinence, to make it—ours.

—D. B.

Oral culture is “verbomotor.” Exclusively oral peoples are utterly unaware of anything like a neutral world. Primeval chaos is never far distant, nor is death. Everything they are familiar with is committed, noisy, and passionate for good or ill. . . .

And [that is] why sounds in general and words in particular are felt as powerful and dynamic actions to which a practical, canny response of action is required in return . . . .

Given the essential dynamism of a sound world as it issues reports of the spirit world—in thunder, flood, wind and voice—one can understand why the word of God . . . is a word of power. The Hebrew sense is paradigmatic. “My word, is it not like fire, a hammer that shatters the rocks?” (Jer 23:29).2

—David Toolan, SJ

¶

So we begin; or more to the point of Exodus, so we continue. Or (closer to the “orality” of the people and Moses, and before the written word became a final arbiter of what events will live on, and what recede)—so we too go forth.

¶

The contradiction will be damocleian sharp, and humiliating to boot. The thunders broke, and Yahweh spoke. One writes of this, but at second or third—or thousandth—remove. It is by no means guaranteed to the author that the thunders broke—on him; or that Yahweh spoke—to him.

The commentator remains safely sequestered in words, words, like a cocoon dreaming of birth—or perhaps like an academic in the famous groves, dreaming of whatever such eminences dream of. Tenure? A crown of laurel?

The text in sum, invites a woeful deconstruction of bombarding realities. So, one thinks ruefully, is the soul deconstructed in the act of writing—a task looked on (and so rightly) as the original artful dodge.

¶

At least let the investigator keep a measure of good sense, walk humbly, conscious of ironies, hearing to his own discomfiture (and benefit), the sound of divine laughter.

Intemperate mirth? It well may be. And this, knowing that the rollicking One, as far as is known, never wrote a word—indeed is known famously and obscurely (but tellingly to our purpose), as Pure Act.

“I don’t know, I’m not sure” . . . the would-be equivalent of a confession. Confess it then; woe to the scrivener, perpetually outside the action.

¶

exodus 1

At the bravura of our narrator we are in awe, and rightly. His scope and bias are intact, even in conveying the mental confabulations and schemes of omnipotent pharaoh.

¶

Much has been made of the identity of this notorious Egyptian regent. Was he Seti I or Meneptha or Rameses II? According to Exodus 12:40, the exile in Egypt lasted for 430 years. So we are face to face with a dynasty, or even with several of these.

But the above details are ignored by our author. The pharaoh is presented as a stereotype, a stone face on a frieze, an automaton going about his wicked, fussy, ultimately bootless works and pomps.

Before us is a particular, perhaps unique form of historical writing. Biased beyond doubt, it dwells compassionately on those left out of the imperial records, those of little or no account. In social upheaval and discomfiture of the mighty, “Those” become “These.”

¶

What then of the ruler, the pharaoh? Let him be irretrievably put down. Let him be not so much as named or pointed out from (one might think) a succession of his likes—before, during, since.

How the mighty are deflated before our eyes—and again and again how the lowly, the victims, are exalted! The names of two midwives, on whom depends all the future, are carefully recorded; shortly they will confound Pharaoh Anonymous I and his edicts.

¶

To our author, the imperial one is an “emperor of ice cream.” A veritable sun god in the eyes of his votaries melts before our eyes, is reduced, all but dismissed, a type, a cliché.

And in contrast, the invincible dignity, the saving arrogance of the underdog. We are being told, and this from the start of enforced bondage, that the mighty are in fact moral clones, their methods predictably awful. They make war. They are boundless in greed and appetite. They waste human lives in forced labor and the lash. Slaves, and a slave culture, is their perverse intent.

¶

Patience. Wait and s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Exodus 1–3
• Exodus 4–10
• Exodus 11–14
• Exodus 15–20
• Exodus 21–34
• Notes