Women of the Word - 9/15/2011

Exodus 1:1 – 2:22

Introduction

Most of what we know about Moses has been shaped by either Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments or Walt Disney’s Prince of Egypt.  There is even a course in seminary called “Moses at the Movies.”  

Exodus, like much of the Torah, was written during the Babylonian Exile, when Jewish leaders feared that the Diaspora would lead to a loss of the oral tradition with Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the Temple. 

What is important for us to remember is that Genesis is the story of the foundation of the tribe; Exodus is the story of those disparate tribes coalescing to become a people.  God is the hero of Exodus, not Moses.  In every case throughout the telling of this story, God heard, God saw, God rescued.

The Birth and Exile of Moses

            The first five verses of Exodus reiterate the genealogy of Jacob’s children given at the end of the Book of Genesis and paint a picture of a prolific and powerful subculture in Egyptian society.  Their number is given as “seventy,” which, rather than being literal, is a priestly sign of completeness.   Then a “new king ascended the throne of Egypt, one who knew nothing of Joseph.”  (Egypt was for several hundred years ruled by an Asian dynasty of Hyksos kings, and it was during this time that Joseph and his Hebrew tribes were welcome.  The Hyksos were eventually overthrown by a native dynasty, and it is from this group that the abovementioned king came.  Although he is nameless in the Biblical passage, most historians assume he is Rameses II, who took the throne around 1300 BCE.) 

            The king, worried about the growing numbers of the Israelites and fearful that their loyalty in wartime may lay elsewhere, started to oppress the Hebrews, herding them into forced labor gangs and reducing them to slavery.  (An irony is that the Hebrew slaves were forced to build several storehouse cities, just as Joseph had done for an earlier Pharaoh during the seven years of plenty foretold in his dream [Gen. 41:25-45].)  Seeing that this method failed to reduce the Hebrew population, Pharaoh then enacted harsher measures.  He commanded the Hebrew midwives to kill any male child at birth but to allow a female child to live.  The midwives, however, were “God-fearing women,” and, through trickery, disobeyed the king.  “So God made the midwives prosper, and the people increased in number and in strength.”  Pharaoh, desperate, then sent out a national edict that all newborn Hebrew males were to be killed (foreshadowing the New Testament’s Slaughter of the Innocents [Matthew 2:16]).

            Chapter 2 begins with the marriage of Moses’ parents, who were of the Levite (Priestly) tribe.  The mother hides the boy for three months, then, when concealment is no longer possible, she places him in a reed basket in the bulrushes at the edge of the Nile.  Pharaoh’s daughter, bathing in the river, finds the child, recognizes him as a Hebrew baby, and “filled with pity for it,” she agrees to his sister’s (who has been hiding nearby)

suggestion that a wet nurse be summoned.  The child’s mother takes him until he is weaned and then brings him to the palace, where Pharaoh’s daughter adopts him and calls him Moses, an Egyptian name meaning “to draw out” with the suffix –es denoting “son.”

            The story jumps from Moses’ days as an infant to adulthood (verse 11), where it says that he “went out to his own kinsmen and saw them at their heavy labor.”  (Evidently he knew his background, and life in the palace had not diminished his identification with his tribe or his people.)  He kills an Egyptian overseer for striking one of the Hebrew laborers and hides the body; however, the next day he is threatened with exposure by the Hebrews (one would think they would be grateful; this may be a foreshadowing of complaints in the wilderness), and Pharaoh sets out to kill him, forcing him to flee over the border to the land of Midian.

There Moses stops by a well where the daughters of the priest of Midian go to draw water for their father’s sheep.  Harassed by some shepherds, the girls are defended by Moses who waters their sheep himself.  When their father learns of his kindness, he invites Moses into his household and, eventually, gives him his daughter, Zipporah, in marriage.  They have a son, Gershom, whose name loosely means “sojourner in an alien place.”   

Wells and water rights are a recurring theme throughout Genesis and Exodus, as is the concept of a “sojourner.”  Israelite law will protect the “stranger within thy gates,” a reminder that for many generations they were, in Egypt and later in Babylon, “strangers in a strange land.”   

Submitted by Karilyn Jaap