Lecture 11: Exodus Begins: Redemption, and the Name Israel Would Finally Experience

The lecture, section by section

1. Two titles for one book

   The Hebrew title is the book's first words, And These Are the Names, tying straight back to Genesis 46 and the sons of Israel who entered Egypt. The Septuagint titled it by its most significant event, the Exodus, the departure. But the departure narrative is complete partway through chapter 15; the rest of the book, flowing without a break into Leviticus and Numbers, unfolds the consequences of that deliverance.

2. The clock of the book

   The events run from Jacob's entrance into Egypt around 1876 BC to the completion of the tabernacle in 1445, the year after the exodus of 1446. The pacing is deliberate telescoping: chapter 1 crosses some three hundred years; the narrative pauses at three high points of Moses' life, his birth in 1526, his fortieth year, and his call at the burning bush at eighty; chapters 5 through 15 fill roughly a single calendar year; two months bring Israel to Sinai; and there the narrative all but stops for eleven months, from Exodus 19 to Numbers 10. Chapters 1 through 18 are historical narrative; at Sinai the book turns didactic, the record of what Yahweh spoke.

3. The vocabulary of redemption

   The Septuagint's title names a major theme: this section of the Torah introduces the Bible's language of redemption and deliverance. In Exodus 6 God says, I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments; no purchase price changes hands, but the redemption costs God his own mighty activity. Around it cluster the verbs, deliver, rescue, save, bring out, bring up, and the latter prophets will reach back for exactly this vocabulary to describe what God will do in the future, a new exodus both physical and, ultimately, spiritual: bondage to freedom.

4. A name to be revealed

   The name Yahweh appears three hundred ninety-eight times in Exodus, and the book records the revelation of its meaning. In the ancient world a name declared both existence and character; Moses knows the people will ask, if the God of the fathers has appeared to you, what is his name? Notice, too, that through the early exchanges Moses speaks to God, and only from chapter 4 onward does the narrative have Moses speaking to Yahweh: the name is taking hold.

5. I AM WHO I AM

   God's answer is built on the verb to be: I AM WHO I AM; say to the sons of Israel, I AM has sent me to you, and then the name itself, Yahweh, he is, my name forever, my memorial name to all generations. When can Yahweh say I am? Always: to Adam in the garden, to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses at the bush, to the second generation on the plains of Moab. The name declares his eternity and self-existence, and with them his faithfulness: the God who is can speak in one generation and act in another, which is exactly what the end of Exodus 2 shows, God hearing Israel's groaning and remembering his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

6. Known by name, experienced at last

   Exodus 6 says God appeared to the patriarchs as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them. The patriarchs used the name, Abram addresses him as Lord Yahweh in Genesis 15, so the statement is not about vocabulary but experience: they had experienced God Almighty, a son born to a hundred-year-old and a ninety-year-old is El Shaddai's work, but they never lived to see the sworn promises kept. Now, in the exodus and the conquest, Israel would experience what Yahweh means: the eternal I AM keeping in this generation the oath he swore in Genesis 15, sealed when the smoking oven and flaming torch passed through the pieces. Hence the cascade of chapter 6: I will bring you out, I will deliver you, I will redeem you, I will take you as my people, and you shall know that I am Yahweh your God.

7. Who is Yahweh? The plagues as theology

   Pharaoh's sneer in Exodus 5, who is Yahweh, that I should obey his voice, receives a ten-part answer: the plagues were a theology lesson, and by the end of chapter 14 Pharaoh knew very well who Yahweh was. Yet his knowledge was experience without relationship, judgment without blessing, a standing warning Israel would need: it is possible to know about Yahweh, even to feel his power, without knowing Yahweh. Much of Israel's later history is Pharaoh's kind of knowing.

8. Holiness begins at the bush

   Before Sinai ever legislates it, holiness confronts Moses at the bush: do not come near; remove your sandals, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground, ground set apart, no longer common. The theme will unfold fully in Leviticus, but its seed is here: a holy God, and in due course a holy God who desires a holy people.

9. The covenant with Israel: covenant number one

   At Sinai God makes a covenant known by its mountain, Sinaitic, or its mediator, Mosaic, but which could as well be called the covenant with Israel, matching the Noahic and Abrahamic pattern. Essex calls it covenant number one for a reason that reaches to the end of the Bible: Scripture promises a second covenant with the house of Israel that will replace this one. There is no second covenant with Noah, none with Abraham, none with David; with Israel there will be.

10. Sabbath: trained before commanded, then made the sign

    Israel left a land where slaves worked every day, so before any commandment God trained them: manna six days, a double portion on the sixth, none at all on the seventh, and those who went looking learned quickly. Only then comes the fourth commandment, and in Exodus 31 the Sabbath is designated the sign of this covenant between Yahweh and the sons of Israel, grounded in the six days of creation and the seventh of rest, kept even while the tabernacle itself was being built.

11. Passover and the ten words

    Chapters 12 and 13 record the Passover and appoint it as Israel's annual remembrance of the exodus. As for the Decalogue, the text calls them ten words, not ten commandments; the traditions number them differently, the Jewish reckoning taking I am Yahweh your God as the first word, the Roman and Lutheran traditions combining the first two commands and splitting coveting in two. Essex holds the classic Reformed numbering: Deuteronomy 5 treats the opening statement as a word, not a command, and Exodus and Deuteronomy draw no dividing line inside the command against coveting.

12. Tabernacle and wilderness

    Two further themes open here and run on: the tabernacle, the place where God meets man, taken up fully with Leviticus; and the wilderness, which we associate with Numbers but which begins in Exodus. God meets Moses in the wilderness, sends him from the wilderness to Egypt, and from Egypt Israel walks into the wilderness at chapter 15, where the nation will remain until the plains of Moab.

1. The patriarchs held God's promises their whole lives without seeing them kept, and Israel finally experienced the meaning of the name Yahweh. Which promises are you holding in the patriarchs' position, known but not yet experienced?

2. Pharaoh experienced Yahweh's power and never knew him. What is the difference in practice between knowing about God and knowing God, and how would you recognize the difference in yourself?

3. God trained Israel to rest by manna before he ever commanded a Sabbath. What does that gentleness in how God forms habits before he requires them suggest about how he grows his people now?