20240728 Exodus 1: The God Who Does God Things
the name of the book of Exodus in Hebrew is “These are the Names”
Moses most likely composed these materials during the years of the wilderness wanderings for the benefit of the second-generation Israelites who were growing up during that thirty-nine-year period, as well as for the benefit of those who came to join with Israel either spiritually or ethnically
We should remember that a considerable proportion of the people who actually arrived at Mount Sinai, after fleeing Egypt to meet with the only true and living God, were not originally Israelites at all. They had seen the plagues, had come to believe that the Israelites were indeed a people to join with, and had taken advantage of the discomfiture of the Egyptians on the night of the Passover to join the Israelite ranks and seek freedom.
These eight verses function as a unit in the narrative by reason of their common topic: a summary of how the Israelites went from favor to disgrace, from a protected people with government connections at the highest level to a gang of slaves laboring under severe oppression. The common reason throughout this explanatory section is their numerical growth.
Of course, this represents an irony. Their rapid growth was a glorious blessing of God, in faithful fulfillment of his creation decrees (see below) and patriarchal promises (see vv. 1–7). How then could it get them in so much trouble? The short answer is that in a fallen world, the blessings of God are often so in conflict with the prevailing corrupt values of this world’s culture that they function as a threat to those who are not aligned with God’s will. The parade example of this phenomenon is the rejection of Jesus. He was the purest example of good that the world has seen, and yet God could send him to earth with the certain knowledge that he would be put to death by people who thought they were doing the world a favor.
So Moses holds the population factor clearly before the reader, as both a good thing from a righteous person’s point of view and also as the cause of much evil because of the reaction of evil people to it. In addition, he points out a further irony: the fact that the oppression of the people and their population growth increased together (v. 12). And he does not word it as might be expected, that is, that as their growth increased, they naturally experienced more oppression; rather, it was as they experienced more oppression that their growth increased.
1:8 In this brief sentence is contained reference to a vast political and ideological shift in Egypt. Joseph almost certainly rose to power (Gen 41–42) during the time of the Hyksos pharaohs, outsiders who had invaded and conquered Egypt. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, an accomplishment much celebrated in Egyptian history, it is quite understandable that feeling against foreigners would run high. It is also understandable that a pharaoh who had expelled—or whose ancestors had expelled—hated foreign oppressors would have had no sympathy for or even interest in honoring the memory of a foreigner who had served as Egypt’s prime minister during the reign of one of those Hyksos pharaohs. In other words, the Israelites were now foreigners in a country whose government hated foreigners, under a pharaoh who was surely determined to prevent what he saw as the miseries of the past from returning, and who would have had not the slightest sense of loyalty to any agreements his Hyksos predecessors worked out with Joseph. The functional implication of “did not know about Joseph” is therefore “refused to honor any prior arrangements protecting the status of the Israelites.” By implication, the Israelites are going to be in trouble, their former assurances37 of acceptance as foreigners in Egypt now being useless.
A subtlety in the pharaoh’s language is not reflected in the NIV translation: what he literally said was that “the nation of the Israelites has become so numerous as to be stronger than we are.”
At this point the progrom plan reached its final stage. There was no more subterfuge, no limitation on involvement: all Egyptians were expected to join in killing all Israelite newborn boys. The process of persecution that had begun modestly and had escalated in steps had reached its zenith, a full-blown, open, national policy of large-scale genocide against a particular ethnic group.
Why throw the boys into the Nile? Why not just kill them with knives or rocks or by dashing them on the ground or the like? There are two good reasons why an Egyptian pharaoh would have suggested this approach. First, it was a convenient and “clean” sort of way to kill infants. It was convenient in that virtually the entire population of Egypt lived essentially on the banks of the Nile, the arable land in ancient Egypt being limited mainly to that area that was served by the Nile directly or via irrigation canals drawing from it. Accordingly, the Nile served not only as the nation’s source of water and therefore wealth but like many great rivers, as its nation’s sewer, its relentless current taking away anything that was not wanted. Throwing a baby into the Nile was a lot easier and quicker, involving no cleanup and leaving no evidence, than almost any other means of killing. The child would simply fall into the water and disappear—out of sight and hopefully, from the Egyptian point of view, out of mind. Second, it shifted some of the blame because of the way the pantheistic Egyptians viewed the Nile as a god. If the Nile were to “receive” the infant, it would at least to some degree represent the god Nile’s judgment rather than that of the individual who carried out the pharaoh’s order. The Nile was viewed both as a giver and taker of life. If the Nile were to take a baby’s life, that was the Nile’s decision, was it not? While the narrative is appropriately terse at this point, it is easy to imagine that the pharaoh’s messengers, in bringing his command to the people, were instructed to inform them that by throwing babies into the Nile they were doing the will of the gods and giving the Nile its proper due among the gods.
many of whom were young enough to be learning their national traditions for the first time, were being reminded of God’s plan through a people descended from Abraham and heirs to the promises first made to him. These promises had four main components: (1) vast population increase for his descendants (Gen 12:2); (2) a long and important family lineage (the meaning of “make your name great” in Gen 12:2); (3) a worldwide blessing through his offspring (Gen 12:2–3), and (4) the eventual granting of unearned citizenship in a special land of God’s choosing
