The bondage and the call
Four books tell the story of Moses: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They form a single march, from the bondage of Egypt to the threshold of the promised land, and this march is the work of God: he draws his people out of slavery, makes a covenant with them at Sinai, gives them his Law and his worship, and leads them through the desert, dwelling in their midst. Everything begins in Egypt, where the sons of Israel sojourned four hundred and thirty years (Exodus 12:40); at the end of this sojourn, God raises up the man through whom he will deliver his people.
Israel enslaved in Egypt
The sons of Israel, who had gone down into Egypt in the days of Joseph, became a people there: “they were fruitful and multiplied, they became numerous and very mighty, and the land was filled with them” Exodus 1:7 This growth begins to fulfil the promise made to Abraham of a posterity as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:5): the descendants are there; the promised land remains to be received. But “there arose over Egypt a new king who had not known Joseph” Exodus 1:8 This pharaoh saw in the people a threat: in case of war, they might join his enemies and leave the country. So he set taskmasters over them to crush them with labour: Israel built for Pharaoh the store cities of Pithom and Rameses, and served in clay, in bricks and in the fields. The oppression produced the opposite of what it aimed at: “the more they oppressed them, the more they multiplied and spread” Exodus 1:12 God’s promise bears its fruit even under the whip; no human power can stop it.
Pharaoh then passed from bondage to murder. He ordered the midwives of the Hebrews, Shiphrah and Puah, to put the sons to death at birth; they feared God and let the children live, and God rewarded them for it: “because the midwives had feared God, he made their houses prosper” Exodus 1:21, giving them descendants of their own. The king finally commanded all his people: “Every son that is born you shall cast into the river” Exodus 1:22 The Nile, the source of Egypt’s life, was becoming a tomb for Israel; yet it is there that God will lay the saviour of his people.
Moses saved from the waters
A man of the house of Levi, Amram, married a daughter of Levi, Jochebed (Numbers 26:59); she bore a son, hid him three months and, no longer able to hide him, took a basket of rushes, coated it with bitumen and pitch, laid the child in it and placed it among the reeds, on the bank of the Nile. The Hebrew word rendered “basket”, tébah (תֵּבָה), is the very word that names Noah’s ark (Genesis 6:14): as the ark carried Noah through the waters of the flood, the basket carries the child through the waters in which the sons of Israel die. His sister, Miriam, stood at a distance. Pharaoh’s daughter, who had come down to bathe in the river, saw the child crying and took pity on him; Miriam came near and offered to find a nurse among the Hebrew women, and Pharaoh’s daughter said to the child’s mother: “Take this child and nurse him for me; I will give you your wages” Exodus 2:9 Jochebed thus nursed her own son, paid by the very house that had condemned the child. When he had grown, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopted him and named him Moses, in Hebrew Moshéh (מֹשֶׁה): “for, she said, I drew him out of the waters” Exodus 2:10
Pharaoh’s decree becomes the instrument of salvation: the child condemned to the river is saved by the river, restored to his mother, then raised at the court of Egypt by the persecutor’s own daughter. He who will lead the people through the waters of the sea was himself first drawn out of the waters.
The flight to Midian
When he had grown, Moses went out to his brothers and saw their burdens. He saw an Egyptian striking a Hebrew; he looked around him and, seeing no one, killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. The next day, as he tried to separate two Hebrews who were fighting, he was answered: “Who made you a chief and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Exodus 2:14 His deed was known; Pharaoh sought to put him to death, and Moses fled to the land of Midian.
He sat down by a well. The seven daughters of the priest of Midian came to draw water and filled the troughs for their flock; shepherds came up and drove them away. “Then Moses rose, took their defence and watered their flock” Exodus 2:17 Their father, on hearing it, had the man called back to share his bread; Moses stayed with him, received his daughter Zipporah in marriage (not to be confused with the midwife of Egypt of the same name) and became the shepherd of his flocks. He named his son Gershom, in Hebrew Guershom (גֵּרְשֹׁם), formed on the word guer (גֵּר), “the stranger”: “I am a stranger in a foreign land” Exodus 2:22
Moses was forty years old when he thus went out to his brothers (Acts 7:23); “he thought his brothers would understand that God was granting them deliverance by his hand; but they did not understand” Acts 7:25 He wanted to deliver his brothers by his own strength, and that strength produced only a murder and an exile. God forms him by the opposite path: forty years in Midian, keeping flocks (Acts 7:30); Moses there learns the shepherd’s trade before leading the flock of God. Meanwhile, the king of Egypt died, and the people still groaned under their bondage; their cry went up to God: “God heard their groaning, and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; God looked upon the sons of Israel and he knew them” Exodus 2:24-25
The burning bush
Moses was leading his father-in-law’s flock beyond the desert and came to the mountain of God, to Horeb. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire, from the midst of a bush: “the bush was all on fire, and the bush was not consumed” Exodus 3:2 Moses drew near to see, and God called him by name from the midst of the bush, then said to him: “Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground” Exodus 3:5 And he revealed himself: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” Exodus 3:6
God states the reason for his coming: “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry; I know their sorrows. I have come down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up towards a land fertile and spacious, a land flowing with milk and honey” Exodus 3:7-8 God also fixed the request to bring to the king of Egypt: to let the people go three days’ journey into the desert to offer a sacrifice to the Lord. And he announced that the departure would not be empty: Israel would not leave with empty hands, but would ask the Egyptians for objects of silver, of gold and clothing. The duration of this bondage God had fixed and announced from the covenant with Abraham onwards: “Know that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs; they will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will judge the nation they will have served, and afterwards they shall come out with great possessions” Genesis 15:13-14 And God had said why this delay: “In the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full” Genesis 15:16 God waits until the measure of the sin of the nations of Canaan is full before judging them and giving their land to his people: his patience towards the pagans sets the length of Israel’s trial. The appointed hour has now come, and God comes down.
The divine Name
Moses asked God his name, so as to answer the sons of Israel who would ask it of him. God replied: “I am who I am” Exodus 3:14, in Hebrew éhyéh ashér éhyéh (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה), and he added: “Thus shall you speak to the sons of Israel: I AM sends me to you”. From this “I am” comes the divine Name, Yahweh (יהוה), “He is”, the third person of the same verb: Israel will name its God by confessing that he is. God gives it as his proper name: “Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, sends me to you. This is my name for ever, this is my memorial from age to age” Exodus 3:15
The Name speaks God’s very being: he is, absolutely, without beginning and without dependence, and everything that exists holds its existence from him. It also speaks his presence: he who names himself “I am” stands with his people, living and faithful, from generation to generation. This is the Name that Jesus will apply to himself before the Jews: “Before Abraham was, I am” John 8:58, and his hearers will understand so well that he is taking the divine Name that they will pick up stones to stone him.
The sending of Moses and his fears
God sent Moses to Pharaoh to bring his people out of Egypt, and Moses raised his fears one after another. The first: who am I, to go to Pharaoh? God replied: “I will be with you” Exodus 3:12 and he gave him a sign: when the people had come out of Egypt, they would serve God on this very mountain, the Horeb of the bush, where the Law would be given. God also announced to him the course of the struggle: the king of Egypt would refuse to let the people go, and God would stretch out his hand and strike Egypt with his wonders, after which Pharaoh would let them depart. Moses sets out forewarned: the first refusal will not be a failure, it will be part of the way announced. The second: they will not believe me, and will say that the Lord did not appear to him. God gave three signs: the staff changed into a serpent, the hand covered with leprosy then healed, the water of the river changed into blood. The third: I am not a man of easy speech. God replied: “Who gave man a mouth? Is it not I, the Lord? Go therefore, I will be with your mouth, and I will teach you what you shall say” Exodus 4:11-12 It is the very assurance he will one day give to Jeremiah, frightened, he too, of not knowing how to speak: “Behold, I put my words in your mouth” Jeremiah 1:9 Despite this promise, Moses still asked him to send another: “Lord, send your message by whom you will” Exodus 4:13 Then God’s anger flared up against him, and he joined his brother to him: “Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he speaks well. And behold, he is coming to meet you, and when he sees you he will rejoice in his heart” Exodus 4:14
The chain of the word is set: God speaks to Moses, Moses puts the words in Aaron’s mouth, and it is Aaron who utters them before the people. God chooses a man slow of speech and gives him his brother as spokesman: the deliverance will visibly be the work of God, and of no human eloquence. The message the two brothers will carry to Pharaoh contains the whole battle to come: “You shall say to Pharaoh: Israel is my son, my firstborn. Let my son go, that he may serve me; if you refuse to let him go, I will slay your firstborn son” Exodus 4:22-23 Israel is God’s son: that is the title of the deliverance, and the last plague is already announced in it.
The return to Egypt and the incident on the way
Moses returned to Jethro, his father-in-law, and asked his leave to go back to his brothers in Egypt and see whether they were still alive; Jethro said to him: “Go in peace” Exodus 4:18 God reassured him about what had made him flee: “Go, return to Egypt, for all the men who sought your life are dead” Exodus 4:19 Moses then took Zipporah, his wife, and his sons, set them on a donkey and took the road back to Egypt, holding in his hand his staff, the staff of the signs, which the text now calls the staff of God. God also warned him that Pharaoh would resist: he would harden his heart and not let the people go, until God struck his firstborn son.
On the way, in the place where he spent the night, “the Lord came to meet him and sought to put him to death” Exodus 4:24 Zipporah took a sharp stone, circumcised her son and touched Moses’ feet with it, saying: “You are to me a bridegroom of blood” Exodus 4:25, and God let him go. Moses’ son was uncircumcised. Circumcision is the sign of the covenant given to Abraham, and the uncircumcised is cut off from it: “An uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in his flesh, shall be cut off from his people: he has broken my covenant” Genesis 17:14 Moses is going to claim from Pharaoh the firstborn son of God, and his own son does not bear the mark of the covenant: the envoy must first fulfil the covenant in his own house before being its mediator for a whole people. Zipporah performs the rite, the blood of the covenant covers the house of Moses, and his life is spared; the blood of a lamb will soon cover the houses of all Israel in the night of the Passover. After this night, the account leaves Zipporah: Moses will send her away with their sons, and they will rejoin him in the desert after the departure from Egypt (Exodus 18:2-3).
The meeting with Aaron and the faith of the people
God told Aaron to go and meet Moses in the desert. Aaron set out, met his brother at the mountain of God and kissed him; Moses reported to him all the words with which God had charged him and all the signs he had commanded him to do. Arrived in Egypt, they gathered all the elders of the sons of Israel; Aaron reported the words and did the signs before the eyes of the people, “and the people believed; they learned that the Lord had visited the sons of Israel and that he had seen their affliction; and, bowing down, they worshipped” Exodus 4:30-31
The people’s first movement before the word of God is faith and worship. This faith, born of the signs, is still fragile: the first worsening of the trial will be enough to shake it, and the same people who worship will turn against Moses (Exodus 5:21).
The first meeting with Pharaoh
Moses and Aaron came and said to Pharaoh: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the desert” Exodus 5:1, the very request God had dictated at the bush Pharaoh replied: “Who is the Lord, that I should listen to his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go” Exodus 5:2 And that very day he made the bondage harsher: straw would no longer be supplied, and the tally of bricks would remain the same. The sons of Israel, beaten by the taskmasters, turned against Moses and Aaron, and Moses himself carried the complaint before God: “Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you send me? Since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has mistreated this people, and you have not delivered your people” Exodus 5:22-23
The deliverance begins with a worsening. The word of God, entering the world, first hardens the oppression; the people suffer the more for it, and God’s envoy carries the complaint of all. Pharaoh has asked the question the whole sequel will answer: “Who is the Lord?” The plagues, the Passover and the sea will be God’s answer, so that Egypt itself may know him.
I am the Lord
God answered Moses’ complaint by renewing his promise. God first told Moses what set this hour apart from all the past: “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God almighty; but under my Name, I did not make myself known to them” Exodus 6:2-3 The patriarchs had known God by his power and his promises; Israel would know him by the Name revealed at the bush, in the very act of his deliverance. He charged Moses to say to the sons of Israel: “I am the Lord. I will free you from the burdens of Egypt, I will deliver you from their bondage, I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. I will take you for my people, and I will be your God” Exodus 6:6-7 But the people did not listen to Moses, “because of their anguish and their cruel bondage” Exodus 6:9
The promise rests entirely on God. Seven times in this oracle God says “I”: it is he who frees, delivers, redeems, takes for his own, gives the land. The people, crushed, have lost even the strength to believe, and the deliverance comes all the same: it rests on God’s faithfulness to his covenant. Moses was then eighty years old, and Aaron eighty-three: forty years in Egypt, forty in Midian, and the mission opens on the threshold of old age (Exodus 7:7). The trial of strength with Pharaoh can begin.