Exodus

It's silly, but I can't help reading Exodus without imagining Cecil B. DeMille's film, The Ten Commandments.  The film takes an awful lot of liberties with what's in the actual text and makes an awful lot of embellishments.  Since there exists an enormous parallel work of commentary and lore on the Five Books of Moses, in the Talmud and other commentaries, I wonder whether any of that was incorporated into the story.  Moses's adoptive mother's name is never given, nor is it ever suggested that he was a respected member of the Egyptian court, let alone a prince. 

Moses's encounter with Yahweh as the burning bush is also considerably less glorious in the text than in the film.  Moses hems and haws about Yahweh's edict that he go and liberate the Hebrews from Egypt, which Yahweh suggests be done by trickery, not as a claim for permanent liberation.  Ex. 3:18

 ¹⁸ “The elders of Israel will listen to you. Then you and the elders are to go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. Let us take a three-day journey into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to the LORD our God.’

But in Ex. 4 we learn Moses doesn't want to do it, says the tribal elders won't believe him, claims that he sucks at public speaking (some have suggested that he was a stutterer), and finally asks that someone else do it.  Just like Abraham and others before him, he argues with Yahweh. Like Christ after him, he essentially says, Take this cup from me.  Yahweh insists He will help Moses, that He'll rig the deal, that He'll give Moses a magic stick that turns into a snake and enable him to do a magic leprosy trick so as to wow the Israelites into believing that He spoke to him.  Yahweh reminds Moses how almighty He is, then tells Moses to get out of here  and go back to Egypt.  Moses keeps demurring so Yahweh gets pissed off at him and tells him that his brother Aaron can be his spokesman then, but to take the magic stick with him to do the tricks. It's actually pretty funny.

So Moses leaves his father-in-law Jethro in Midian to return to Egypt.  On the way there is a bizarre little episode in which God tries to kill Moses, but Moses is saved when his wife wipes their son's bloody foreskin on his feet.  Ex.4:24-26

  ²⁴ At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met Moses^[a] and was about to kill him. ²⁵ But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it.^[b] “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. ²⁶ So the LORD let him alone. (At that time she said “bridegroom of blood,” referring to circumcision.)

Pretty dang weird.  Here is the Hebrew.  Not much more helpful. Why would Yahweh suddenly want to kill Moses after all this?  Moses wasn't exactly being helpful, and since his son was born outside of Israel, I guess Yahweh was angry that he wasn't circumcized. 

Just to step back a moment, the names for God in Exodus are pretty interesting. In Ex. 3:6, Yahweh introduces himself as the God, "Elohei" (cf. Allah) of each of Moses's patriarchal ancestors.  Then it is noted that Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at "El-HaElohim".  Does this mean "the gods"?  I need to know more Biblical Hebrew grammar to understand this. 

Aaron goes out and meets Moses in the dessert and they plan their exodus.  The stick tricks work and the people believe them.  When it's time to ask Pharaoh for a religious vacation, it is Moses and Aaron who go, presumably with Aaron doing the talking.  They lie that Yahweh spoke to both of them.   

In Ex. 6:2 God says he was known to the patriarchs as El Shaddai, The Great One, but I thought the Hebrew read Yahweh?  Ok, I just checked, and yes, the Hebrew reads Yahweh/Jehovah, not El Shaddai. Weird. I guess the words read Yahweh but He didn't formally introduce himself?  heh.

Ex. 6:13 reveals that Yahweh then commanded both Moses and Aaron to bring the Israelites out of Egypt.  Ex. 6:16-20 reveals that Levi's grandson Amram (Moses's and Aaron's Dad), married his father's sister, which I'm hoping means something different than his father's full-blood sister, which sounds like pretty appalling incest.  Elisheba, or Elizabeth, was Aaron's wife.  Ex. 6 ends with a genealogy of the early Levite leaders and the assertion that it was indeed Moses and Aaron of the Levite clan who led the Hebrews out of Egypt. Oh, and Moses complains to Yahweh once again that he shouldn't be the one to talk to Pharoah, since he stutters.