The story of Israel as a people begins here. Everything of enduring significance that ancient Israel became, believed, and proclaimed is ultimately influenced not only by what actually occurred in the time of the exodus, but by the story of the exodus - the story as it was first remembered and repeated; the story as it assumed relatively fixed classical forms in different areas, in the North or South; the story as its multiple versions, written and oral, were compared, mutually "corrected," and finally composed into the single, unified narrative that is before us now. It is not alone the event of the creation of order and meaning out of chaos that conditions the mind and faith of Israel, but also her own sustained, fluid reading and interpretation of the event.

It is important to add that in the tradition of biblical faith, historical revelation, which is the self-disclosure of God in history, is never deemed to inhere simply in the event as event, but also in the interpretation of the event. The motion picture industry fails utterly and with almost unexceptional regularity in its stupendous efforts to reproduce segments of the biblical story because it assumes a self-validating character in the divine disclosure and is apparently unable to deal with the admittedly difficult, illusive, and profound factor of interpretation. The significant biblical event is always the event as faith sees, remembers, tells, and celebrates it. That God discloses himself in the event - if he discloses himself in the event - is an affirmation made possible only because he discloses the fact of his self-disclosure in the faith of human interpreters of the event.

We hold that it was precisely not demonstrable that God was in any direct, causative, and purposive way related to the exodus events. Any impartial observer - for example, an ancient counterpart of a United Nations representative - would surely have been astonished at Israel's subsequent claims about this epoch. We can only assume that the Egyptians, some of whom were participants or even victims, regarded the Egyptian chapter of the exodus event very differently. Indeed, Egypt thought so lightly of the whole episode as to make no mention of it anywhere in the rather extensive Egyptian records thus far discovered.

In the Old Testament the Israelite participants, actual or empathic, impute to the event of the exodus the actual relationship of deity to human event, the responsibility of God's Word in and through the total event. Recall only that Israelites were able to say, generation after generation, "We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out. . . ." Were they right or wrong in this interpretation of the event? Were they inspired or deluded? Was this affirmation itself revealed or was this fundamentally the prideful projection of a people's self-image? These and other questions can, of course, be answered only according to one's own interpretation of the biblical interpretation of the biblical event, that is, according to one's own position vis-a-vis the life of faith. But all must interpret the interpretation; and all must acknowledge and respond to the role of interpretation in the Bible's claim to be a historical revelation of God. And whatever we may ultimately judge to be the historical nature and structure of the biblical event, we must reckon with Israel's reading of it if we are to understand historical Israel.

1:1-7

Seventy persons into Egypt - a round number,¹ but no doubt accurately recalling a small group, hardly more than a large family in the East's fashion of families. Twelve names representing twelve tribes - how idealized is this? There is no doubt that David's kingdom embraced twelve dominant tribal groups, nor any doubt that many or all of these tribal entities were earlier involved in one or several confederations of tribes. Question: were the progenitors of these subsequently confederated tribal groups all present in pre-exodus Israel? Or does the story spontaneously idealize by reading back into its origins the numbers and entities of its subsequently developed components? We pass, and advise you to do the same. Equally competent scholars answer emphatically yes, emphatically no, and emphatically no one can know. But if we are not permitted to pass, then we stress what appears to us to be the probability that many, or even most, of Israel's components were not biologically represented in Egypt. How much the more remarkable that subsequently all Israel espoused, confessed, and lauded the exodus event. But then, men of faith in all time have so confessed and appropriated the exodus event. Men of faith in all time find something profound in their own existence given articulation in the words, "We were Pharaoh's slaves and the Lord redeemed us." The image and language of the exodus faith is timeless.

Five phrases (v. 7) stress the initial benign environment of Egypt. Let the story have its head. The land was full of Egyptians, not Israelites, of course; but how more effectively can the story make its point?

1:8-14

This is Israel's story. Egypt's words are as Israel heard them, 1:8-14 or thought she heard them, or wanted to hear them. If they do not instruct us in the language of Egypt, they are marvelously penetrating in the language and thought of Israel.

It is the story's way, and a part of its gift, to be imprecise. On the basis of multiple lines of evidence (as convincing as such evidence can be), the "new king over Egypt" refers either to Seti I (c. 13 10-1290) or his son, Ramses II (c. 1290-1224). These two kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty (c. 1310-1200) were both ambitious builders, and work probably started by Seti, at Pithom (modern Tell er-Rerabeh?) and Ramses (Tanis, in the eastern Delta), was completed by Ramses. Perhaps there was, for varying reasons, a growing antipathy between Israelite and Egyptian (v. 12); but work became for the slaves more intense and bitter because Egypt now embarked on a program of building to the glory of Egypt and the Nineteenth Dynasty, and more pointedly, to the glory of Ramses the Great! Certainly the story is idealized and condensed, but it vividly highlights the essence of the crisis: the life of Israel - of whatever size and constituency - was now made bitter with hard, rigorous service (v. 14).

1:15-22

The term "Hebrew" appears prominently now (1:15, 16, 19; 2:6, 7, 11, 13) to remind us of the nature of this group in relation to the life of the ancient Near East. Elsewhere - in the archives of the kings of Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty of the fourteenth century - we read of 'Apiru, a term probably related to "Hebrew," denoting not a state or political unit, but rather a widespread type of communal existence. The term represents the character of the groups who were not permanently identified with the area of their occupation, not indigenous to the territory. They were aliens who nevertheless were able on occasion to move with effective force on their own behalf.²

2:1-10

The Old Testament story recalls realistically this quality of Israel's origin, quite without apology. Indeed, the story here stresses with satisfaction the contrast between the physical constitution of the Hebrew and the Egyptian. In this exodus chapter the total resources of the Hebrew are pitted against the total resources of the Egyptian. It is, of course, the divine resource which is to be the decisive factor; but the form of the story betrays Israel's vast sense of enjoyment of sophisticated Egypt's embarrassment and humiliation through the instrument of the rough Hebrew, the mixed Jacob-Joseph 'Apiru.

The critical reader will observe here (and over and over again throughout the Old Testament story) a logical contradiction, an item suspicious, if not incredible, if judged from the standpoint of factual probability. Would an absolutely autocratic master administration, involved in gigantic building operations, voluntarily and radically reduce its potential male slave labor? From a practical point of view, the answer would, of course, be no. Then what is the relationship of the narrative to the actual historical episode?

Let us acknowledge, not apologetically but positively, that this is not a pedestrian enumeration of mere factual details. We know that the factual details cannot be reconstructed from the present story. Rather, what appears here is only that which is essential to the theme - the astounding victory of Israel over Pharaoh. Pharaoh had at his disposal all the wealth, power, and resources that man, the earth, and the Egyptian gods could create, while Israel, a sad segment of 'Apiru, had only her deity, unknown to man, the earth, and the gods.

What precipitated the action that resulted in the creation of the people of Israel from a band of 'Apiru existing on Egypt's edge around 1300 B.C.? The appearance of a death motif in the answer to this question is inevitable. Stated symbolically in terms of killing the first-born, the fact is that for these people existence was no longer life, but living death. Human life was reduced to subhuman existence and was deprived of all human expressions - freedom, leisure, exercise of choice, opportunity to be creative. In essence, if not in fact, Egypt decreed death. Thus, the relationship between story and event, narrative and fact, is much closer than the superficially critical eye discerns.

We must remember that we are dealing with a text which assumed its present form over a period of about eight centuries, that is, roughly between 1200 and 400 B.C. In the course of this development, it has drawn from many sources, both oral and written, which were produced or modified in different times, in different geographical areas, and therefore, from different perspectives. The mechanical process by which the present exodus story developed explains some of the characteristic features of the text.

Beyond a doubt, the image of Moses in these pages of the Bible is much more than a simple, "unretouched photograph." Moses appears in the story as something more than a mere man. But it could not possibly be otherwise in view of the fact that in the subsequent life, recollection, and meditation of Israel, he was more than a man. For the continuing generations of Israel no "photo" could convey the form, stature, achievement, and "immortality" of Moses. In Old Testament Israel, he rightly remains the first man, the unique man, the prophet par excellence, the peculiarly God-like man playing the role of human Creator-Sustainer-Redeemer in the first epoch of Israel's life. Ordinary facts of birth, life, and death (Deut. 34:6) cannot contain, nor indeed adequately represent, the "truth" of the man and his enduring meaning to those whose existence he shaped and to whom, in a sense, he gave life.³

We know, of course, that Moses was a man (in this sense "only" a man), and in the story he is so represented on occasion (e.g., Ps. 106:32-33 in reference to Num. 20:10 ff.; cf. Ex. 17:1-7). But to present him in this manner consistently would inevitably be false to his status and his meaning in the life of Israel. It is no wonder that a corporate, intensely subjective, and adoring memory should produce the image of Moses as it now appears.

The Old Testament story has its inconsistencies and contradictions. These are inevitable in the nature of the story and were certainly evident to those involved in its development. We should not be overly concerned with internal ambiguities, remembering the underlying multiple sources and the relatively fluid status of the developing text; and remembering too that they who developed the story were not primarily concerned with factual details, but rather with the dominant themes and their enduring meaning in the life of the people of Israel.

The initial episode in the "life" of Moses echoes a familiar theme in the lore and traditions of ancient peoples. Here is a part of a comparable account of the origins of Sargon I, king of Akkad about twelve hundred years before the time of Moses.

Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade, am I.

My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not

My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.

She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.

She cast me into the river which rose not (over) me.

The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water.

Akki, the drawer of water, lifted me out as he dipped his ewer.

Akki, the drawer of water, [took me] as his son (and) reared me.⁴

We cite this parallel to show the similar theme, but note the contrast between the two accounts - the relative tenderness and intimacy of the Moses story, the implicit quality of deep human compassion, the unspoken but acute sensitivity to human relationships. Above all, we see the irony which contributes so forcefully to the central theme of Moses-Hebrew versus Pharaoh-Egypt, the fascinating "accident" by which all of Egypt's richest gifts and endowments are lavished upon him who is to conduct the campaign ending in Egypt's abysmal frustration.

We have stressed the close relationship between the Old Testament story and the cultic life of Israel, the institutionalized devotional expression. Remember that relationship especially through the first fifteen chapters of Exodus. Israel's corporate memory of Moses, God, and the Hebrews in Egypt is certainly shaped and accented in devotional use, in the annual celebration and re-enactment of the glorious event of divine creation in the triumphal exodus from Egypt, much in the fashion of the Church's annual memorialization of the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ.⁵

The character of the story is better defined in the word "tradition," than in the word "history." Tradition, while not necessarily divorced from all implements of history, is nevertheless fundamentally determined in Israel by the mind of faith which is theology and by the worship institution which is the cultus. We can see the result in this idealized, simplified story of Moses' birth and rearing. The form is dictated by the primary concern of both faith and cultus to render praise to God. The story is in intention a powerful affirmation: in God's grace the very princess of Egypt is brought into the service of Moses and the Hebrews!

The name Moses is Egyptian. It means "son" and is compounded in Egyptian names like Tutmose and Ahmose. But rather characteristically, the story must find a Hebrew etymology; and it comes up with a naming-narrative (v. 10) tying the Egyptian name to a Hebrew word meaning "to draw out." The story gives a passive reading to the name: Moses is the one "drawn out" from the water. But to make this etymology legitimate, the Hebrew form of the name can only be the active participle, a fact certainly not lost in the story's implicit understanding. The name "Moses," adapted from the Egyptian into the Hebrew, means the one who executes the "drawing out," and so points to the essence of Moses' life, his role of leadership in the deliverance of Israel.

2:11-15

Moses' identification with his future role of deliverer is made clear in verses 11-1 15a. The great act of deliverance is foreshadowed as he acts decisively and violently in sympathetic identification with the abused, as Hebrew is tormented not only by Egyptian (v. 11), but by fellow Hebrew as well (v. 13). The episode affirms his compassionate character (cf. Num. 12:3).

As a result of the episode, Moses seeks refuge in the land of Midian (vv. 15b-22). Midian is only vaguely defined, partly because the Midianites were a seminomadic people. But the general area is sure - near the northern shores of the Gulf of Aqabah, south of and adjacent to the territory of Edom (cf. 1 Kings 11: 14-18). Moses fled east from Egypt, across the Sinaitic peninsula.

An example of the use of realistic detail of symbolic importance is found in the story of Moses by the well. Obviously, this cannot be proved factually, but the story's sense of reality is sound. In the semidesert, in all parched lands, life literally flows to and from the source of water (cf. the role of the place of the well of the Jacob story, Gen. 29). What transpires is (as in the Jacob scene) romantic; but the episode again emphasizes Moses' character as deliverer.

Corporate memory recalls Moses' adopted home in Midian as the home of a priest. Moses is subsequently called upon to be not only premier-commander, but prophet-minister-priest as well, and so here another role is foreshadowed. Indirectly (and directly, see 18:1-27) Moses is indebted to his father-in-law for his administrative skills, "civic" as well as religious. However, in Midian, Moses is but a "sojourner in a foreign land" (v. 22), and this episode ends with a return to the theme of Egyptian oppression and the task which he cannot, even if he would, avoid (vv. 23-25).

It is the function of the concluding verses of chapter 2 to make clear what has gone before and what is about to take place - the call and commission of Moses. If the story is correct in recording the death of an Egyptian pharaoh during Moses' stay in Midian, we suspect it was Seti I, who died about 1290, although it could be Ramses II, about 1224. Evidence of varying sorts points preponderantly to a thirteenth-century date for the exodus, and perhaps favors a date earlier rather than later in the century. We shall here assume that the "new king over Egypt" of 1:8 was Seti I (c. 1310-1290) under whose administration the lot of all 'Apiru in Egypt grew less tolerable; and that following his death (2:23) and the accession of Ramses II (c. 1290-1224) the existence of slave and semislave laborers degenerated still further, precipitating the exodus of the group under Moses.

Moses' people are in hard bondage. Israel - it is Israel now - has cried out to God. God hears, God sees, God knows, God also "remembers." He remembers his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now, we do not suppose that in this preexodus time the confessional formula of patriarchal covenant was invoked, since the formula itself is dependent upon the exodus event and the subsequent identification of Israel as a covenant people. The story verbalizes the faith that the exodus event is in meaning consequent upon what God had purposed long ago in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thus, the story impresses on the hearer or reader the enormous dimensions implicit in what is happening. This is an act of covenant fulfillment; God is "remembering" and performing his covenant program. And this act has universal implications, for the promise to Abraham and the patriarchs is a promise ultimately to all the families of the earth (see Gen. 12:3). It is a promise to all men who are "in Egypt," who are in bondage, that God hears, sees, knows, and remembers! The story affirms its own universal and timeless significance.

Three words in the first two verses of chapter 3 raise questions about the framework of the story. In these verses Moses' father-in-law is Jethro, but in 2:18 he was Reuel. The: sacred mountain, "the mountain of God," is called Horeb, a name used less than twenty times in the Old Testament, but it is called Sinai - quite apparently the same mountain - about forty times. In the first two chapters of Exodus God is designated only by the Hebrew word 'Elohim, which also underlies the word "God" in 3:1. But in 3:2 ff. another term appears, "the Lord," in Hebrew originally simply four consonants YHWH. For centuries Hebrew was written without vowels. The probable pronunciation is Yahweh, although in Israelite-Jewish tradition this specific and particular name of God was commonly deemed too sacred to be pronounced. The reader or speaker simply said 'Adonai, meaning the Lord. The term "Jehovah" is a hybrid, combining the consonants YHWH with the vowels of 'Adonai.

Jethro-Reuel (and perhaps also called Hobab, see Num. 10:29; Judg. 4:11); Horeb-Sinai; 'Elohim-Yahweh. These variants point unmistakably to different sources in the oral tradition, the first writing, and later "editorial" stages. Through the nineteenth century of our era and into the twentieth biblical scholars have worked productively at the analysis of the Old Testament by means of a documentary hypothesis - the theory (supported by many variants such as these) that multiple documents or sources were employed and combined in the present text. We see no reason to abandon this theory if the hypothesis is not rigidly or arrogantly employed; if we remember that often it is impossible to untangle the "sources"; if we recognize that there is artistic, even theological, meaning in the way in which the sources have been combined; and if we recall that what we choose to designate as a single source may itself be the product of multiple lesser "sources."

The patriarchs of documentary analysis are three nineteenth-century German scholars, Graf, Kuenen, and Wellhausen. Early in the twentieth century S. R. Driver (Literature of the Old Testament, 1913) gave mature and now classical formulation to their essential position; and more recently Robert Pfeiifer in this country (Introduction to the Old Testament, rev., 1948) and Otto Eissfeldt in Germany (Einleitung in das Alte Testament, rev., 1956) continued to analyze and interpret the Old Testament in the tradition of literary criticism.

Other scholars use more radically modified methods of literary criticism proceeding from the basic assumption of multiple sources; and in Germany in the past few decades interest has shifted to a different approach known as form criticism which asks different questions of the text. The "literary" critic first attempts to determine the source, its extent, date, and even authorship. The form critic addresses himself first to questions of the community which produced a given segment of Old Testament text, the possible role of that segment in the life of the community, and such insights into the faith of ancient Israel as may be derived from the passage. But the form critic utilizes the work of literary critics, for example, in the inspired work of the father of form criticism, Hermann Gunkel, in the early decades of this century, and G. von Rad now in the middle decades.⁶Only relatively few, notably among Scandinavian scholars, have completely abandoned the presuppositions of literary criticism.

We will use here the standard symbols, J, F, and P, to designate the three most conspicuous narrative strands interwoven in Exodus (as well as in Genesis, Numbers, and perhaps. Joshua). The symbol J represents the source in which Jahweh-Yahweh is the preferred style of the divine name, and which seems to have originated in the south (Judah). It is generally taken to he the record of traditions current and fluid down to the tenth century, when the J-work was done, and it appears to he the work of an individual.⁷The symbol F represents not an individual's work of collection and editing, but a varied, unintegrated assortment of stories and traditions circulating in the north (Ephraim) and preferring the divine name 'Elohim. Drawn from the traditions current in Israel to perhaps the eighth century, it was combined with the material in J to augments supplement, or pose a significant variant to the J body of tradition. P (for the characteristic priestly perspective), the latest process of collection to attain a fixed form, also draws from the common mine of tradition until its development was arrested in the fifth century when it was combined with JE, probably by the same continuing community of priests who formed it.

Ex 3:1-10

Exodus 3 is JE, but F is dominant since the term "God" ('Elohim) occurs more frequently than the term "the Lord" (Yahweh). Exodus 4-5 (including 6:1) is also JE, but here J dominates. P, following brief appearances in chapters 1 and 2 (1:1-5, 13-14; 2:23-25), first takes over the exodus story in 6:2-7:13. This description of the text before us now explains some of the superficial phenomena of the story as it stands, but it also speaks of the relationship of the story to the total life of ancient Israel.

The scene is Horeb (E and Deuteronomy) or Sinai (J and P). We are not positive about its location. The traditional site is the mountain Jebel Musa in the southern Sinai peninsula; but if Jethro and the Midianites were here, they had ranged rather far out of their customary orbit east and perhaps north of the Gulf of Aqabah. In part on the strength of the proposition that the description of God's appearance on the sacred mountain in Exodus 19 presupposes volcanic phenomena (a view supported by the guiding cloud and pillar of fire?), some would locate Horeb/Sinai in the territory of Midian proper where alone in the whole area there is evidence of volcanic action. Still others would find the sacred mountain to the north and west of the northern extremities of the Gulf of Aqabah in the area loosely defined as the wilderness of Paran.

This location satisfies the inference from a number of passages that Horeb/Sinai was not far removed from Kadesh-barnea ('ain el-Qudeirat?) which, while not positively identified, was surely situated just south of the Negeb (Canaan's southernmost territory) and considerably to the northwest of the tip of Aqabah. We incline to this third alternative.

We may now dispense with the minor problems of internal ambiguity, for we understand the structure of the story. For example, one of the story's components identified the reality behind Moses' vision as an angel, the authorized representative of Yahweh (v. 2), but another as Yahweh himself (v. 4). There is nevertheless unity in the narrative in its central affirmation - that Moses knew beyond any possible doubting the firm call of Yahweh/God to "bring forth my people, the Sons of Israel, out of Egypt!" On the strength of what is recorded, we do not presume to reconstruct the "facts" of the event. We take this as testimony of Israel's faith in Yahweh and Moses. We take this for nothing more nor less than the way Israel remembered.

Israel remembers the texture of this encounter between Yahweh and Moses - the texture rather than the concrete structure. The quality rather than the literal substance of Moses' overwhelming and ultimately indescribable experience of the Call is reproduced. Moses' tiny space, the world of a moment, is exploded by the invasion of the Fullness of Time. His word is in conversation with the Word - Moses, Moses, you may not walk here with shoes, since this, being ground of Meeting, is holy ground. Do not walk here with shoes, since in this place of holiness your uncovered feet acknowledge that you, Moses, stand uncovered and naked in the holy place, this island, this enclosure, this tomb of your existence now entered by the Word of Yahweh!

Israel remembers the essence of the Call; the word of Moses is in conversation with the Word; the person of Moses, bared to the soul, is engulfed in Glory. And to what end, the Call? That My people, the sons of Israel, may be delivered from their bondage in Egypt!

3:11-12

I will send you to bring all of this to pass. And Moses responds, in effect, By all means, Lord, bring it to pass, but not through me.

1. Moses' first protest is essentially - Who am I to do this? Child of Israel-Egypt; fugitive; priest's son-in-law, and Midianite shepherd. This is my identity. I am obviously disqualified. But he is answered that he must now identify himself in terms of his relationship to God, "I will be with you."

Moses' problem when confronted by the Word is every man's problem who believes himself to be so confronted. The story of Moses always "is" however much we may be concerned with its "wasness." The coin which reads "Faith" on one side and "Unfaith" on the other is universal. The two faces may not be separated or significantly altered, even by a Moses.

3:13-22

2. Moses is willing, for the sake of argument, to accept this definition of true identity. But to define himself in terms of a relationship to another, he must know the other. He must again protest and ask, in effect - Who are You, Lord? Tell me your Name, lest when they ask me, as ask me they will, I will have no name, and having no name, no real knowledge of Who or What You are, to say nothing of who and what I am.

Six possible interpretations of the name are given. The J work - as we have suggested, the earliest identifiable collection of Israel's stories and traditions - takes for granted the knowledge of the divine name, Yahweh, from earliest times (Gen. 4:26). In F and P, the personal name, as opposed to the titles by which God was known, was first revealed to Moses. This is the view of verses 3:13-22 (traditionally assigned to E) as well as of 6:2 (P). Now it may well be, as a matter of fact, that God was worshiped in the south (J's provenance) by the name Yahweh long before the Moses-Joshua group entered Canaan bringing with them the sacred name which only then became normative in the north. It may also be, as a number of competent scholars have maintained, that Jethro the Midianite was a Kenite, a clan related to tribes long in residence in south Canaan; and that the form, structure, and even the terminology of Moses' faith was influenced by the relationship. It is certain, as we shall see (ch. 18), that Moses was significantly indebted to Jethro.

However varied may be the historical details related to this question, the story is unequivocal in its most crucial point. Moses has a fresh, immediate, and unprecedented encounter with God, out of which new and deeper insights into the nature of the deity are gained.⁸ In response to the question, "Who are You, Lord?" we are given six possible meanings of the name.

I am who I am or I will be what I will be (v. 14)

I am or I cause to be (all that comes into existence!)

YHWH (v. 15) here related to the verb "to be" but possibly derived from a root meaning "to blow" or perhaps "to sustain, to maintain"

God of your fathers

God of Abraham . . . Isaac . . . Jacob

God of the Hebrews (v. 18)

The uncertainty as to the derivation of the name YHWH results in a total remarkable confession of faith: the God of the Hebrews, these particular 'Apiru enslaved in Egypt, is the fathers' God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is and will be, who causes to be, who manifests his power (blowing), who sustains all life. This is the God of the fugitive Moses and the Hebrew slave!

4:1-9

3. But there is a third protest - will he be believed? A note of impatience creeps into the divine response as the Lord reveals to Moses the power he now possesses to perform the magician's acts. Here again the Old Testament story shapes itself according to the principle of essential meaning, subordinating details of events and the external forms of the past. Was there an actual contest between Moses and Pharaoh's magicians? We cannot say. But in the essential contest between Yahweh-Moses-Israel and Pharaoh-Staff-Egypt, Egypt is defeated on her own terms - the magician's apparent power over objects of the environment - and the story highlights and augments this thematic motif.

4:10-17

4. The story moves to Moses' fourth protest. "I am not eloquent, . . . I am slow of speech and tongue."

Yahweh's answer is double-pronged. The story presents in Yahweh's words a stirring affirmation of the biblical creation-faith - God is the creator and sustainer of the life and time and total environment of man. This is all implicit in the rebuke,

"Who has made man's mouth?" And this sharp response is accompanied by the promise, "I will be with your mouth!"

Now Moses breaks Yahweh's patience. The RSV translates, "Oh, my Lord, send, I pray, some other person" (v. 13). The sense of the Hebrew is much stronger: Send whom you jolly well please. I'm not your man! The story acknowledges Yahweh's surging anger against Moses, but nevertheless represents the long-suffering Yahweh still countering a recalcitrant Moses, this time with the assurance that eloquence can be had in the person and service of Moses' brother Aaron.

4:18-23

The significant events between Moses' call and his program of deliverance (ch. 5) are culled from sources both ancient and primitive, and late and sophisticated. There has been a considerable time lapse since Moses came to Midian (v. 19). His recently acquired powers of magicianship will not effect deliverance and inferentially faith declares that only Yahweh can bring this about (v. 21). Pharaoh is to be informed (vv. 21 ff.) that Israel is Yahweh's first-born son (cf. Hos. 11:1, "my son ); and the demand theme, which is to be the refrain in the following chapters, is sounded - "Let my son go that he may serve me!" If the demand is refused, retaliation will be in kind - "If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay your first-born son."

4:24-26

The form of this strange little narrative of Moses' near brush with death probably reaches back to a time not far removed from the exodus era. It is impossible to say precisely what facts gave rise to the account. Moses must be circumcised. Is his uncircumcision an affront to the deity? Or more positively, is it now essential that Moses seal and affirm by circumcision his own covenant with Yahweh just described in his call? The narrative may represent something of both. In any case, since Moses, near death, is physically unable to tolerate the rite, it is performed vicariously upon Moses' son, and this act of covenant-making effects the cure of Moses' sickness-unto-death.

Finally the story records Israel's response to Moses of unqualified faith: "And the people believed; . . . they bowed their heads and worshiped."

It is the Word of Yahweh which effects Israel's deliverance from bondage, from chaos, from meaninglessness. But it is also unmistakable in the story that this deliverance followed only upon the response of faith from within the life of bondage, chaos, and meaninglessness!

We must again repeat that we are here commenting on a story which cannot be taken for objective external history. It is, in a manner of speaking, internal history; it portrays a people's inner life, self-understanding, and faith. The inescapable questions of possible correspondence between the inner and outer history must ultimately be answered by each individual reader and interpreter of the story.

The Preliminary Meetings

5:1-7:13

The issue is joined. Pharaoh is confronted with the Word's demand. His natural response is: Whose word is this? Who is Yahweh? I never heard of him and the answer is no.

Following the story's colorful and imaginative development of the plot (to 5:21), Moses reacts to Egypt's increasingly oppressive measures and the animosity of his own people as he is to react in the face of bitterness again and again. He turns to Yahweh. He appeals to the Word. And on the final outcome, at least, he is reassured (6:1).

It is the P stratum of the story (6:2 ff.) which now reports its own memory" of Moses' call; or if, in the unified story's intent, this is a reiteration at a critical moment of the call experience, it brings to mind the earlier episode of the mountain of God, the burning bush, and the holy ground (JE 3:1-6). There are differences in the two accounts. The scene here is Egypt. There is no attendant vision. The sense of awe and mystery in the earlier encounter gives way here to a relatively developed theology; it is here a highly articulate Word giving eloquent expression to the nature and purpose of Yahweh. And where in JE the sense of covenant is only implied, however emphatically, in P the term "covenant" itself is explicit.

It is nevertheless the same covenant. It is the same Word. It is the revelation of the same divine name YHWH (6:3) for the first time to Moses. It is a brilliant and realistic stroke to repeat Moses' transforming encounter with the Word at Horeb Sinai at this moment of abysmal discouragement following the first appearance before Pharaoh and the bitter verbal abuse of the Israelite foremen. The story understands and would have us understand that Moses is able to continue only on the strength of a renewal of purpose effected by a vivid reappropriation of the Word which first moved him from Midian to Egypt.

If the P stratum has its dull genealogies (e.g., 6:14 ff.), if it embraces large blocks of legal material, if it sometimes exercises an unnecessarily minute interest in the external accouterments of institutionalized religion, it also incorporates some of the Old Testament's most beautiful and eloquent lines. Read aloud the content of the moving Word to Moses in 6:2-8. It ought to be read aloud. Its form strongly suggests that it existed for generations first as a spoken liturgy or confession of faith, habitually recited in the round of formalized worship, that is, in the cultus. Note that the quality of divine compassion, mercy, and grace comes through here as it has not previously in Exodus; that this is a recital of faith in the mature and purpose of God (observe the emphasis even more: pronounced in Hebrew, on the divine "I" and compare the same feature in Joshua 24); and that all this is an expansion of the simple, eloquent theme which opens and closes the recital - "I am Yahweh" - conveying in the very name all the essential meaning of the divine life.

The Moses-Word dialogue breaks off at 6:13 to resume at 6:28 continuing through 7:9. The intervening verses (6: 14-27) constitute (except vv. 14-15; cf. Gen. 46:9 ff.) Levite genealogy concerning Moses and Aaron but more particularly Aaron, through whom the line of the institutional priestthood is derived (vv. 23, 24).

Now Moses repeats his self-deprecation: his lips are uncircumcised. This time the Word responds (7:1, cf. 4:14-16), "I will make you as God to Pharaoh" ('Elohim, not Yahweh), that is, Moses will possess vis-a-vis Pharaoh certain attributes of deity; "Aaron your brother shall be your prophet," that is, Aaron is to be his spokesman. The story here pays magnificent tribute to Moses.

As evidence of the story's use of variant traditions, Aaron now (7:8-13) wields the rod endowed with magical powers, not Moses (as in 4:2-4). This is P, and priestly tradition understandably magnifies the role of the father of priests. Aaron's act with the rod is promptly duplicated by the whole complement of Egyptian magicians; but it is quickly added, with the humor and zest of a good story, that Aaron's rod-into-serpent swallowed up the Egyptian equipment.

Still Pharaoh's heart was hard (7:13), might remained unmoved, power remained corrupt. Still, as it were, the world turned a deaf ear to the cry of faith. The preliminary meetings were all abortive.

7:14-13:16

Literary critics see the three major source-strata all intermingled here. No single source appears to have embraced all ten plagues. Some plagues may well be duplicates, for example, plagues 3 (gnats, 8:16-19, P?) and 4 (flies, 8:20-32, J?) are both plagues of insects. At the same time, form critics remind us that any interpretation must take into account the confessional form of the story, that is, its present structure, intent, and emphasis as derived from its cultic use, as imparted from its repeated recitation throughout Israel's generations on the occasion of the annual celebration of the great deliverance. The entire unit, Exodus 1-15, is the product of a multiform literary tradition, but a relatively uniform cultic-liturgical tradition - a fact which again leaves quite beyond recovery the external-objective structure of the event.

What is preserved is the fact and the quality of the faith of the participants - the actual or sympathetic participants (probably both, but who can say in what proportions?). It is the central affirmation of the story that calamities falling with such severity upon Egypt were occasioned and controlled by the purposive Word of Yahweh. The event, this sequence of disastrous episodes, is interpreted as revelatory event, disclosing the nature and intent of Yahweh - his nature as Lord of creation and his intent to make of Israel a people.

All else is subordinated to this theme. Thus, the present form of the story is obviously unconcerned with consistency. For example, is all of Egypt's water affected (7:19, P?) or only the Nile waters (7:17-18, J?)? Or, in general, who is the immediate agent of the wonders produced, Yahweh (J?) or Moses (F?) or Aaron (P?)? As another consequence of the story's preoccupation with the faith-meaning theme, the major roles are unmistakably drawn in idealized and simplified fashion, more according to theological than to historical function. Most conspicuous in this regard is, of course, Pharaoh, representing "unfaith," brought repeatedly to the brink of submission but never persuaded, and therefore ultimately the victim of crushing defeat.

What of the Pharaoh's actual role, whether Ramses II, his successor Merneptah, or, in more remote possibility, some predecessor of Ramses? This is simply an impossible question. The overwhelming significance with which the event of the exodus is charged in the story obviously and appropriately reflects Israel's estimate, not Egypt's. Since the episode is mentioned nowhere in contemporary Egyptian records thus far uncovered, we assume that from Egypt's perspective it was nothing remotely resembling the momentous event it seemed to Israel. But this is Israel's birth as a people, her very creation out of formlessness and void, and therefore the varying strands of tradition must represent this event as of consequence to the very person of the Pharaoh of Egypt.

Essential truth and bare fact are not necessarily coincident, coextensive, identical. It may well be, as some astute Old Testament historians maintain, that 14: 5a preserves the historical fact that Israel fled without Pharaoh's knowledge and was pursued only subsequently when he was for the first time informed of her escape. But in the internal sense of faith, the fundamental significance of what is conveyed is profoundly true. To the mind of faith, Pharaoh's role and response in this event are authentic. "Let my people go, that they may serve me!" (7:16; 8:1,20; 9:1,13; 10:3; cf. 3:12; 4:23,10:7). The answer of Pharaoh - the epitome of human "unfaith" and pride - is in faith forever true: These are not your people, but mine, and they shall not serve you but me.

11:1-13:16

In the round of the Old Testament cultic year, the most prominent and probably the oldest festival is the passover. From the time of Moses on, it was celebrated in the spring of the year, commemorating the exodus and particularly the "passing over" of the Israelite homes (12:23) when death invaded Egypt and claimed her first-born. But the festival appears to have had a pre-exodus history among pastoral folk as a spring celebration of the birth of the lambs with attendant rites for the consecration of the flocks and probably a communion meal shared by the shepherd group and the deity. Exodus 5:1 may refer to this parent festival of the passover.

Together with the tenth and decisive plague, the exodus story includes the full prescription for the passover celebration (12: l-13,21-27,43-49) A second closely associated festival, the feast of unleavened bread, is similarly given its first prescription here (12:14-20; 13:3-10). In subsequent centuries when Israel had become a settled people, this agricultural festival also commemorated the exodus (12:17; 13:8). A third cultic rite is also introduced - the rite of the dedication of the firstborn (13:1-2,11-16). It is introduced here because of its natural association with the moving "first-born" theme which dominates these chapters.

The first simple passover was no doubt in a real sense celebrated in the episode of the last plague, which was considered by the Israelite participants to be decisive to their escape. This seems probable whatever the external structure of that moment of time. But the present story gives us a form of celebration developed over the seven or eight following centuries (12:21-27 appears to derive from the older J stratum; but 12:1-13, 43-49 is of the P character). And this is as it should be in the case of all three rites, since the story is concerned primarily with the meaning of the episode in the life of Israel. Only the developed matured rites could effectively convey what Israel understood to be the meaning of her birth-night: that Yahweh, in this event, made himself known as Lord of life and creation, of time and history. In converting (certainly long after entrance into Canaan) an agricultural festival of unleavened bread celebrating the fertility of nature and a nature-deity into a rite memorializing the action of Yahweh and his Word-to-Moses in history, Israel underscores her faith in the purposive, effective reign of God in time and history. And in relating the rite of dedication of the first-born to that same momentous night, she declares this meaning in her deliverance from Egypt - that the same Yahweh who brought her forth out of Egypt also gives and sustains, and so rightfully owns and possesses, all life.

13:17-14:31

We can be very sure that this little band of escaping 'Apiru I did not go out "equipped for battle" (see RSV, v. 18). We probably ought to read the text here "by fifties" or "in five divisions." It is a point of the story and surely a fact of the real event that the escape was won in spite of the complete vulnerability of the escapers.

In the Hebrew text, there is no reference to the Red Sea but to the Reed Sea, mentioned first in 10:19, again in 13:18, and repeatedly thereafter. The sea in question, then, was never purported to be the present Gulf of Suez. Unhappily. we have as yet no consensus as to where and what it was, other than the remarkably astute observation that it must have been a body of water in which reeds commonly grew. Was it Lake Sirbonis, east of Egypt and adjacent to the Mediterranean? Or is it not more likely that the crossing took place at the northern end of Lake Timsah or the southern tip of Lake Mensaleh, both bodies of water being situated along the course of the present Suez Canal? We cannot be sure, in part because as yet we have been unable to identify Etham (13:20), Pihahiroth, and Migdol (14:2).

We shall not here attempt to reconstruct Egypt's pursuit (14:5-21),¹⁰save to insist that the whole episode has been dramatically heightened in keeping with Israel's sense of its overwhelming significance. It was, by the story's own admission, "a mixed multitude" (12:38), a conglomerate lot of hangers-on to Egypt's relatively lush land, some of whom must have been to Egypt more liability than asset. That Ramses II or any other pharaoh of the Eighteenth or Seventeenth Dynasty, put himself in person at the head of his entire complement of chariotry (14:7,9) is, to say the least, improbable.

The story nevertheless comprehends and intends to highlight the tensions of faith and unfaith. We were Pharaoh's slaves! We lived and we continue to live and relive that experience. We remember the tension because we know the tension now. We recall what we felt, what we always existentially feel - our freedom to serve God is only a dim possibility, the pursuit of which means the abandonment of such security as we have. How can we face the quest of freedom in God's service when the quest propels us into an existence that is a vacuum, devoid of all the familiar symbols of security, ground to walk on, means of subsistence, and some reasonable assurance of continuity? Let us go back to Egypt. Let us return to life and meaning tangibly supported by human means and human devices, even Egyptian. In the life of faith this tension always exists.

Source critics long ago divided the scene of the dramatic crossing (14:10-31) into J and P (F figures here insignificantly if at all):

J P

21b. And Yahweh drove the sea 21a,c. Then Moses stretched back by a strong east wind all out his hand over the seas, night, and made the sea dry and the waters were divided. land.

24. And in the morning watch 22. And the people of Israel

Yahweh looked down upon the went into the midst of the sea host of the Egyptians. on dry ground, the waters

25. And clogged [or bound, or being a wall to them on their caused to bog down] their right hand and on their left. chariot wheels so that they 23. The Egyptians pursued, and drove heavily; and the went in after them into the

Egyptians said, "Let us flee midst of the sea, all from before Israel; for Yahweh Pharaoh's horses, his fights for them against the chariots, and his horsemen.

Egyptians." 26. Then Yahweh said to

27b. And the sea returned to Moses, "Stretch out your hand its wonted flow [the inference over the sea, that the water is clear: the wind abated and may come back upon the the water returned to its Egyptians." customary level] when the 27a. So Moses stretched forth morning appeared and Yahweh his hand over the sea. routed the Egyptians in the 28a. The waters returned and midst of the sea. covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the host of

Pharaoh.

In J the event is recorded as crucially conditioned by "natural" phenomena - an abnormally low water level at one end of the lake produced by uncommonly strong winds, the return of the water, the Egyptian chariots rendered inoperable by the now miry shallows, and the necessary abandonment of the chase. While P represents an event more impressed with the quality of the miraculous, it is important to acknowledge the fact that both interpretations affirm with equal insistence the decisive role of Yahweh. Essentially the same two interpretations are to be seen combined in the account of the plagues. Incidentally, we shall encounter this motif of the phenomenally dry crossing again in the story of Israel's entrance into Canaan (Josh. 3:1 ff.; cf. 2 Kings 2:8).

15:1-21

The climax of the crossing is unambiguous in the present text. This bitterly suppressed people, this company of the lost, this weak, diffuse body suddenly given unity and entity by Yahweh himself, all break forth into a spontaneous hymn of praise, more shout than song, more chant than anthem, more cry of ecstasy than artistic creation (15:21, cf. 15:1):

Sing to Yahweh for he has triumphed gloriously;

The horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea!

The Song of Moses or Miriam (15: 1-18) has usually been taken as a later expansion of the original, very ancient two lines attributed to Miriam in 15: 21, although some have more conservatively maintained the originality and antiquity of the long poem.¹¹ In any case, we affirm its relative antiquity, subject of course to modification (for example, to accommodate the reference to the tenth-century temple in Jerusalem, vv. 13b,17), and its immediate relationship from the beginning to the cultus, to the annual celebration and re-enactment of the event.

15:22-17:16

We cannot trace the route of march, nor can we hope to reconstruct the sequence of events. We are unable to define the geographical limits of the wilderness of Shur (15:22) or the wilderness of Sin (16:1, from the name Sinai?).¹²And as we have seen, the location of the sacred mountain itself, Sinai/ Horeb, remains uncertain.

The story employs four somewhat random narratives to emphasize the quality of Israel's existence upon first emerging from Egypt. The first days in the wilderness were days of intense anxiety and crisis over survival. In near panic the first cry - always the first cry in parched lands - is, "What shall we drink?" (15:22-27). It must have been raised repeatedly in the wilderness years (17:7; Num. 20:1-2). This band of escapers also faced the problem of hunger, and the second narrative centers in the cry, "What shall we eat?" (16:1 36). The third episode recounted to illustrate the crisis of survival repeats the motif of the people's thirst but puts a more sweeping question, "Is Yahweh among us or not?" (17:1-7). The fourth in this series concerns another basic threat to existence, attack from hostile forces (17:8-16).

Was Moses in fact knowledgeable in the art of "healing" unpalatable waters? Did Israel on occasion gather quail near the Mediterranean shore, when, as still happens, they had flown south over the sea to fall exhausted on the ground of northern Sinai? Was their "bread" (manna, RSV 16:15, note; and cf. bdellium, Num. 11:4-9) on occasion a sweet substance found adhering to the tamarask tree, a honey-like sap sucked out by insects to form a fragrant edible gum? Did Moses, wise in nature's ways, uncover or make available the waters of a natural rock spring? Did he in fact possess the powers of the primitive medicine man, to gain or seemingly to gain by magic means the victory over Amalek?

We cannot but ask these questions, even though no answer is forthcoming. These four episodes have been employed, apparently deliberately in this sequence, for primarily theological reasons - to illustrate simply and effectively the Yahweh-Moses-Israel conquest of the fundamental threats to Israel's existence in her first breath of independence following her hazardous birth out of Egypt.

18:1-27

Now the story turns, as Israel must have turned, to the crucial matters of consolidation and organization.

Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, was a Midianite, and more specifically, apparently a Kenite (Judges 1:16). Whether and to what extent the religion of Moses was initially borrowed from the Kenite priest Jethro (a theory long maintained under the designation, the Kenite hypothesis) remains unresolved. But there can be little doubt, in view of chapter 18, that Jethro gave Moses significant advice in matters of civil administration. The parallel, though differing, account in Numbers 11 places full responsibility for this action on Moses and Yahweh; Jethro is not even mentioned. Now if Jethro, the Midianite-Kenite, never served in such a relationship to Moses, it is difficult to understand how and why tradition (in tendency always disposed to magnify the stature of Moses) would create an account giving so decisive a role not simply to another man, but to a non-Israelite. The fact that Moses followed the advice of Jethro (18:13-27) lends support to the general proposition of Israelite Yahwism's ultimate (if unmeasurable and indefinite) indebtedness to the faith and cultus of Jethro.¹³

Jethro takes his leave of Moses (18:27). (The parallel narrative in Numbers 10:29-32 records Moses' urging his father-in-law to stay with them - "you will serve as eyes for us" in the wilderness - thus agreeing in the very positive estimate of Jethro and his relationship to Moses and Israel.) The exodus story now moves on to a block of material centering in events and experiences at the sacred mountain. The act of Israel's creation-deliverance, offering initially a miserable prognosis and fulfilled against seemingly insuperable odds, is rounded out with the establishment of some order and stability. Yahweh and Yahweh's Word through Moses have effected the impossible - deliverance from Egypt; salvation from the threats of extinction by thirst, famine, and sword; and now a workable administrative structure adequate to the needs of a group increasingly involved in the problems of a new people, with a new freedom and a new and uneasy responsibility.

1. It is essential that the Bible be read in conjunction with this book, since constant reference is made to specific words and passages.

2. Cf. M. Greenberg's thesis, The Hab/piru, in the American Oriental Series, vol. 39, New Haven, 1955; and A. Alt, Kleine Schrif ten zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel, Munich, 1953, vol. I, pp. 168 ff., 291 ff.; 1959, vol. III, pp. 162 ff.

3. For a description of the continuing modification of the character of Moses in tradition, see G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, Munich, 1957, vol. I, pp. 288 ff.

4. From the translation in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2nd ed., Princeton, 1955, p. 119. The brackets indicate the translator's reconstruction of the original text; the parentheses he adds simply for clarity. The translator notes that the meaning of the Akkadian word for "changeling" is doubtful.

5. Cf. J. Pederson, Israel, Copenhagen, 1940, vols. III-IV, pp. 728 ff. Pederson sees Exodus 1-15 as "obviously of a cultic character" aiming at glorifying the god of the people of the paschal (Passover) feast through an exposition of the historical event that created the people" (p. 728). He first expounded this view in "Passahfest und Passahlegende," Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 11 (1934), pp. 161-175.

6. Cf. H. Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis, trans. W. H. Carruth, Chicago, 1901; Genesis, in the series Handkommentar zum Alten Testament, 3rd. ed., G ttingen, 1910; What Remains of the Old Testament, trans. A. K. Dallas, London, 1928; and with J. Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen, Gottingen, 1933. See, in English, G. von Rad's Studies in Deuteronomy, in the series Studies in Biblical Theology, London, 1953; and other works of his already cited.

7. M. Noth, Ueberlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuchs, Stuttgart, 1948. Noth argues convincingly for a pre-J collection of traditional materials.

8. On the name and nature of Yahweh, see W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, New York, 1957, pp. 15 ff.; D. N. Freedman, "The Name of the God of Moses," Journal of Biblical Literature,LXXIX (June, 1960), 151 ff.

9. Cf. Pss. 77, 81, 105, 106.

10. Cf. B. D. Napier, Exodus, in the series The Layman's Bible Commentary, Richmond, 1962.

11. Cf. F. Cross and D. N. Freedman, "Song of Miriam," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, XIV, no. 4 (October, 1955). Cross and Freedman argue that the long poem is in its entirety the "Song of Miriam" and in its original form dates from a time no later than the twelfth century B.C.

12. The two wildernesses of Sin (17:1 and Num. 33:11-12) and Zin (Num. 13:21; 20:1; 27:14; 33:36; 34:3; Deut. 32:51; Josh. 15:1,3) may in reality be one and the same, located south of Judah and embracing Kadesh. The Septuagint assumes the identity of the two.

13. This proposition, the Kenite hypothesis, has had wide acceptance among Old Testament scholars for about a century. For bibliography and an able defense of the hypothesis, see H. H. Rowley, From Joseph to Joshua, London, 1950, pp. 149 ff. For arguments in rejection of the view, see Martin Buber, Moses, New York, 1958 (first published, 1946, pp. 94 ff.)

Anyone acquainted with political life, even merely as observer, knows how viciously a public figure may be maligned by his own words lifted out of context. The treacherous device of damning by out-of-context quotation has served in the past and unhappily continues to serve effectively un the disastrous defamation of persons in public life.

One commonly hears it said, with a shrug, "You can prove anything in the Bible." And in a sense this comment is true: interpret the biblical verse or the brief narrative or in a couple of instances even the Old Testament book in isolation and it becomes in meaning something totally different from what was clearly its intent in context.

This is pointedly true of the whole Genesis story. Source critics see here the same three primary strata of tradition - J, F, and P - which we have already seen in Exodus; but we will do well to remind ourselves again that these symbols represent by and large the collection and arrangement of smaller units of oral and/or written material some of which, at least, were already long in existence. There can be no doubt that what we identify in the Tetrateuch (Genesis-Numbers) as P employs and incorporates in the fifth century some material as old or possibly older than J. And J in the tenth century may well have had as a primary source an earlier effort to bring together coherently a wide assortment of stories deemed to have significant bearing on the life of the people Israel.²Certainly individual units in the J corpus had been in existence for centuries before they were integrated; and beyond any doubt these units were often strikingly modified in meaning in the context of the J work.

We must always interpret the part in the light of the whole. We will read the whole book of Genesis in the context of the faith of the people of Israel - a people who, as we have seen, deem their life to be the gift of Yahweh and their destiny the subject of his Word. And the varied components of the present book of Genesis we will read as for the most part purposively and meaningfully related to the whole work.

In briefest outline, Genesis falls into two parts. The pivotal point is chapter 12, the call of Abraham - at once the climax and interpretive key to the first eleven chapters, and the opening, thematic scene of the second division of Genesis, chapters 12-50. The J work no doubt supplied Genesis with its earliest outline and its profound theological bearing. But the form of this remarkable introduction to the life of the people of Israel remained fluid from the tenth century to the fifth century and the final Genesis story may with all justification be termed a meditation on history. It is as such both an informed and an informing introduction; which is simply to say that like any good introduction, it is informed by that which it introduces and is therefore also informative to that which it seeks to present meaningfully.

The first section, 1-11, intends to set the particular story of Israel against the background of all creation and in the midst of universal human existence. It has commonly been termed the "primeval history," but this overemphasizes the quality of "wasness." The faith of Israel, the interpretation of her historical life in Yahwism, inevitably poses the question: If the Word of Yahweh thus creates, shapes, and informs our life, if the life of Yahweh thus impinges effectively upon human history, what is his relationship, and ours, to the wide world? In the first two chapters of Genesis Israel affirms in two totally different ways that all order in the universe is both introduced and maintained by Yahweh, and that the meaning of human existence, and indeed of all lower forms of life, derives solely from him. Creation is the control of chaos and the gift and support of meaning. It always is, however much we may say it was.

Chapters 3-11, to which we will turn in the next section, demonstrate in full context the intention to affirm in faith that all men (not excepting Israel, obviously) contend, in one way or another, from one false presumption or another, that order and meaning are not thus created and sustained, but are subject to man's arbitrary manipulation. This results in a state of existence intolerable both for man and God - a state of existence into which Yahweh introduces his Word through Abraham and Israel for the restoration of creation. "In you all the families of the earth will be blessed" (12:3 RSV margin).

Israel's Yahwism was from the beginning in tension or even sometimes in bitter conflict with the widespread indigenous fertility cults of Canaan. Local sanctuaries abounded enshrining the male deity, Ba'al, and often his consort, 'Asherah (later and elsewhere. Astarte, Ishtar, etc.). Fertility rites, practiced in the interests of securing fertility and productivity both human and natural, involved cultic prostitution - the sex act performed with cult personnel to bring efficacious union with the deity and the consequent guarantee of fertility of field and body.

Against this widely prevailing understanding of the "creation faith" we suspect that in Yahwistic circles the very term "creation" may have been a dirty word and that the development and discussion of Israel's creation faith was suppressed as part of the long, anguished struggle against religious syncretism and the loss of the distinctly moral-ethical-historical character of the Yahweh faith. It is in any case a fact that Israel's creation faith - certainly a basic element of the structure of Yahwism from early times - receives scant specific mention (apart from the J story of Gen. 2:4b ff.) until relatively late, and no absolutely unqualified elaboration and application until the latter part of the sixth century (in Isa. 40-66), when also, at the earliest, the creation story of Genesis 1 became a part of the accepted cultic instructional idiom.

For this is what it is. The style is strongly didactic. A few phrases occur repeatedly: And God said, and God saw, and God called, and God made, and God created, and God blessed. The story is a precisely ordered piece, with each of its six creative acts rounded out with the same refrain: and there was evening, and there was morning, one day, a second day, a third day, etc. (in ancient Israel as in the practice of Judaism now the course of a day is marked from evening to evening). No word is anywhere wasted, no phrase ill conceived, unpondered. And the climax? It is the verification of the Sabbath institution, the ultimate authorization:

So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.³(2:3)

Yet this story's origin is emphatically not full-blown out of the demands of a revitalized cultic-religious program centered in the rebuilt city and temple of Jerusalem in the closing years of the sixth century. The story had its dim beginnings and it betrays its distant involvement in an ancient myth of creation out of the Near and Middle East which survived in various forms but best and most fully in the Babylonian Enuma Elish (a title derived from its opening words, "When on high ).⁴Here chaos is represented in the goddess Tiamat, a name perhaps echoed in the Hebrew word for "deep" tehom (1:2). Creation is effected when the god Marduk-Bel, with the assistance of lesser gods, carves up Tiamat's carcass to form from it the earth and its arching canopy, the firmament. Neither the Hebrew nor the Akkadian (Babylonian).accounts envisage creation out of nothing, since in both creation results from the radical transformation of a prior chaos.

But gone from the Hebrew account is any suggestion of "biological" relationship between chaos and God. Gone is the long gory struggle. Gone is the stupendous effort of Tiamat's defeat. Genesis 1 does preserve the notion of creation by work in the frequent use of the verb "make" and the thrice-repeated verb "create" (of "the heavens and the earth," v. 1; of "every living creature that moves," v. 21; and of man, v. 27). But the measure of the story's theological refinement is nowhere more conspicuous than in its confident, if subtle, superimposition of creation by Word - the Word which, effortlessly spoken, effortlessly calls into being that which was not. "'Let there be light!' And there was light."

Not creatio ex nihilo but creation conceived in terms analogous to Israel's own creation. Israel was prior to the call of Moses, but she was chaos. She was without order, meaningless. She was in the onomatopoetic phrase of verse 2, tohu vavohu, "formless and void." God called her into being (not from nonbeing but from "antibeing"⁵) by his Word. So, analogously, Israel understands and articulates her faith in the world's and man's creation: all that now exists is brought into being by Yahweh and his 'Word out of chaos and continues in non-chaotic existence only in and by the creating-sustaining Yahweh. Creation, in Israel and the world, is continuous. In the faith of Israel the story of creation always is.

The origins, background, and history of the second creation story remain obscure. It was apparently available to the J work in the tenth century and was there appropriated to J's uses as the opening chapter of the corpus. It became stabilized, so to speak, very early and therefore displays a spontaneity, charm, and naivete which contrast sharply with the preceding story. The ordered sequence of Genesis 1, the specific citing of the range and depth of creation, the refined theological concept of creation by Word, and any institutionally motivated purpose (Sabbath)-all this is absent. There is concurrence that Yahweh God (2:4b ff.; but "God," 'Elohim alone, in 1:1 ff.) worked "in the beginning" (1:1), that is, "in the day that Yahweh God made earth and the heavens" (2:4b) from pre-existent matter - chaos (an earth formless, void, engulfed in darkness, 1:2) or, and this is part of the concurrence, an earth utterly barren, a sterile world (2:5). Both stories understand creation as essentially transformation. The thought of ancient Israel is always characterized by the nonspeculative. One rarely encounters in the Old Testament any disposition to probe beyond time, concrete existence, matter, and history. There is even syntactical concurrence: the two stories open with sentences similarly structured:

When God began to create [RSV margin] the heavens and the earth, [when] the earth was without form and void, . . .then God said. . .

In the day that Yahweh God made the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth, . . . then the Lord God formed man. . .

But perhaps the most fundamental contrast is also here apparent: the J story proceeds at once to the creation of man (literally, "formation" for this story does not use the word "create ). The language is raw, earthy, concrete, and pictorially three dimensional. Here it is not the conceptual "created . . . in the image of 'Elohim" (1:27) but the graphic "formed (moulded) of dust from the ground." And this lifeless but shaped mass of clay is now animated by Yahweh's breath, the breath of life, blown without benefit of any intermediate devices into the cold clay nostrils of the sculptor's figure.

Here is a primitive, even crude etiology (a creation myth explaining present, persistent phenomena of existence). This was its intentional meaning in the centuries of its circulation before J employed it. As such, it is interesting as one in the growing collections of ancient mythologies, but it is now irrelevant, if not also aesthetically and theologically unpalatable. But we must ask after the story's J-meaning, its Israel-meaning. What intentional interpretation is imparted to the story contextually? How does the J-work understand the story? Why do Israel's traditionists through the centuries retain the story and hold it inseparably joined in the unit Genesis 1-2 and the larger unit Genesis 1-11?

The quality of naivete is capable of great depth and subtlety. The present intention of the story is to give expression to what J and all true Yahwists in Israel deemed to be the essence of the relationship, not as in Genesis I between God and all creation, but pointedly and existentially, between Yahweh and man. The one essential, universal datum of man's life is his immediate, direct, total dependence on Yahweh. Yahweh gives him form out of the formless ground. Yahweh imparts life to the lifeless form. Yahweh gives the productive environment in which his life is set with only the one condition (symbolized in the story in the forbidden tree) that men acknowledge his status as creature by observing this single restriction to his freedom imposed by the creator. Aside from this, his autonomy is complete and includes full jurisdiction over all lesser creatures, as is testified to in his naming these creatures and so assuming toward them the superior and controlling relationship of the namer to the named.

And this creation-faith is articulated in Israel always in terms analogous to the exodus experience of formation out of the lifeless ground of Egyptian slavery, animation by Yahweh's breath and Word in escape, and autonomy, unqualified save by the creator-creature relationship, in Canaan's productive environment.

An etiological story out of the common fund of Middle Eastern mythologies becomes in the context of Israel's life and faith profoundly theological. Thus, not once but twice in the opening lines of Israel's long, intimate story she declares her faith that her story, which is to follow, is inseparably related to the world's story; that the world and her own role in it have meaning only in the proposition that the earth and all who dwell in it are Yahweh's; and that the stuff of chaos rendered unchaotic by the creative power of Yahweh alone nevertheless resides in all, restrained only by the living God and his living Word.

Briefly surveyed, this block of chapters is comprised of four major narrative units and two extended genealogies in chapters 5 and 10. The self-contained tales of the Garden (3), the Brothers (4), the Flood (6-9), and the Tower (11) all bear the marks of a pre-J origin and history and, with the exception of the Flood which is now combined with a strong P strand, appear substantially as selected and employed by J. E has a part in Genesis only beginning, probably, in chapter 15. Genealogies are offered by both J (4:17-25; 5:29; 10:8-19,21,25-30) and P (5: 1-28,30-32; 10:1-7,20,22-23,31-32). J's are colorful, anecdotal and etiological (e.g., Jubal "was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe," 4:21), while P's are boringly businesslike with only slight relief from the enumerated weight of human years and procreation. Both J and P thus testify to Israel's historicizing of these timeless tales, originally disjointed, single, homeless, and dateless, but always relevant and deemed in Israel's faith to describe the universal human situation, the perennial condition of man.

We may term the block of chapters, then, JP, a designation which serves at least to remind us that the work is composite and that it reflects the meditation and faith of Israel over a good five-hundred-year span, from the Yahwist in the tenth century to the priests of the fifth century. The latter, through whose hands the whole Pentateuch finally passed before it was elevated to the relatively unmodifiable status of holy canon, are responsible for the superficial editorial framework of Genesis. It is P that would divide Genesis into sections by use of the formula "These are the generations of . . . ," or a coin-parable phrase at 2:4 (perhaps originally standing before 1:1 and introducing "the generations" of heaven and earth?); 5:1, Adam; 6:9, Noah; 10:1, sons of Noah; 11:10, Shem; 11:27, Terah, Abram, Lot; 25:12, Ishmael; 25:19, Isaac, Esau, and Jacob; 36:1, Esau; 37:2, Jacob. But certainly the basic sequence and structure of Genesis - the arrangement of its principal components - still derives from the J work.

It was not many decades ago that serious discussion (and heated debate) still commonly centered in the question of the literal truth of these tales, including, of course, the creation stories. Defenders of the truth of the Bible, who erroneously assumed that the truth of a narrative is precisely in the measure Of its literal accuracy, were constrained to interpret so as to substantiate the objective reliability of the account. For example, to bring Genesis 1 into conformity with more scientific theories viewing creation as a developmental-evolutionary process over vast eons of time, the word "day" was arbitrarily interpreted to mean just that, eons of time! And this despite the fact that this same word, in Hebrew yom, is habitually used with great frequency for the span of time from evening of one day to evening of the next.

Happily, this debate has appreciably subsided, although in certain quarters there are still those ready to tilt to the death on behalf of what is, alas, an idol - a deified book representing the reduction of Israel's Yahweh (and in the New Testament Christ's God and Father) to a particular combination of ink letters preserved on lifeless sheets of paper bound together between a pair of cardboard or leather covers and known as the Bible. In Judaism as in Christendom, the area in which this old debate can now be revived is greatly reduced. With characteristic British understatement and with admirable humor (intentional or not), the ghost of the argument for objectivity was firmly laid in the clipped accents of Professor A. S. Peake of the preceding generation of Old Testament scholars, in address to the tale of the flood:

The question of the historical character of the narrative still remains. The terms seem to require a universal deluge, for all the flesh on the earth was destroyed (6:17; 7:4, 21-23), and "all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered" (7:19 f.). But this would involve a depth of water all over the world not far short of 30,000 ft., and that sufficient water was available at the time is most improbable. The ark could not have contained more than a very small proportion of the animal life on the globe, to say nothing of the food needed for them, nor could eight people have attended to their wants, nor apart from a constant miracle could the very different conditions they required in order to live at all have been supplied. Nor, without such a miracle, could they have come from lands so remote. Moreover, the present distribution of animals would on this view be unaccountable. If all the species were present at a single centre at a time so comparatively near as less than five thousand years ago [dating by genealogical tables returns a date for creation around 4000 B.C. and Noah and company about a thousand years later], we should have expected far greater uniformity between different parts of the world than now exists. The difficulty of coming applies equally to return. Nor if the human race took a new beginning from three brothers and their three wives (7:13; 9:19) could we account for the origin, within the very brief period which is all that our knowledge of antiquity permits, of so many different races, for the development of languages with a long history behind them, or for the founding of states and the rise of advanced civilizations. And this quite understates the difficulty. . .⁷

The flood story of course may preserve the memory of not infrequent inundations in the Tigris-Euphrates valleys, as is also no doubt the case in the somewhat parallel Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (whose Noah bears the grand name of Utnapishtim). But the story is taken over into biblical use not from what in any sense we could call "historical" form, but from a prior and predominant etiological function - to give, in charming, interest-holding narration, an "explanation" of such common phenomena as the rainbow (9:13), the cultivation of wine (9:20f.), "racial" distinctions and divisions (9:24-27), the occurrence of men of abnormally large stature (in the originally separate and probably truncated tale of the sons of God and the daughters of men which now introduces the account, 6:1-4), and many other etiologies more blunted in present form.

The same is true of the three other tales which form the main body of the section Genesis 3-11. We list some of the most conspicuous etiologies: pain of childbirth, 3:16; the relative position of man and woman in society, 3:16; the intractability of man's natural environment and the consequent necessity of his hard labor, 3:17-19; man's irrevocable consignment to death, 3:19; the antipathy between the nomad and the agriculturalist and perhaps also the origin of violence in human relationships in the Brothers, 4:1-16; and the frustrating fact in the human situation of fundamental communication thwarted by plurality of speech and wide geographical dispersion, 11:1-9.

The stories do not appear to have been radically altered in the course of their appropriation into the biblical corpus. It has been aptly remarked that, for example, the Yahwist's "editing" is hardly more than the placing of accents of refinement on the story in the use, say of the name Yahweh where earlier some amorphous term for deity stood in the story.⁸And in the formation of JP it is obvious that editors regard it as essential that the distinctive forms of both existent flood accounts, for example, be retained, a fact accounting for present "discrepancies" in the tale in the form of duplicates and contradictions.⁹

What is editorially - and theologically - affirmed first by the Yahwist and tacitly by all subsequent handlers of the tradition (since they do not see fit to make any radical alteration in the Yahwist's outline) comes about not from the heavy-handed use of the red pencil, so to speak, but by the much more subtle editorializing achieved by the selection, arrangement, and juxtaposition of stories originally independent of one another. The stories thereby play a different role and say something very different. Israel shares with her neighbors the fascination of etiology and certainly she continues to delight in the charm of the stories at this level. But clearly in the J work, the P work, and the JP work, emphatically in the context of the history of Israel, in this subsequent level of the life and interpretation of these etiological tales, the character and quality of the etiological is transformed to make of the scattered individual etiologies a single, all-embracing explanation - an etiology conceived not in the area of prescientific observation but in profound faith. In Israel and the world Yahweh's good intent in creation is thwarted and his good order tragically disfigured. In the faith of Israelite Yahwism, this is an empirical fact. If creation has not yet reverted to chaos, divine order and meaning are nevertheless woefully disfigured. The single, characteristic, and comprehensive biblical etiology, the etiology of all etiologies, is concerned with the how and why of distorted, aborted creation. It attempts to answer this one vast theological phenomenon of existence with the explanation, alienation. The problem of man's life, out of which all of the problem of the human situation issue, is the chasm by which man is separated from God, the creature from the creator. It is a condition epitomized in Yahweh's first address to liberated, autonomous man, "Where are you?" (3:9). "Who told you that you were naked" (3:11), that you must run from me and hide from me, that you must separate yourself from me, so that we are alienated and estranged? "Have you eaten of the [forbidden] tree" (3:11), the only symbol limiting your freedom and denoting so long as it is inviolate your acknowledgment of your creatureliness? 'What is this that you have done" (3:13) in the role of creature with which I endowed you?

The primitive etiology becomes in the JP-Israel story a profoundly theological etiology. All men willfully violate the favorable and, on the whole, nonrestrictive terms of human existence. When the terms are violated in an act of alienation, the conditions of man's tenure in creation (the Garden) are so altered that he must be expelled. The good order and clear meaning of creation become obscured, and though existence continues under Yahweh's sustenance, scrutiny, and concern, it is now beset with the bitter fruits of man's rebellion against Yahweh, against God's creation, and against man's status within it.

Of course, we do not suppose that the Yahwist in the tenth century B.C. would or could thus have analyzed his purposes in the composition and unification of these tales. But we think this is nevertheless the essence of even the Yahwist's interpretation of Israel and the world. And we are sure that the maturing Yahweh faith in subsequent Israel interpreted the sequence of Creation, Garden, Brothers, Flood, and Tower as the only key to understanding her own story: God called Abraham out of Haran (11:31) and Israel out of Egypt in order to bless the alienated families of the earth, to effect the healing of the estrangement of man and God, creature and Creator, and the restoration and redemption of the order and meaning of creation. This is the etiology - the explanation in terms of origins that are, not were, that extend not vertically but in comprehensive horizontal fashion over all time and history. This is the etiology of the one great phenomenon of existence, that fact of the relationship between Israel, the Word of Yahweh, and the world.

The etiological story can be set, then, without violence to Israel's essential understanding, in our own terms. The four tales of Garden, Brothers, Flood, and Tower are progressive variations on a theme. Man is creature. He rebels (in four different modes) against his status in an act of pride by which he wittingly defies the Creator. The resulting alienation is perforce responded to by Yahweh, since the conditions of creation have in any case already been altered; or perhaps there is a sense in which the ensuing alienation is itself the positive judgment of God.

In the Garden man's sin (which is the expression vis-a-vis God of unwarranted and/or rebellious pride) takes the form of trust in his own understanding in defiance of the Word. The one tree from which he may not eat and by not eating may, as it were, glorify God, he observes is good for food, a delight to the eyes, and much more, conveys to the eater the gift of wisdom (3:6). His consequent reasonable (to him) appropriation of all creation, his calculated denial of essential status, and the implicit arrogation to himself of the prerogatives of creator bring the Creator's unhappy response of judgment. What existence might be, it is not.

In the tragic story of the Two Brothers, as in all of the tales, the very naivete is made to serve the profounder uses of theology. All men are in Cain and Abel. All men are brothers responsible to and for one another (4:9 f.). All men are Yahweh's, ultimately responsible to him. But one arrogates to himself prerogatives in the very nature of creation that are Yahweh's. He acts in violence against his brother and in judgment suffers alienation not only from his lost brother and from the human community, but from Yahweh as well (4:14).

The Flood presents a tale different in character from the other three. It is not only longer, but much more complex, diffuse, composite. and, in its long history, much more heterogeneously motivated. Nevertheless it is made to conform to the same essential theme of sin and judgment - man's violation of creation and the necessary response of the creator. Here human depravity is cited, that condition of man in which the thoughts of his heart are only evil (6:5). The cataclysmic judgment this time is destruction. But as Yahweh is concerned for man in the Garden and man in the Brothers, here also the story affirms a positive theology: the divine response in judgment is not without continuing mercy, since man is now given a fresh beginning. Alas, how quickly it comes to grief (9:20-27), even in the very person of Noah, "a righteous man, blameless in his generation," who "walked with God" (6:9). At Israel's level of interpretation the story would remind the listener-reader that the strength of sheer righteousness is inadequate and that the estrangement of man in creation can be met effectively only with faith - a motif we shall see made central in the cycle of stories about Abraham.

In the last of this sequence of stories, the Tower, all mankind is represented as a single clan or tribe wandering aimlessly over the East - or through history. To manipulate their own security, they will build themselves a tower to reach into heaven and so guarantee control over that sphere; they will build the imperishable city; and they will establish for themselves the indestructible name. "And Yahweh came down" utterly un-invoked, unmentioned, ignored. From Yahweh's point of view this is willful alienation of the most painful sort. The terms of creation are not defied. They are simply ignored. This is the ultimate act of rebellion and estrangement in which all the controls of creation and existence are unhesitatingly assumed by the creature. This is the final expression of apostasy by which trust in ultimate security is to tally transferred from God to man, and man becomes apostate to himself and to his own devices.

If there is a climactic quality in this fourth variation on the theme of sin, the response of judgment is also more enduringly bitter. Only in this one of the four stories is the judgment unmediated by any expression of Yahweh's continuing grace. The human situation is (apparently) irremediably afflicted with the accursed quality of the divisive, both in language and in geographical dispersion.

And yet it is just here that the primeval story is inseparably linked to the story of salvation: Abraham is called out of the multitude of peoples "in order that in him all the families of the earth may be blessed." So it is that the introduction of the story of salvation [in the call of Abraham, Gen. 12] answers the unresolved question of the primeval story - the question of God's relationship to the totality of peoples. This point where the story of salvation is brought in, Gen. 12:1-3, is not only the conclusion of the primeval story - it is the only real key to its interpretation. In thus inseparably uniting primeval story and salvation story the Yahwist expresses the meaning and goal of the function of redemption which Yahweh has charged to Israel. He gives the etiology of all etiologies of the Old Testament . . . on grounds neither rational nor documented by particulars, he proclaims that the ultimate goal of salvation effected by God through Israel's history is the overcoming of the chasm between God and all men everywhere.¹⁰

1. Cf. Pss. 8, 104.

2. Noth calls the hypothetical, but very plausible, pre-J source G for Grundlage. meaning "basic source" (Ueberlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuchs, Stuttgart, 1948).

3. Cf. G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, Munich, 1957, vol. 1, p. 152; and Genesis, trans. J. Marks (from Das Erste Buch Mose, in the series Das Alte Testament Deutsche, vol. II) Philadelphia, 1961, pp. 59 ff. See also the monograph by E. S. Jenni, Die theologische Begrundung des Sabbatgebotes in Alten Testament, Zurich, 1956.

4. For the translated text of the seven tablets, by E. A. Speiser, see James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2nd ed., Princeton, 1955, pp. 60 ff.

5. The term is suggested by N. H. Gottwald. See his discussion of the creation motif in Babylon and Israel in A Light to the Nations, New York, 1959, pp. 455-463.

6. Cf. Ps. 29.

7. "Genesis," Peake's Commentary on the Bible, London, 1937, p. 143.

8. Cf. von Rid, Genesis, op. cit., pp. 30 ff.

9. Cf. B. D. Napier, From Faith to Faith, New York, 1955, pp. 48 -52.

10. von Rid, Genesis, op. cit., pp. 23.

These chapters should be read in a single sitting, or in as few sessions as possible. The reader should read uncritically and not be concerned if parts of the whole refuse to fit into any scheme of interpretation or any pattern of meaning.

Three fairly well-defined subunits appear, which at one time were probably three separate cycles of stories. The subunits center in (1) Abraham and Isaac, 12-26; (2) Jacob (and Esau), 27-36; (3) Joseph, 37-50 (excepting 38 which deals with Judah and Tamar).

Areas of Meaning

The questions we must address to these patriarchal stories fall into three categories. How are these stories to be interpreted (1) historically, (2) etiologically, and (3) theologically?

The "age of the patriarchs" is roughly the first half of the second millennium B.C. (2000-1500). Several archaeological finds illuminate this epoch in the life of the Middle East. We know from evidence gathered all over the productive lands around the fast Arabian desert (long ago the historian J. H. Breasted designated this area as the Fertile Crescent) of a widespread eruption of desert peoples, Semitic nomads, into the more sedentary areas. The invaders were called Amorites ( Westerners ) and for centuries they dominated the life of the Fertile Crescent, with city-states firmly established at such sites as Haran (from whence came Abraham, 11:31), Ugarit, Mari, and Babylon, which was ruled in the decades around 1700 by the renowned Hammurabi, Ugarit and Mari, among other ancient sites, have yielded profuse contemporary information of several kinds. At Nuzi, southeast of Nineveh, clay tablets from the patriarchal age further inform of that epoch's practices and customs. All of these, together with a still-growing body of contemporary information from the exciting fields of archaeology, confirm the credibility of the whole atmosphere of the patriarchal stories. If no shred of specific evidence substantiating the historicity of the patriarchs has appeared, it is on the other hand impossible now to maintain that the stories are of no historical value. Whatever may be the ultimate "historical" decision with respect to the plot and the players themselves, the stage-settings are indisputably authentic.¹

The array and variety of etiological stories in Genesis is striking.² Three primary types recur again and again.

1. The ethnological story explains in terms of the "past" observable phenomena relating to known tribes and ethnic groups. Amman and Moab, recognized in Israel as related peoples, are explained in their relatedness in the simple terms of the brothers Abram and Lot (13) and the literal father-sons relationship of Lot to Ammon and Moab (19). Their consignment to territory beyond the Jordan and to the south of Israel is etiologically explained and justified in the story of Lot's voluntary choice of that area (13).

2. The etymological legend betrays Israel's (and, in general, the East's) profound interest in names, their meaning, and the relationship between meaning and innate character or performance, or between meaning and situation of origin. The explanation of Isaac's name (from a word meaning "laughter ) is thrice repeated (17:17, 18:12; 21:2) as is Ishmael's ( God hears" 16:11; 17:20; 21:17). An alleged peculiarity of Jacob's birth and the subsequent, continuing relationship between the descendants of Jacob and Esau is etymologically explained ( heel-holder" - born holding his twin brother's heel, 25:26); while the same man's character (and in their own eyes, surely, that of his descendants who bear the name) is etymologically defined in his other name, Israel (perhaps "Striver with God" 32:28).

3. The cult etiology explains the existence of a sanctuary or a cultic ritual. Israel's major sanctuaries are thus all domesticized by association with the patriarchs, as, for example, Abraham at Jerusalem (Salem, 14:18) and Jacob at Bethel (28:10 ff.). Cult etiology attributes the origin of the rite of circumcision to Abraham (17, but also to Moses, Ex. 4:24-26, and Joshua, 5:2 ff.).

But in the present context, historical and etiological relations are subservient to the broadly theological bearing of the patriarchal narratives. The "literary" judgment, for what it is worth, sees the whole, 12-50, as a JEP compendium. E is deemed to enter the structure at 15 (a prominent feature of E is the dream motif). P's role is in substance seen to be relatively slight except in 17 (covenant by circumcision, the P parallel to the JE covenant in Yahweh's promise, the response of faith, and Yahweh's irrevocable commitments to promise in ch. 15); in 23 (the charming story of the patriarch's negotiation for a burial ground, a narrative we suspect to be of very different stuff indeed from 17); and in 25, 34, and 36. The rest is in the main JE except the very odd chapter 14 which continues to defy both historical and literary analysis. But again, this "documentary" structure serves to remind us of the centuries from J to P, from Israel's days as political state to her reconstitution as theocratic state, during which the fluid collection of traditions, the still pliable story of Israel, continued to serve as a living commentary on this people's existence. In the following sections on the patriarchs it is essentially this meditative, theological perspective which we shall pursue.

Abraham and Isaac (Gn 12-26)

The theological theme, sometimes subdued and even momentarily lost, is unmistakable. Abraham is a chosen man. The chooser is Yahweh. The reasons behind the choice of Abraham (and not some other) are decidedly unclear, but the purpose behind the choosing is most explicitly affirmed. It is to give a land (remember the Garden, 3), peoplehood (recall the Brothers, 4), the blessing (contrast the Flood, 6-9), and a name (see the Tower, 11):

Go . . . to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great. . .(12:1-2)

It is, in short, to create a people, a people of Yahweh, a people of God, a covenant people. Yahweh said this to Abraham (12:1). This is the WORD to and on behalf of a people.

But Abraham's election by Yahweh is not confined to the two-member relationship of Word and people. It is in its end function of universal import. It is Word and people - and world:

In you all the families of the earth will be blessed.³(12:3, RSV margin)

One strongly suspects that in ancient Israel the first patriarch was seen in terms analogous to Israel's first historical epoch. One notes an unmistakable correspondence between Abraham and Moses. Both respond to an exceedingly difficult call in an act of profound faith. There is a sense in which neither is fully Hebrew-Israelite. Both come into Egypt and go out again with ringing success. Both are committed to covenant in circumcision (Gen. 17; Ex. 4:24-26). In both the role of intercessor is featured (Gen. 18:22 ff.; Ex. 32:30 ff.). And although both are represented as models of faith, there are notable instances of gross unfaith in each.

If Israel tends to see her own first epoch essentially "anticipated" in the Abraham cycle of stories, there can be no doubt that she also sees the many in the one, that she identifies herself as people with Abraham the patriarch, that she gives concrete articulation to her own tensions of faith in his fluctuations from faith to unfaith. In short, Abraham is at once both Abraham and Israel. This identification of one and the many accounts in part for the remarkable realism of all the patriarchal stories. This kind of story shows everywhere the tendency to idealize and the tendency to cast Abraham as the epitome of faith is apparent especially in the story of the near sacrifice of Isaac, the climax of the Abraham cycle of stories (22, but cf. 15). But Israel holds her one and her many to be indivisible. Israel knows her own repeated, irrepressible acts of unfaith, her own unceasing disposition to deny the response of faith in which she was created, by which she is sustained, and through which alone her existence has order and meaning. What she knows to be true of herself, she knows also to be true of her fathers and her heroes; and she records their stories in the realistic awareness that faith always exists in tension with unfaith.

Jacob (Gn 27-36)

We do not deny that the patriarchs may, as it were, speak their own lines on occasion; and we have already testified to the authenticity of the settings. But Genesis 12-50 is an incomparable and intimately informed historical document in its revelation of ancient Israel's inner life. In depth and degree quite without parallel this is the internal history of a people - self-understanding, self-deprecation, pride, shame, fears, hopes, aspirations. The ideal response of faith so movingly portrayed in Genesis 22 is Israel's deepest confession of her own calling - to be ready to suffer the loss of her own historical life in response to the Word and at the same time maintain her faith in the Word's declared purpose to bless the world through her. And at the other extreme of the confessional scale, the stories of Jacob's lies and deceits, his unscrupulous, calculated operations conducted with some considerable finesse for his own self-interest, these reveal as conventional "history" never could Israel's acknowledgment of her own share in the distortion of creation and her own particular form of rejection of status.

For Jacob is Israel. Israel is his name (Gen. 32:28, J; and 35:10, P). The identity of the one and the many is unmistakable and unforgettable. The Jacob cycle thus effectively silences those who would persist, innocently or maliciously, in interpreting "the chosen people" as self-righteous, self-inflated, and self-praiseful. In Yahwistic-prophetic circles, in the core Yahweh-faith of Israel, Israel knew that Jacob was Jacob-Israel, and that Israel was Israel-Jacob. Israel knew and through her prophets acknowledged that she shared with all men the faithless, self-worshiping corruption of motive and action by which all creation and all human life within it are defaced and distorted.

Popular Yahwism in ancient Israel (like popular Christianity in our own day) commonly cheapened and reduced the faith. The notion of chosenness for mission and responsibility was popularly perverted to signify exclusivism and superiority. Israel certainly knew arrogant pride. But consistently in the core representation of Yahwism she acknowledged this pride and deplored it. The Jacob cycle is a declaration of realistic self-knowledge - in no sense does Jacob-Israel merit election and covenant. It is a candid appraisal of the qualities of deceit and viciousness devoid of the morbid: in the tales of Jacob, Israel accepts her own vigorous participation in the alienations of existence with remarkable candor and even with humor.⁴

In the Bethel and Peniel episodes of Jacob-Yahweh "meetings" (28 and 32) the stories also mirror Israel's faith that, like Jacob, she is finally sustained and justified only by Yahweh.

Joseph (Gn 37-50)

For whatever reasons, Isaac lacks the impression of substance, color, and vitality returned in the Abraham and Jacob narratives. Nothing significant is told of him that is not in essence recounted of his father or son.

Four chapters serve to bridge the Jacob and Joseph stories. The story of the rape of Dinah (34) may have strong tribal implications - Dinah is a weak tribe aggressively assaulted by the tribe of Hamor. Certainly the background of the patriarchal age is reflected - frictions between tribes; a level of sexual morality upon which for a number of reasons we may not sit in judgment; and a consistent representation of Jacob who rebukes his sons not on moral but on utilitarian-prudential grounds (34:30). Chapter 35 also reiterates themes of the Jacob cycle - the tension between man and God, Jacob and Yahweh, sin and grace; the faith that Jacob-Israel is redeemed only by Yahweh; and the repetition of the promise and the blessing. In the Edomite genealogy of chapter 36 and its accompanying notices Israel affirms her claim to the land on grounds other than Yahweh's gift and at the same time recognizes again her close relationship to some of her historical neighbors. Chapter 38 interrupts the otherwise closely integrated Joseph story. Why? Is it in contrast with and favorable commentary on Joseph's sterling moral deportment in the next chapter? Is it in any pious sense to say that this is what, alas, a son of Jacob is (38), but this (39) is what a son of Jacob ought to be? We note in any case, and emphatically, that it is, like so much in the patriarchal narratives, a very good story indeed especially in the graphic portrayal of Tamar, in its deft integration of plot, and in its fine suspense.

The Joseph story has been called E's masterpiece. But J is very much in evidence as the confusion and contradictions in chapter 37 indicate (for example, E features Reuben and the Midianites, but J, Judah and the Ishmaelites). But although the story is at such points conspicuously composite, it achieves a tightness of coordination that distinguishes it from the much more loosely integrated cycles centering in Abraham and Jacob. Its settings, as for the most part in the preceding stories, are authentic. But again its function in the present context cannot he primarily historical; or rather, and again, its historical value for us lies primarily in its contribution to our historical knowledge of inner Israel.

The Joseph story also sees the many in the one; and the one this time is a projection of Israel's most inspired hopes for what she may be, for what, according to the Word, she must be - a blessing in the earth. Joseph matures and survives to adult manhood against insuperable odds, and having gained full stature he is given to feed not only a starving "Israel" and a starving Egypt, but a starving world (41:57).

Now this kind of correspondence between patriarch and people, as with Abraham and Jacob, is imprecise. In the Joseph story too the players speak their own lines, lines created long before the historical phases to which they bear correspondence. We do not for a moment mean to suggest that Gen. 12-50 was created out of whole cloth as an allegorical, fictional, personalized "history" of Israel. . . . the bulk of the immaterial comes in fact out of Israel's ancient past, transmitted first orally and given. . .written formulation (first) by the Yahwist. . . Nor do we mean to say, then, that the story of Joseph came into being as a messianic message with the intention of treating Joseph as a messianic figure. We do mean to suggest . . . that in the unmistakable implications of messsianism in Joseph, the germ of the later development of the concept (see, e.g., Isa. 49:6) was something already given in Israel's early traditions, precisely as the germinal faith in one God as Creator (Gen. 2), Judge (3-11) and Redeemer (12 ff.) was also given in the same traditions received by the Yahwist.⁵

Genesis begins and ends declaring in faith that Israel's created, called life will find fulfillment only in a role of instrumental service to the world. It cannot be only people and Word. It is people, Word, and world. This is the meaning of covenant with the patriarchs.

These two chapters introduce a very large block of material - Exodus 19:1 to Numbers 10:10 - of varied sorts and from a broad span of centuries, a block editorially created and given unity in the place, Sinai. In present form this whole block purports to have its origin there. It has been set in the midst of a section unified in the place Kadesh. Kadesh appears as the center of operations both before and after this extended Sinai complex.

Now while this block is no doubt in its present arrangement the work of priests, it contains a significant nucleus that is not of the priestly cast. Exodus 19-24 and 32-34 we may term Yahwistic-prophetic (though not necessarily limited to the old J stratum); and within this unit, Exodus 19, 20, and 24 appear to have constituted the basic framework. This prior structure was simple and theologically eloquent. In chapter 19 the glory of Yahweh is revealed with uncommonly convincing power (the term often used for this is "theophany ), signifying Yahweh's commitment to his covenant made with Israel. In chapter 20 the instigator of the covenant and the senior party, Yahweh, makes known his will - the decalogue, the ten commandments (literally, ten words) - for the other party to the covenant, Israel. In chapter 24 Israel's commitment to this covenant is symbolized in a cultic act involving the shedding of blood and a communion meal signifying the irrevocable quality of the commitment.

Here, again, we are faced with unresolvable historical questions. The Sinai block of material is certainly an insertion from the literary point of view. The oldest forms of Israel's cultic recitations (Deut. 6,26 and Josh. 24) do not mention Sinai and the giving of the law, so central in later Judaism. Does the present Old Testament story here combine two originally separate "histories"? Is the exodus-Kadesh tradition the memory of the Egypt-Moses-Israel group, as cultically created and celebrated in the northern hills of Canaan where this contingent first settled? And is it possible, then, that the Sinai complex is characteristically southern, drawing upon the cultically remembered experiences of a totally different group who were later united in the Israelite monarchy with the descendants of the exodus group? We simply do not know. What is clear is that the whole entity which we know as Israel and later as Judaism accepted for its own both exodus-Kadesh and Sinai-law traditions and, with discerning theological appropriateness, combined them in what we have broadly termed the one great exodus event.

The Glory of Yahweh (Ex 19:1-25)

It is important to remember that we are dealing with a part of the Old Testament story which had a long oral history before it assumed its written form, and no doubt the oral form was shaped, preserved, and periodically "celebrated" at some particular, ancient cultic center. Chapter 19 is in three scenes: The Initiating Word, 19: 1-9a; The People's Preparation, verses 9b-15; and Yahweh's Commitment, verses 16-25.

19:1-9a Observe the strong emphasis on the spoken word.

"Yahweh called . . . saying, '~Thus shall you say . . . and tell . . .(v.3). Verses 5-9 contain many further examples:

Obey my voice. These are the words which you shall speak

So Moses called . . . and set before them all these words which Yahweh had commanded him

And all the people answered ... and said, All that Yahweh has spoken we will do

And Moses reported the words

And Yahweh said

Deuteronomic traditionists (designated by the symbol D) have added to the narrative or modified the language of the story in verses 4-6. Somewhere along the way, these Deuteronomic editors have lightly touched the form of the Tetrateuch (Genesis-Numbers) here and there. But the major work of D is Deuteronomy amid the editing of the block of the Old Testament story from Deuteronomic through Kings. That these verses here show the D mind and vocabulary is apparent in a comparison of verses 4-6 with Deuteronomy 32:11; 7:6; 14:2; and 26:18.

19:9-15 Ancient cultic practice and belief are still mirrored here. The requirement of ceremonial purification may well reflect old notions of taboo. It is taboo (and risked on pain of death) to be "unclean" in the presence of deity; but if this is a primitive concept it still appears preferable to us to the all too common chumminess in the God-man relationship in popular religion of our own time. Better some sense of the old taboo's awe than the reduction of God to the role of buddy, or worse, the intimate partner in a relationship with erotic overtones.

The story means, of course, to laud the stature of Moses. While Israel stands afar off under strict taboo, Moses will climb to the summit of the mountain and enter the very cloud of the Presence!

19:16-25 The closing verses here, 21-24, are a fine example of the sort of disaster that can befall the biblical text. This is a little collection of debris which cannot he explained and out of which little or no sense can be made. It does serve to remind us, however, that this whole treasure of the Old Testament story is given to us in earthen vessels (cf. II Cor. 4:7, in the New Testament), and serves sharply to check any man who would equate the Word and the vessel which contains it.

Verses 16-20 are something else. Is it storm or volcano? Or is it intentionally metaphorical language to convey the overpowering awe, mystery, and power in the manifestation of the Glory of God? If this is unclear, the testimony of faith is utterly unambiguous: to every instrument of human perception Yahweh made known his Presence and Glory. It is not the self of Yahweh that is revealed, but the unqualified fact of his immediately in~pinging life and nature and will. The motive? It is the validation of the Word which is given and of the covenant which here comes into being.⁶

The Decalogue (20:1-17)

Other such compact definitions of covenant responsibility appear in the Old Testament. We shall be looking at some of them in Deuteronomy 27:15 ff., Exodus 21:12,15-17; Leviticus 19:13-18. And the present decalogue appears a second time in slightly modified form in Deuteronomy 5:6-21.

It would be a rash man indeed who would attempt to toss away the vast weight of a tradition which insists on the role of Moses as law-giver. But we think it would be an equally arrogant man who would attempt to define in any detail the content of actual Mosaic law. One can discern regulations which are not Mosaic in "words" which speak to Israelite existence in demonstrably post-Mosaic times, e.g., statutes unquestionably aimed at conditions of monarchic political existence in Canaan, or at the control of problems presupposing settled agricultural life.

The Decalogue is not, as one might casually infer, an original nucleus around which was formed the ever-expanding Old Testament law - or better, Torah, which means "instruction." Rather, it is a self-conscious, skillfully conceived and executed effort to reduce to its most significant essence a relatively comprehensive body of Torah. The Decalogue is the summation of the will of Yahweh for Israel drawn from an established and relatively extensive legal-instructional corpus.

20:1-12

The first five commandments are concerned with Yahweh's (1) identity, (2) nature, (3) name, (4) day, and (5) claim.

Identity of Yahweh (20:2)

Most of Protestantism counts verse 3 - "no other gods" - as the first commandment and verses 4-6, prohibiting images, as the second. Roman Catholics and Lutherans combine these as the first commandment and count two commandments in verse 17, against coveting. Judaism, whose reckoning we shall follow here counts verse 2 - the definition of Yahweh's identity vis-a-vis Israel - as the first commandment and verses 3-6, combining in one commandment the prohibition of other gods and any physical representation of deity, as the second.

I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. (20:2)

This is a commandment. Know and acknowledge Yahweh as him without whom you, Israel, would not exist; without his creative, sustaining, redeeming Word, chaos, formless and void, would still embrace you. Only in Yahweh's identity are you an entity. Know and acknowledge Yahweh who brought Israel out of shackles into freedom, from unmeaning to meaning. I am Yahweh your God, who wrought this for you. In terms of your very existence and history, this is my identity!

Nature of Yahweh

It is Yahweh's nature to be God alone. In the notion that there are other gods and in their representation, Yahweh is in fact denied, since his essential nature is thus denied (see vv. 3-6).

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything. . . (vv. 3-4)

Here again in verses 4-6 (as in 19:3-6) we encounter the Deuteronomic cadence, characteristic of the style and point of view of Deuteronomy and commonly dated in the late eighth, seventh, and early sixth centuries. We would ourselves nevertheless affirm the relative antiquity of the essential commandment supporting Yahweh's oneness, aloneness, and uniqueness.

What of a "jealous" Yahweh, verse 5? Is this the projection (primitive?) of a small god, vindictive, petulant, easily flattered? Something of this may still adhere to the commandment. But on the other hand, if Yahweh is one-alone-unique, then he must be "jealous" - which is neither more nor less than to maintain consistently this divine nature. To condone an image, that is, not to be jealous, would be to deny himself. And this Deuteronomic expansion on the "word" (of the original "ten words ) respecting the nature of Yahweh concludes on the note of Yahweh's devotion to those who live in accord with his nature.

Name of Yahweh

The name of Yahweh may suffer no abuse because it is inseparable from the reality of Yahweh.

You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain;
for Yahweh will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. (v.7)

The name is of the essence of that which it names; and to push the concept back to its more primitive application, to name the name is to seek to appropriate and command the power of the one named. But Israel, clearly debtor to a broad, common background of Near Eastern culture in the second millennium B.C., repeatedly converts and transforms what she borrows. Men sought to use the divine name - and Israelites repeatedly the name of Yahweh! - to bring under their own control the power of the deity. This is, of course, magic. The ultimate background of magic is perhaps still discernible, but the intent of magic is thwarted by the very prohibition. The power of magic is denied. He who would gain his own ends by name-incantation incurs a breach in the very relationship upon which he presumes to act.

Day of Yahweh

The fourth word on Yahweh's day is added now to the preceding words on his identity, nature, and name (see vv. 8-11).

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. (v.8)

Why? On what authority? In verse 11 the Sabbath institution is validated in the very pattern of creation and in language strongly reminiscent of the conclusion of the P account of creation (cf. Gen. 2:2-3). The present form of the commandment in Exodus would appear to be dependent upon Gen. 1: 1-2:4a.

The form of the Decalogue as preserved in Deuteronomy 5 presents at this point its most considerable deviation. Keep the Sabbath

. . .that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and Yahweh your God brought you out thence with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore Yahweh your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. (Deut. 5:14b-15)

Here sabbath observance rests not upon a primeval "event" but upon a historical event. Yet it is essentially the same quality of faith. The fundamental sanction of sabbath in both statements of the commandment is creation - in Deuteronomy of a people and in Exodus of the world. To "remember" and "keep" the day is to acknowledge Yahweh as creator-sustainer and to affirm that life continues under his reign and providence. It is an act of trust, All of fretful labor's anxious preoccupation with the maintenance of life is suspended every seventh day precisely as an affirmation of the providence of Yahweh. And in its most intimate understanding. of course, the sabbath is the perpetual reminder of the covenant not only with Israel, but through Israel, with all the families of the earth.⁷

Claim of Yahweh

The climax of Yahweh's pentalogue is the establishment of his claim on every life by and through the parental relationship.

Honor your father and mother. . .(20:12)

In context, this is in effect Yahweh's saying,

Your life is my gift. I created you in the image of the divine (Gen. 1:27); the essential breath of life which makes you a living being is my animating breath (Gen. 2:7). The gift is given, the image of the god-like is conveyed, the breath of life is transmitted, through your father and your mother. The life your parents bear and give to you is my life. To dishonor them is to dishonor me.⁸

We think it is the sense of the fifth commandment in its present place and sequence that mother and father are to be honored not for what they are intrinsically or sentimentally or even out of any particular moral or ethical or sociological considerations; but pointedly in acknowledgment of Yahweh's claim on every life. Life is his and therefore sacred and holy. The holiness of life can be upheld only in honor of father and mother through whose joined life the divine image and animating breath are given.

The deuteronomic phrase which concludes the first pentalogue is more than an appeal to the motive of reward. If Yahweh's identity, nature, name, day, and claim are acknowledged, it cannot be otherwise than that your days will be "long," that your life will be fulfilled in order and meaning. Such is the faith always undergirding the Old Testament story.

20:13-17

The second pentalogue is concerned with the integrity of Israel. The first five words define the God-man relationship. The second five are prohibitions of that which is destructive in the relationship of man to man. However, that relationship is in no sense a "secular" relationship, but rather always seen in the three-member scheme of God-man-man.

It is the function of the second pentalogue to defend in human community the inviolable mutual respect for (6) life, (7) person, (8) property, (9) reputation, and (10) status.

LIFE

You shall not kill (v. 13). Every man's life is God's life. This is the reason, powerfully implicit in context, why no one may violate the life of another (recall the Brothers, Gen. 4:2-14). This prohibition seeks to maintain the integrity of every individual life as basic to the life of community, both the community of men and the community of God and man.

PERSON

You shall not commit adultery (v. 14). If community is to be community neither life nor person may be violated. What is involved in the sex distinction is purposively and functionally given by Yahweh (so in both stories of creation). The abuse of that purpose and function violates the giver, Yahweh, as well as both persons involved; or, where the marriage covenant is also violated, three or even four persons may be involved and violated. The David-Bathsheba episode provides historical commentary on the Old Testament understanding of adultery as disruptive of community between God and man (2 Sam. 12:13; and see also Joseph's classic statement, Gen. 39:9) as well as between man and man (2 Sam. 11).

Property

You shall not steal (v. 15). This is in defense of a man's property, but in a sense more dire and stringent than we, economically cushioned, so to speak, would casually suppose. The loss of a garment, put aside during the warmer day, could in parts of the East result not only in the owner's bitter suffering from cold through the night, but to physiological complications leading even to death. Or, in a simple pastoral economy where life is tenuously sustained in a literal hand-to-mouth fashion, the loss of a simple shepherd's meager flock could easily be a life-or-death concern to him and his family. In a society where property and life are directly connected, the prohibition against theft is of a piece with the two preceding prohibitions in defense of life and person. To steal in a society where the vast bulk of property is in an immediate sense the means of subsistence is potentially as great a violation of community as murder or adultery. It is as powerful an assault on human integrity and the God-man-man relationship as either of these.

Reputation

You shall not hear false witness against your neighbor (v. 16). His reputation may not be violated. The language here suggests juridical practice. To bear false witness is to give false testimony in court. Formal "witness" then, in this sense, must be accurate.

At the same time, this commandment, as one of a series of summary statements expressing the larger Torahof Israel, must a broader meaning. This, too, reflects the man-man relationship but theologically conceived. As in the case of life, person, and property, reputation may not be falsely violated without also violating Yahweh and the aggressor's own relationship to Yahweh. In intention, whatever the juridical overtones, the prohibition means to suppress any and all "witness" that constitutes false testimony against the neighbor, and the depreciation, even destruction, of his reputation.

Status

You shall not covet your neighbor's house . . . or anything that is your neighbor's (v. 17). This final prohibition is consistent in intent with the four preceding prohibitions. The full status of a man - all that is implicit in that inclusive word "house" - must be inviolable not only from physical or material damage overt abuse, or appropriation, but also (and this is a remarkable concept) from another's wish, thought, or dream of appropriation - in short, another's covetousness.

This injunctive word against illicit traffic through the mind is at once sum and climax of the pentalogue in protection of Israel's integrity. All true community finally hangs on how the neighbor's "house" is contemplated. If contemplation is covetous, community is already violated and all possibility of mutuality is crushed.

Ten commandments-prohibitions: a pentalogue whose purpose is to maintain the integrity of Yahweh, author of the covenant with Israel; and another pentalogue concerned with the community thus created and with that community's integrity thus defined. This is conceived to convey out of Israel's full Torah the very essence of Yahweh's total will with respect to himself but at once also every other covenant person.

The place of the decalogue in the life of ancient Israel can hardly be overemphasized. Once formulated (in its original form, subsequently expanded, not later than the early monarchy) it was understood and celebrated in Israel as a major

"event" on a par with and inseparably linked to the event of Israel's deliverance from Egypt. And in that same way it was deemed to be a salvation event, disclosing the fact, meaning, and purposiveness of Yahweh's Word in Israel and the world.

These are the ordinances. Ex. 21:1

The first and oldest considerable code of instruction in the Old Testament is the Covenant Code, Exodus 21-23. The introduction to it, Exodus 20:18-21:1, resumes the Yahweh-manifestation interrupted by the decalogue; and again the story magnifies the role and stature of Moses. "You speak to us," the people cry, "but let not God speak to us lest we die" (20:19). And Moses, reassuring his people, ascends the mountain, disappears in the cloud of the Presence, and receives the Word which tradition represents to be the Covenant Code (21:1). One must not overlook the prescription for the simple, unpretentious altar which has been, a trifle irrelevantly, inserted here in 20:24-26. This is an early and discerning protest against the perennial tendency in every cult, ancient and modern, to elaborate the "equipment" of worship so as to make of the material representation of worship an end in itself. This prohibition of the ostentatious altar was, of course, violated in Israel. One can cite examples of rationalization on behalf of pretension: the fault in the elevated altar is not in the altar but in the priest's short skirts; we will robe the officiating priests so that their "nakedness" will not be exposed (Ex. 28:40-43). Elsewhere one encounters open testimony to the disposition to elaborate the structure of the altar (Ex. 27:1-8; 1 Kings 1:50-51; Ezek. 43:13-17). But the demand for the simple altar was not forgotten (Josh. 8:30-31; 1 Kings 18:31).

From 21:2 to 22:17 the Covenant Code presents laws for the most part apparently borrowed from Canaanite practice in the course of the two centuries preceding the establishment of monarchy. On the other hand, in 22:18 to 23:19 cultic regulations predominate which tend much more to express the original character and mind of Israel. The conclusion of the code, 2 3:20-33, is a Yahweh speech summarizing and reaffirming covenant:

You shall serve Yahweh your God, and I will bless your bread and your water . . . I will fulfil the number of your days. . .(23:25 f.)

In its present form the code is, of course, no older than this latest concluding section (perhaps the middle of the eighth century). But the full code embraces a span of many centuries and draws both from preoccupation Canaan and pre-Mosaic Yahwism. It is, all in all, a stupendous achievement.

On Servitude and Freedom [21:2-11]

On what other theme could this code so appropriately open? "We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, and Yahweh brought us out!" (Deut. 6:21).

Verses 2-6 regulate the conditions of freedom for the Israelite slave and ought to be compared with the same law in the Deuteronomic Code (Deut. 12-26) which, as a later formulation, represents on the whole considerable refinement of feeling. In Deuteronomy (15:14) the slave is freed not only together with all his family, but with liberal provision from the resources of his master. Still later, in a third major Old Testament collection of Torah known as the Holiness Code, Leviticus 17-26, the very institution of the slavery of an Israelite to an Israelite is abolished (Lev. 25: 39-42).

The grounds for the firm protection of the rights of the Israelite slave (Covenant Code), for his generous consideration upon going free (Deuteronomic Code), and for his ultimate removal from the possibility of enslavement (Holiness Code) are emphatically theological. It is implicit in CC; but explicit and emphatic in DC and HC:

You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and Yahweh your God redeemed you; therefore I [thus] command you! (Deut. 15:15)

. . .for they are my servants, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt; [for this reason] they shall not be sold as slaves! (Lev. 25:42)

It is consistently and pointedly Yahweh's historically known grace and redemption in Israel which is responsible for the Old Testament's remarkable regulation of slavery (see further Ex. 12:43 f.; 21:20 f.; Deut. 12:17 f.; 16:10 f.; 23:15 f.; Lev. 25:10).

On Control of Violence [21:12-35]

We have what appears to be the mutilated torso of an ancient unit - perhaps an original decalogue, "ten words" - in four surviving "words" in 21:12,15-17. Here the death penalty is decreed for murder (cf. Gen. 9:6 Lev. 24:17; Num. 35:30 f.), for physical violence against parents, for manstealing, and for verbal abuse (cursing) of parents. The first has been humanely elaborated (vv. 13-14) to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. The third has been expanded with the phrase "whether he sells him or is found in possession of him." In common with ancient Hittite and Babylonian codes of law, the Covenant Code compensates the injured (vv. 18-19).

There is apparent tension between the proposition that the slave is property on the one hand and a human life on the other. If verse 21 represents the former principle, verses 26-27 (perhaps originally connected to 21) clearly represent the second, always dominant in the Old Testament: if the slave's owner inflicts the loss of an eye or even a tooth upon the slave, the slave must be given his freedom in compensation!

The lex talionis, the law of retaliation (vv. 22-25; cf. Lev. 24: 18-21 and Deut. 19:15-21), is a widely held legal principle in antiquity. Looked at positively, this "life for life, eye for eye" sentiment no doubt marked an advance in juridical concept and practice at some time in the distant past, in the sense that it limited damages. In the Old Testament as a whole, of course, this principle of exact retaliation is not normative. Israel took it over from Canaan for a period and retained it only for certain particular cases as a standard of judgment in specific instances of injury. In the instance before us, lex talionis remained applicable; and this is true also of the two other instances of its use, Leviticus 24:18 ff., and Deuteronomy 19:15 ff. But, in general, the Yahweh-covenant quality is dominant, and Israelite law, covenant law, is characterized by relative gentleness and mercy.

The theme of violence continues in verses 28-36 but the focus shifts to the beast, the ox, and the problems created by violence done both by him and to him.

On General Conduct and Responsibility [22:1-23:33]

We mark three sections here. The first section, 22:1-17, differs from the second, 22:18-23:19, in form as we1l as in content. The first is characterized by the structure, "If so and so . . . the offender shall do thus and so . . ." Such casuistic formulation derives from the Canaanites and concerns itself with what we should call secular, as opposed to religious, law.

The second section occasionally incorporates the casuistic "if" form (22:25; 23:4), but with the second person "you" not the third "he"; but generally it is not casuistic in expression but apodictic, stating the noncasuistic, nontheoretical, direct, unqualified commandment or prohibition. Apodictic law explicitly deals with cultic or theological concerns (e.g., 22:20); it is implicitly more closely related to the particular life of covenant Israel and the Yahweh faith. Apodictic law is characteristically Israelite in origin and perspective.⁹

The third section, 23:20-33, is the subsequently composed postlude in the form of a hortatory speech of Yahweh.

Casuistic Laws

22:1-17 These verses are casuistic laws of Canaanite origin for the most part; and the theme throughout the section is the determination of appropriate restitution. These are lay regulations as opposed to cultic or religious stipulations. Parallels appear in profusion over the ancient East and in specifically expanded form in, for example, the Code of Hammurabi of Babylon (eighteenth century B.C.). Yahweh plays no role (the phrase of verse 11 is intrusive), deity receives institutional mention under the vague term 'Elohim (vv. 8 and 9), and theological-ethical content is virtually void.

Apodictic Laws [22:18-23:17]

Beginning in 22: 18, the characteristic form of expression shifts from the casuistic to the apodictic.

The death sentence is categorically imposed for three offenses - sorcery, sex perversion (with an animal), and idolatrous sacrifice. Hittite (but not Babylonian) law also decrees death for this kind of debased sex act; but in the present context of Israel's Torah the law is cast in the same theological perspective as the prohibitions immediately preceding and following. Sorcery (with all divination, witchcraft, and necromancy; cf. 1 Sam. 28; Jer. 7:18 and 44:15; Lev. 20:27; Deut. 18:10; Mal. 3:5) is anathema because it invades the exclusive domain of Yahweh. Non-Yahweh sacrifice, the most vehement of the three prohibitions, denies Israel's very being, since it is Yahweh who "brought us out of Egypt . . . and into this place" (see again Deut. 26:7-9). So, too, by association and context, the theological basis of the middle prohibition: to debase and pervert the sex function by which covenant life is perpetuated is to deny the covenant, the Yahweh-man relationship, and Yahweh himself.

Verses 21-24 cite three classes of persons repeatedly given special mention in Old Testament Torah - the sojourner, the widow, and the orphan. The sensitive discernment of relationship between Israel's Egyptian experience and her proper treatment of the sojourner (v. 21) appears again in 23:9. Verses 25-27 (cf. Deut. 23:19 f. and Lev. 25:26-28) regulate aspects of the old institution of credit. Verse 28 is a prohibition in support of authority, divine and human (the Holiness Code, Lev. 24:16, imposes the death sentence for blaspheming "the name of Yahweh ).

Cultic requirements constitute verses 29-31. Verse 29b is hardly the survival of an ancient demand in Israel for child-sacrifice. The willingness to offer the son and some (here not prescribed) symbolic act to that effect is called for (see 13:2,13,15). In the core Yahweh faith, early and late, literal human sacrifice was consistently repudiated. An old taboo survives in verse 31 but now with theological justification: it is because you are mine, says Yahweh, that you are not to play the role of scavengers to the beasts of creation.

The Covenant Code's most eloquent lines on the theme of justice appear in 23:1-9. No comment is called for, save to urge the reader not to miss the continued relevance and pertinence (the "isness ) of the Egyptian sojourn, nor the summary statement in Deuteronomy 16:19-20, perhaps the most moving single plea for justice in the Old Testament:

You shall not pervert justice; you shall not show partiality; and you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, only justice, you shall follow. . .

Verses 10-19 deal with cultic concerns - the sabbath year (vv. 10-11), the sabbath day (vv. 12-13), and the three major annual festivals (vv. 14-19). The feast of unleavened bread (passover, 34:24) commemorates the exodus from Egypt. The feast of harvest (feast of weeks, 34:22 and Deut. 16:10, 16) or pentecost (so named because it came to be celebrated fifty days after the feast of unleavened bread) or the first fruits of wheat harvest (also 34:22) is by whatever name the celebration of the first harvest of the fields, ready in Palestine in April. And a third feast, of ingathering (so also 34:22 but Deut.16: 13-16, the feast of tabernacles), celebrates the grape vintage in the fall. These "three times in the year shall all your males appear before Yahweh" (v. 17). Verses 18-19 carry four regulations of the passover (unleavened bread) festival. Both stipulations in verse 18 warn against carrying the passover celebration beyond its appointed day. Verse 19a reiterates 16. And verse 19b (also 34:26 and Deut. 14:21), whether originally humanely motivated or not, came to be interpreted in Judaism as excluding any mixture of milk and meat.

23:20-32

From casuistic laws and apodictic Torah, the Covenant Code turns in its concluding section to what ostensibly lies immediately ahead - the acquisition of Canaan. Deuteronomic editors seem to have had a hand in this (cf. Deut. 7:1-5), but the substantial framework of this Yahweh speech (20-22, 25b-28,31a) is as old as the tenth century. The "predicted" limits of the land to be acquired correspond roughly to the peak holding under David and Solomon. The speech is informed of the slow progress of acquisition; and also of some prior attacks upon Canaan unwittingly assisting Israel's task ( hornets" v. 28, cf. Josh. 24:12, Deut. 7:20; and note the fly and the bee of Isa. 7:18). It is in any case a splendid summary section to the Covenant Code, appropriately reaffirming the powers, gifts, and commitment of Yahweh himself to the covenant with Israel.

The Covenant Sealed [24:1-18]

We know that covenants in the ancient east were of several kinds.¹⁰In the Old Testament story at least two primary types of covenant are emphasized. The earliest understanding of covenant in Israel sees Yahweh as initiator, definer, and sealer of covenant with Israel. It is covenant in which the human role is very nearly passive. Such is the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15; and such is the sealing of the covenant described in Exodus 24:1-2, 9-11. Yahweh himself prepares a communion meal to which he invites Israel's leadership. It is Yahweh who gives the food and in giving it commits himself to the covenant.

Ancient covenants sometimes laid greater stress upon the role, obligations, and commitment of the junior or subordinate party to the covenant. It is covenant in this interpretation which is recounted in Genesis 17 (P), where Israel's commitment is sealed in the rite of circumcision. And in the passage before us, Exodus 24:3-8, a rite is described by which Israel's acceptance of covenant is symbolized - covenant as defined for Israel, as her responsibility and obligation, in the Decalogue and in the Covenant Code.

In 24:12-18 Moses (and incidentally Joshua) is again set apart, his person and stature lauded. But this closing section of the chapter is also clearly intended to serve as the conclusion of the long section beginning with Exodus 19 and at the same time as appropriate introduction to the extended (priestly) section which follows in chapters 25-31, and which has to do exclusively with the institutionalizing of all that has occurred in the making of the covenant. It is the intent of this link not only to laud the role of Moses, but to declare again that the total development of Content and form in the practice of Israel's faith presents itself to every succeeding generation with the authority of Yahweh himself directly mediated through Moses.¹¹

Yahweh brings order out of chaos. It is the impingement of his life upon history which imparts meaning to the meaningless. This is the faith which ancient Israel proclaims in her story. Not alone in Yahweh's creation of a people and a world but emphatically also in the creation of covenant, he discloses himself, his nature, his purpose. Decalogue, and now Covenant Code, are deemed to be continually creative, always now sustaining order out of the stuff of chaos.

Covenant is the promise of Yahweh, and his own irrevocable act of commitment to that promise to take Israel for a people, and through her to restore to the world the lost blessing of creation, to mend the now fractured meaning of existence, and to heal history's tragically disordered order. But covenant is also deemed to be concretely that by which Israel is to live out all the days of all her years - the ordinances which Moses set before her in response to the Word (see 20:1 and 21:1), ordinances in fulfillment of which Israel herself alone would be fulfilled. In her covenant-keeping Israel is kept. Sustaining food, sweet water, days without illness, births without accident and parental love without frustration, and satisfying length of days (23:25-26) - abundant life in these terms is offered in a covenant relationship in which Yahweh creates a people and a people serve him in faithfulness.

The conception of the task undertaken in this text¹² rules out any discussion of the two very similar priestly sections of Exodus having to do with the plans of institution (25-3 1) and the acts of institution (35-40). Both sections are concerned - sometimes in closely corresponding or even identical terms - with the physical means, forms, nature, dimensions, and personnel of the cultic-religious institution, the first section ostensibly as plans and the second as detailing the actual construction, realization, and inauguration of the full-fledged cultic institution.

It is impossible to determine from these sections the actual objects involved in Israel's early cultus. The description of the tabernacle (chs. 26 and 38), for example, bears no direct relationship to any real Israelite sanctuary. Memories of a Mosaic-nomadic tent of meeting may be imbedded in the description. It is certain that the form of Solomon's temple (tenth century) influenced the account. But any reconstruction according to these specifications would produce a tabernacle structure which never existed in fact.

The three chapters of Exodus now before us are composite. We have already noted their general Yahwistic-prophetic east and the nature of the large block of which they are a part (Ex. 19: 1-Num. 10:10). What we have termed J and E are both here, with other voices, or other hands. But the finished product is a unified achievement.

Perhaps the reminder is again in order that Israel's interest in the original "event" rests predominantly in its present and continuing meaning that the form of the narrative before us is unquestionably cultically conditioned, that is, shaped by the influences of cultic circles at centers of worship in which, the tradition was maintained; and that this cultic tradition returns an image of Moses formed out of long years of meditation on the total significance of his life and time through the succeeding generations of Israel's life.

The Golden Calf: Denial of Covenant

32:1-35

Moses is on Sinai, now himself as mysterious and unapproachable as that Presence of Yahweh which he alone may confront and the Word of Yahweh which he alone may hear. The impatient people, to whom the reality of Moses and Yahweh has become only a memory and who know the widespread representation of deity in the form of a calf (probably a young bull, denoting primarily the strength of reproductive power and fertility, natural and human), with Aaron's consent and counsel, make Yahweh (v. 5) in this form, and to Yahweh thus materialized they hold a full-fledged cultic celebration.

Yahweh's immediate repudiation of Israel for this breach of covenant is directly conveyed in his Word to Moses, in form charming and naive, but in communication of the sense of ruptured relationship profound and powerful:

Go down! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves! (v. 7)

Now (such is the sense of the Word) step aside, get out of my way - hold my coat - while I administer - death!

Now therefore let me alone . . . that I may consume them!

Now the thematic note:

Of you (Moses) I will make a great nation! (v.10)

But Moses will not entertain this complimentary proposal even by mentioning it. Instead he makes successful (v. 14) intercession on Israel's behalf reminding Yahweh that Israel is his people whose destruction would frustrate the glory of the exodus (vv. 11-12) and constitute a shameful breach of Yahweh's promise to the patriarchs (v. 13; the prayer, as other aspects of the narrative, is informed by relatively late traditional stereotypes).

Moses descends the mountain carrying the two stone tablets inscribed with the Decalogue, presumably ( the writing was the writing of God," v. 16); sees what has occurred (Joshua suddenly appears again, cf. 24:13); and in fury breaks the tablets, symbolizing the covenant which Israel has in the same way just shattered.

It all happened "at the foot of the mountain" (v. 19). Tradition recalls that Moses came here first with Jethro's flock and first knew here the piercing of the shell of his existence by the Word of Yahweh out of the undiminished, unconsurned burning bush. To this same mountain Moses brought Israel where she - a people redeemed only yesterday out of slavery - acknowledged Yahweh as the Shatterer of her own tight little prison, and entered a covenant with him, accepting his commitment to her and reciting her own vows of faithfulness. Here, at the foot of the mountain, she brazenly denied the reality of her encounter, repudiated her emancipator, and shamelessly broke her vows. Here, at the foot of the mountain, Moses cast into the moral rubble the tables of the testimony already in effect reduced to powder and ashes.

When Moses confronts Aaron, the one on whom responsibility clearly falls, he produces a line of evasion, an emphatic disclaimer, which forever ranks with the best, the most ridiculous, and therefore the most humorous of its kind:

I said to them, "Let any who have gold take it off"; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and there came out this calf! (v.24)

What a remarkable accident. We had absolutely nothing to do with it.

One could wish for restraint in the introduction of the next paragraph (vv. 25-29). We can appreciate the seriousness of the prohibition of images in Israel and (at its highest motivation) the theological maturity which it represents. We are at the same time sure that the human word is given the status of divine Word in the command (v. 27) of indiscriminate slaughter; and we are sure that Moses never regarded such an act as ordination to priesthood (v. 29)!

The narrative concludes on the note of Moses' moving intercession, to be ranked among the greatest prayers ever preserved (vv. 31-32); and with the response of the Word in grace (v. 34a), but with the firm reminder that Yahweh will when the occasion demands make himself known as judge (v. 34b). The final verse (35) is the contribution of a traditionist who obviously feels that Yahweh must be made of sterner stuff, or that Israel must he yet more sternly treated and so produces the disagreeable and anticlimactic notice of the plague.

Among circles of Old Testament students, it has been commonly held, almost taken for granted, that the present narrative was created as a condemnation (with Mosaic-Sinaitic authority ) of the representation of Yahweh in the bull image at the two chief sanctuaries of North Israel, Dan and Bethel, beginning late in the tenth century when the united Israelite kingdom was split (1 Kings 12:28-29). Now, we are sure that tradition reinterpreted and no doubt somewhat modified the story in the light of this heresy; but we are unable to see any reason for denying that the story was already in existence then and that in fact the Yahwistic heresy of image representation began in the beginning of Israel's life as a people, in the first, Mosaic chapter of that life.

Yahweh and Moses: Renewal of Covenant

33:1-34:9 Chapter 33 opens with Yahweh's Word still sounding in bitter tones of reaction to the broken covenant. "You (Moses) and the people whom you have brought up out of Egypt" get out of here and move on to the land. But it is the promised land; and "I will drive out" those who impede your settlement in the land. And, inconsistently, the negative note resumes in verse 3: Go ahead, but go without Me!

This divine ambivalence plays a role in the plot. Yahweh's Word has been given. That Word cannot be broken. But Israel has behaved in flagrant defiance of all that was implicit in the covenant-Word, so that from any human point of view Yahweh is justified in having no more to do with Israel, indeed in withdrawing himself for Israel's own protection, since to stay among them in wrath would be to destroy them! The role of this tension and duality is to serve in the delineation of the character of Moses; the person of Moses and his intercession and faith are responsible for the resolution of the divine ambivalence.

In hopes of appeasing the divine anger, Israel "stripped themselves of their ornaments, from Mount Horeb (Sinai) onward" (v.6).

More clearly than in any previous reference, the tent of meeting is the place where Yahweh may be found (v. 7). The use of the two terms "tent of meeting" and "tabernacle" leaves the reader in doubt as to whether they are the same or different structures. Chapters 29 (vv. 4,10,11,31,32,42) and 30 (vv. 16,18,20,36), for example, employ only the first term (cf. also 27:21 and 28:43) and clearly identify tent and tabernacle. In chapter 33 before us it may be that the tent of meeting is envisaged as a provisional arrangement, a substitute tabernacle for the duration of Yahweh's withholding his own direct Presence from Israel: Yahweh meets only Moses in the tent of meeting - and that "face to face"! (v. 11; but see the contradiction, v. 20, from another of the sources employed in the shaping of the present account). In subsequent references identity or virtual identity must be assumed (35:21; 38:8,30,32; 39:40 NB; and 40: repeatedly).

This is all in Moses' praise. Here the uniqueness of Moses is defined in terms of the uniqueness of his relationship to Yahweh. Here the Old Testament story testifies that Israel owes her existence to Yahweh, to be sure, but also to Moses, without whose intercession the Yahweh-Israel enterprise would to all intents and purposes have been dissolved. This is tradition s testimony and tribute to the absolutely incomparable Moses. He goes alone to the tent of meeting for a meeting - the Meeting - while all Israel stands in awe and reverence (v. 8). Yahweh follows, and all Israel worships "every man at his tent door" (vv. 9-10).It is a face-to-face meeting (see above).Moses speaks with such power as to persuade Yahweh of the wisdom of his words and to gain a reversal of the divine decision to withhold the immediate Presence of Yahweh from Israel (vv. 12-17). And Yahweh bestows on Moses words of rare occurrence indeed: "I know you by name (vv. 12, 17; cf. Matt. 1:21 ff.; 16:13 ff.); "you have found favor in my sight" (vv. 12,17; cf. Mark 1:10; Luke 2:40); "I will give you rest" (v. 14; cf. Matt. 11:28); and "the very thing that you have spoken I will do" (v. 17; cf. Matt. 28:18; 10:32; Luke 12:8; John 16:23).

Finally, in marked contrast to the face-to-face meeting (v. 11; cf. Num. 12:8; Deut. 34:10) Moses' request to behold Yahweh's Glory is granted (vv. 18-23; compare and contrast Elijah's great hour on the holy mountain, 1 Kings 19). The quality and meaning of the Glory is suggested in the coupling the proclamation of the name YHWH (33:19; 34:6) with the passing by of the Glory, and in the words goodness, graciousness, and mercy (33:19 and 34:6-7). Implicit, of course, is Yahweh's forgiveness of Israel, won through the intercession and devotion of Moses, and assured now in the passing Glory of Yahweh's goodness, grace, and mercy. Indeed, the actual description of the passing by of the Glory and the rounding out of this intimate Sinai-Horeb scene between Yahweh and Moses (34:6-9) expands on the theme of the graciousness of Yahweh (cf. Joel 2:13; Jon. 4:2), affirms the appropriate humility of Moses before this revelation of the nature of Yahweh, and puts on Moses' lips a prayer which constitutes a fine summary of all that has gone before in chapters 32 and 33. "If I (Moses) have (realy) found favor in your sight," then (and it is now a moving, timelessly relevant prayer!) let the Lord . . . go in the midst of us, although it is a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.

In 34:1-4, the narrative takes up again the subject of stone tables of the law destroyed in Moses' wrath at the sight of the golden calf. Tradition is making a single story of several strands; and since Moses' marvelous vision of Yahweh's Glory is also the renewal of covenant with Israel, the broken tablets must be replaced. These verses supply the logically necessary advice that Moses has two new blank tablets at hand and ready.

The Redefined Covenant: the Ritual Decalogue [34:10-28]

Accordingly, the covenant between Yahweh "merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness" and a forgiven Israel is instituted afresh. In this completed work of tradition, that is, as the present text of Exodus 34 is handed over to us, the content of the new covenant law differs from the old, the Decalogue of Exodus 20. Following an introductory speech of Yahweh which declares the marvels Yahweh is about to perform and warns against the temptations of Canaan and its religious institutions (vv. 10-13), a decalogue is given which, however, concentrates exclusively on concerns of the cultus, and has therefore come to be known as the Ritual Decalogue, as against what is often called the Ethical Decalogue of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5:

I (v.14)You shall worship no other god, for Yahweh, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God (cf. 23:13).

II (v.17)You shall make for yourself no molten gods (cf. 20:23).