Exodus

Background

Exodus picks up where Genesis left off. Jacob’s family, seventy people when they came to Egypt, has grown into a nation, and a new king “who did not know Joseph” puts them to forced labour (1:8–14). The Hebrew name of the book is Shemot, “names,” from its opening line; “Exodus” comes from the Greek title, “the going out.”

Jewish and Christian tradition ascribed the book to Moses, and parts of it describe Moses writing (24:4; 34:27). Critical scholarship since Wellhausen has read it as a composite, with the tabernacle chapters assigned to the Priestly source and the plague narrative woven from at least two older strands (documentary hypothesis). One of the hypothesis’s oldest exhibits sits in this book: God tells Moses that he appeared to the patriarchs as God Almighty, “but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them” (6:2–3), though Genesis has the patriarchs using that name freely.

Dating the events divides conservative scholars among themselves. 1 Kings 6:1 places the exodus 480 years before Solomon’s fourth year, which yields about 1446 BC. The store cities named in 1:11, Pithom and Raamses, point instead to the reign of Ramesses II in the thirteenth century. Neither date has a secure Egyptian record behind it, which is where the historical argument below begins.

The book was formative long before anyone debated its date. The Decalogue became the backbone of Christian catechesis, and the prophets, the Gospels and Paul all reach for exodus language when they describe redemption.

Outline and key ideas

Slavery and a deliverer (1–6). Pharaoh orders the Hebrew boys drowned; one survives in a basket and is raised in Pharaoh’s house. Grown, Moses kills an Egyptian, flees to Midian, and meets God in a bush that burns without being consumed. God gives him a commission and a name (3:13–15).

The plagues (7–12). Ten blows fall on Egypt, several aimed at its gods (12:12). The last is the death of the firstborn, from which Israel is spared by the blood of a lamb on the doorposts (12:1–13).

The sea (13–15). Israel leaves, is pursued, and crosses on dry ground while the Egyptian army drowns. The Song of the Sea that follows (15:1–18) is some of the oldest poetry in the Hebrew Bible.

The wilderness (16–18). Manna, water from the rock, war with Amalek, and Jethro’s advice to delegate judging.

Sinai and the covenant (19–24). God offers terms: “you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples… a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (19:5–6). The Ten Commandments follow (20:1–17), then the Book of the Covenant, a body of case law on slaves, violence, property and festivals. The covenant is sealed with blood thrown on the people (24:3–8).

The tabernacle, the calf, and the glory (25–40). God gives detailed plans for a portable sanctuary. While Moses is on the mountain, Aaron makes a golden calf and the people say, “These are your gods, O Israel” (32:1–6). Moses offers to be blotted out of God’s book in their place (32:30–32), asks to see God’s glory, and hears the self-description that the rest of the Bible keeps quoting: “merciful and gracious, slow to anger” (34:6–7). The book ends with the glory filling the finished tent (40:34–38).

The classic older commentaries are Origen’s Homilies on Exodus (c. 240s), Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses (late 4th century), and John Calvin’s Harmony of the Law (1563), which arranges Exodus through Deuteronomy by topic. Standard modern ones are Brevard Childs’s The Book of Exodus (1974) and William Propp’s two Anchor Bible volumes (1999, 2006).

How the traditions read it

Exodus is where the churches get the Passover behind the Eucharist, the commandments behind their catechisms, and the story behind every theology of deliverance. The passages below are where they part ways.

The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart (4:21; 8:15; 9:12)

The book says three things. God announces in advance that he will harden Pharaoh’s heart (4:21; 7:3). Pharaoh hardens his own heart through the early plagues (8:15, 8:32). And from the sixth plague on, the text says the LORD hardened it (9:12). Paul then takes the case as his example of God’s freedom: “he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills” (Romans 9:14–18).

• Origen. In On First Principles 3.1 Origen answers Gnostic readings with an analogy: one sun melts wax and hardens clay. The same acts of God that softened the Egyptians who left with Israel hardened a heart already set in wickedness. God’s work is one; the result depends on what it falls on.
• Augustine. Augustine granted that God “works in the hearts of men to incline their wills wherever He wills,” but added that whenever Scripture says a heart is hardened by God, “never doubt that some ill deserts of their own have first occurred” (On Grace and Free Will 41–43). The hardening is judicial, and therefore just.
• Reformed. John Calvin devoted a chapter of the Institutes to this question (2.4) and refused to soften it into mere permission: God does not stand by while Satan hardens, he governs the act, though Pharaoh’s own malice is the cause of his guilt. Calvinism reads Romans 9 as the apostle’s own commentary on Exodus.
• Arminian and Wesleyan. Arminianism reads the divine hardening as God’s response to a will already set, delivered by withdrawing restraint and by the very mercy Pharaoh keeps rejecting: each reprieve after a plague gives him another chance, and each refusal sets him further. On this reading foreknowledge explains the announcement in 4:21 without making God the author of the sin.
• Open theism. Open Theism takes the alternation of subjects at face value: Pharaoh hardens himself first, and God’s hardening comes later as a judgment within a story whose outcome is genuinely being worked out.

The name of God (3:13–15)

Moses asks what to say when Israel asks God’s name. The answer is ehyeh asher ehyeh, rendered “I AM WHO I AM,” followed by the name spelled with four Hebrew consonants, YHWH, which English Bibles print as “the LORD.”

The Greek Old Testament translated the phrase ego eimi ho on, “I am the one who is,” and that reading shaped Western theology. Thomas Aquinas argued that “HE WHO IS” is the most proper name of God, because it names God’s very act of being rather than any attribute (Summa Theologiae I q. 13 a. 11); Classical Theism rests a good deal on that verse. Eastern Orthodox theology takes the opposite lesson from the same words: God says that he is, not what he is, which is why his essence stays unknowable and he is known in his energies (Gregory Palamas, Theosis).

Hebrew scholars generally render the verb as a future or a promise, “I will be what I will be,” and read it as a pledge of presence rather than a statement about being. Karl Barth took it that way, as God’s refusal to be defined and his freedom to be God however he chooses. Jewish tradition stopped pronouncing the name altogether, reading Adonai instead, which is why English Bibles use small capitals. Critical scholars also weigh 6:2–3 against Genesis as evidence of different sources.

Passover and the Lord’s Supper (12)

A lamb without blemish, killed at twilight, its blood on the doorposts, its body eaten in haste, and no bone broken (12:1–13, 12:46). John applies the unbroken bone to the crucifixion (John 19:36), and Paul says flatly, “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Every tradition agrees on the type. They differ on what the church’s meal now is.

The Roman Catholic Church draws the strongest line. The Council of Trent’s twenty-second session (1562) teaches that after celebrating “the ancient Passover, which the multitude of the children of Israel immolated in memory of their going out of Egypt,” Christ “instituted the new Passover, to wit, Himself to be immolated, under visible signs, by the Church” — the Mass as a true sacrifice (Transubstantiation). Eastern Orthodox churches call Easter itself Pascha and keep the same identification without Trent’s scholastic framing (Orthodox Eucharistic Mystery).

Protestants part from that account while keeping the typology. Lutheran and Reformed readers hold that the Passover lamb points to a sacrifice offered once and never repeated (Hebrews 9:25–28), so the Supper distributes that sacrifice rather than offering it (Sacramental Union, Spiritual Presence). Memorialists press the word Exodus itself uses: the day is a zikkaron, a memorial (12:14), and the Supper likewise. Their critics answer that Jewish remembrance of Passover was never bare recollection — each generation says that God brought us out of Egypt — so “do this in remembrance of me” carries more than recall.

How many commandments, and which (20:1–17)

The text never numbers them. It calls them “the ten words” (34:28), and the churches have divided those words differently ever since. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2066) says so plainly: the numbering “has varied in the course of history,” Catholic practice follows Augustine’s division, “it is also that of the Lutheran confessions,” and “the Greek Fathers worked out a slightly different division, which is found in the Orthodox Churches and Reformed communities.”

In the Augustinian division the prohibitions of other gods and of images form one commandment, and the prohibition of coveting is split in two to keep the total at ten. In the Greek division the ban on images stands on its own as the second. This is the origin of a long polemic, repeated in Protestant tracts since the Reformation, that Rome deleted the second commandment. Catholic and Lutheran apologists answer that nothing is deleted: the text of the commandment is printed in full in their catechisms, and only the counting differs. Jewish numbering differs again, treating “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” as the first word.

Images and the golden calf (20:4–6; 32)

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image” (20:4–6) sits a few chapters away from God’s own command to carve cherubim for the ark (25:18–20). Every side of the argument has to hold both verses.

• Iconoclast. In 726 the emperor Leo III issued an edict declaring images to be idols forbidden by Exodus 20:4–5, and ordered them destroyed (Catholic Encyclopedia, secondary). The council of Hieria in 754 made the case theologically, and the position is Iconoclasm.
• Orthodox and Catholic. John of Damascus answered that the incarnation changed what can be depicted, and borrowed Basil’s rule that “the honour given to the image passes over to the prototype” (Exact Exposition 4.16; Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18). The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 defined that images are to receive “due salutation and honourable reverence, not indeed that true worship of faith which pertains alone to the divine nature” (definition). The Catechism (§2129–2132) repeats both the cherubim argument and the distinction (Icon Veneration).
• Reformed. John Calvin devoted a chapter to the “impiety of attributing a visible form to God” (Institutes 1.11), arguing that God’s own appearances were temporary signs of his presence, not licence to picture him. The Heidelberg Catechism (Q96–98) holds that God “cannot and may not be visibly portrayed in any way” and rejects images as books for the laity.
• Lutheran and Anglican. Both kept art in churches while rejecting its veneration, treating images as adiaphora, things neither commanded nor forbidden.

The golden calf is the test case. Aaron builds it, then proclaims “a feast to the LORD” (32:5). Many scholars read the calf not as a rival god but as an attempt to picture Israel’s own God, which is exactly what the second commandment forbids. Reformed writers use the episode to argue that worship must be regulated by what God commands; defenders of images answer that the calf was made without a word from God, while the cherubim and the tabernacle were made at his dictation.

The Sabbath (20:8–11)

Exodus grounds the Sabbath in creation (20:11); Deuteronomy grounds it in the exodus (Deuteronomy 5:15). Exodus also makes it the sign of the covenant, with death for breaking it (31:12–17). The question is how much of that carries over.

Thomas Aquinas gave the answer most of the West worked from: the commandment is moral insofar as it sets aside time for God, and ceremonial insofar as it fixes the seventh day (Summa Theologiae II-II q. 122 a. 4). Martin Luther put it bluntly in the Large Catechism: “this commandment was given to the Jews alone” as far as the external rest goes, and Christians keep a day for worship and for hearing the word. The Augsburg Confession (art. 28) treats the move to Sunday as the church’s own ordering, not a divine command, and notes the Catholic argument that if the church could change the Sabbath, its power over traditions must be great.

English and Scottish Reformed theology went the other way. The Westminster Confession (21.7–8) calls the one day in seven “a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment binding all men in all ages,” changed at the resurrection from the last day of the week to the first and “to be continued to the end of the world, as the Christian Sabbath,” with rest from worldly employments and recreations (Sabbatarianism). The milder continental line appears in the Heidelberg Catechism (Q103), which asks for the ministry, attendance and rest from evil works without legislating the day’s conduct. Seventh-day Adventists keep the seventh day itself, holding that no apostolic text authorises the change. All sides have to weigh Colossians 2:16–17 and Romans 14:5, where observance of days is left to conscience.

Law after deliverance (19–24)

The commandments open with a reason: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (20:2). The law follows the rescue; it does not earn it. What traditions make of that order shapes their whole reading of law and gospel.

Covenant Theology treats Sinai as an administration of the one covenant of grace, which is why the Westminster Confession (ch. 19) can divide the Mosaic law into moral, ceremonial and judicial, abrogate the last two, and keep the moral law as “a rule of life” for believers. John Calvin called this the law’s third and “principal use” (Institutes 2.7.12). Lutherans argued the point among themselves until the Formula of Concord (1577) affirmed the Third Use of the Law while insisting that the gospel, not the law, produces the obedience. Dispensationalism draws the sharpest line: the Mosaic law was a distinct dispensation given to Israel and ended at the cross, so the believer’s rule is the law of Christ, not Sinai.

Critical and recent Pauline scholarship reads the order of Exodus itself as the corrective. E. P. Sanders called the pattern covenantal nomism: Israel is brought into the covenant by grace and keeps the law to stay in it, which is the background of the New Perspective on Paul. Readers in the older Protestant tradition reply that Paul’s quarrel was never with Exodus 20:2 but with using the law to establish a standing before God it was never given to provide.

Exodus as liberation (1–15)

The story is the Bible’s clearest account of God taking a side. He “heard their groaning” (2:23–25), opposed an empire, and freed slaves. African-American spirituals read it directly: “Go down, Moses, tell old Pharaoh, let my people go.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez built Liberation Theology on it in A Theology of Liberation (1971), arguing that the exodus shows salvation touching political and economic bondage, not only the soul. James Cone made the same move for Black Theology: a God who liberates slaves is known in the struggle of the oppressed, or not known at all.

Rome answered without dismissing the reading. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Libertatis Nuntius (1984) grants that “the theologies of liberation make wide use of readings from the book of Exodus” and that the exodus is freedom from foreign domination and slavery, then insists that its purpose was the covenant at Sinai, so “the liberation of the Exodus cannot be reduced to a liberation which is principally or exclusively political.” Its sharper objection is to the use of Marxist analysis, not to the preferential option for the poor.

A second objection comes from the other end of the story. Robert Allen Warrior’s essay “A Native American Perspective: Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indian Missionaries” (1989) pointed out that the exodus ends in conquest, and that readers whose ancestors met a settler reading of Joshua cannot take the narrative as straightforwardly good news.

Did it happen? (history and archaeology)

No Egyptian text mentions Israel in Egypt or a mass departure. The earliest Egyptian reference to Israel at all is the Merneptah stele of about 1208 BC, which places them already in Canaan. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, in The Bible Unearthed (2001), concluded that no archaeological trace supports a large exodus and that the narrative took the shape we have in the seventh century BC, as a statement about Judah’s own moment.

Egyptologists who defend a historical core answer that the evidence is the kind that rarely survives. Kenneth Kitchen’s On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003) argues that Semitic slaves, the names in the story, the form of the Sinai covenant and the Egyptian loanwords all fit the late second millennium, and that nomads leave almost nothing behind. James Hoffmeier’s Israel in Egypt (1996) and Ancient Israel in Sinai (2005) make the case from Egyptian geography and the North Sinai excavations.

Many biblical scholars take a middle position: a smaller group escaped and its memory became the founding story of a larger nation. Churches differ on how much is at stake. Biblical Inerrancy as defined in the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy (1978) treats the narrative as historical fact; Limited Inerrancy and most Catholic and mainline readers hold that the book’s truth is its theology, and the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum (§12) directs readers to the literary forms the writers actually used.

Further reading

• Brevard Childs, The Book of Exodus (1974): the standard critical commentary that also traces how the church has read each passage.
• Terence Fretheim, Exodus (Interpretation, 1991): a theological commentary built around the question of who God shows himself to be.
• Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003): the fullest conservative case that the narrative fits its claimed period.
• Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (1971): the book that made Exodus the centre of a political theology.