An Introduction to the Book of Exodus

Exodus: The Birth of a Nation

The book of Exodus is the West’s meta-narrative of hope. It tells an astonishing story of how a group of slaves were liberated from the mightiest empire of the ancient world. Theologically, its message is even more revolutionary: the supreme power intervenes in history in defence of the powerless. Never before and never since has the message of monotheism been more world-transforming, and the exodus narrative has inspired many of those who, in later times, fought oppression in the name of freedom and began the long journey across the wilderness in search of the Promised Land.

In the seventeenth century it inspired the English Puritans and parliamentarians in their battle against an overbearing king. It was engraved on the hearts of the Pilgrim Fathers as they set sail across the Atlantic in search of a new world. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin used it as their image when, in 1776, they drew their designs for the Great Seal of the United States. When African-Americans sang of freedom, they said, “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go.”

On 3 April 1968, Martin Luther King delivered a sermon in a church in Memphis, Tennessee. At the end of his address, he referred to the last day of Moses’ life, when the man who had led his people to freedom was taken by God to the top of a mountain from which he could see in the distance the land he was not destined to enter. That, said King, was how he felt that night. “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” That night was the last of his life. The next day he was assassinated. Forty years later, for the first time in history, an African-American was elected president of the United States.

No story has been more influential in shaping the inner landscape of liberty, teaching successive generations that oppression is not inevitable, that it is not woven into the fabric of history. There can be another place, another kind of society, a different way of living. What happened once can happen again for those who have faith in the God who had faith in humankind. The God of freedom calls on us to be free.

Nietzsche, the great atheist, put it best. He called Judaism “the slave revolt in morals.”

He understood that it was the faith of the powerless. Nietzsche believed in the opposite: “the will to power.” Knowing as we do what happened in the century after Nietzsche’s death – the bloodiest century since humans first walked the earth – we are entitled to conclude that Nietzsche was wrong, as wrong as it is possible to be. Power destroys the powerless and powerful alike, oppressing the one while corrupting the other. If we are to build a society with a human face, we must always choose the way of Exodus, with its message of hope and human dignity.

From Family to Nation

As we move from Genesis to Exodus, the entire biblical landscape changes, and the Jewish project takes on substance and form. For the first time, politics enters the narrative, centre-stage. God intervenes in history in a series of miracles and wonders that have no precedent and no real sequels.

For the first time we encounter law in all its nuances – Torah, mitzva, chok and mishpat – as the substance of the Divine will. And for the first time we encounter a transformative leader, Moses, who emerges from the shadows of a strange, improbable childhood to become, despite his many hesitations, the man who was to leave his mark on the Jewish people from that day to this.

The reason for all these changes is the appearance, early in the first chapter of Exodus, of one word we have not heard before in connection with the covenantal family: the word Am, “people” (Ex. 1:9). Not accidentally, it is an outsider who uses it first, Pharaoh, ruler of Egypt, for it is he who first realises the change that has come about. What had been, at the end of Genesis, a family, has become a nation, just as God had said it would in his first words to Abraham: “I will make you a great nation” (Genesis 12:2). With that, the very terms of Israel’s existence are transformed.

Genesis was about individuals and their relationships: husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and their sibling rivalries. One of its recurring themes was the difficulty the matriarchs – Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel – had in conceiving children. Despite the grandiose promises to the patriarchs – that they would have as many children as the stars of the sky, the sand of the seashore and the dust of the earth – having even a single child turned out to be difficult, even miraculous. Yet as we turn the page and begin the new book, all of that vanishes, and a family of seventy members becomes a nation with six hundred thousand adult males. The Israelites, we are told in a cascade of verbs, “were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). Even the attempt by Pharaoh to limit childbirth by subjecting the Israelites to hard labour, failed completely: “The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew” (Exodus 1:12).

Exodus is about the birth of a nation, described variously as an am (people), goy (nation), kahal (congregation), and edah (community). No sooner do we see this than we understand what the Jewish project was intended from the very outset to be. It is about politics, society, and the principles on which a people can come together to form associations. It is about justice, freedom and the rule of law. It is about the sanctity of life and human dignity. Ultimately it is about the use and misuse of power. Exodus places frankly before us the risks inherent in power. It can be used to oppress, enslave and, in extremis, to kill. That is what Pharaoh proposes at the beginning of Exodus.

It is important to understand precisely what is being argued in these opening pages. Pharaoh is not portrayed as the embodiment of evil. He is not a Haman. His people are not the Amalekites. Later in the Torah, Moses will command his people not to hold lingering resentment against their former oppressors: “Do not abhor an Egyptian, for you were strangers in his land” (Deuteronomy 23:7). Pharaoh is driven by political motives, not hate: “The Israelites have become much too numerous for us. Come, let us deal wisely with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country” (Exodus 1:10).

The Exodus narrative is not a simple story of good versus evil. It is a critique of the politics of power, empires, hierarchical societies and the division of populations into free human beings and slaves. Lord Acton summed it up in his famous dictum that “all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In its place, the Torah proposes a different kind of politics, based not on power but on covenant, the free agreement of a free people who accord absolute sovereignty to God alone. The idea could hardly be more radical, and it has shaped the history of the West. In an age when might triumphed over right, the Torah records one of the great turning points in the human story, when the Creator of heaven and earth intervened in defence of the powerless.

An Exile Foreseen

Despite the radical differences between Genesis and Exodus, it is clear that the two form a single unit. Exodus is the enactment of what had already been foreshadowed in Genesis, especially in the haunting covenant scene in Genesis 15. Abraham, having been promised by God that “I will make you into a great nation,” had still not had a single child. In exasperation, he says to God, “O Sovereign Lord, what can You give me since I remain childless?” God then repeats his promise. Abraham will have children, as many as the stars of the sky, and he will one day have a land. But something else will happen first:

As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated for four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterwards they will come out with great possessions.” (Genesis 15:12–14)

No sooner do we read the opening of Exodus than we know what is happening. This is Abraham’s night vision come to pass – the “thick and dreadful darkness.” There is nothing random or unscripted in the series of events that led to the exile and enslavement of Abraham’s descendants. It is part of the script written by the Divine hand, the people’s initiation into nationhood and identity. They will become – they were predestined to be – the people born in, and forever after shaped by, the experience of homelessness and oppression.

Genesis 15 is only the most explicit foreshadowing of the events of the Torah’s second book. But when we re-read Genesis in the light of Exodus, we catch traces of it everywhere, nowhere more clearly than in Genesis 12, at the very beginning of the Abraham story. Abraham, we recall, has been told by God to leave his land, birthplace and father’s house and travel “to the land I will show you.” No sooner does he arrive than he is forced by famine to leave and go to Egypt. There (Genesis 12:10–20) he encounters all that his descendants will eventually experience: the need to go to Egypt because of famine in the land of Canaan, the fear that the males will be killed (Abraham fears that they will kill him and take Sarah into the royal harem); the plagues that affect Pharaoh’s household; an eventual expulsion at the order of Pharaoh; and Abraham’s departure with “great wealth” as the Israelites would eventually do. The Midrash rightly sees Genesis 12 as a prime example of the idea that “everything written in connection with Abraham is written in connection with his children.”

In some sense, all the exiles of the patriarchs in Genesis – Abraham’s and Isaac’s to Gerar (Genesis 20, Gen. 26), as well as Jacob’s to Laban (Genesis 28–31) – are precursors of the great exile with which Genesis ends and Exodus begins.

So we know this about the book of Exodus: that it is not mere history. It is not the story of a sequence of events that just happened. This is the working out of a Divine drama, foreseen by God and foretold to Abraham centuries earlier.

Monotheism and the Universality of Justice

On the surface, the most gripping aspect of the narrative is the miracles it recounts: the ten plagues, the division of the Reed Sea, water from a rock, and food (manna) from heaven. But Maimonides rightly notes that the miracles are secondary.

What is primary in the book of Exodus is another aspect of monotheism altogether: the idea of a single God whose sovereignty extends everywhere.

In the ancient world, each nation had its gods, and they were territorially limited. They were gods of this place, not that. This is the essential meaning of Pharaoh’s remark to Moses when he demands the Israelites’ release in the name of God. Pharaoh replies: “Who is the Lord that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go” (Exodus 5:2). This does not mean that he did not know who the God of the Israelites was. It means that within Egypt, the gods of Egypt ruled.

The book of Exodus is the first time we hear of a God not territorially bound, a God of anywhere and everywhere. The point of the plagues is precisely to show this. They are not (with the sole exception of the tenth plague) to punish the Egyptians or Pharaoh. They are to show that God – the one God – is everywhere: “that My name might be proclaimed in all the earth” (Ex. 9:16).

This is the meaning of Moses’ remark in Deuteronomy: “Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation?” (Deuteronomy 4:34). Each nation had its gods, but none except Israel worshipped the God of everywhere and everyone, and this is a political point, not just a theological one. It establishes the concept of justice as a universal ideal transcending the idea of national sovereignty. To put the point in the language of today: the exodus represents the first international intervention in the name of human rights.

Moses, Man of Justice

The concept of justice leads us directly to the central human figure of the drama of Exodus, namely Moses. Moses represents a new form of leadership of a kind not found in Genesis. In Genesis the patriarchs are just that: fathers of children, heads of an extended family. With the exception of the war fought by Abraham in Genesis 14, they are not political figures. As soon as the Israelites become a people – 600,000 adult males, a significant force – they need a new kind of leader. That is what Moses was: a unique combination of prophet, liberator and lawgiver, the voice of God to his people, the voice of his people to God, and the representative of both in his long confrontation with Pharaoh.

We are told little of his early life, but every detail and nuance counts. We see him as a young man intervening three times in the cause of justice: first, defending an Israelite against an Egyptian, a second time defending an Israelite against a fellow Israelite, and on the third occasion defending Jethro’s daughters against the local Midianite shepherds. With absolute economy, all the permutations are covered. Moses intervenes to protect people against attack, whether the victims or the perpetrators belong to his people or not. The story of the Exodus is about impartial justice, and Moses is a man of justice, prepared to act and take risks for its sake.

Three other details are fundamental. Moses, adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, is brought up in Pharaoh’s household. This means, as Ibn Ezra notes, that he has not experienced slavery or internalised its self-abasement. There is nothing hesitant about his manner. He has been brought up in the royal court. He is used to leadership. He is, as far as the Israelites are concerned, an outsider, and perhaps only an outsider can be an agent of change, the transformative leader they need.

Second, he spends most of his adult years far away, as a shepherd in Midian. He knows the ways of the desert. He has had time to mature, to reflect, to compare the urban civilisation of Pharaoh’s court with the nomadic life of the Midianites. He has had his own wilderness years, and this too is part of his apprenticeship as the man who would eventually take the Israelites through their collective wilderness years.

Third is the strange detail of the encounter with God at the burning bush, when Moses says repeatedly that he is “not a man of words,” he is “heavy of mouth and of tongue” (Exodus 4:10; Ex. 6:12). Whether or not this is to be construed literally, it signals to us that the words Moses speaks are not his own.

Just as Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel could not have children naturally, to signify that their children were in some sense the children of God, so Moses cannot naturally speak, to signal that his words are the words of God.

One other feature of Moses’ early life should not be overlooked. Though he is the central figure in the drama of the exodus, there is a striking emphasis on the roles of six women, without whom there would not have been a Moses. There is Yocheved, Moses’ mother, who had the courage to have a child at a time when all male Israelite children faced death. There is Miriam, Moses’ sister, who followed his fate and ensured that he knew who his people were. There are Shifrah and Puah, the two midwives, who defy Pharaoh’s decree of genocide. There is Zipporah, Moses’ Midianite wife, who accompanies him on his mission and at one stage saves his life. And most remarkably, there is Pharaoh’s daughter, who rescues Moses and adopts him, knowing that in doing so she is acting in contravention of her father’s will.

These are six stories of outstanding moral courage and they are all about women, at least two of whom, Zipporah and Pharaoh’s daughter, are not Israelites (the identity of the midwives is left uncertain, perhaps deliberately so). It is the women who recognise the sanctity of life and refuse to obey orders that desecrate life. It is the women who, fearing God, are fearless in the face of human evil. It is the women who have compassion – and justice without compassion is not justice. It is as if the Torah were telling us that Moses, the supreme embodiment of the passion for justice, is not enough. There must be, in Carol Gilligan’s phrase, “a different voice,” the voice of empathy, sympathy and attachment, the values that make us human, if we are to create a society in which justice has a human face.

People of the Covenant

At the heart of Exodus is a monumental event, the covenant at Sinai, to which the entire story of slavery and liberation has merely been a prologue. It is there, in the desert, at the foot of the mountain, that the central event of Judaism takes place. God pledges himself to a people and the people pledge themselves to God.

The idea of covenant was not new. It was a standard device in the politics of the ancient Near East. Essentially it was a non-aggression treaty between two powers, tribes, clans or city-states. Sometimes it was an agreement between a stronger power (suzerain) and a weaker one, whereby the weaker paid tribute to the stronger, in return for which the stronger undertook to protect the weaker.

We have met such covenants in Genesis. Abraham made one with Avimelech, king of Gerar (Gen. 21:22–34). So, later, did Isaac (Gen. 26:28–31). Jacob made a treaty with Laban (Gen. 31:43–54). The Sinai covenant was quite different: unprecedented beforehand and unrivalled since. In it an entire nation committed itself to the sovereignty of God. The revelation that accompanied it was unique: the only time God appeared, not to a prophet, priest or king, but to an entire nation. In essence, it defined the Israelites as God’s people. He alone was to be their king, lawgiver and protector. Israel would become a people unlike any other. In the words of Torah, it was to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” – the simplest and most challenging mission statement of Jewish existence, then and now.

Three things made the Sinai covenant unique. First was that one of the parties was God Himself. In any other context this would sound absurd. The gods of the ancient world ruled by power, not by the agreement of the people. Second was that the entire nation – not just a king or an elite – were party to this decision. The text twice emphasises that the agreement to accept the covenant was made by “all the people” (Exodus 19:8; 24:3). The third is that the covenant itself was not confined, as were all others in the ancient world, to external relations. It was to govern the internal life of the people as well. It would become their moral and spiritual code, their constitution of liberty.

We have in the Sinai covenant nothing less than the first-ever statement of a free society. The first two points establish the principle that, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” even when the Governor is creator of heaven and earth. God, in the rabbis’ phrase, is not a tyrant. He does not impose His will by force. He does not enslave. On the contrary, He is the God who liberates slaves. He becomes Israel’s sovereign only when they willingly declare, “All that God has said, we will do and heed” (Ex. 24:7). The free God seeks the free worship of free human beings.

The third point tells us that a free society is a moral achievement. It is not a mere transaction of power. The “ten commandments” with their emphasis on the sanctity of life, the integrity of the family, respect for truth and for the property of others, summarise the essentials of a decent society in so short and simple a way as to be memorised by – engraved on the hearts of – an entire people. They remain the world’s most famous moral code.

Covenant, as the late Daniel Elazar showed in a lifetime of scholarship, is a unique form of politics, an alternative to two others that have prevailed elsewhere. There are hierarchical societies, divided into rulers and ruled, with their kings, courts and bureaucratic elites. There are organic societies, based on custom, tradition and laws sanctified by time. Covenantal societies are different because of the value they place on consent, the responsibility they place on the citizenship as a whole, and their insistence on dignity, equality and justice. Covenantal societies are moral societies in which might is subservient to right.

This, then, is the culmination of what the Torah has been about all along. In creating human beings and endowing them with freedom, God had, as it were, taken a risk. He had made the one life form capable of defying Him and destroying the entire order of creation itself. The story so far has been of one disappointment after another. Adam and Eve sinned. Cain committed murder. By the time of the Flood, the earth was filled with violence. Even after the Flood, the builders of Babel were capable of monumental hubris. What then could God do to ensure that humanity would not destroy itself?

The Torah’s answer is that God lowers His expectations. He makes a covenant with Noah, insisting on the sanctity of human life. He then chooses Abraham to be the forerunner of a new way of life, in a land far from the centres of power in the ancient world: Mesopotamia and Egypt. The patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis rehearse the demands of difference. Can they live apart from their neighbours? Can they remain uncorrupted by the lax moral standards of their time? Can they stay faithful to God? Not least, can they live peaceably among themselves? Once these things have been established, by the end of Genesis, the time is right for them to become a nation – a nation that would never forget the debt it owed to God, or the bitterness of slavery. That is what the first half of the book of Exodus is about.

The concept of covenant was rediscovered in the West in the wake of the Reformation, where it played a major role in the “birth of the modern” and the emergence of free societies. In the sixteenth century it was influential in Switzerland, Holland and Scotland. In the seventeenth, it was central to the thought of the Puritans who brought about the English revolution, together with those who became the Pilgrim Fathers of America. It remains central to American political thought and discourse to this day.

Mutuality

The Sinai covenant was not the first made by God. He had already made one with Noah (Genesis 9), and another with Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 15, Gen. 17). There were subsequent covenant renewal ceremonies at the end of Moses’ life, in the days of Joshua, during the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah, and later, after the Babylonian exile, in the age of Ezra and Nehemiah. The covenant at Sinai was, however, the fulcrum on which all else turned. The Noahide and Abrahamic covenants were unilateral initiatives on the part of God. Noah and Abraham were not asked for their agreement. The subsequent ratification ceremonies were all at the initiative of human beings: prophets, kings and scribes. Only the Sinai covenant was fully mutual, a Divine initiative that involved and depended on human consent.

It is specifically here, at Sinai, that we find the classic expression of an idea unique to Judaism: that the religious situation is a partnership, a reciprocal relationship, between God and humankind. This is, on the face of it, a paradoxical idea and one that was not fully developed in either of the two daughter religions of Judaism, namely Christianity and Islam. It sounds hubristic, almost blasphemous. In what conceivable way can God, the Creator of the universe, need the partnership of human beings? What is there that human beings can do that God Himself cannot do without human help?

The short answer is: live within the human heart.

Recall that in the ancient world there were many gods. They lived, fought and contended for supremacy. The heavens, to the pagan mind, were densely thronged with a pantheon of deities. In Abrahamic monotheism, with its belief in One God, God’s only conversational partner is humanity itself. We are God’s only Other. But to be truly other, humanity must be endowed with freedom, exactly as a parent must give a child the freedom to make his or her own choices, and if need be, mistakes, if the child is ever to reach maturity. It is this freedom, this integrity of otherness, that is at the heart of covenant. A covenant is a pledge between two or more partners, each of whom respects the freedom and integrity of the other, to be loyal to one another and to do together what neither can achieve alone.

The Israelites could not survive on their own. That is a point the Hebrew Bible makes time and again. Without God, they were no match for their neighbours. They were a small nation surrounded by great empires. But God cannot live within the human situation alone. Adam, Cain, the generation of the Flood and the builders of Babel all failed to be adequate human responses to the existence of God. That now became the mission of the Jewish people. In itself – its history, its fate, its laws, its way of life – it would continually testify to something greater than itself. It would be a signal of transcendence. That is what Isaiah meant when he said: “You are My witnesses – declares the Lord – that I am God” (Isaiah 43:12).

Exodus: Text and Subtext

This leads us to the great subtext of the Exodus narrative. On the surface, it is about how the Israelites were slaves and God brought them to freedom by a series of signs and wonders. The Israelites played no part in this process. They were pawns in the hands of Pharaoh on the one hand, God on the other. History is a script written by God, and it is for us to leave our destiny entirely in His hands. This is the plain sense of the text.

But there is a subtext which is nuanced differently. A careful examination reveals that Exodus contains a number of double narratives, whose significance becomes clear when we put them together. So, for example:

1. 1There are two battles, one immediately before, the other immediately after, the crossing of the Reed Sea, the first against Pharaoh and his chariots, the second against the Amalekites.
2. There are two sets of stone tablets recording the revelation at Mount Sinai, one before the episode of the Golden Calf (broken by Moses on his descent from the mountain), the second after the people have been forgiven for the Calf.
3. There are two times that God is revealed in a cloud of glory, once at Mount Sinai (Ex. 24:15–18), the other, at the end of Exodus, in the Tabernacle (Ex. 40:34–35).
4. The Sinai covenant was declared twice, once by God (Ex. 20:1–14), the second time by Moses, reading from “the book of the covenant” he had written to record God’s words (Ex. 24:1–11).
5. There are two accounts of the construction of the Tabernacle, one before (Exodus 25–30), the other (Exodus. 35–40) after the Golden Calf.

If we examine each pair carefully we will see that they share a common feature. In each case, the first is the work of God alone, while the second involves a human contribution. The Israelites did not need to fight against the Egyptians but they did fight against the Amalekites. The first tablets were the work of God alone, but the second involved Moses as well. At Sinai the Israelites did not create the space within which God appeared; in the Tabernacle they did. At Sinai the Israelites heard the voice of God, but so intense was the experience that they said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Exodus 20:16). After the revelation, Moses wrote down God’s words and read them to the people. The first account of the Tabernacle is about God’s instructions; the second is about how the people carried out those instructions. In each case, the first of the paired episodes involves an act done by God alone; the second involved human participation.

So Exodus tells a double story. Yes, God delivered the people by a series of miracles. Yet if those miracles were to have a lasting effect on the people, they had to make their own contribution to the process of liberation. There is an eternal message here. A people can be granted freedom by an external cause, in this case Divine intervention. But a people sustain freedom by their own efforts. It is not what God does for us, but what we do for God, that changes us.

That is the ultimate significance of the politics of covenant, born at Mount Sinai. More than any other type of politics, covenant makes demands of its citizens. A covenantal society is one in which everyone has responsibilities as well as rights; in which everyone is expected to study and understand the law as well as keep it; in which parents are duty bound to tell the story of freedom to their children; in which we are collectively as well as individually responsible for the common good. So while the surface narrative speaks of God’s miraculous deliverance, the deeper thrust of the story is about the mutuality and reciprocity between God and human beings. We must earn our freedom if we are to keep it.

A Realistic Utopia

That surely is the enduring power of the book of Exodus. It is utopian in its aspirations. It envisages a society that will be the opposite of Egypt, in which justice prevails, human life is held sacred, and every individual has equal dignity as the image and covenant-partner of God. But it is a realistic utopia.

There is, in Exodus, no attempt to airbrush away the flaws and faults of human beings. The Israelites are portrayed as fickle and short-sighted. They complain. They readily give way to despair. In an age in which rulers wrote history in the form of triumphal inscriptions, the Israelites alone recorded their failures more vividly than their successes.

There is thus every indication in Exodus that freedom will involve a long journey. It is fair to say, thirty-three centuries later, that we have still not arrived at the destination. But freedom is not a blind journey, a road without a map. The destination is clearly signalled, though it lies beyond the horizon. It is the promised land, flowing with milk and honey, the land Moses spent his life leading his people towards but was not privileged himself to enter. One of the underlying themes of the book was best stated in a later age by Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not for you to complete the task but neither are you free to desist from it.”

The path to freedom is travelled one step, one generation, one era at a time, never losing heart or forgetting our aim.

The key to Exodus politics, as it is to Judaism as a whole, is what elsewhere I have called “Utopia now.”

That is the significance of Shabbat, whose presence looms large in the book. It was the first commandment the Israelites received in the wilderness. It holds a pivotal place in the ten commandments. It is repeated immediately before and after the episode of the Golden Calf. It is central to the politics of freedom.

On Shabbat we rehearse utopia, or what Judaism came later to call the messianic age. One day in seven, all hierarchies of power are suspended. There are no masters and slaves, employers and employees. Even domestic animals cannot be made to work. We are not allowed to exercise control over other forms of life, or even forces of nature. On Shabbat, within the covenantal society, all are equal and all are free. It is the supreme antithesis of Egypt. What a stroke of genius it was to introduce a foretaste of the future into the present, to remind us constantly of our ultimate destination and to be strengthened by it regularly on the way.

So Exodus ends as Genesis began, with the holy day on which God and His image, humankind, find rest at the still point of the turning world, in the midst of the otherwise restless strife of the human condition. The Israelites were called on to be among the nations what Shabbat is in the midst of time – a sign of what ought to be, in the midst of what actually is.

History has no more unlikely heroes than the Israelites of Moses’ day. Capricious, fractious, wayward, hardly able to see tomorrow, let alone the unfolding drama of the centuries, they became, in Herman Melville’s evocative phrase, the bearers of “the ark of the liberties of the world.”

The Exodus story is the universal story of what happens when men and women are touched by the call of God, to relinquish their fetters and have the courage to begin travelling the long road to freedom.