Moses is Given a Job (Exodus 1-4)

[Exodus 1]

Jacob's sons - aka Joseph's brothers - aka the patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel - live and prosper in Egypt, and finally die there. With the succeeding generation also comes along a new Pharaoh who, concerned by the growing number of Israelites in his kingdom, enslaves them and impresses them into the construction sector. So much for employer loyalty.

Not even satisfied with enslaving everybody, the Pharaoh summons the two midwives who serve the Israelite population. How many people that amounts to we aren't told, but with twelve extended families multiplying over no more than a generation or two, you'd think the extreme upper bound might be, what, a thousand? Anyway, the Pharaoh tells these midwives to kill every male Hebrew child they deliver. And they don't. So the Pharaoh summons them again and is like, what's up, ladies? The midwives offer the rather improbable excuse that Israelite women are so "vigorous" that without fail they manage to get their young squeezed out before the midwives can hit the scene. Pharaoh lets them off, but he now issues the male-infanticide order to his kingdom as a general proclamation.


[Exodus 2]

An unnamed couple from the tribe of Levi have a baby boy. The mother manages to hide the child for three months, but eventually decides to place him in a bitumen-caulked basket and send him floating down the Nile. Or up the Nile, as it's the world's only river flowing northward, yes?

Well the Pharaoh's daughter, out on a stroll, espies this baby basket, and is herself espied by that baby's sister, who had been hanging out by the riverbank watching her brother float away. Not knowing who the girl is, the Pharaoh's daughter has her go find an Israelite woman to suckle the child, and the girl picks her mom. We will never hear from the mom or the daughter in this story again.

When grown (not sure to what age) the boy is presented to the Pharaoh's daughter. She adopts him, naming him Moses.

Now this is all very nice of the Pharaoh's daughter, but I don't understand how she can get away with it in the very household where her dad is ordering this very baby killed. The narrative doesn't give us much insight into her methods or motives. But I guess that's pretty par for the course in the Bible....

Out on a walk himself one day, Moses sees an Egyptian shift manager beating an Israelite slave, and - young labor radical he - Moses up and freaking kills the guy. He seems none too concerned about this one way or the other until he's out strolling again the next day. Two Israelite workers are in fisticuffs, and he tries to break up the fight. "Oh, what are you going to do about it?", one of them asks Moses, "up and freaking kill me?"

So the word is out on the murder rap. The Pharaoh even learns of it, and so Moses flees to Midian. There, in a typical Old Testament turn, he helps seven girls get some water from a well from which they're being blocked by a couple of mean shepherds - and therefore is offered a wife that very night by the girls' father. Zipporah is the girl's name, and she and Moses go on to have a kid together named Gershom.

The chapter ends by telling us that back in Egypt the Pharaoh dies, and that god - suddenly, for some reason - now wants to listen to the Israelites' beneath-bondage groaning and to "remember his covenant with Abraham". Why he let his people's suffering go on for a generation before listening in is not explained.


[Exodus 3]

Moses, over in Midian, is tending the sheep of his father-in-law Jethro when he encounters a bush which burns without being consumed. A voice speaks to him through the bush, and, in view of the almost complete absence of Haldol in Midian at the time, Moses listens up.

"Moses! I am that I am", says God through the bush. Which, however familiar this story may be to us, really is pretty odd. In setting world-historical events into motion, why does the LORD choose to communicate through incendiary shrubbery?

Fearful, Moses averts his eyes and is enjoined to take off his shoes since he's standing on sacred ground. God explains that despite the decades of delay, he has noted the sufferings of the Israelites, and intends to lead them out of Egypt into "a land flowing with milk and honey."

Couple of problems there. One, the land God's talking about - Canaan - is actually, as far as I'm aware, pretty much a barren desert. Two, as God goes on to say, the area is already occupied by "the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites." Sounds more than a little crowded, really. And with the hindsight allowed by writing from the 21st century, we can say with pretty high confidence that this state of affairs was not going to be changing anytime soon. Palestinian two-state solution, anyone?

In any event, it is to be Moses' job to make the Great Relocation happen. "Come, therefore, I will send you to Pharaoh, and you shall free my people, the Israelites, from Egypt." God says Moses is to tell the Hebrews that he has been sent by their ancestors' god, name of I-am-that-I-am ("Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh"); and that the Pharaoh will let everyone go following various terrors and wonders God will work in the land to drive home his point.

It seems inexplicable to me that God didn't just go directly to the Pharaoh with all this....


[Exodus 4]

But whoa there, Moses says. Why will people believe I've really been sent by you? God offers a solution in the form of a magic trick: whenever Moses casts his walking rod down to the ground, it will become a snake until he picks it back up. Impressive, sure, but a queer credential to offer as proof that you've been sent by God. Sent by Criss Angel, more like it.

And in case the snake-stick doesn't do it for him, God offers Moses two other, weirder, tricks. One is the ability to give himself temporary leprosy in his hand - which - well, I'm completely stumped by that one. The other is the power to cause buckets of Nile water to turn to blood when splashed on the floor. All in all, pretty morbid stuff. How about letting Moses levitate, or to create beautiful golden sparkles in the air or something? Or just to command great powers of persuasion, huh?

Which Moses decidedly lacks. He pleads with God to pick somebody else for this job, considering how bad a public speaker he is. "Have your brother Aaron speak for you", God says. "Aaron's good at that kind of thing. And so now get going.

"Oh, but by the way, it makes no difference how eloquently you or Aaron speaks to the Pharaoh, because I'm going to harden his heart and make him refuse you." Whuh? In other words, this whole thing's a predestinational charade, and at least half of God's plan is to stomp down the Egyptian people for the bad decisions he is dictating that their ruler make on their behalf. Nice.

But that's just the start of God's violent irrationality: check out this insanity. As Moses journeys to Egypt, God descends upon his camp in the middle of the night and tries to kill him. Yes, kill him. Why? No idea. No freaking idea: that's all the Bible tells us. "At a night encampment along the way, the LORD encountered him [Moses] and sought to kill him." (Exod. 4:24)

So, after doing nothing for a full generation about his chosen people's enslavement, God first sets off this lone man to save them (rather than free them directly by approaching the Pharaoh himself); God then casually mentions he has rigged the whole effort to fail anyway, at least for long enough to justify some massacring and plague-sowing among the largely innocent Egyptian populace. And now, before Moses can even start in on this pointless task, God runs up from out of nowhere in the desert in the middle of the night, and tries to kill him.

What - a - maniac.

This flabbergasting incident is brought to an end even more flabbergastingly by Moses' wife Zipporah. As her husband falls under murderous attack by Jehovah Yahweh, she does what any rational person would do in such a situation: she grabs a piece of flint and saws a shank of flesh from off the penis of her infant son. Then she touches the bloody foreskin to "his" thighs (Moses'? The baby's? I can't tell, but I can't see how it matters, since either way it doesn't make a damn lick of sense.). Creepily, and without any rationally discernible meaning, she says, "You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!" --Who is? Moses? The baby? The foreskin? What is a bridegroom "of blood"? Who is the bride to this bridegroom... blood? What is she talking about?

Well naturally, of course, this causes the LORD to back off and stop trying to kill her husband. Relieved, Zipporah repeats, "A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision."

Wow.

Well anyway, everybody instantly forgets about the incident, Moses meets up with Aaron on the way into Egypt, and together they meet with the Israelite elders to perform magic tricks. All accept that Moses has arrived on a divine mission.