What's EXODUS about?

Summary

The book of Exodus describes how the ancient Israelites escaped from slavery in Egypt and how they encountered God in the wilderness. The events being described would have happened around a thousand years before the book was written. The book was probably compiled from a variety of ancient stories into one coherent account soon after the Israelites returned home from their slavery in Babylon.

Exodus has two halves with different focuses. The first half describes how God arranged to rescue the people with whom God had entered into a covenant in the distant past. God does this by calling Moses to confront their slave-owners, in the form of the Pharaoh, and ironically by arranging for a Pharaoh's daughter to rescue Moses when he was a baby. The miraculous escape through the Red Sea became a template by which the Israelites came to understand God's care for slaves and the oppressed.

The second part of the book describes how the people experienced God during their time in the wilderness. They receive the ten commandments describing how people are to live with justice and dignity for all, but the people immediately disobey the commandments. That theme repeats many times in the following books – it is clearly an important experience—that God has expectations but never gives up on care for this tiny people. That would have explained to the people, while enslaved in Babylon, why that disaster had happened, and why God arranged for their return to Jerusalem.

Later in the second half of Exodus Moses gives the people receive detailed instructions about how sacrifices and worship is to be carried out. No doubt these descriptions were of immense assistance to the returning exiles when they were re-building the ruined temple, and re-starting the detailed worship and sacrifices that they had not seen for two generations.

How Exodus is important for us

Exodus encourages us to look for ways in which we can cooperate with God in giving leadership for escape from the many kinds of slavery we find ourselves bound to. We are enslaved within a global process of exploitation of the poor which threatens the future of humankind as well as so many forms of life. Moses resists the call to lead the people, as we also are likely to feel powerless against the international forces of our day. But God's underlying reality (God reveals God's name as “I AM”—perhaps a way of saying that God is ultimate reality) is of deep goodness welling up in unexpected ways, and as we put our roots into that reality we may find ourselves able to lead and so not to be helpless slaves after all. The detailed, and fascinating, descriptions of worship in the second half of the book may help us be aware of how much greater, and more glorious, God is than anything we can imagine. We live, as does the entire cosmos, within that glorious foundation that we call God. That in itself helps us know there is so much more than the tragedies which we cannot evade in our time.