LECTURE
7
Rev. Stephen van Schalkwyk
Introduction
Postmodernism has taught us that it is vitally important to be
critically aware of the presuppositions we bring to a text. Our experiences,
belief systems, value sets, and social filters all interact with a text and
influence the meaning we draw out of the process of “reading”.
The stories of the
beginning of the world in Genesis 1– 11 are followed by Israel’s stories of her
own beginnings as a people and a nation. The first five books of the bible, the
Pentateuch, are about identity – the identity of “the people of God”. Just as
God is the centre of the creation stories, so God is the one who created
Israel.
Borg asserts that the basic
narrative is, “We began as nomads, wanderers upon the earth without a home. We
fell into slavery to the lord of Egypt. God heard our groaning and liberated us
from bondage. And God gave us a bountiful land in which to live.”
The completed form that we
now have was probably largely formed during or after the Jewish exile in
Babylon in the 500s BCE and perhaps finalized as late as the time of Ezra in
the 400s BCE. It would have been passed down through generations through oral
traditions, and it expresses the broad concerns that come to the fore during
what has been called “the axial period” (cf. Karl Jaspers and History of
religion scholars). This was a time (800 to 200 BCE) of revolutionary human
thought among people of different cultures (the Far East, Asia, the Middle East
and the Russian Steppes). People had migrated to new lands and were in process
of populating large cities. There was a shift from a nomadic lifestyle to the
agrarian, and this concentration of people and resources necessitated the
development of laws, rules and mores by which people could live together peaceably.
Promise and
Borg sees an overarching structure to the narrative: that of “Promise
and Fulfilment”. It is illustrated by the call of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis
12. God calls them to leave home and family and embark on a journey to a land
they do not know: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s
house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation.”
There is given a twofold promise: the land of Canaan and many descendants (a
great nation). The rest is the story of the fulfilment of God’s promise. In
fact the Pentateuch ends many years later with the descendants of Abraham at
the Jordan River, about to cross over to the Promised Land.
In many of the individual
stories between the promise and its fulfilment, the reader experiences great
threat to the fulfilment. And the characters and reader are confronted with the
question, “Will God be able to fulfil the promise in the face of what look like
overwhelming circumstances?” This threat to the fulfilment is played out
through many themes; one is the Barrenness of the Matriarchs:
· Sarah is barren and old.
· Rebekah is barren for twenty years of her marriage until a miraculous
intervention and gives birth to Jacob and Esau.
· Rachel, the one Jacob loves, is barren until her womb “is opened” after
many years and she gives birth to Joseph, who later saves his brothers— the
ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel— in a time of famine. The narrator has
Joseph say the following after being betrayed, sold into slavery, imprisoned,
forgotten and rising to power:
“Do not be distressed or
angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to
preserve life . . . . God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on
earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me
here but God.” (Gen. 45.4– 5, 7– 8.)
The point is that God created and sustains the natural world, and God
has similarly called Israel into existence and sustains her through promise and
fulfilment in the face of threat.
The Exodus as Israel’s Primal Narrative
The Exodus is Israel’s Primal Narrative:
· First, “primal” means “of greatest importance ”—the most important story
to Israel.
· Second, “primal” means “originary” or “originating”: the events narrated
in this story gave birth to Israel; it is her story of beginning.
· Third, “primal” means “archetypal”: this story narrates the universal
struggle between the human propensity for politics by force (empire) and the
liberating will of God, between the lordship of Pharaoh and the lordship of
God.
This is history “metaphorized”: the writers use remembered stories to
paint a picture with literary artistry, dramatic hyperbole, and extraordinary numbers.
The purpose is to make theological and psychological insights memorable – this
is teaching /instructive. The purpose is not to teach facts, but to show how to
live.
The most important part is
what this story meant to Israel; this is how and why they told it:
Israel’s enslavement Egypt becomes the greatest threat to the promise.
In bondage, she is condemned to hard labour, oppression, and genocide. Under
the power of the empire of Pharaoh, Israel has no future.
Then Moses is born. His birth opens the book of Exodus and his death
closes the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of the Pentateuch. In between we
have the story of his life: liberator, law-giver, and leader of Israel.
The future liberator of
Israel is miraculously saved from genocide and the “water” (Moses means “drawn
from the water. Water is archetypal for chaos) and then raised in the imperial
household. He grows up and kills an Egyptian slave-driver, flees Pharaoh,
marries a Midianite woman, has a son, and becomes a shepherd. He later receives
a call to liberate the people from Egyptian tyranny.
He appears before Pharaoh
announcing the divine imperative: “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let
my people go.’ ” Let my people go—an imperative, not a plea— is a refrain in
the chapters. Pharaoh’s response is haughty and contemptuous: “Who is the LORD
that I should let Israel go?” So God sends plagues against the empire which
affect the Egyptians, and not the Israelites: all the waters turn to blood,
frogs, gnats, flies, death of the Egyptians’ livestock, boils, hail, locusts,
and a thick darkness that lasts for three days.
The point is that it was
God who “brought us out of Egypt with a great and mighty hand.” Pharaoh still
refuses the rule of God, and so the most devastating plague strikes: the death
of the firstborn of all Egyptians, including Pharaoh’s son. The Israelites are
“passed over” when the smeared blood on the doorposts and lintels of their
homes. In the darkest hour, God deals the decisive blow, sparing the
Israelites, making the fulfillment of the promise possible again and it is here
that the festival of Passover is established.
The Israelites leave Egypt, Pharaoh changes his mind, His army chase the
fleeing slaves and The Israelites are caught between the might of Empirical war
and the chaos of the waters. God intervenes, the Israelites get across on dry
land, and the Egyptians are overcome by the forces of chaos (the sea).
From the sea, the people
journey through the desert to Mt. Sinai, led (the pillar of cloud, column of
fire) and nourished by God: water from the rock, manna and quails miraculous
fall … Promiseà threat à interventionà hope for fulfilment.
The Law
The events at Sinai take up twenty-two chapters of Exodus, all of the
twenty-seven chapters of Leviticus, and the first ten chapters of
Numbers—fifty-nine chapters in all. They tell of the giving of the law through
theophany (visual manifestation of God with cloud, lightning, thunder and
tremors). God gives the Covenant and when the people accept the covenant (laws)
they become God’s “treasured possession” and “a priestly kingdom and a holy
nation.” Israel, the various tribes are welded into a people - Israel.
The laws come from many
different periods in Israel’s history and include ethical, ritual, civil and
criminal laws. Borg tells us that there were 613 rules of Jewish Law. Through
this story of the Pentateuch, the laws are given a holy origin and a sacred
meaning. They are rules of justice, charity, land and money that are given for
the express purpose of avoiding a concentration of violent power into the hands
of the few (empire) so that the few can manipulate and oppress.
From this point on, the
major threat to God’s promise now comes from within Israel: Fidelity. Her own
faithfulness to the God who has been faithful becomes the burning question.
Because of their infidelity, the exodus generation is not allowed entry to the
land of the promise and they spend almost forty years in the wilderness as that
generation dies out. As the book of Numbers ends, the descendants of the exodus
generation are camped in the plains of Moab just east of the Jordan River, at
the border of the Promised Land. The Pentateuch closes with Deuteronomy: a
series of Moses’ speeches, spoken to Israel just before she takes the land and
has the promise finally fulfilled.
