Exodus 1-6: The Market Theory of Deities

So, after the massive dramas of Genesis, I'm finally on to Exodus.
I don't think I was quite prepared for exactly how much stuff Genesis was going to cover - I mean, one of the reasons I decided to do this project of reading the Bible and blogging about it was to see for myself all those references that turn up in literature and popular sayings and song lyrics and umpteen other cultural spheres. It feels like half of the references I might have had mind have already been covered, from Adam and Eve to Lot's wife to Joseph and his coat of many colours...
So, now we skip a few generations in the land of Egypt, and start with a rundown of the tribes of Israel. I guess if we're dealing with a text that comes from an oral history tradition, every so often you need to remind people who the main characters are, in case they're a bit forgetful or nodded off last time the storyteller came round.

But due to that lapse of several generations the Egyptians have forgotten that Joseph came up with those cunning ways of getting them alive through a famine (or maybe they remember very well how he got all their land and livestock off them and handed them to Pharoah). So the Hebrews have been enslaved (in the true hard-labour sense it seems, not that cushy viceroy-type slavery that Joseph fell into), but there are still enough of them to scare the Egyptians sufficiently that Pharoah orders the midwives to kill off male children (which I suppose makes sense on a military level, but not really on a population control level.)
As part of this attempt to control the Hebrew numbers, a 'daughter of Levi' puts her strapping baby boy in a basket in the river, where he gets found by an Egyptian princess and brought up. Having killed an Egyptian for killing a Hebrew he flees to the land of Midian, which apparently takes him up to the head of the Red Sea and the north of the Sinai Peninsula, or even into modern southern Jordan. Here he describes himself as a:

"stranger in a strange land,"

one of those fantastically resonant Bible quotes that echoes down the ages in book titles and, apparently, the name of an episode of Lost. Just to really lower the tone.
In Chapter 3, God speaks to Moses out of a burning bush. This is another of those Bible tales where myriad theories about mistranslations and misunderstandings of place names come into play, so we could actually be talking about events as divergent as a chatty bramble patch or a voice from Mount Sinai.
Here I get to digress a bit, because Mount Sinai is one of the my favourite places in the world. It is outstandingly beautiful and atmospheric, with the vastly thick walls of the ancient monastery of St Catharine's marking the start of the trek to the summit - best done at night, to avoid the desert sun and to watch the dawn over the desert. The local Bedouin control the tourist trade in the area, which means that at least some of the money spent on the mountain stays with them rather than being siphoned off into the coffers of multinational tourist corporations. Many of these Bedouin are themselves terrifically handsome in their characteristic periwinkle-blue kuffiyahs, and their camels (a surprisingly comfortable way to get up the mountain for the mobility-challenged) seem to be pretty well cared for and healthy compared with some of the sorry specimens in other parts of the Middle East.
Anyway, tourist blurb over, and I expect I'll get to repeat it all when we get to those tablets of stone...
But God decides to promise Moses that he will be returning to:

"a land flowing with milk and honey,"

whilst also listing the other peoples -

"the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzities, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites"

who are going to get kicked out so that the Children of Israel can have the land. No precedents being either followed or established there then.

God, however, is being very clear about his intentions for Moses and his people, as demonstrated by the use of lots of CAPITALS;
(ch3 v14) "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you," and then also in Chapter 6, where God's name Jehovah is also IN BIG CAPITALS.
After some miracles involving sticks and snakes and leprosy to prove that he is indeed, God, God decides to try and kill Moses, who is only saved by his Midianite wife throwing their infant son's foreskin onto the ground before the LORD. I'm now totally lost as to quite what it is with the whole foreskin thing. At least Isaac's life got swapped for an entire sheep...

With all these shenanigans in the land of the Midianites, the poor old Israelites are still stuck in Egypt as slaves, although they still seem to be putting their faith in God, even if he has apparently forgotten about them for several generations. Their situation gets even worse after Moses returns with God's various instructions, because the suggestion that the Israelites be allowed to leave off slavin' for 3 days to go and worship in the wilderness is met with the order that instead of a holiday, they will have to find their own raw materials for the bricks they have to manufacture, but still make the same quantity of bricks in the end. So by the end of Chapter 6, we have lots of promises from God, and lots of demands of worship, but very little action from Him and a whole lot more work for the Hebrews.

Now, this has led me to my Market Theory of Deity, as mentioned in the title of this post. I reckon that when you have a polytheistic system with lots of Gods competing for sacrifices, faith and other affirmation from human worshippers, they have much more incentive to be nice. OK, so there is a fear element - storms, famine etc - but there is also going to be an extent to which Gods will also get more worship if they deal out a certain amount of niceness. In a a monotheistic monopoly situation, however, God gets to behave pretty much as he likes, leaving his Chosen People in slavery, forgetting about them, and then demanding major amounts of love, honour and probably sheep and goats while we're at it. Not so different from certain large utility companies (without the blood sacrifice, though some gas bills don't seem so far off it.)

All photos in this post taken by Sarah Irving on and around Mount Sinai, August 2008

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.