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.

What is this blog?

On our honeymoon in October 2008, my husband Marc and I decided to set ourselves the task of reading the whole King James Bible over the course of 2009. We would try and read a few pages each day, needing to average 17 pages per week of Marc's 1950s Oxford University Press version to complete the task by the end of the year. And committing to maintaining a regular blog of what we read, our reactions to it and the observations of others on the subjects raised seemed a good way of trying to maintain the momentum.
I'll leave Marc to explain why he, a devout atheist raised in a vaguely Roman Catholic tradition and with a fairly trenchant dislike of religion, would want to do this. I'm a confused atheist/agnostic with a sentimental attachment to some small elements of my Anglican schooling and considerable hostility to some of the Scots Presbyterian bits of my ancestry, and I have very mixed feelings towards the project.
For me, it's partly a cultural endeavour, aimed at encountering and understanding where many of the literary references of the last several hundred years stem from.
Partly it's about trying to understand more about our major religions through one of the great books of one of them.
Partly it's about working out my own relationship with Christianity; as I mentioned, I have no affiliation to and considerable scepticism of most organised religion, be it institutional European Christianity or the Eastern faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism that so many self-deluded middle-class Westerners seem to have convinced themselves are more 'spiritual' and less patriarchal than the Religions of the Book. I have encountered plenty of smug, bigoted, homophobic, selfish, arch-capitalistic, morally bankrupt Christians who confirm all of the stereotypes and prejudices of anti-clerical socialists and anarchists. But I've also encountered some really amazing Christians, including liberation theologists in Nicaragua and Mexico who identify Jesus as a revolutionary figure whose example can stand for all those fighting oppression. And the likes of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron, whose willingess to stand in the way of the vicious oppressions of the Israeli army and the vile, murderous, racist settler community there are an inspiration to anyone with any belief in the potential for power and goodness in the human spirit.
(And yes, I know that if I'm going to hang some of my arguments on Catholic examples I should be reading the Jerusalem version, but tough, there's the literary argument mentioned above too.)

In December 2001, I spent some time in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement, learning for myself about the oppressions being imposed on the Palestinian people on a daily basis, and beginning a long involvement with the region. On one of the days between Christmas and New Year, we took part in a takeover of the Surda checkpoint, used by the Israeli authorities to prevent students moving between the city of Ramallah and Bir Zeit University. Many students had missed months of classes. That day, we used human chains to block the routes the Israeli army used to bring jeeps and armoured vehicles down from their military base, and held the roads while local students used heavy machinery from nearby building sites to push the concrete roadblocks and a metal military watchtower off the cliff.
We only held the roads for a few hours, after the IDF used tear gas and sound grenades to push us back. But one of my abiding memories was watching a Catholic priest in his 70s, I think called Peter and I think a member of a Michigan Peace Team, lying in the road in a huge cloud of tear gas, the only thing blocking the way of the menacing army jeep whose raucous siren was blaring for him to move. Peter had been a consistently positive and wise figure over the previous two weeks of digging out muddy roadblocks in the pissing rain, having live ammunition shot over our heads outside President Arafat's compound, and trying to balance out the pain, fear, rage, confusion and anger of 60 people who knew they wanted to do something but weren't sure what or how. Peter is a reminder for me in my most anti-clerical moments that people have done some appalling things in the name of Christianity, but there are also some wonderful people who derive strength and inspitation from the teachings of the Christian faith, and that for that maybe some of its teachings are worthy of consideration and respect.