Exodus 32-40: more bloodshed, more gold

OK, I'm even further behind now. Blame the evil three legged cat (I'm sure there must be something in this fat book about casting weird little yowly three-legged things like that out into the wilderness). He killed Marc's computer monitor by throwing up down the back of it, so we're now sharing a computer and on rationed blogging time.
Anyway.
Chapters 32 and 33 recount the tale of the making of the Golden Calf. As if to confirm all the stuff I've been talking about regarding the importance of ritual, the Israelites take a very short time indeed to start freaking out about the fact that Moses has vanished up to the top of Mount Sinai to commune with God, and demand that Aaron makes them something else to worship instead.
Collecting jewellery off them, Aaron takes very little persuading to make a statue of a bull calf, which immediately becomes the new God.
God, who has been showing himself to be a rather insecure and demanding character since at least the beginning of Exodus, and of course on occasions like ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, gets understandably stroppy about this:

“Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them”
(Chapter 32 verse 10)

Moses manages to talk him down a bit, and back down at the bottom of the mountain seems to be happy to go along with some spectacular buck-passing by Aaron (I thought we had major legal precedents established that 'he told me to' was no excuse?):

“And Aaron said, let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.
For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.”
(Chapter 32 verses 22-23)

Despite this, Aaron gets comprehensively forgiven and reinstated into his God-assigned role as the head of a lineage of priests, while in a typically Biblical bit of understated callousness 3,000 people apparently get butchered for this bit of cow-worship, but this only warrants one very short verse and no real explanation as to why. Bit like the massacre of the people of Shechem or various other non-Israelite groups, who, like the girl in the B movie whose function is just to scream and look terrified, just exist to get minced to show off Israelite power:

“And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.”
(Chapter 32 verse 28)

Yep, that's it.
Having generously forgiven the leadership of this rather hierarchical set-up, God now reinforces his position by ordering the destruction of any other gods who might be knocking around, and yet again all those commandments about rituals get repeated, just in case anyone had forgotten them.
Chapters 35-38 mainly recap in the actual performance the instructions delivered by God to Moses for the making of the Ark of the Covenant, involving lots of gold, silver, brass, shittim wood and purple, red and blue cloth. The level of detail entailed extends to listing the number of tenon joints needed to hold some of the boards together:

“One board had two tenons, equally distant from one another: thus did he make for all the boards of the tabernacle.
...
And forty sockets of silver he made under the twenty boards; two sockets under one board for his two tenons, and two sockets under another board for his two tenons.”
(Chapter 36 verses 22 and 24)

Collecting all the materials for this – all apparently accumulated from the existing wealth of the Israelite people (even though they've been enslaved in Egypt for several generations?), so at least it's recycled. I remember from archaeology classes at uni that one of the types of evidence considered to indicate that a society was hierarchical is the carrying out of large-scale construction projects (Stonehenge, for example), the presence of crafts specialisations (because people doing specialised crafts obviously need someone else to be growing/producing the goods to feed them, since they don't have time to do it themselves, so you need some kind of social system that supports this differentiation) and burials or other accumulations of wealth such as gold jewellery or ritual objects.
Giving little credence to hippy notions of co-operation, it is assumed that the presence of hierarchies and leaderships is necessary to get enough people together at the same time and for long enough to actually build anything of any significant size or value – and although this Ark isn't particularly huge in itself, it does involve major accumulation of wealth and of labour, with all the society's women apparently engaged in weaving the hangings, and its skilled craftsmen (rejoicing in the wonderful names Bezaleel and Aholiab) devoting their time to this effort.


We also get quite a bit about the priests' ephods, which is apparently a word of which there is controversy about the meaning of, but may be some kind of loincloth, or possibly a kind of ritual apron. In this case, they seem to be accompanied with 'curious girdles,' which also sound great but lack specifics as to why they are curious... this for me is one of the joys of the Old Testament and especially the King James Version, that we come up against some bizarre and in some cases totally incomprehensible words and phrases, their exact meanings lost in the mists of time, but their general resonance remaining.
And so the Book of Exodus ends, with the completion of this great creative and ritual work, a social bonding experience between the Israelites who donate their valuables and time to create a symbol of their belief and their identity as a people. And, armed with a growing conviction that they are God's one chosen people, and with a substantial list of laws as to the proper conduct of society, they're ready to head off to the land of Canaan:

“For the cloud of the LORD was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”
(Chapter 40 verse 38)

Exodus 24-31: some very, very detailed instructions

I've slightly had my comeuppance here. OK, so I decided to talk about the importance of ritual in my last post. But this section is really going for it – although I suppose if you're setting out details of religious rites that are meant to last for thousands of years it could take a while.
But God has obviously put some very serious thought into exactly how he wants worshipping.
So, after a ceremony to celebrate the fact that the Israelites have been given the Ten Commandments (involving, as usual, some gory sacrifices), Moses heads up to the top of Mount Sinai, and doesn't come down for 40 days.
As far as can be told from chapters 25-31, that 40 days is spent being given intensively detailed instructions on what God wants the Ark of the Covenant to look like. Marc obviously finds the instructions rather OTT and the lists pretty boring, but I quite like some of them.
The descriptions of what the Ark should look like is quite enjoyable to read, with excitingly lush materials:

“And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats' hair,
And rams' skins dyed red, and badgers' skins, and shittim wood,
Oil for the light, spices for anointing oil, and for sweet incense,
Onyx stones, and stones to be set in the ephod, and in the breastplate”
(Chapter 25 verses 4-7)

It's a bit like reading fat glossy women's magazines, full of celebrities wearing designer labels and wearing fabulous shoes – you wouldn't necessarily want to do it yourself, but it's kind of fun.
The Ark is also to include something called a Mercy Seat, which explains the origins of the Nick Cave song (also covered by Johnny Cash) which I had vaguely wondered about before. It apparently translates better as a seat of grace, which fits with it being where God shall appear.



One question that occurs to me is exactly where all this gold and other expensive trappings are meant to come from, from a people apparently still wandering around in a desert and who only a few chapters back were busy kicking up a fuss over the prospect of dying of thirst.
Not only do we have extensive amounts of gold and gems on the design spec, with chapter 25's long lists of bowls, candlesticks, vessels and other bits of metalware which have to be made with pure gold, but also lots of precious jewels:

“And thou shalt set in it settings of stones, even four rows of stons: the first row shall be a sardius, a topaz, and a carbuncle: this shall be the first row.
And the second row shall be an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond.
And the third row a ligure, and agate, and an amethyst.
And the fourth row a beryl, and an onyx, and a jasper: they shall be set in gold in their inclosings.”
(chapter 28 verses 17-20)

Many of the cloths have specifically to be purple, which as far as I can remember from my ancient history means that it has to be dyed with extracts from the murex shell, which was fabulously expensive and very much sought after, with major trade routes and conflicts linked to various empires' desire to get their hands on good supplies of it. And we're not just talking the priests' robes here, but also curtains for the temple courtyard which are meant to be 20 cubits in length – which I think is about 30 feet, or 10 metres.
Aaron, Moses' brother, is designated the father of a line of priests, since this is to be a hereditary post – and a rather cushy billet too. As well as getting to wear all that purple, the priest class seems to do rather well out of the massive amount of blood sacrifices ordered, which include large quantities of bullocks, rams and lambs – surely a huge challenge for this desert nomadic people?

“And thou shalt offer every day a bullock for a sin offering for atonement: and thou shalt cleanse the altar, when thou hast made an atonement for it, and thou shalt anoint it, to sanctify it.
Seven days thou shalt make an atonement for the altar, and sanctify it; and it shall be an altar most holy: whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy.
Now this is that which thou shalt offer upon the altar; two lambs of the first year day by day continually.
The one lamb thou shalt offer in the morning; and the other lamb thou shalt offer at even:
And with one lamb a tenth deal of flour mingled with the fourth part of an hin of beaten oil; and the fourth part of an hin of wine for a drink offering.”

(Chapter 29 verses 36-40)
But, it needs noting, the priests get to eat a bit of this stuff – that which isn't completely incinerated as burnt offerings – which implies that they're going to have a better diet than a lot of their people.
And, as with events such as the massacre of Shechem and the Tower of Babel, the actual handing over the the stone tablets gets just a brief mention at the end of these very long and details demands for how ritual must be carried out:

“And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”
(Chapter 31 verse 18)

Exodus 17-23: rules and regulations

Still wandering in the wilderness in the south of the Sinai peninsula, the Israelites apparently haven't yet learnt the graceful art of gratitude, but continue to get snitty with Moses at every opportunity:

17/2 "Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? Wherefore do ye tempt the LORD?
17/3 And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst."

Although having said this, the continued concerns about water are a strong reminder of how important a supply of H2O is, and how lightly we now take it in societies where it is still plentiful, and prefigures the significance it has in the conflicts of the modern Middle East and, increasingly, in Africa and Central Asia.


But in this case, Moses resolves the situation by smiting a rock on Mount Horeb, which flows with water – Mt Horeb apparently being another name for Mt Sinai, where there are little green gardens amongst the desert rocks.
The Israelites also find themselves doing battle with the Amalek, a tribe which appears on a number of occasions in the Bible and was the cause in various bits of Jewish theology of discussions over the justification of a war of total extermination – indeed genocide – against another people:

17/13 "And Joshua discomforted Amalek and his people with the edge of his sword.
17/14 "And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven."

On a lighter note (though they would hate me for saying this, probably), the Amalek are also identified with the Nephilim, a reference which only sad old goths like me will get excited about.
In Chapter 18, Moses is reunited with his wife and, apparently more importantly, his father-in-law Jethro, to whom he enthuses about God's “goodness” in delivering the Israelites out of Egypt, which given the horrors God seems to have put them through for the sake of repeatedly winding up Pharaoh seems a bit overstating it.
But Jethro does have one use, in teaching Moses the graceful art of delegation and avoiding burnout:

18/22 "And let them judge the people at all seasons: and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge : so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee."

I can think of many environmental activists and social entrepreneurs who obviously need to pay closer attention to their Bibles...
Chapter 19 sees God being demanding again, listing the various forms of devotion and worship he's expecting. But he also lays on some fairly spectacular scenes in the runup to the Ten Commandments

19/18 "And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly."

Given that we're in a fairly major volcanic zone, this is the kind of thing that can probably be explained adequately through natural phenomena, but to a few thousand people who live in tents and are vulnerable to dying from cold, heat, thirst and starvation, you can see why it might have quite a psychological impact.
Chapter 20 is basically the Ten Commandments themselves. These largely make pretty good sense in terms of maintaining a stable society, especially in the unstable and difficult situation of roaming around a big desert, where people need to be able to rely on one another and conflicts over each other's truthfulness, light-fingeredness, cattle, oxen, asses, offpsring or spouses could be seriously disruptive.
The comment about:

20/5 "I the LORD thy God a jealous God"

might however be stating the obvious, given many of the pronouncements of the previous dozen chapters.
The ensuing verses dealing with the correct way to perform rituals also emphasise the importance of belief and rites to a people who, by nature of their rather antagonistic tendencies to anyone whose land they turn up in and their wandering nature, need a very strong internal social cohesion. Plenty of anthropology sees ritual (not necessarily the belief behind it) as a form of 'social glue,' bonding people together, and at this point in the Israelites' history this all makes pretty clear sense. The best-known example of this theory is probably Victor Turner's studies of ritual amongst the Ndembu of what was then Northern Rhodesia. See this paper by Mathieu Deflem for a broad discussion of the topic. Chapter 23 also returns to this obsession with ritual, setting out days of rest and feast days.





Chapters 21 to 23 are primarily taken up with a more detailed setting-out of many more rules and laws of Israelite life. A lot of these can be somewhat disturbing in their inequity and sometimes cruelty, but also need to be seen as a product of their time – the problem then arising is when fundamentalist religious believers take them as graven in stone and try to enforce them on other people in a contemporary setting.
So, we have justifications for slavery, with laws which allow for lighter punishments for killing one's slave than for killing a free man (chapter 21 verse 20). Slaveowners can separate husbands and wives or parents and children, and female slaves appear to be subject to sexual use as well as being forced to perform other types of labour. Male ownership of women is also enshrined in rules such as that which states that if a person attacks a pregnant woman and causes her to miscarry, the compensation goes not to her but to her husband – the owner not only of the woman but of her child, born or unborn (chapter 21 verse 22).
The bits about executing cows who kill people is a bit weird, though:

21/28 "If an ox gore a man or woman, that they die: then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten,"

although the practice seems not to have entirely died out in the USA until the 20th century. I'm going to refrain from making stereotypical anti-American comments about that, since I've got a feeling the French might have been doing it to farmyard animals too. But I may be thinking of medieval stuff about executing pigs for being witches...
Many of the rules are also a good illustration of the main concerns of an agrarian society, setting out the punishments and compensations involved if people damage crops, set fires or endanger other people's livestock (chapter 22 verses 5 and 6). There are explicit instructions to let fields lie fallow and rotate crops (chapter 23 verses 10 and 11). Widows and orphans also get special protection, which seems fair enough (22/22).
More scariness pops up though, with some famous lines:

22/18 "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,"

juxtaposed with more weirdness; I mean, I find the idea of bestiality as grim as the next person, but execution does seem a slight over-reaction. But then I'm not a raped sheep:

22/19 "Whosoever lieth with a best shall surely be put to death."

And eating roadkill is, apparently, out, which may disappoint a few strange people who take resource conservation to considerable lengths:

22/31 "...neither shall ye eat any flesh that is torn of beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs."

And the injunction against 'raising a false report' (23/1) surely means that thousands of tabloid hacks are truly stuffed. But is this a bad thing?



The closing of chapter 23 is, however, another rather chilling outline of the kind of justifications that are used by some Zionists for the right of the modern state of Israel and those even more extreme, violent and disturbing settlers to use any means, up to and including mass murder, to clear the lands of modern Palestine and Israel, possibly extending into Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, of any person who is not Jewish:

23/31 "And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.
23/32 Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.
23/33 They shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against me."

Exodus 13-16: Red Sea and white fluffy food

Having fled slavery in Egypt, the Israelites receive various new orders from God, generally via Moses. Many of those in chapter 13 seem to confirm the patriarchal nature of this religious regime, demanding initially that the firstborn - "whatsoever openeth the womb" - is the property of the LORD, but then moving on to the explicit assertion that it's the male firstborn that is actually of interest.
Not that being of the LORD is necessarily a good thing, unless you're human, as for other species it seems to entail getting sacrificed:

13/15 "And it came to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let us go, that the LORD slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man, and the firstborn of beast: therefore I sacrifice to the LORD all that openeth the matrix, being males; but all the firstborn of my children I redeem."

For once, in the this book, being female seems like a better option.
Despite the grim fates it prescribes for an awful lot of male creature, some of the language in this chapter is fantastically powerful and resonant – positively Biblical, in fact:

13/21 "And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; and to go by day and night:
13/22 He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people."

But despite any lyrical tendencies that may be showing themselves, the LORD is still doing the whole dangerous capricious thing, hardening Pharaoh's heart again (in chapter 14 verses 4, 8 and 17), apparently with the continued aim of being able punish the Egyptians for actions which God himself has engendered by the reaction that he inspires in Pharaoh.
Given that this chapter features another great Biblical iconic event, the parting of the Red Sea, this is fairly significant, as it involves the entire Egyptian army, complete with the poor horses who like all those poor animals that died in the Plagues have done nothing to anyone, getting swept away by the wrathful waters after the Israelites have passed.
Like many great events of the Bible, there have been many archaeologists and, to be blunt about it, pseudo-scholars running around trying to find geological and archaeological evidence for real events which might account for the legends. The actual creation of the Red Sea, a northern part of the African Rift Valley which ends with the Dead Sea, isn't really a candidate, since it was a process which happened – whether suddenly or gradually is disputed – tens of millions of years ago. Film director James Cameron, whose other peer-reviewed scientific studies include Titanic and Terminator, managed to tweak Biblical estimates that the exodus probably took place around 1300BCE and push it back a few hundred years to coincide with the huge volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini, which probably destroyed the Minoan civilisation on Crete and is often associated with the creation of the legend of Atlantis. This is based on some re-readings of Egyptian carvings to decide that the eruption caused the plagues:

"The Exodus producers believe the waters were turned red by chemicals released by underwater tremors. Something similar happened to the lakes in Cameroon in 1986. If the waters were poisoned, amphibians would hop ashore, producing the biblical plague of frogs. When the frogs died, insects would have bred on their bodies leading to plagues of locusts, fleas and lice.
They in turn would have spread disease to humans, the plague of boils, and animals, the plague of dying livestock. They would also have threatened crops, forcing the Egyptians to store grain which might have then turned mouldy. Contaminated food might account for the plague of deaths among first-born Egyptian males. Weather conditions spawned by the eruption might also have caused the plagues of hailstorms and darkness."
(The Sunday Times, 6th August 2006)

and then the same set of volcanic disturbances resulted in the parting of the waters of the Red Sea.
Whatever.
Most of Chapter 15 of Exodus reads like a hymn of praise the God for this salvation, lyrical and rhythmic and following the kind of verse forms typical of such songs, with repetition of the achievements for which praise is being given, and listing of other victories and strengths:

15/15“Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed; the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away.”

This gratitude, however, does not last long. Somewhat disempowered by several generations in slavery, the Israelites fairly rapidly start wailing and complaining about the lack of food and water, and generally being ungrateful and showing very little initiative.

15/24 "And the people began to murmur against Moses, saying, What shall we drink?"

This carries on in chapter 16, until finally God resolves the situation by sending manna from heaven, a kind of fluffy white frost which quickly disappears when the sun comes up and “bred worms, and stank” if people tried to gather it up to keep overnight. It does sound wonderful:

16/31 "And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey."

However, the Israelites do apparently have to live on it for the forty (count 'em) years it takes for them to get through Sinai to Canaan (which seems a little excessive, it's not THAT far, and hell they managed to invade the whole thing in less than a week during the Six Day War).
And now I'm going to finish off with a cartoon which doesn't specifically relate to this post but I is vaguely associated with the whole theme of this blog, and which I thought was quite amusing.

Exodus 7-12: the plagues of Egypt and Passover

So, over the course of five chapters we have a fairly spectacular series of plagues, all designed to make Pharoah let the Israelites leave Egypt.
In order, we have the bloody, stinking water (which sounds like some kind of 'red tide' algal bloom to me); frogs which die everywhere; lice (ugh); flies (eeuuuwh); murrain, which kills all the cattle and sheep; boils all over everyone, including the 'magicians'; thunder, hail and fire (sounds like a dodgy 70s pop band); the notorious locusts, and finally the death of the firstborn sons.


I have two main problems with these.
Firstly, what did the poor frogs, cows and sheep, and for that matter the firstborn sons, some of whom were presumably just we'uns at the time of being bumped off, do to anyone? This all seems highly unfair. I mean, obviously there is some strategic point to offing Pharoah's son to get him to make policy changes, but:

“even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts”

(the ones that have survived the murrain, presumably). What influence are they supposed to have? How are they supposed to help the Hebrews be allowed to leave? This is all getting very bloodthirsty...
Secondly, it's all a massive set-up. All these plagues are allegedly ways to getting Pharoah to let the poor enslaved Israelites go, but after every one we get a statement like:

“But the LORD hardened Pharoah's heart, so that he would not let the children of Israel go” (Ch10 v20)

and:

“But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he would not let them go” (Ch10 v27)

So, apparently Pharoah is supposed to let the Israelites go, but the LORD keeps stopping him. What sort of psycho game is he playing here? I'm just confused now.
But having pretty much nuked the entire livestock , farmland and water supply of Egypt (them Yankees with their Agent Orange got nuttin' on the LORD in a bad mood), the LORD then stops hardening Pharoah's heart enough that the Israelites finally get to leave.
To follow this up, we get the instructions for the Jewish feast of Passover (the night the houses of the Israelites were Passed Over by the Angel of Death seeking the firstborn), or Pesach, with the meal of lamb, bitter herbs and unleavened bread. It's a beautiful and dignified meal – I was privileged to be invited to a seder (Pesach meal) at a leftie kibbutz in the Arava desert 13 years ago, and was very moved at how, even though I was at a table full of usually rowdy teenaged students, everyone remained quiet and solemn for many of the readings which punctuated the servings of food.


I'm not entirely sure I should have been there, though, looking at the official instruction booklet we have here:

“12/43 And the LORD said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the passover: There shall no stranger eat thereof:
12/44 But every man's servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then he shall eat thereof.
12/45 A foreigner and an hired servant shall not eat thereof.”

My experience that year amongst young Jewish people who had made aliyah – emigrated to Israel – was also an interesting lesson in the way that ritual can be more important for 'outsiders' and people who need to reinforce community and define themselves, than for those who feel more secure in their identity and community.
These young people – at the time in, I guess their early 20s – had made the choice as British Jews to move to Israel, partly perhaps because of job opportunities (or, quite frankly, to escape the bloody British weather), but substantially, as I understood it, because they felt deeply attached to the notion of a Jewish homeland in Israel and as being part of that project. Most of them, because of the friend I was travelling with, came from left-wing Zionist Jewish youth movements such as RSY Netzer and Habonim.
So, my friend (a non-kosher-keeping Jewish girl) and I, in Jerusalem during Passover, went into one of the many wonderful bakeries in the Arab quarter of the Old City, in search of bread that wasn't matzo. We'd had several days on kibbutz of unleavened matzo being made into all sorts of inventive forms of carbohydrate, and all of them were pretty tasteless and horrible. Basic matzo itself is kind of like cream crackers and actually ok, but it was the efforts to replicate leavened things like pasta and sandwiches using matzo meal that had been tough going.
Friend and I sneaked our illicit leavened bread home, where we planned to respectfully eat it away from people who were keeping proper kosher for Pesach. Not in this flat though. All of those aliyah-making twentysomethings (none of whom would have happily gone in the dark, narrow, spice-and-mint-scented streets of the Arab quarter) fell upon the proper bread like starved things, and the bagfull lasted about ten minutes. And, if keeping Pesach is primarily an expression of identity, a way of defining and celebrating Jewishness in a Britain which has over the centuries been deeply hateful, violent and prejudiced towards them, then why is it still necessary to pursue it once you're home and dry? (Even if it is on contested land...)
And, at the risk of sounding like one of those Daily Mail readers who laments the passing of some bizarre mythical 1950s England full of scrubbed-clean blonde people who skipped around being neighbourly to each other, there is something very sad about the fact that modern society seems to have lost most of its rites and rituals, that we rarely celebrate things together with any sense of poetry and solemnity, that festivals like Christmas seem to largely be an excuse for over-indulgence or an opportunity for desperate and over-worked people to cram some R&R into their lives. We seem to have lost the notion of a ritual meal as a time to share with other people and to step back, getting some perspective on both the past and future. I think it's a sad loss.

Thanks to National Geographic and Discourse.net for the pix

Exodus 12-15: The Red Sea reddens

Exodus 12

The LORD gets Moses to get the Hebrews to do the lamb to the slaughter thing and

Verse 9 “Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire, his head with his legs, and with the purtenance thereof”

For the LORD is going to get all Biblical

Verse 12 “For I will pass throught he land fo Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt , both man and beast: and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgement.”

There are gods of Egypt? I thought there Could Be Only One? Is this a market consolidation exercise then? Has anyone told the Competition Commission??

Anyhow, the Hebrews are to daub their lintels:

Verse 13 “And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.”

And sure enough, God has a pretty handy friend-foe target acquisition thing going on. Doubtless BAE Systems, purveyors of airborne smiting, would like a look-see, and America's allies would be keen for Pentagon to take it on. As the old anecdote goes: during the Italian campaign, when the German bombers flew over the British ducked, when the British planes flew over the Germans ducked, and when the American planes flew over, everyone ducked...

So Moses tells his homies what's gonna go down, they do as they're told for once, and God gets down to some heavy-duty smiting.

Verse 29 “And it came to pass that at midnight, the LORD smote all the first born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his thrown unto the first born of the captive that was in the dungeon: and all the first born of cattle.”

Pharaoh is understandably less than gruntled, and tells Moses to get outa town

Verse 32-3 “And take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be gone: and bless me also. And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, that they might send them out of the land in haste: for they said, We be all dead men.”

So after 430 years of post-Joseph sojourning in Egypt, 600,000 leg it.

And God tells Moses and Aaron that this should be remembered.

Verse 48 “And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it: and he shall be one that is born in the land: for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof.”

Remind me not to stay over with any of my Jewish friends round Passover...

Exodus 13

More rules about bread, with “a land of milk and honey” as a carrot. The further price is

Verse 12 “That thou shalt set apart unto the LORD all that openeth the matrix, and every firstling that cometh of a beast which thou hast: the males shall be the LORD's.”

which is where the whole “giving up your firstborn” thing comes from I guess.

So the LORD (presumably through Moses)

Verse 17 “... led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near: for God said, Lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt.”

Not so squeamish these days, it seems...

Verse 18 “But God led the people about through the way of the wilderness of the Red sea: and the children of Israel went up harnessed out of the land of Egypt.”

So they end up near Etham, in the edge of the wilderness, with a dirty great big pillar of a cloud in the day time and a pillar of fire at night.

Beats a satnav, I guess.

Exodus 14

So LORD tells Moses to get his people camped in a spot where Pharaoh will chase 'em. He duly does, and he duly does.

Verse 7 “And he took six hundred chosen chariots and all the chariots of Egypt, and captains over everyone one of them.”

The fleeing Hebrews are bricking it (still without straw, one suspects)

Verse 11-12 “And they said unto Moses, Because there were no graves in Egypt, has thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? Wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt? Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.”

Nice to know that ancient revolutionaries (which is what Moses clearly is) had the same battles with reformists who'd rather cling to the scraps from the master's table than to Be Free.

Moses says that God is on their Side.

So God puts on a show moving his pillars of cloud and fire.

Verse 21 “And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea: and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.”

The Hebrews leg it along the dry land, the Egyptians follow and, oh, look, you've all seen the movie, yes? "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!" No, that's a different movie...

Moses unparts the waters

Verse 28-9 “And the waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them: there remained no so much as one of them.” But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.”

Exodus 15

Clearly

Verse 3 “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.”

None of this namby-pamby love thine enemy tosh. “Drown them all, let God sort them out.”

Verse 11 “Who is like unto the, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?”

Among the gods eh? What happened to the rest of them then?

Verse 14 “The people shall hear,and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina.”

Well, you got that much right...

Oh, there's a victory dance, led by a woman...

Verse 20-1 “And Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand: and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.”

Are we inhuman, or are we dancer?

Anyway, it's the desert, and they're short of water, and folks murmur against Moses. The LORD shows Moses a tree which, when cast into the salty waters they have, desalinates them.

God promises disease-free living in exchange for unending worship. Can't say neuroticer than that, can you?

And they come to Elim, with its twelve wells of water...

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.

Exodus 1-2: Baby killing, man killing, God forgetting?

Exodus 1

Starts with roll call of the “twelve tribes”

Verse 7 “And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceedingly mightly; and the land was filled with them.”

There may be trouble ahead... And sure enough, there's a new boss, not the same as the old boss.

The new king who didn't know Joseph says “these guests are like fish, they've gone off after three days.”

Verse 10 “Come on,let us deal wisely with them: lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us."

Ah yes, unreliable, agents of a foreign power yadder yadder yadder.

The Hebrews get “taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens” but like Hydra “the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.”

So feeling harried and Herod, Pharaoh tell the midwives to bump of the boys.

Verse 16 “...if it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.”

Huh??!! That is arse-backwards. One male can inseminate lots of women, whereas lots of males chasing a limited number of females is a recipe for internal tension. Women are the bottleneck in population demographics. Duh! Or maybe its a psyop to demoralise the Hebrews?

The God-fearing midwives disobey, and at their next performance appraisal tell Pharaoh the Hebrew mothers spit them out before the midwives get there.

So Pharaoh gets all Nilistic.

Verse 22 “And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river and every daughter ye shall save alive.”

I think I see where this is going. I may mosey on through one more chapter before retiring...

Exodus 2

Verse 1 “And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi.”

[FFS, haven't you clowns heard of exogamy??]

Verse 2 “And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she was him that he was goodly child, she hid him three months."

But the jig is up and she puts him near where Pharaoh's daughters will find him near the river's edge.

Kid (Moses, natch) gets raised, and telescoping forward a bit...

Verse 11 “And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brehtren, and looked upon their burdens and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw there was no man, he slew the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”

Attaboy- none of this turn the other cheek malarkey. And with a good understanding of the 11^th commandment “Thou Shalt Not Get Caught.”

Moses gets in another fight, the wee hothead and his opponent says “You're not the boss of me”

Verse 14 “And he said, Who made thee a prince and judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian? And Moses feared and said Surely this thing is known.”

Yep. Pharaoh wants his guts for garters so he legs it to Midian. He helps out at a well and is rewarded with some shepherd's daughter Ziporah. And Moses decides to start citing Robert Heinlein novels

Verse 22 “... for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”

Verse 23 “And it came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried., and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage.”

And I am restraining myself from sub/dom gags....

Verse 24 “And God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”

WTF? God forgets? GTD, God, GTD...

Verse 25 “And God looked upon the chldren of Israel, and God had respect unto them.”