Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Introduction
1. Days of darkness (1:1 – 2:10)
2. The turning point (2:11–25)
3. Old Moses . . . new Moses (3:1–10)
4. A sneak preview (3:11 – 7:7)
5. The God who is sufficient (3:11–22)
6. The God who is able (4:1–31)
7. Interlude: into the arena (4:14–28)
8. Yes . . . No . . . Why? . . . Now (4:29 – 7:7)
9. Viewpoint (7:8 – 13:16)
10. Why the plagues? (7:14 – 10:29)
11. Why the Passover? (11:1 – 12:42)
12. Remember and respond (12:14 – 13:16)
13. The next stage: the companionate God
14. God’s curious ways (13:17 – 17:16)
15. Where we’ve reached and where we’re going (19:1–2)
16. To meet with God (19:3–25)
17. The ten words (20:1–20)
18. The Lord means his Law and loves his people (20:22 – 24:11)
19. The Lord’s tent (24:12 – 27:19)
20. The way into the Holiest (27:20 – 30:10)
21. Practicalities (30:11 – 31:18)
22. A dreadful step back, a huge step forward (32:1 – 34:35)
23. The glory cloud (35 – 40)

This book began its life in 1974 when the Keswick Convention invited me to prepare the morning Bible expositions – with an additional request for something from the Old Testament – and I elected to undertake Exodus. The work alerted me all over again to the richness and importance of the book, and the attempt to compress forty chapters into four hours got me interested in its structure. ...

My first request is that this book be read with an open Bible alongside, for the best benefits will be reaped by patient reading which takes time to look up cross-references. Where the structure of a section or passage is given in diagram form, please work through it, point by point, before going on to read what is written about it. Reference must be made here to the number of footnotes attached to this study of Exodus. Not everything important to the understanding of Exodus can be accommodated in an expository treatment, where the emphasis is on the emerging message, and so the footnotes are offered in the hope that they will give students and preachers access to this additional material. From time to time the footnotes threatened to ‘swamp’ the page! In these cases they have been moved to become additional notes attached to the chapter in question.

Cassuto says about his extensive commentary that, ‘we shall not cite the various interpretations (but) content ourselves with expounding the simple meaning of the text in the manner we deem correct’. This is the case here too, indeed it has to be so, for neither ability nor space would permit a comprehensive review and critique of what all the commentaries say. I have chosen, for example, not to give any sort of extensive introduction to the documentary analysis of the Pentateuch and Exodus into the famous J, E, D and P strands. It would, however, be an absurd ‘head-in-the-sand’ attitude to ignore totally an understanding of Exodus that has been so hugely influential. For myself, I have to confess that the documentary theory has never commanded my adherence or seemed to me the most helpful or natural way of approach. I plead for the tolerance of those who think otherwise. I have occasionally offered extra comments in the notes where it seems that this method particularly lacks coherence, evidence or persuasiveness.

Other commentaries will have to be consulted on this and many other questions, and I have provided a list of books I have used, which taken as a whole will be found reasonably comprehensive. The concern of this book, as of the whole Bible Speaks Today series, is ‘The Message of Exodus’, what it testifies of the Bible’s God, in what ways it points to the Lord Jesus Christ and heralds him in advance, and how it bears, within the unity of the Bible, on the nature and life of the people of God, their redemption, obedience, security and inheritance.

Now that this particular bout of study on Exodus is finished, I shall miss it greatly: the sheer joy of engaging with its message; its frequently stately, sometimes earthy and businesslike, and always beautiful Hebrew; and its uplifting revelation of the Lord God in his power and patience, tenderness and redemption, and in his inflexible insistence on honouring his word and keeping his promises. In their history as recorded here, our early brothers, sisters and parents in the Israel of God found him in turn to be their covenant-keeping Redeemer in slavery, the Angel of the Lord, their divine companion in pilgrimage, and the Holy One indwelling their camp and sharing their lot. He is still unchangeably the same.
Alec Motyer

1:1 –2:10
1. Days of darkness extract

The title of this chapter comes from an old hymn, ‘I will sing the wondrous story’ by F. H. Rawley. It is a hymn of great realism, spiritual and circumstantial, and its words, even if slightly antique for today’s taste, catch exactly the national and personal plight of the Israelites in Egypt:

Days of darkness still come o’er me;
Sorrow’s path I oft may tread

So indeed it was! After its fashion, the Bible narrative does not itemize the dark sufferings the people endured. We are never told all we might want to know, but only what we need to know, and the narrator apparently considered that the words slave masters . . . oppressed them with forced labour . . . worked them ruthlessly (1:11–13) were quite enough to sketch in the picture. Beyond that public oppression, however, lay agonizing depths of private and domestic grief (1:22). ‘Darkness’ and ‘sorrow’ unbounded!

1. The people of God and their inscrutable God

And these were the people of God. That is the point where the mystery deepens. Exodus takes the trouble to assure us of the family tree of these sufferers (1:1–3). Their ancestry to Jacob and doubtless the story of Genesis 46:1–4 had been told down the generations: they were where they were by divine command, under divine promise, awaiting divine intervention. Of these things, however, they saw no outward sign. Heaven above was as silent as earth around was threatening. And before we allow the thought to arise that all this happened long ago, we need to ask why Paul thought it necessary to teach the disciples of Lystra, Iconium and Antioch that ‘We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God’ (Acts 14:22), or why Peter addressed the church as ‘God’s elect, strangers in the world’ (1 Pet. 1:1). Experience without explanation, adversity without purpose, hostility without protection – that is how life will always appear for the earthly people of God.

2. Living in the shadows

What a tale of suffering these verses actually tell. ‘Days of darkness . . . Sorrow’s path’ indeed for our ancestors in Egypt! There was general hardship as slave masters were put over them to oppress them (11). The word oppress means ‘to bring them low’, ‘to beat down’. The tale continues in verses 13 and 14: the Egyptians made Israel into slaves and used them ruthlessly. This is an unusual word which is used only five times in the Bible and signifies the imposition of general hardship and ruthlessness of behaviour.

In addition to all this there came a further frightful and cutting hardship: the murder of the children. Pharaoh told the Hebrew midwives that ‘When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth . . .if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl let her live. The NIV translation differs from the Hebrew original by replacing ‘son’ and ‘daughter’ with ‘boy’ and ‘girl’. Parents discover this distinction when they have a baby. Immediately after the birth there comes the moving and tender element of relationship when the baby becomes so much more than just a boy or a girl, it is a son or a daughter. So, it was not just boys and girls who were being killed or kept alive, it was sons and daughters, and we get a glimpse of the personal anguish this caused.

The weight of opposition ranged against the people of God was enormous. Pharaoh wanted to bring about a genocide, and therefore he did the logical thing by trying to kill all the male babies. When this failed he mobilized the whole force of the land of Egypt against the Hebrews (22). Pharaoh at the top, his people living cheek by jowl with the people of God, who were spread throughout the land, and finally the river-god itself. All the power of Egypt, all the power of the enemy – royal, popular, supernatural. Days of darkness indeed!

3. Help arising from unexpected places

Ranged against the might of Pharaoh and his slave masters was a series of seemingly insignificant women.4 First of all, there were the two midwives, Shiprah and Puah, whose names have gone down in Scripture because of their heroic faith.5 Then there was the resolute Jochebed, Moses’ mother, who loved her baby, the third of her children. She seems also to have recognized something special about him, which made it even more unbearable to think of throwing him into the river, or allowing anybody else to do it (2:2). So, at what terrifying risk to herself we are not told, she hid the little one and, when necessity drove, obeyed the letter but not the spirit of Pharaoh’s edict. She did actually commit her child into the devouring mouth of the river-god, the Nile, but only to find that there was, on her side, a power over all the power of the enemy (cf. Luke 10:19; 1 John 4:4).

Then there was Miriam, that resourceful girl! Imagine noticing so acutely how Pharaoh’s daughter’s face changed when she looked at the baby, and realizing so intuitively that behind the royal countenance there was a compassionate heart – and then to have the audacity to bring the baby’s mother into the equation as his nurse. What a turnaround! Far from this Hebrew baby being killed by the will of the royal house, his rescuer emerged from the royal house, and his own mother was actually paid to bring him up as a prince of Egypt! Finally, there was Pharaoh’s daughter herself, who was much more than a ‘minor miracle’. Out of the core of the genocidal royal family came this precious person, a tender-hearted princess. Her father could, apparently without pity, consign ‘sons’ to the Nile and ‘daughters’ to slavery, but his own daughter had not inherited his personality. She had a maternal heart, eyes easily moved to tears, feeling for the feelings of others, and Moses, as we shall discover, grew up to be like his adoptive mother, a tender-hearted, compassionate man. ...