Joel S. Baden - The Book of Exodus: A Biography

LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

The Book of Exodus

LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

The Book of Exodus, Joel S. Baden

The Book of Revelation, Timothy Beal

The Dead Sea Scrolls, John J. Collins

The Bhagavad Gita, Richard H. Davis

John Calvins Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bruce Gordon

The Book of Mormon, Paul C. Gutjahr

The Book of Genesis, Ronald Hendel

The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs

The Book of Job, Mark Larrimore

The Koran in English, Bruce B. Lawrence

The Lotus Stra, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

C. S. Lewiss Mere Christianity, George M. Marsden

Dietrich Bonhoeffers Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty

Thomas Aquinass Summa theologiae, Bernard McGinn

The I Ching, Richard J. Smith

The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, David Gordon White

Augustines Confessions, Garry Wills

The Talmud, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

FORTHCOMING

The Analects of Confucius, Annping Chin and Jonathan D. Spence

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Carlos Eire

Josephuss The Jewish War, Martin Goodman

Dantes Divine Comedy, Joseph Luzzi

The Greatest Translations of All Time, Jack Miles

The Letters of Paul, Margaret M. Mitchell

The Passover Haggadah, Vanessa Ochs

The Song of Songs, Ilana Pardes

The Daode Jing, James Robson

Rumis Masnavi, Omid Safi

The Book of Exodus

A BIOGRAPHY

Joel S. Baden

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957588

ISBN 978-0-691-16954-5

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel, Thalia Leaf

Production Editorial: Terri OPrey

Text Design: Lorraine Doneker

Jacket/Cover Design: Lorraine Doneker

Jacket Art: Jacob Lawrence, The Migrants Arrived in Great Numbers,
1940. 2018 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation,
Seattle /Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Tayler Lord, Kathyrn Stevens

Copyeditor: Cathryn Slovensky

This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my grandmother, Beatrice Gitlin,

who celebrates her ninety-eighth Passover this year

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book such as this, which ranges far from my native scholarly field, is necessarily made possible only with the support of friends and colleagues. I am grateful to all those who took the time to read portions of the manuscript, saving me from any number of errors and oversights. These include Harry Attridge, Andrew McGowan, Marc Brettler, Bruce Gordon, and Benjamin Valentin.

I am also deeply indebted to my graduate student assistants, without whom the project could not have been either started or completed: Laura Carlson, Harley Roberts, and James Nati.

Candida Moss is, as always, my constant intellectual companion, for which I am always thankful.

My daughters, Zara and Iris, are the ever-brilliant lights of my life, for whom I do all things.

This book is dedicated to my grandmother, who still sings the Four Questions in Yiddish at every Passoverproof of the enduring and ever-adaptive nature of the Exodus, and, at ninety-eight, of her own endurance as well.

INTRODUCTION

The book of Exodus is the second book of the Hebrew Bible, but it may rank first in lasting cultural importance. It is in Exodus that the classic biblical themes of oppression and redemption, of human enslavement and divine salvation, are most dramatically and famously expressed. Many of the Bibles most famous characters and episodes are found here: Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, the burning bush, the ten plagues, the Passover, the crossing of the sea, the revelation and law-giving on Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the golden calf. The story of suffering, escape, and journey through the wilderness toward the promised land was the defining narrative for ancient Israel and has maintained a central position in Western culture ever since. This book will trace that story through some of its most prominent and fascinating permutations, showing how Exodus has been adopted and adapted in numerous and often unexpected ways across space and time.

Before we begin, one important clarification is necessary. A distinction must be made between the biblical book of Exodusthe text that comes between Genesis and Leviticus and constitutes one-fifth of the canonical Pentateuch or Torahand the Exodus story. The biblical book is but one, relatively late, stage in the development of the Exodus story. As the first chapter below will argue, what we call the book of Exodus is a somewhat artificial delineation of material within the Pentateuch, one that comprises much, but not all, of the material that we commonly associate with the overarching narrative of the Exodus. Moreover, the biblical book, while containing the central core of the Exodus story, is among the most variegated in the Bible. It also includes poems, law codes, architectural plans, and rituals. Each of these has had its own interpretive trajectoryespecially the extensive description of the tabernacle, which occupies nearly a quarter of the biblical text of Exodus and provides the foundation for, among other things, the traditional Jewish definition of what constitutes forbidden work on the Sabbath. Similarly, many of the individual episodes and characters within the story could be the subjects of their own biographies. This book cannot contain such multitudes. And, as interesting as they are, these various elements are all overshadowed in the history of interpretation by the grand narrative in which they are set.

That grand narrativethe movement from Egypt to Canaan, from oppression to freedomextends beyond the borders of the biblical book to which it lent its name. Its themes appear outside of the book of Exodus, indeed outside of the Pentateuch altogether, and often in forms that predate the composition of the pentateuchal text. Just as the traditional nativity story performed and displayed every Christmas season is not derived from a single New Testament gospel but is a distillation, combination, and expansion of an underlying narrative, so too references to the Exodus story do not tend to reflect the exact contours of the biblical book of Exodus. For millennia, the Exodus has been understood as an event, a tradition, a cultural memory, and a metaphor. The biblical book is itself but one literary version of the Exodus. Though it may be authoritative for some, it is neither the first nor the last word.

It is not the book of Exodus but the Exodus story that has captured the imagination of audiences and interpreters from the biblical period to the present. It is the Exodus story that this volume will be primarily concerned withthough never forgetting that it is the manifestation of the story in the biblical book that is most famous and most influential. In the following pages, we will consider the ways in which individuals and groups, in the thousands of years since the story coalesced into the form we now know, have appropriated this story to be their story, have cast themselves or others into the biblical roles, and have used the themes of this story for their various ends.