Elaine Phillips - Commentary on Exodus: From The Baker Illustrated Bible Commentary

Elaine Phillips

Introduction

The book of Exodus reports the most dramatic events in the Hebrew Bible. After the Israelites spent 430 years in Egypt (Exod. 12:40) God delivered his people from oppression, brought them into the bonds of covenant relationship at Mount Sinai, and established his sanctuary in their midst. The exodus was a foreshadowing of the deliverance from the bondage of sin accomplished by the atoning death of Jesus Christ as the Passover lamb (1 Cor. 5:7; 1 Pet. 1:1819).

Title

The Hebrew title of the book, Shemot (names), is based on the first key word of the text. It refers to the names of the children of Israel who went down to Egypt, and it establishes continuity, in spite of the centuries of intervening silence, with the events that closed Genesis. The English title, Exodus, comes from the Greek Septuagint title and addresses the theme of the first part of the book.

Date and Historicity

The historicity of the exodus has prompted extensive scholarly debate, accessible in standard texts on the history of Israel. The following commentary is written from the perspective that the exodus was a historical event during which the Israelites were freed from their bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt. That there is no mention of the event in the Egyptian sources is not surprising; temple inscriptions were designed as positive propaganda, reminding the deity that the pharaoh had ruled well. The devastation of the country and the stunning defeat of the Egyptian army demonstrated the opposite. In addition, written words were viewed as magically powerful; an event might repeatedly recur if committed to writing. The reverse was also true; if something was not written down, it was as if it had never happened. Finally, the mud flats of the delta regions are far from ideal for preserving buildings, let alone documents. From the perspective of Israelite historiography, it is unlikely that later writers would concoct such a humiliating narrative if it were not true.

There are two positions regarding the date of the exodus, each having significant supporting data as well as unanswered questions. The early date, primarily based on 1 Kings 6:1, is 1446 BC, placing the exodus during the eighteenth dynasty. According to Exodus 2:23 the ruling pharaoh died shortly before the exodus. In fact, the eighteenth dynastys Thutmose III died circa 1450 BC. If the exodus occurred in 1446 BC, Amenhotep II (14501426) was pharaoh at the time. Thutmose IIIs immediate predecessor was Hatshepsut, a formidable woman who was both the wife and half sister of Thutmose II. She coreigned with Thutmose III for a period of time and exercised considerable power in Egypt. Hatshepsuts character could fit the biblical picture of the daughter of Pharaoh who rescued Moses. Akhnaton (Amenhotep IV), a late eighteenth-dynasty pharaoh, briefly championed a form of monotheistic worship of the sun. If the effects of Gods miraculous work on behalf of Israel had an impact in Egypt as it had on the nations around (Exod. 18:1; Josh. 2:10; 1 Sam. 4:8), perhaps the brief turn away from polytheism was one of them.