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The close connection between Genesis and Exodus. The Babel narrative and the opening of Exodus are tightly connected. The story of Babel informs much of how Exodus opens and sets up some strong connections between the two. The key literary bridge between Babel and Exodus 1 has to do with the twin phrases “come, let us … lest …” and “baking bricks” (literally, “bricking bricks”). In Genesis, the people of Babel post-Flood say to themselves, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city and a tower and its head in the heavens and let us make for ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth.” This bit of speech comes after the people say to themselves “Come, let us brick bricks and burningly burn them.”
The author of Genesis highlights both the invention of brick and city making (Gen. 11:1–3) and the impulse of gathered humanity to build a city, tower, and name for themselves in direct opposition of the creation mandate. The narrative of Babel introduces brickmaking as part of humanity’s attempt to set itself up over against the creator-God they abandoned. The city and tower are tools to “make a name” for themselves, and as a result set themselves up as masters of their own lives and destinies. It’s a declaration of pride and autonomy.
So when the author of Exodus puts the same words into the mouth of the Pharaoh-who-did-not-know-Joseph. The new Pharaoh looks out over the growing population of Hebrews and says something that’s eerily similar to the words of Babel. He says, “Come, let us be wise toward the Hebrews, lest they grow great, and it happens that we come to battle and they join even our enemies and fight against us.” Pharaoh and the people wanted to prevent the uprising of the Hebrews and chose to enslave them.
Exodus 1:14 points out that, as part of their labor, the Hebrews were to make bricks. The author of Exodus wants us to connect both of these stories together as a way of foreshadowing what’s to come. The “come/lest” attempt of Babel failed miserably when Yahweh intervened. So here we begin to wonder if this new “come/lest” attempt of Pharaoh will share the same fate.
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The significance of Yahweh’s self-revelation to Moses on Horeb. I find the wordplays at work in the original Hebrew throughout the Horeb vignette fascinating, and I think they do a lot of heavy lifting in shaping the narrative it a way that’s literally lost in translation to English.
For instance, throughout the narrative the mountain is called “the mountain of the God.” Consistently, the Hebrew article precedes the world elohim throughout the narrative. There’s a sense in which the people knew the mountain was inhabited by a deity but didn’t know which one. I find Carl Ehrlich’s work on the Deir ʿAlla inscription particularly insightful on this account. He discusses the inscription’s portrayal of Balaam trying to stop the overthrow of the Canaanite god El by the local “Shadday” gods. The Shadday-gods were isolated deities that lived on mountains and threatened to turn the whole world to darkness in an attempt to overthrow El (cf. Carl Ehrlich, “Balaam the Seer: From the Bible to the Deir ʿalla Inscription,” TheTorah.com, 2018. https://www.thetorah.com/article/balaam-the-seer-from-the-bible-to-the-deir-alla-inscription).
Consequently, Exodus presents the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a deity living on a mountain in the wilderness set to overthrow the deities of Egypt, including casting the whole of the land into darkness. Furthermore, as Ehrlich elucidates, God’s chosen name for himself when talking to Abraham was El-Shaddai. English translations render it “God Almighty,” but the lexical force of the Hebrew—particular in light of the Deir ʿAlla stella—would lead us to translate it “God of the wilderness mountain.” Taken together, these observations lead us to see Abraham’s family God as actually having a home—Horeb. Having delivered the family of promise to Egypt safely, he retreated to his home until Moses stumbled upon it.
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On “I will be what I will be” as a better rendering of the Hebrew. For an excellent explanation of the divine name in Exodus 3, see Block, Covenant, 140. See also Robert Alter’s note on this passage in his translation of the Hebrew Bible. Further, I argue that rendering ehyeh asher ehyeh as “I will be what I will be” preserves a critical literary parallel with Moses’s question in Exodus 3:11: “And Moses said to the God, ‘Who am I that you would send me to Pharaoh?’” Yahweh’s response at this point is simply, “I will be with you.” Or “Ehyeh imkha.” The answer to both Moses’s question of his own identity and the identity of the God-on-the-mountain is the same: “I will be.”
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The defiance of Pharaoh and Yahweh’s demonstration of his power. One of the points of discussion that often comes up in the plague narratives is the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart. In Exodus 4:21, Yahweh promises he will “harden Pharaoh’s heart.” In this particular instance, the word we translate “hardened” more commonly means “strengthened.” The same phrase appears in Joshua 11:20 to mean the steeling of soldiers’ hearts for battle, but it is most concentrated in Exodus 4–14.
The idea in Exodus is that Yahweh intends to firm up Pharaoh’s heart to continue the contest should Pharaoh begin to flag. Yahweh intends to go all ten rounds, as it were, and should Pharaoh start to soften, Yahweh will prop him up on the ropes to keep going. Pharaoh’s hard heart, then, isn’t the obstinance of a rebellious child, but the proud defiance of a warrior bringing all of the famed wisdom and might of Egypt to bear against this unproven God who wandered in from the wilderness. It has far less to do with hardening Pharaoh against repentance in the way we might think in light of the New Testament gospel, but more making it a fair fight where Pharaoh and his people get to see the fullness of Yahweh’s strength on display.
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The nature of the third commandment and taking God’s name. For an excellent treatment not only of the literary nature of the third commandment but also its implications for believers still today, see Carmen Imes, Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019). Imes does a fantastic job of laying out both the cultural and literary considerations for what “bearing God’s name” looks like not just in the ten commandments but also in the life of Israel.
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The importance of allowing Yahweh to change his mind when confronted by Moses. Reading the text as if Yahweh is playacting for the benefit of Moses completely robs it of any force it has in setting both the character of Yahweh as a person and the utter depravity the Israelites are capable of. Yahweh’s rage must be his genuine reaction in the narrative for any of it to make sense in context or to even work as a revelatory method. As soon as we take God’s anger and his change of heart away from him in the name of harmony-with-our-theology, we castrate the text and deprive it of all force. The common framing of the whole exchange between Yahweh and Moses as a kind of test, where Yahweh knows already he’ll choose mercy but wants to see if Moses has learned anything about his character, plays nicely with our sterile theology, but it murders the narrative.