The Conflict behind the Exodus: Forget about the Egyptians

The book of Exodus is an epic. It qualifies as an epic because it is a very old oral tradition that speaks of a foundational myth, with heroes, foes, war, destiny and divine intervention; especially the first 15 chapters, the famous chapters that tell how Moses escapes Egypt, was spoken by God in the desert, and returns to free the Hebrews. He becomes a sibylline that foretells catastrophes to fall on the Kingdom of Egypt, while the Pharaoh stubbornly denies freedom to the Hebrews, but eventually they break free. Everyone knows the story.

Among the ancient epics, it is a remarkable tale. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and so forth, the main characters are mortal men and women, helped and burdened by divine beings. But in the Exodus, if we pay close attention, we discover that the main character is God and not a particular man. He is the hero who acts through Moses, His messenger. Moses is, in contemporary film culture, the Lord's avatar. And this we can legitimately say because, with a few exceptions, Moses never speaks his mind to anyone, but only to God, and when he is addressing anyone else, he is speaking the literal words that God spoke to him, so that his words are not his but the Lord's. And all the calamities that he foretells are not made by him but by God. Even the stubbornness of the Pharaoh is determined by the Lord's will, so that the story's evil force also springs from the Lord. The only thing that appears to be out of God's grasp is the faith of the Hebrews, the people He is trying to convince by all these spectacular signs.

The Exodus, as any other epic tale, tells us a lot about the people to which it belongs. The first remarkable feature is its theocratic nature. Whereas the Sumerian, Hellenic and Latin epics are centered on human beings aided by gods, the Hebrew story is how God is being assisted by a man. The former are humanists, because they center in the human hero's struggles against nature, and the deities around him are other aspects of his humanity and of nature (call them metaphors, if you wish). On the contrary, the Exodus is theocratic, because it centers on the history of how God convinces the Hebrews of his supreme nature. At first glance it appears to be the story of the Hebrew people against the Egyptians, led by Moses who is helped by the Lord, in a similar way as the Iliad is the story of the Achaeans against the Trojans, led by Achilles who is helped by Athena (broadly speaking). The problem is that Moses is no Achilles, and God is no Athena. Moses is an old man who cannot do anything by himself, not even having rhetorical skills he is aided by his brother Aaron, while Achilles is young, handsome, and the strongest of men. Contrariwise God can do anything, including manipulating the enemies emotions and decisions, whereas Athena is just one among a multiplicity of deities struggling between themselves to move their particular agendas with more or less success. In the Hellenic poem the gods are more like humans, and the heroes are demigods breeded with them. But in the Hebrew book humans are truly humans, and the Lord is truly a god. This is where the Hebrews break completely with all the peoples around them.

Even though it appears that the story of the Exodus is the tale between the struggle of Hebrews against Egyptians, when we realize that the Egyptians, and their king, are nothing more than tools in the Lord's plan, we come to understand that that conflict is set above a deeper dialectic. If God is already determining all the actions of the Egyptians, depriving them of free will, then the conflict is only apparent. God manipulates them in order to humiliate and destroy them, without them being able to fight back, not to speak of the inexistence of their gods. So, what is the true conflict in the Exodus? Let us explore Moses' role, and see if it guides us to solve this question.

Most of the tale consists in the Lord speaking to Moses, and actually telling him what is going to happen, because it is in God's will what is finally going to happen. In a way, God is the narrator of most of the story, because He is telling ahead what eventually happens (in narrative theory, something called prolepsis, commonly referred to as flash-forward), and Moses just goes out and foretells it. First, it means that Moses is a very successful augur. Second, because the Lord is just revealing to him what He is going to do, Moses and the Hebrews, as opposed to Pharaoh and Egypt, are only spectators of God's unfolding power. They are not doing anything; actions against the Egyptians are never taken by them, so they are not actors in this play. What is the play? God, the main character, destroying the Egyptians. This play (Hebrews watching God) is what seems to be played in the Exodus, because in the end the true spectator is the reader of the book, not the Hebrews. The conflict with the Egyptians is a play being watched by the Hebrews, where the Hebrews' narrator is Moses, and Moses' narrator is the Lord, the ultimate narrator. This passive relation between Egyptians and Hebrews is being beholden by the reader, the ultimate beholder. The true question to the ultimate beholder, that is "we", is: what is the play we are truly reading? God reveals it to us when he speaks to Moses as follow:

"Go in to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them, and that you may tell in the hearing of your son and of your son's son how I have made sport of the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them; that you may know that I am the Lord" (Exodus: 10: 1-2).

We should understand now what is the conflict at hand. The Egyptians are only there so that the Lord can make sport of them. They are not free actors. They can't fight back. And the Lord is doing this because he wants to show Himself to the Hebrews. Moses is the messenger in this showing, so that the Hebrews recognize that He is who He is. During the rest of the Exodus, the Hebrews are constantly questioning Moses, and God has to come all over to help him with all these miracles. The Hebrews believe for a time, and again they become skeptic, so God has to show Himself again, and Moses has to explain it to them. The only free actors are the Hebrews, who have the choice of not believing, and God is acting through Moses so that they may believe, by knowing who He is. The true conflict of the Exodus is the dialectic of faith and disbelief, whereas the calamities falling upon Egypt is just God literally showing off, so that the Hebrews may know His power, and believe. In sooth the Lord cannot make them believe out of His own will. He is convincing them.

Without human free will, this convincing action would be spurious, a mere act of appearances by God. So He gave them free will so that they may decide for themselves whether to believe or not. The rest of the story is simply destiny, and free will plays no role, so that there is no conflict. The Egyptians are destined to be obdurate so that they may be destroyed, and in this act, God shows Himself. The Hebrews are destined to escape and find their promised land in Canaan, but this destiny is only fulfilled when they truly believe, and as they decide to believe, they take one more step. In few words, if they don't believe, they perish. The fulfilling of their destiny requires their faith. In this way destiny and free will are linked, because the Lord makes them fulfill their predetermined end with the condition of deciding to believe in Him. This is the moral and theological teaching I find behind the book of Exodus.

Of course, there is a historical and anthropological background to it. I.e. that there is a historical migration of a people of Semitic origin from the Nile Delta to the western shores of the Dead Sea and the Jordan river, carrying with them a novel religion: monotheism. And that all the calamities occurring in Egypt must date to a time of troubles, like a crisis of central authority, maybe civil war, maybe the actual rebellion of the Hebrews, who in the very beginning of the book are increasing in population and it becomes a policy problem for the Egyptian central administration (an immigration problem, if you wish). Now the origin of the Hebrews' religious belief is still the topic of a long historiographical debate that I decide to ignore. Why? Because if we believe in God, then it is perfectly logical to think that Moses' role as a prophet is perfectly possible, and any scientificist doubt is cast as spurious.

However, the Exodus, and Moses as an epic character, tells us a lot of the Hebrew people, and of the very first origin of Christianity. First, political power and greatness is irrelevant to the sight of God, who can do anything. Second, the true hero is an augur with personal contact with God, and not a warrior, so that the ethos of this people is based on religious faith and not physical qualities. Third, the people concerned is not a warrior nor conqueror one, but a prophetic people, and their triumph over the rest of their neighbors rests on their faith and not on their might, because God's might makes war for them. (There is a warrior aspect of the Hebrews in the Deuteronomy and, of course, in Kings. But lets stay with the Exodus). Finally, lacking in any warlike virtues, the Hebrews believed in a God that redeemed them of this historically fatal weakness, and this belief has been the spring of the world's two major religions, whereas the religions of mighty warrior, the Sumerian Gilgamesh, the Hellenic Iliad, the Latin Aeneid, the Aztec Aztlan Myth, become mythological and epic literature.

In the end, in history, faith ultimately triumphs over physical and material qualities, and the knowledge on them. The Jews are still there, where the Egyptians, Philistines, Babylonians, Romans, etc. disappeared. Our nations and empires and economies rise and fall, where Christianity and Islam will endure for a lot more.