EXODUS

Martin Noth
EXODUS
This is the first full-length
commentary in English since 1918.
Dr Noth detects behind the Book
of Exodus the cultic professions
of faith in which the mighty deeds
of God in their early history were
celebrated by the people of Israel.
The deliverance from Egypt and
the making of the covenant on
Sinai were remembered with special
fervour as the foundation events
of the whole Old Testament
religion. Subsidiary themes in
the tradition were the events
behind the Passover sacrifice; the
prophetic achievement of Moses;
and the binding together of the
tribes during the wanderings in
the wilderness. With this wealth of
material in the oral tradition,
it is no wonder that this part
of the great literary work of the
Pentateuch is of such importance
for students of Jewish and
Christian origins.

Translated by John Bowden from

the commentary in Das Alte Testament
Deutsch. Dr Noth is a Professor
in the University of Bonn and is
author of The History of Israel
(A. and C. Black)

Second impression
40s net
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/exoduscommentaryO000mart
MARTIN NOTH
EXODUS
 THE OLD TESTAMENT LIBRARY

General Editors

G. Ernest Wricut, The Divinity School, Harvard University

Joun Bricut, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia
James Barr, University of Manchester
Prtrer Ackroyp, University of London
 MARTIN NOTH

EXODUS
A Commentary

SCM PRESS LTD

BLOOMSBURY STREET LONDON
Translated by J. S. Bowden from the German
Das zweite Buch Mose, Exodus
(Das Alte ‘Testament Deutsch 5)
published 1959 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
Gottingen

FIRST PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH 1962

SECOND IMPRESSION 1966
© sCM PRESS LTD 1962
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
w. & J. MACKAY & CO LTD, CHATHAM, KENT
 CONTENTS
Translator’s Note 7

I. Introduction
1. The contents of the book 9
2. The literary composition of the book 12
3. The final form of the book 18

II. The Exodus from Egypt

1. The beginnings of Egyptian oppression: 1.1-22 19
2. The birth of Moses: 2.1-10 24.
3. Moses in Midian: 2.11-4.23 27
4. The return of Moses and his first meeting with Pharaoh: 4.24-6.1 48
5. Another call of Moses: 6.2—7.7 56
6. Divine signs and wonders before the stubborn Pharaoh: 7.8-10.29 62
7. Passover night and the Exodus: 11.1-13.16 84
8. The miracle at the sea: 13.17-14.31 102
g. Thanksgiving for deliverance: 15.1-21 120

III. The Beginning of Israel’s Life in the Wilderness

1. The first stopping-places: 15.22-27 127
2. Quails and manna: 16.1-36 129
3. Water from the rock: 17.1-7 137
4. The victory over the Amalekites: 17.8-16 140
5. The meeting with the priest of Midian: 18.1-27 144

IV. The Making of the Covenant on Sinai and the First Divine
Ordinances
1. The theophany on Sinai with the Decalogue: 19.1-20.21 151
2. The Book of the Covenant: 20.22—23.33 169
3. The making of the covenant: 24.1-I1 194.
4. The instructions given on the mountain for the establishment of the
cult: 24.12-31.17 199
(a) Introduction: 24.12-25.9 199
(6) Instructions for making the ark: 25.10-22 202
(c) Instructions for making the table: 25.23-30 205
(d) Instructions for making the lampstand: 25.31—40 206
(e) Instructions for making the ‘tabernacle’: 26.1-37 209
5
 CONTENTS

(f) Instructions for making the altar and the court: 27.1-21 214
(g) Instructions for making the priestly garments: 28.1-43 217
(A) Instructions for the installation of the priests: 29.1-46 227
(i) Instructions for making the altar of incense: 30.1-10 234
(k) Instructions for levying a poll-tax: 30.11-16 235
(/) Instructions for making a laver: 30.17—21 236
(m) Instructions for making the holy anointing oil: 30.22—33 237
n) Instructions for making the incense: 30.34—38 238
0) The appointment of the craftsmen: 31.1-11 239
fp) Instructions for keeping the sabbath: 31.12-17 240
5. Apostasy and another covenant: 31.18-34.35
(a) The apostasy of the golden calf: 31.18-32.35 241
(6) The presence of Yahweh with his people: 33.1-23 252
(c) Another covenant: 34.1-35 258
6. The instructions are carried out: 35.1-39.43 268
7. The furnishing of the sanctuary: 40.1-38 281
 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Te ORIGINAL COMMENTARY was based on the author’s

own translation of Exodus. This English edition prints the
Revised Standard Version, with italic type to distinguish JE
from P and square brackets enclosing material which Professor
Noth regards as secondary. Where differences between his text and
the RSV are such as to affect the commentary, this has been indi-
cated in the notes.
 INTRODUCTION

1. THE CONTENTS OF THE BOOK

I: THE EXTANT manuscripts of the Greek translation of the Old

Testament, the so-called Septuagint, the ‘Second Book of Moses’
has been given the title “Departure (from Egypt)’ = exodos
(Aigyptou), and accordingly it has been called Liber Exodi in the Latin
Vulgate. This title indicates an important part of the contents, the
historical events narrated in the first part of the book. It is customary
to refer to the book as ‘Exodus’, whereas in the original Hebrew it is
described by the first words of the text (wélleh ‘«mdét) ‘(These are) the
names’, following a usage widespread in the ancient East.
The book comprises only a limited extract from a larger whole, the
complex of the ‘Five Books of Moses’, the so-called Pentateuch.*
It begins at a very clear and very important turning point in the
Pentateuchal narrative. In the first book, Genesis, the patriarchal
history has been told up to its conclusion; the second book, Exodus,
presupposes the existence of a people Israel in Egypt. Whereas
Genesis is concerned with distinct individual figures, from the begin-
ning of Exodus onwards the subject is Israel as a collective entity. It
is true that the names of the ‘sons of Israel’ (= sons of Jacob) are
related once again in Ex. 1.1 ff. to form a link with the patriarchal
history that has gone before, but neither these individual names nor,
as a rule, the individual tribes play any further part in subsequent
events—Israel is treated as a whole. There is, moreover, a con-
siderable lapse of time between the end of Genesis and the beginning
of Exodus over which the narrative passes almost imperceptibly, the
whole period of the sojourn of Israel in Egypt, which according to the
*On this see G. von Rad, Genesis, ET 1961, pp. 13 ff.
°
ide) INTRODUCTION

late tradition of Ex. 12.41 was of considerable length. Of this the

Old Testament tradition has no more to tell us. Here we have the
largest gap in time which is indicated by the Pentateuchal narrative
in the form in which it has been transmitted. It was therefore quite
appropriate for a new book to begin at just this point when, at a time
unknown to us, the great literary work of the Pentateuch was first
divided into five books or rather was apportioned between five
separate rolls. The ending of the book is a different matter; here the
continuity of a coherent narrative is interrupted quite abruptly. The
theme of the instructions received by Moses on Sinai and of the way
in which they are carried out is by no means exhausted at the end of
the book; it continues through the whole of the third book, Leviticus,
and into the beginning of the fourth book, Numbers. The practical
aspects of a division into five approximately equal parts caused the
interruption of the continuity at this point and only by later additions
was the last chapter of Exodus made to look like some sort of a
conclusion.
It therefore follows that Exodus must be understood as part of a
larger whole. In view of what has been said, this is true not only of its
relationship to the following ‘books’ but also—in spite of the break
which is caused by the transition from one theme to another—of its
relationship to Genesis. For the whole complex of the Pentateuchal
tradition already had the essential elements of its structure at the
stage of oral tradition before it began to be fixed in writing, a develop-
ment whose results we have today in the ‘Five Books of Moses’. This
tradition was enshrined in cultic confessions of faith through which on
certain occasions the mighty acts of God in the prehistory and early
history of Israel were celebrated.* These confessions were rooted in
particular circumstances in which the action of God had been made
manifest, circumstances which are still clearly recognizable as
distinctive themes even in the narrative form of the whole as we have
it in the transmitted text.
The Book of Exodus deals with the central events of the Penta-
teuchal tradition. The first part of the book describes the Exodus
from Egypt. It was always a fundamental expression of Israelite
faith that “Yahweh brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt’. In
this event Yahweh had by a decisive act demonstrated for Israel that
he was at work in history and at the same time quite clearly took
Israel to himself. The climax of the divine action in these happenings
*For details see von Rad, loc. cit.
 THE CONTENTS OF THE BOOK II

comes in the miraculous rescue at ‘the sea’,* and wherever the Exo-
dus from Egypt is discussed the first thought is always of the wonder
at the sea. Even the narrative form, existing as it does now in a
number of variants, builds up to this peak, although it first deals in
considerable detail with the subject of the plagues and the repeated
negotiations with Pharaoh. This part of the story probably originates
in the Passover tradition, which is concerned with the protection of
the first-born in Israel, both man and beast. These were guarded by
the Passover sacrifice against the onslaught of the ‘destroyer’, whereas
in Egypt the ‘destroyer’ could carry on with his work of annihilation
and in so doing bring in the last and most terrible plague. In addition,
the story of the birth, youth and call of Moses has been inserted into
the beginning of the story of the ‘Exodus from Egypt’.
The second main theme of the book is the theophany and the
making of the covenant on Sinai. This element of the tradition has
had a separate history; it was probably recited at certain central
cultic festivals in Israel in which the making of the covenant between
God and people was regularly re-enacted. Remarkably enough it
appears to have been incorporated only at a relatively late stage into
the summary credal confessions of the mighty acts of God towards
Israel, and doubtless at first had its own special place in the cult. It
was however already included in the complex of Pentateuchal
tradition before the development of the fixed literary form which we
now possess and quite properly formed the central point in this
complex. For Israel the making of a covenant is connected by no
means ‘indispensably but at least appropriately with the subject of
‘the Law’, with the result that the Law in its most varied forms now
plays a most important part in the narrative of the theophany and
the making of the covenant. This whole theme is by no means con-
cluded in Exodus, but the book contains the most important features,
namely the narrative describing the theophany on the mountain and
the making of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel. The ad-
ditions to this theme in the following books fall under the subsidiary
heading ‘law’ (in the wider sense), which is elaborated in great detail.
Between the two main topics which have already been mentioned
there are further narratives which belong to the separate subject of
Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, i.e. the period during which
*[This term will be used throughout in place of the traditional ‘Red Sea’,
which is not an accurate translation of the Hebrew text and has a confusing effect
on any discussion of the route of the Exodus. Cf. further ch. II. 8, p. 102. Tr.]
oe INTRODUCTION

God led Israel through the desert between Egypt and Palestine. They
in fact form a link between the Exodus and the Entry into the
Promised Land. These narratives comprise a loose juxtaposition of
episodes from nomadic life in the wilderness, a life whose character-
istic features were still at a later date familiar to the tribes of Israel,
bounded as they were by the desert. But this theme does not serve
merely to give a graphic description of a particular period in the pre-
history of Israel; behind it stands the tenet of Israelite faith that it
was in fact ‘in the wilderness’ that Yahweh had shown his concern for
Israel (cf. Hos. 13.5; Jer. 2.2; 31.2). The theme of the wanderings
appears once again in the Book of Numbers. If we look at the Penta-
teuch as a whole, it forms a frame round the Sinai theme and in its
turn is framed by the two matching themes of the Exodus from Egypt
and the Entry into the Promised Land. Thus, although there is at
first sight a bewildering abundance of such different individual
narratives, the Pentateuchal traditions have been arranged under a
clear pattern which holds this unusual work together and makes it
clear that the individual books—and among them Exodus—are just
members of a greater whole.*

2. THE LITERARY COMPOSITION OF THE BOOK

The present final form of the Book of Exodus, as indeed that of the
whole Pentateuch, has been found to be the result of a very compli-
cated process involving the evolution of traditions as well as literary
development. The intensive work on the Pentateuch which has been
carried on by scholars for many generations has shown that the
completed Pentateuch, as it now stands in the Old Testament, can-
not be explained as the work of one ‘author’ and that the attribution
of the Pentateuch to Moses as author, of which we find traces only
after the Old Testament period, does not hold true. Viewed as one
large entity, the Pentateuch seems remarkably consistent, but the
individual details betray a multitude of differing concepts and styles
which compel us to posit quite a long process of literary development.
The most probable solution of the literary riddle of the Pentateuch
has proved to be the hypothesis that the present Pentateuch is the
result of a working together of different, originally independent
*For a thorough treatment of this cf. G. von Rad, Das formgeschichtliche Problem
des Hexateuchs, 1938, ET in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 1966,
pp. 1-77; M. Noth, Uberlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch, 1948.
 THE LITERARY COMPOSITION OF THE BOOK 13

‘written sources’, each of which, in a separate literary work, had

fixed the material of the Pentateuchal tradition in writing. This
hypothesis, which at first was tested and confirmed chiefly on
Genesis, is quite evidently well supported for Exodus also. Accord-
ingly, here too we have the written sources of the ‘Jahwist’ (J) the
‘Elohist’ (E), and the ‘Priestly writer’ (P).* Of these sources the two
first-named belong quite closely together as the ‘older sources’,
whereas the Priestly writing is a comparatively late work with its own
peculiar approach. In Exodus, it is true, the literary relationships are
rather more complicated than in Genesis. The reason for this is the
content of the book. In the first part, which tells of the Exodus from
Egypt and the beginnings of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness, the
interchange between the contributions of the different sources is still
much the same as in Genesis. The narrative of the events on Sinai,
on the other hand, reveals a different state of affairs. As the Old
Testament Law was understood to have its basic roots in the covenant
on Sinai, different corpora of Law were inserted into the Sinai
narrative. These sit too loosely to their context to show any signs of
having once belonged to one of the narrative sources mentioned
above. It must therefore be supposed that they were at first indepen-
dent entities and were placed in their present position at some stage
of the literary development which we can no longer ascertain. This
is the case both with the ‘(Ethical) Decalogue’ and the ‘Book of the
Covenant’, but not on the other hand with the so-called ‘Cultic
Decalogue’ of ch. 34, which is firmly established in the context of the
J narrative. The insertion of these passages of other origin consider-
ably disturbed the firm structure of the three narrative sources,
especially as the passages inserted seem to have brought with them
still further accretions which served as a framework to them. To this
we must add that the central events of the theophany, the making of
the covenant and the giving of the ‘Law’, have clearly attracted all
kinds of supplementary expansions and elaborations, so that the
literary situation at this point has become unusually complicated.
The position is further changed in the Sinai narrative, as the P
stratum now comes very markedly into the foreground. Hitherto P
has provided a summary survey of history as a framework and has
only changed to a more detailed description at important individual
events which are crucial for its theology (the Creation, the Flood and
the Covenant with Noah, the Covenant with Abraham). Now,
; *See von Rad, Genesis, pp. 23 ff.
14 INTRODUCTION

however, it has reached its real goal, the description of how the cultic
community formed of the twelve tribes of Israel was constituted by
divine commandment, with a cult and cultic apparatus regulated
down to the last detail. P therefore now expands to its full extent and
for long sections forces the old sources right into the background. But
at the same time this P material has also received a particularly large
number of secondary additions. This is understandable, as the
design for the legitimate sanctuary with all its apparatus, as given
by P, was of fundamental significance for the post-exilic Jerusalem
cult. It was therefore obvious, indeed necessary, that everything in
the actual practice of the post-exilic sanctuary which deviated from
or went beyond the P design should be introduced at least as a
secondary element into the P narrative. The narrative was in the
main left unaltered, but in this way underwent considerable
expansion.
As a result of all this we must reconstruct the literary development
of Exodus in roughly the following way. Credal summaries of the
fundamental acts of God in the prehistory and early history of Israel,
including the Sinai theme, assisted greatly in the construction and
arrangement of the whole within the framework of the general
Pentateuchal tradition. In addition, a great deal of narrative
material, certainly first handed down by oral tradition, served to
give the description of the events a concrete and living form. Beyond
these general statements we can say hardly anything really certain
about the state of things at the pre-literary stage.
We can only recognize clearly the literary compositions which
literary-critical analysis has made it possible to disentangle from the
interwoven form which they subsequently had and so to view them in
isolation. We can form a particularly clear picture of the work of the
‘Jahwist’, as both in Genesis and in Exodus it has been inserted into
the main narrative largely in its original language and original order
and has therefore been preserved. The ‘Jahwist’, i.e. the anonymous
author of this particular narrative stratum in the Pentateuch, is prob-
ably to be dated in the time of David or Solomon. At any rate he
belongs to the beginnings of the transformation of the Pentateuchal
tradition into literature and is for us the chief representative of the
older sources. His work, which spans all the Pentateuchal narrative
material from the Creation to the Conquest, has two main charac-
teristics. First, J preserved the older narrative material which had
either come to him in the framework of the already existing pattern
 THE LITERARY COMPOSITION OF THE BOOK T5

or had been inserted by him into that framework exactly as it had

been preserved, fresh and alive, and frequently with its grandeur of
conception, and by his great narrative skill gave it a definitive form.
Secondly, he presented the great compilation of traditions which had
been produced in this way in the light of a salvation-history theology,
the programme of which is formulated in particular in Gen. 12.1-3.
By doing this he did not, it is true, let the cultic origin of the tradi-
tional themes and also of many of the individual items disappear com-
pletely, but he let it fade very much into the background. In impor-
tant points he spiritualized and rationalized the older traditions. The
best illustration of this in the Book of Exodus is his description of the
making of the covenant in 34.1-28. Here there is no cultic element,
and the decisive action consists in a revelation of the divine will in
much the same way as that in Gen. 12.1-3. For J not merely the
cultic sphere but the whole of history is the province of the divine
action. It would seem an obvious assumption that the time of David,
which involved Israel in a train of events which led to far-reaching
commitments in ‘foreign policy’, did not fail to influence the theology
of the Jahwist, and that at the same time the necessary conditions
arose for the Pentateuchal tradition to be made into literature. The
result we possess in the work of J.
We obtain a much less vivid picture of the ‘Elohist’, whose con-
tribution can also be distinguished in Exodus, though much less
clearly than in Genesis. Nevertheless here too E proves to be a
continuous work which runs parallel to Jbut arose independently of
it. At some now unascertainable time, but before the Priestly writer
was involved in the literary development of the Pentateuch, the
work of E was incorporated into the parallel work J, apparently in
such a way that E was not preserved in its original entirety but only
in those elements which seemed essential. The question whetherJ or
E is the earlier is disputed; E is usually taken to be the less ancient,
but this cannot be proved for certain. In any case E in fact stands
much nearer to the pre-literary stage of the Pentateuchal tradition
than J, at whatever date the work may have been set down in writing.
The E narrative of the making of the covenant (Ex. 24.9-11), with
its marked cultic presentation, surely belongs to an earlier stage of
the history of the tradition than the correspondingJ narrative which
has been mentioned earlier. It is often assumed that E may have
had a special affinity with ‘prophecy’* but we can gain no certain
*Cf. von Rad, op. cit., pp. 25 f.
16 INTRODUCTION

indication of this from Exodus. If this were in fact the case we should
think of an early stage in the history of prophecy and certainly not of
‘classical prophecy’.
The ‘Priestly writing’ (P) is of a completely different character
from the older sourcesJ and E. Its author lacks any direct connection
with a narrative tradition that is still fresh and alive. Instead he
knows this tradition only at second hand from the combined work
JE, now in literary form, which clearly served as a model. He has
taken over the construction and arrangement of the whole from this
model, but has little interest in a description of the course of history
as such. In general he is content with summary indications of the
sequence of events. His attention is entirely devoted to the divine
ordinances and instructions which are for him of eternal validity.
These ordinances and instructions have indeed been promulgated at
definite moments of history—P always makes this concession to the
experience of faith that God has acted in history—and could there-
fore be treated only within the framework of a historical description,
but the stress lies on these ordinances and instructions in themselves,
and their content, once they have been given, no longer appears
dependent on historical suppositions. This characteristic of P
emerges clearly even in the Book of Exodus. After a few remarks
which serve as a transition and an introduction, P describes the call
of Moses, his negotiations with Pharaoh and the ‘plagues’ of Egypt
(in chs. 6-11*). But the description has lost all the tension which is
built up in the narrative of the older sources, in which the reaction
of Pharaoh on each occasion and the further course of events seems
completely uncertain from episode to episode. In P, everything is
played out to a divine plan which has been previously determined
and, moreover, already divulged. The description given by P sud-
denly becomes much fuller, however, at the last plague (ch. 12*),
for now we have the instructions for the Passover sacrifice which is
to be observed thenceforward. These are given in full detail. Re-
marks about the Exodus from Egypt are followed by a description of
the miracle at the sea (ch. 14*) and then the story of the manna
(ch. 16*). In P this last story is in fact told in some detail, but not so
as to give a lifelike description of the plight of Israel in the barren
wilderness. It is intended to reveal to Israel the ordinance, made at
Creation, that there shall be rest on the seventh day, and to enjoin
*Parts only of these chapters belong to P. For details see the text of the chapters
in question.
 THE LITERARY COMPOSITION OF THE BOOK Dy)

the keeping of a jar of manna as a lasting remembrance. In the

description of the stay at Sinai too there is no indication that Israel
experienced an overwhelming encounter with God. P no longer talks
of a theophany or the making of a covenant. Israel appears at Sinai
so that Moses may receive on the mountain detailed instructions for
making the sanctuary and the things it is to contain as well as for
establishing the legitimate cult. This is indeed a fundamental event
for P, whose whole description leads up to it and virtually comes to a
conclusion with it. For, according to P, in this event Israel received
the all-embracing ordinance by which the people were to live from
then on wherever they might be—at first still in the desert, later in
the cultivated Promised Land. If we are to find a date for P, the
terminus a quo is primarily the end of the Judaean kingship of the line
of David in 587 Bo, as the ‘High Priest’ in P has already taken over
insignia and cultic functions of the Jerusalem king. Moreover it is
apparent at various points that P is also later than the reform pro-
gramme in Ezek. 40 ff.
Ezek. 40.1 dates this to the year 571 Bc, but the section is not a
unity and no certain dating can be made of its different strata. P calls
for a date late in the Exile or after the Exile, thus showing itself to
be in any case some centuries later than the older sources in the
Pentateuch and—a more important factor—to derive from a com-
pletely different situation. Israel’s loss of independence and the
collapse of her old institutions had made it necessary for her to have
a new organization on the basis of a common cult in Jerusalem which
since the enforcement of the Deuteronomic demand for unity had
been the only legitimate sanctuary. This explains P’s interest in the
one legitimate sanctuary and in the ordinances which were valid for
Israel. It is difficult to give a more exact date for P. There is much
to suggest that P with its instructions for the sanctuary belongs to the
period before the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and the full
restoration of the cult there, i.e. sometime before 515 Bc, when the
rebuilt temple in Jerusalem was solemnly consecrated. In that case
it would have become necessary to alter the design in P by secondary
additions for it to conform to the actual circumstances in the temple.
We cannot, however, produce definite proof for such a dating, as we
have also to reckon with the possibility that in the final shaping of the
P text some alterations have in the course of time crept in to ensure
conformity with the sanctuary that actually existed.
18 INTRODUCTION

3g. THE FINAL FORM OF THE BOOK

After the P narrative and its additions had been expanded by the
incorporation of the already combined JE narrative, the literary
development which produced Exodus in the form in which it has
been handed down was virtually complete. There remain just a few
completely secondary elements which were added later. The corpora
of law, which cannot be assigned to any. of the sources (see above
p- 13), had already been included in the JE narrative at some earlier
stage.
Exegesis of the book is concerned with its final form. Even its
literary history can only be discovered by a literary-critical analysis
of this final form. Such exegesis cannot however be carried out with-
out constant reference to the individual stages of this literary develop-
ment. In its present state the book is as it were a fabric, skilfully
woven from a series of threads, and the only satisfactory way of
analysing a fabric is to keep firmly in sight the threads of which it is
made up and the material of which the threads themselves are com-
posed. Each thread belongs to the pattern of the whole, and none is
without its own importance. The path from the living narratives of
the oldest literary strata, still recognizably rooted in the formative
period of oral tradition, to the rationalizing theology of ordinances
which is advanced in the latest writing is a significant one, whose
course has left its traces in the final form of the book in a number of
decisive moments. It is a path which even within the Book of Exodus
leads us into central concepts of the faith of the Old Testament.
 II
LHE EXODUS, FROM EGYPT

I.I — 15.21

I. THE BEGINNINGS OF EGYPTIAN OPPRESSION:

I,1-22

11 These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with
Jacob, each with his household: ? Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah,
3 Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, * Dan and Naphtali, Gad and
Asher. ° [All the offspring of Jacob were seventy persons;] Joseph was
already in Egypt. ® Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that
generation. ? But the descendants of Israel were fruitful and increased
greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong; so that the land
was filled with them.

8 Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. ° And
he said to his people, ‘Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty
for us. 1° Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war
befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.’
11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens;
and they built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses. 1° But the more
they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.
And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. * So they made
the people of Israel serve with rigour, 14and made their lives bitter
with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in
the field; in all their work they made them serve with rigour.
15 Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was
named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 1*‘When you serve as midwife to the
Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill
him; but tf it is a daughter, she shall live.’ 1” But the midwives feared God,
and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children
live. 18 So the king of Egypt called the midwives, and said to them, “Why have
you done this, and let the male children live?’ 1° The midwives said [to Pharaoh],
19
20 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

‘Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are
vigorous and are delivered before the midwife comes to them.’ ®° So God dealt
well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and grew very strong. ** And
because the midwives feared God he gave them families. ?* Then Pharaoh
commanded all his people, ‘Every son that is born to the Hebrews
you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.’

[1-7] The introduction of the great theme “The Exodus from

Egypt’ is connected briefly and loosely to the theme of the Patriarchs
which has preceded it in the Book of Genesis. We now have this
connection only in the late formulation by P (vv. 1-7) ; the numerical
detail in v. 5a refers back to the secondary P section Gen. 46.827,
which is perhaps an indication that it too is secondary. The older
sources too would originally have had a similarly brief connection
with the stories of the Patriarchs. In this connection the great step is
taken from the history of the family of the Patriarchs to that of the
people of Israel. The expression «né yisra’el, which in v. 1 still means
the ‘sons of Israel’, i.e. ‘sons of Jacob’ (on this cf. Gen. 35.10 P), from
v. 7 onwards consistently describes the ‘Israelites’ who now form the
object of the divine action in history. This transition is achieved by
the simple statement that after the generation of the sons of Jacob
had died (v. 6) an unspecified period of time had elapsed during
which the descendants of Jacob had increased so greatly that they |
had now become a ‘people’ (v. 9) living in the midst of Egypt.

[8-14] Here we have an immediate motive for the Egyptian

oppression of the ‘people of Israel’; Israel, who had increased in
number and had thus become strong, seemed so undesirable to the
Egyptians that a new Pharaoh, who by this time knew nothing of
Joseph’s former good offices to the Egyptian administration, which
had under an earlier Pharaoh led to a ceremonial invitation of the
whole of Jacob’s family to Egypt (cf. Gen. 45.16 ff.; 47.1 ff.), saw
himself compelled to take counter-measures. These counter-
measures consisted first in a restriction of freedom by the general
conscription of Israelites for forced labour in building and agricul-
tural work, and later in the brutal slaughter of their male children.
The following chapters deal chiefly with the first of these two counter-
measures, and in the narrative description of the oppression of Israel
in Egypt the forced labour is to be the primary theme. This corre-
sponds with an actual historical situation. Egypt had long been an
autocratically ruled land in which virtually all work was done by an
I.1-22] BEGINNINGS OF EGYPTIAN OPPRESSION PINE

enslaved subject people in the service of the king.* This situation was
well known to the Old Testament tradition (cf. Gen. 47.13-26).
Even alien elements of the population were subject to this system. It
often happened that people living in the neighbourhood of the fertile
Nile country, especially those with no settled dwelling from the area
to the north-east of Egypt which borders on Asia, would come into
Egypt like the ‘Bedouin tribes of Edom’ who were admitted into the
land on the eastern border of the Nile delta by an Egyptian frontier
official of a time about 1200 Bc.f It was the custom in the ancient
Orient of the second millennium Bc to describe such people, who
were deprived of the rights of the old-established inhabitants of
the land, as ‘Hebrews’. This description is used in the Old Testa-
ment narrative of Israel’s dwelling in Egypt both by the Israelites
and the Egyptians, at least in Ex. 1, in so far as the latter talk of
‘Hebrew women’. The word ‘Hebrew’, when used in the Old
Testament, often sounds as though it were the name of a people.
But in the Old Testament the Israelites are only called ‘Hebrews’
in particular situations, such as the sojourn in Egypt, and in
this we can still see the special significance of the word ‘Hebrew’.
The Egyptian tradition also knows of such ‘Hebrews’ (the word is
transcribed ‘pr in the Egyptian hieroglyphic script which can only be
written in consonants). Thefe are several Egyptian texts which
describe the employment of such ‘Hebrews’ as building workers. tA
passage from an administrative letter of the time of Pharaoh Raamses
II (1292-1225 Bc), preserved on a Leiden Papyrus, is particularly
remarkable. It discusses the question of providing corn for ‘the
people of the host’ and ‘for the ‘gr, who are drawing stones for the
great gateway of . . . (name of the building) . . . of Raamses, the
beloved of Amon’. . . . ‘This information brings us to a period of
history in immediate proximity to the narrative in Ex. 1. Not that the
‘Hebrews’ mentioned in the papyrus must have been identical with
the oppressed Israelites of Ex. 1; for the Egyptian as for the whole of
the oriental world at that time ‘Hebrew’ was quite a comprehensive
term which included far more than just the Israelites in Egypt. But
*Cf. A. Erman and H. Ranke, Agypten und dgyptisches Leben im Altertum, 1923,
2558. j ;
: +Cf. the report of this official preserved on a papyrus. [J. B. Pritchard, Ancient
Near Eastern Texts,? 1955, p. 259, gives an English translation of the passage in
question. Tr.] '
+They are collected in K. Galling, Textbuch zur Geschichte Israels, 1950, pp.
30 f.
54> THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

the story of the oppression does in fact show the Israelites in the
position of such ‘Hebrews’ (‘pr) and indeed particularly in the time
of the Pharaoh Raamses II. The very concrete information in v. II,
according to which the Israelites had to help in the building of the
cities of Pithom and Raamses, is an indication of this. Both towns lay
in the eastern Nile delta, Pithom on the site of the present hill ruin of
tell er-retabe in the fertile valley wdadi et-tumélat which stretches from
the eastern arm of the Nile to the neighbourhood of the Bitter Sea in
the middle of the Isthmus of Suez, Raamses slightly further north in
the north-east part of the delta. Raamses was the delta residence of
the Pharaohs, built by Raamses II, and its full Egyptian name runs
Pr-R‘mssw-mry-’"Imn = ‘House of Raamses, the beloved of Amun’;
Pithom, in Egyptian Pr-’Itm = ‘House of Atum’, was also built by
Raamses II who was particularly interested in the eastern delta.
The narrative material of the Egyptian oppression thus includes
some accurate historical features which are important for the under-
standing and dating of the Israelite stay in Egypt. They were pre-
sumably passed on from the beginning with the narrative tradition
of the theme of the ‘Exodus from Egypt’.
To Egyptian eyes all this would have been a picture of what had
once been customary in Egypt, but in ancient Israel, to whom the
autocratic Egyptian state was and remained something foreign, it
was seen as a hostile measure which had been specially directed
against an Israel which was looked upon with mistrust. The report
of the Egyptian oppression occurs in this simple form in the latest
literary narrative, P (vv. 13 f.). The older literary narratives have
gone further and explain the hostile attitude of the Egyptians which
is presupposed in the tradition from the start as caused by fear in the
face of an Israel now grown extremely numerous. Here the main
thought of the narratives may have been that it was the Egyptian aim
to keep down the now powerful Israelites by forced labour and to
prevent them by a rigorous slavery from developing their strength
(so in essentials vv. 8-11 J). Only then would there arise the further
thought that the Egyptians wished to put a check to any further
increase in Israelite numbers by means of this forced labour and
limit or even completely prevent the growth of another generation
(cf. vv. 10a, 12). Here in fact it remains questionable whether the
imposition of forced labour could be a suitable means for this end.
Perhaps the part of the story which is concerned with the danger to
Israelite posterity in Egypt was only grafted on to the tradition of
I.1-22] BEGINNINGS OF EGYPTIAN OPPRESSION 23

forced labour afterwards and has been developed for originally

independent reasons.
[15-22] Pharaoh’s quite brutal command to his people to throw
all newborn Israelite boys into the Nile appears in v. 22. It is not
said whether this order was to be carried out by brute force or by
some underhand trick and whether in fact it was really carried out
at all for any length of time. In its present context this command
appears just as Pharaoh’s most extreme measure after his failure with
the midwives which has already been mentioned, but in fact in v. 22
on the one hand and vv. 15-21 on the other we are dealing with
different literary strata in which the circumstances which endanger
the new-born Israelite boys have been treated each in a different way.
This is indicated by the fact that v. 22 speaks of Pharaoh, while in
vv. 15-21 we have ‘the king of Egypt’ (the remark ‘to Pharaoh’ in
v. 19 may be an addition). As the word ‘God’ and not the divine
name Yahweh is used in vv. 15-21 we must regard v. 22 as part of
the J narrative (joining on to vv. 8-12), whereas the passage vv.
15-21 is to be taken as a fragment of E which, as a special piece of
the Elohistic tradition, was already incorporated in the formation
of the literary unity of the older Pentateuchal material (JE), and thus
eventually found a place in the completed Pentateuch. According to
vv. 15-21 the king of Egypt wanted to be sure of preventing any
further growth of Israel by surreptitiously doing away with the boy
children of the Israelites as soon as they were born, in some way of
which we are not told. This assumes that the Israelites lived very
close together in Egypt, and had not yet grown so excessively numer-
ous that two midwives were insufficient to help at all Israelite births.
The two midwives, who have been given the decorative Hebrew
feminine names ‘Beauty’ and ‘Splendour’, are expressly described as
‘Hebrew women’, and in this story the king of Egypt is under the
impression that these two Hebrew women will comply with his
wishes. It is not even said that he had promised them any form of
reward for their action. Of course he is mistaken here, and his artful-
ness is surpassed by the artful remarks of the two midwives (v. 19).
Clearly too the midwives may be sure that they are under the pro-
tection of their God in their passive resistance to the mighty king of
Egypt. The E fragment is the only part of Ex. 1 in which God is
mentioned. The midwives’ fear of God proves to be a real factor in
history, and God afterwards gives express and visible confirmation
to the midwives that this fear of God was the right course, and that
24 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

he stands with those who fear him against all earthly power, by
‘dealing well’ with them (v. 20a). Thus God helps Israel in Egypt
invisibly yet effectively by means of the midwives. After the con-
cluding v. 20, which states this explicitly, v. 21 looks like a secondary
addition and in fact adds nothing new; it seems to be a later attempt
to substantiate in rather more detail the very general remark that
God ‘dealt well’ with the midwives.
We must ask whether the part of the narrative which describes the
danger to the new-born Israelite boys did not in fact come into the
tradition from the following story of the birth of Moses, which pre-
supposes this danger. It would then at a secondary stage have been
incorporated into the theme of the forced labour in Egypt so that
this forced labour looked as though it was meant to prevent any
increase of the Israelites (cf. vv. gb, 10a), an application which is
hardly to be understood as its original purpose. In the older sources,
of which in fact only J is still at all recognizable in its original shape,
this attempt on the new-born male Israelites appears as a second
more drastic measure since the forced labour had failed as a means
of diminishing Israelite numbers (v. 12). P could later dispense with
a description of this second measure, and his short description of the
forced labour (vv. 13 f.) could also omit the aim to reduce Israelite
numbers, as he did not intend to include even the story of the birth of
Moses in his work. In so doing P returned to quite an old state of the
tradition.

2. THE BIRTH OF MOSES: 2.1-10

2 1Now a man from the house of Levi went and took to wife a daughter
of Levi. ® The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was
a goodly child, she hid him three months. * And when she could hide him no
longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with bitumen
and pitch ; and she put the child in it and placed tt among the reeds at the river’s
brink. * And his sister stood at a distance, to know what would be done to him.
5 Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, and her maidens
walked beside the river; she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid
to fetch it. ® When she opened it she saw the child; and lo, the babe was crying.
She took pity on him and said, ‘This is one of the Hebrews’ children.’ * Then
his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘Shall I go and call you a nurse from the
Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?’ ® And Pharaoh’s daughter said to
her, ‘Go.’ So the girl went and called the child’s mother. ® And Pharaoh’s
daughter said to her, ‘Take this child away, and nurse him for me, and I will
give you your wages.’ So the woman took the child and nursed him. 1° And
2.1-10] THE BIRTH OF MOSES 25
the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her
son; and she named him Moses, for she said, ‘Because I drew him out of the
water.’

The style of this brief story is smooth, but the story is not in itself
a complete unity. The introduction indicates that the boy was the
first-born child of his parents. We are therefore surprised at the sud-
den appearance in v. 4 of an elder sister, who has not only not been
introduced earlier but according to v. 8 is already a grown girl. Of
course this state of affairs does not drive us to assume several ‘sources’
from which the narrative has been composed, as no continuous suc-
cession of doublets is discernible in the narrative. It is much more
likely that a simple basic story was afterwards embellished, to
heighten the tension for the hearer or reader, by the addition of the
special point that the boy was nursed by his own mother. The whole
story, including this expansion, belongs to the old Pentateuchal
narrative material and may be assigned to J.
[1] No names are given to the parents of the child; it is only a late
tradition which was acquainted with the names of Moses’ parents
(Ex. 6.20; Num. 26.59). The Sister, subsequently introduced, is also
unnamed; here likewise it is only a later tradition which says that
Miriam was the sister of Moses (see pp. 122 f. below). It is merely
remarked that the parents were ‘of the house of Levi’. What, how-
ever, the original tradition means by ‘the house of Levi’ remains
extremely questionable—later it was natural to think of the ‘priestly
tribe of Levi’; indeed in view of Ex. 4.14 (see pp. 46 f. below) we
must even ask whether a more accurate translation might not be
‘from the house (the family) of a Levite’ or even ‘from a Levitical
house, i.e. a Levitical family’. In any case there is something special
about this descent. The life of a new-born ‘Hebrew child’ (cf. v. 6) is
threatened; this presupposes not so much the story of the midwives
in 1.15-21 as the general command of Pharaoh in 1.22. [2] The child
can be successfully hidden for only a short time from the Egyptians
who wish to carry out the order of Pharaoh; then—this may be
the meaning—it will betray its presence by loud crying. [3] So it
is put by its mother in a concealed spot somewhere among the reeds
on the banks of the Nile. Perhaps someone will find it and take it
home without realizing that it is a Hebrew child. In any case it
seems better to expose the healthy, ‘goodly’ child to an uncertain
26 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
fate than to leave him to a quite certain death. This ‘uncertain fate’
—as the story with all its later developments intends us to under-
stand—in fact means Yahweh, but this is said neither explicitly nor
obviously.

[5] The arrival of Pharaoh’s daughter, which now follows, and the
way in which she acts, are portrayed in a naive way reminiscent of
a folk-tale. A daughter of Pharaoh—in Hebrew she is described as
‘the daughter of Pharaoh’ because she is the only one concerned in the
present story—comes with her maidens quite unceremoniously down
to the Nile to bathe. In contrast to her brutal father she takes pity on
the boy although fully realizing that he isa Hebrew. [4, 7—10a] Accord-
ing to the elaboration of the story she even allows the boy to be
nursed by a Hebrew woman and gives her wages. [10b] She adopts
the boy, as though a daughter of Pharaoh could perform such a legal
action on her own initiative. She gives the boy a name which is ex-
plained from the Hebrew language as though Hebrew were the tongue
spoken by her; in fact the explanation does not quite fit the story as
the boy was not really ‘drawn out of the water’. The explanation of
the name Moses given here belongs to the popular etymology of
names which is frequent in the Old Testament. The derivation of the
name Moses (méseh) from the verb mas‘ah—‘draw out’ (here the name
could in form be an active participle whereas the explanation
properly requires a passive) was perhaps current in ancient Israel
in connection with a story of the wonderful rescue of the child Moses.
It might even be that such a story arose as an aetiology of the
name. Ancient Israel did not know that Moses is in reality an Egyp-
tian name, that it is a shortened form of Egyptian names like
Ahmosis, Thutmosis, etc. The narrator of Ex. 2.1-10 did not know
this either; otherwise he would hardly have missed the opportunity
of explaining the strangeness of the name by the adoption and
naming of the child by a daughter of Pharaoh.
We would be closing our eyes to well-known facts if we were un-
willing to recognize that the elements in the story of the birth of
Moses are themes which occur frequently in legendary stories.* The
world of the ancient East provides the legend of the birth of King
Sargon of Akkad who was an important ruler in Mesopotamia in the

*See the material in A. Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients‘,
1930, pp. 400 ff.;cf. also H. Gressmann, Mose und seine Zeit, 1913, pp. 7 ff.
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 27
second half of the third millennium sBc.* According to this, when
Sargon was born he was put by his unnamed mother in a little box,
made of reeds and sealed with pitch, and was then set afloat on the
Euphrates. A peasant saw him and adopted him, and finally the god-
dess Ishtar grew fond of him and made him a great and powerful
king. This motif is also well-known from the Cyrus legend which is
told in Herodotus (I 108 ff.). A ruler seeks the life of a child whom he
fears as a future opponent and has it exposed, but the child is rescued
in a miraculous way and later gains the victory over the ruler and
himself becomes a great king. It can hardly be doubted that such
stories were known in the world of ancient Israel and had their effect
on the development of the story of the birth of Moses. Although the
individual details of these legends are developed in completely differ-
ent ways, there is common to them all the basic thought that great
figures, both rulers and benefactors, had stood from the beginning
of their lives under the special working of a divine providence which
had proved itself effective in the face of all the attacks directed
against them by worldly despots. The mythical element which
frequently emerges in comparable legends is completely lacking in
the Old Testament story of the birth of Moses, whose particular point
is that it is the daughter of the despot himself who rescues the future
antagonist and allows him to grow up in the immediate surroundings
of the despot. The story certainly only arose once the historical figure
of the man Moses had taken a firm place in the ancient Israelite
tradition.
3. MOSES IN MIDIAN: 2.11-4.23
11 One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and
looked on their burdens ; and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his
people. 12 He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian
and hid him in the sand. 18 When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews
were struggling together; and he said to the man that did the wrong, ‘Why
do you strike your fellow? 14 He answered, ‘Who made you a prince and a
judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?? Then
Moses was afraid, and thought, ‘Surely the thing is known.’ © [When Pharaoh
heard of it, he sought to kill Moses.]
But Moses fled [from Pharaoh, and stayed in] the land of Midian; and
he sat down by a well. 1° Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters;
and they came amd drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s
flock. *” The shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses stood up and
helped them, and watered their flock. 18 When they came to their father |Reuel],
*[There is an English translation of this legend in Pritchard, Ancient Near
Eastern Texts, p. 119. Tr.]
28 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

he said, ‘How is it that you have come so soon today?’ 1° They said, ‘An
Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and even drew water
for us and watered the flock.’ ?° He said to his daughters, ‘And where is he?
Why have you left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread.’ ** And Moses
was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah.
22 She bore a son, and he called his name Gershom; for he said, ‘I have been a
sojourner in a foreign land.’

23 In the course of those many days the king of Egypt died. And the
people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help,
and their cry under bondage came up to God. #4 And God heard their
groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with
Isaac, and with Jacob. 7° And God saw the people of Israel, and God
knew their condition.

3 1.Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, [Fethro,| the
priest of Midian; and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and
came to [Horeb,| the mountain of God. * And the angel of the LORD appeared
to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo,
the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. * And Moses said, ‘I will
turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ * When the
Lorp saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him [out of the bush],
‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ ®> Then he said, ‘Do not come near;
put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing ts
holy ground.’ ® And he said, ‘I am the God ofyour father, the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was
afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lorn said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in
Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their
sufferings, ® and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians,
and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, [a land flowing
with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites,
the Perizzites, the Htvites, and the Febusites]. ° And now, behold, the cry of
the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which
the Egyptians oppress them. 1° Come, [I will send you to Pharaoh] that you
may bring forth my people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.’ 11 But Moses
said to God, ‘Who am I that I should [go to Pharaoh, and] bring the sons of
Israel out of Egypt?’ 1° He said, ‘But I will be with you; and this shall
be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought forth the
people out of Egypt, you shall serve God upon this mountain.’
13 Then Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the people of Israel and say
to them, ““The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me,
“What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ 4 God said to Moses, I
AM WHO I am.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel, “I am has sent
me to you.” 15 God also said to Moses, ‘Say this to the people of Israel,
“The Lorn, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
and the God of Facob, has sent me to you’: this is my name for ever, and thus
I am to be remembered throughout all generations. 1* Go and gather the elders
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 29
of Israel together, and say to them, “The Lorn, the God ofyour fathers, (the
God ofAbraham, of Isaac, and ofFacob,| has appeared to me, saying, ‘I have
observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt; 7? and I promise that I
will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt, {to the land of the Canaanites,
the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Febusites, a land
flounng unth milk and honey\.’”’ (*® And they will hearken to your voice; and
you ond the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The
Lorn, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, we pray you, let
us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the
Lorn our God.” 9 I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless
compelled by a mighty hand. *° So I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt
with all the wonders which I wnll do in it; after that he will let you go.
) And I unll give this people favour in the sight of the Egyptians; and when
you go, you shall not go empty, ** but each woman shall ask of her neigh-
bour, and of her who sojourns in her house, jewelry of silver and of gold, and
clothing, and you shall put them on your sons and on your daughters; thus you
shall despol the Egyptians.’ |

4° Then Moses answered, ‘But behold, they will not believe me or listen
to my vowe, for they will say, “The Lorp did not appear to you.” * The
Lorn said to him, ‘What is that in your hand?’ He said, ‘A rod,’
* And he said, “Cast it on the ground.’ So he cast it on the ground, and it became
a serpent; and Moses fled from it. * But the Lorn said to Moses, ‘Put out
your hand, and take it by the tail’—so he put out his hand and caught wt, and
it became a rod in his hand—{® ‘that they may believe that the Lorn, the
God of ther fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob, has appeared to you.’| * Again, the Lorn said to him,
‘Put your hand into your bosom.’ And he put his hand into his bosom;
and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous, as white as snow.
* Then God said, ‘Put your hand back into your bosom.’ So he put his hand
back into his bosom; and when he took it out, behold, it was restored like the
rest of his flesh. [* ‘If they will not believe you,’ God said, ‘or heed the first
sign, they may believe the latter sign. * If they will not believe even these two
signs or heed your voice, you shall take some water from the Nile and pour tt
upon the dry ground; and the water which you shall take from the Nile will
become blood upon the dry ground.’ |
10 But Moses said to the Lorn, ‘Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either
heretofore or since thou hast spoken to thy servant; but I am slow of speech
and of tongue.’ »* Then the Lorn said to him, ‘Who has made man’s mouth?
Who makes him dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is ut not I, the Lorp?
12 Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you
shall speak.’ (** But he said, ‘Oh, my Lord, send, I pray, some other person.’
4 Then the anger of the Lorn was kindled against Moses and he said, ‘Is
there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well; and
behold, he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you he will be glad in
his heart. © And you shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth;
and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you what
you shall do. *° He shall speak for you to the people; and he shall be a mouth
E.—-B
30 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

for you, and you shall be to him as God.] 17 And you shall take in your hand
this rod, with which you shall do the signs.’
18 Moses went back to fethro his father-in-law and said to him, ‘Let
me go back, I pray, to my kinsmen in Egypt and see whether they are still
alive.’ And Jethro said to Moses, ‘Go in peace.’ 1° And the Lorp said to
Moses in Midian, ‘Go back to Egypt; for all the men who were seeking your
life are dead.’ 2° So Moses took his wife and his son[{s| and set them on an
ass, and went back to the land of Egypt; and in his hand Moses took the rod
of God.
cs[21 And the Lorp said to Moses, ‘When you go back to Egypt, see that
you do before Pharaoh all the miracles which I have put in your power; but
I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go. ?* And you shall
say to Pharaoh, “‘Thus says the Lorp, Israel is my first-born son, *° and
I say to you ‘Let my son go that he may serve me’ ; ifyou refuse to let him go,
behold, I will slay your first-born son.”’ ’|

The reports of the flight of Moses into the land of Midian (2.11 ff.)
and of his return from there to Egypt (4.18 ff.) make a frame round
the whole of this section and separate it both from what goes before
and from what comes after. In essentials, the section describes how
Moses encountered God in the land of Midian and how as a result he
was commissioned with a message from God to the Israelites in
Egypt. The content of his proclamation was to be that God would
now free the Israelites from their subjection and lead them out of
Egypt. This subject not only takes up the greatest amount of space
within the section but must also have formed the kernel of the tradi-
tion from the beginning of its history, for no other starting point can
in fact be found for a historical tradition of a stay of Moses in the land
of Midian to which the story of the encounter with God might per-
haps have been attached in a secondary manner. The action taken by
Moses against the unjust assault on a ‘Hebrew’ in Egypt which
compelled him to flee from Egypt (2.11—-15) is as little an independent
element of the tradition as the exemplary readiness to help which he
displays in the scene at the well in the land of Midian (2.16—-20).
These are just explanations by the narrator of how Moses came out
of Egypt and how he came to be connected with the household of a
Midianite priest. It is indeed a very old element of the tradition that
Moses was connected by marriage with Midian, but even this hardly
seems likely to have given rise to the contents of the entire section;
in view of the tradition of a later meeting between Israelites and
Midianites (cf. Ex. 18) it would not have been necessary to go to the
length of letting Moses at some previous time stay for a while with the
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 31
Midianites. The primary tradition therefore was clearly that Moses
experienced his first encounter with God on the mountain of God in
Midian.
This is most remarkable. In the old historical narrative tradition
of the Old Testament the Midianites appear as the dreaded foes of
an Israel which has meanwhile become settled in Palestine. They are
the oldest camel nomads known to us,* who from time to time used
to invade the settled land (cf. Judg. 6.1 ff.). They are, moreover,
occasionally mentioned alongside Arabian tribes and tribal associa-
tions (Gen. 25.4). In later times the area of their pasturage lay in
north-west Arabia on the east side of the Gulf of Elath, the Gulf of
el-‘aqgaba, where according to the evidence of the geographer Ptolemy
(second century AD) of Eusebius-Jerome (in the Onomastikon) and of
medieval Arabian geographers, perhaps even as early as that of the
Jewish historian Josephus (first century AD) there was a place
*“Madian’ in a neighbourhood rich in oases not far from the southern
end of the gulf mentioned above. This was evidently named after the
Midianites. This would take us from Egypt out into a district which
was quite some distance away and separated from Egypt by the
whole of the Sinai peninsula. It is impossible to say whether such a
distant location for the Midianite territory is inconsistent with the
part played by the Midianites in the Old Testament traditions of
Moses, but on the other hand we must reckon with the possibility
that the Midianites of Old Testament times, who as camel nomads
were quite mobile, at least for a while had had their camping places
and watering spots even to the west of the gulf of e/-‘agaba and the
wadi el-‘araba and were thus on the Sinai peninsula and in particular
in its northern part, the so-called wilderness of Sinai. There is
absolutely no certain indication in the Moses stories for fixing the
neighbourhood in which tradition has it that Moses meets the
Midianites. It cannot be assumed with any degree of certainty that
in his flight Moses was aiming for the near neighbourhood of Egypt
and hence the eastern delta, as the theme of the flight merely serves
the narrator’s purpose of leading Moses to the Midianites and is
secondary in comparison with the primary element of tradition that
Moses first encountered God in the land of Midian. This implies at
the same time that even the locality of the ‘mountain of God’ in
Midian can no longer be fixed. It makes a further appearance in
Ex. 3.1 and yet again in Ex. 18.5. The context of this last appearance
*Cf. M. Noth, History of Israel, ET?, 1960, pp. 160 f.
32 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

is a meeting between Moses, who now brings the people of Israel

along with him, and the priest of Midian; it is thus evident that it
belongs firmly to the complex of the tradition of the meeting between
Israel and Midian. In Ex. 3.1 this mountain of God is called Horeb,
but the name occurs at the end of the passage in such a lame way
that it must quite certainly be regarded as an explanatory addition
which later attempted to define more precisely the originally un-
named ‘mountain of God’ in Midian. In the deuteronomistic litera-
ture the mountain of the great theophany, the covenant with God
and the proclamation of the Law is customarily described with the
name Horeb (e.g. Deut. 1.2, 6, 19), whereas elsewhere in the Old
Testament and particularly in the special Sinai tradition it is called
Sinai. The glossator of Ex. 3.1 therefore evidently wanted to identify
the mountain of God in Midian with Horeb/Sinai. In doing so he
made an equation which was certainly already very old. True, we
must ask whether the mountain of God in Midian, left so strikingly
without a name, which was traditionally the place of a meeting
between Israel and Midian and of a connection between Moses and
the family of the Midianite priest during the time that Israel was
wandering in the wilderness,* was originally identical with Sinai
(= Horeb). But probably this equation already lay behind the rise
of the story of Moses’ first encounter with God in the land of Midian.
This story can hardly belong to the oldest part of the tradition.
Moses here does not receive the decisive commission of a proclama-
tion to the Israelites in the land of their slavery, Egypt. Of course the
Israelites stand under the care and protection of their God even in
Egypt. But this land was still not worthy of becoming the scene of a
direct theophany to Israel; this takes place only in the wilderness.
Perhaps the special Sinai tradition lies behind this idea. Now if Moses
in the wilderness is sent by God as a messenger to Israel while they
are still living in Egypt so that a connection between God and people
may be established not by means of a direct theophany on Egyptian
soil but in Moses’ status as messenger, we are led to assume a basis in
a combination of the Sinai tradition and the Exodus tradition. Such
an idea was not present in the tradition from the very beginning, but
was only conceived in the course of the development of the tradition.
At this stage in the formation of the tradition, however, the starting
point was probably the equation of the unnamed mountain of God
in Midian, which originally belonged to a special element of the
*Cf. pp. 147 f. below on Ex. 18. 7 Cf. von Rad, Genesis, p. 20.
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 33
tradition, with Sinai (= Horeb). For the experience of Moses in
Ex. 3.4 was a prelude to the future experience of Israel. As Israel
‘fled’ (Ex. 14.15a) from Egypt, eventually witnessing in the wilder-
ness the appearance on the holy mountain of Sinai (= Horeb) of
their God (Ex. 19), so too at an earlier time Moses had once been
forced to ‘flee’ from Egypt (Ex. 2.15b) to be astounded by a theo-
phany on the ‘mountain of God’ in the wilderness (Ex. 3.1 ff.). We
cannot explain why the story in the latter context does not simply
speak of Sinai (= Horeb) but is associated with the tradition of the
unnamed mountain of God in the land of Midian, identified with
Sinai (= Horeb). Perhaps at the same time we are to find here the
basis of the affinity of Moses to the Midianites, who at one time
belonged with ‘the mountain of God’.
Although the story of how Moses was sent as a messenger to the
Israelites in Egypt after God had appeared to him at a place in the
wilderness belongs to a relatively late stage in the history of the
tradition, it is nevertheless part of the older material of the Penta-
teuchal narratives fixed in literary form and is represented in both
the old narrative strata J and E. P later passed over this story and
unthinkingly has Moses receiving his commission in Egypt (Ex.
6.2 ff.). In our section P appears only in 2.23abb—25 with a brief
remark about the groaning and crying of the Israelites in bondage in
Egypt and how this is heard by God. If this passage is detached, the
remaining narrative material is obviously not a literary unity but
shows clear traces of the juxtaposition of two originally independent
threads of narrative which have subsequently been woven together.
At the conclusion, the twofold report of the return of Moses to
Egypt is particularly clear. Whereas in 4.18 as a result of his en-
counter with God Moses immediately makes up his mind to return to
Egypt and therefore asks, and receives, permission from his father-
in-law, according to 4.19—20a it is Yahweh who orders him to return,
apparently some time after Moses has had his encounter with God
and when the danger to his life in Egypt has passed (v. 19b), a
command with which Moses immediately complies. As the divine
name Yahweh occurs in v. 19,* vv. 19-20a must be assigned to J and
*[The RSV, for reasons which are given in the Preface, translates the Tetra-
grammaton with the English word Lorp printed in capitals, whereas Noth in the
body of this commentary, following a usage now universal among Old Testament
scholars, uses the more accurate name Yahweh of the God of Israel. For the sake
of clarity I have retained this latter usage throughout so that ‘Yahweh’ in the
commentary will in each case correspond with ‘the Lorn’ in the RSV text. Tr.]
34 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

therefore v. 18 to E, to which might also be added v. 2o0b, as the ‘rod

of God’ seems to have played a special part in E (cf. p. 47). The
connecting verses 21-23 which anticipate the following narrative in
an unusual way can hardly have belonged to the original story. As
the divine name Yahweh appears in them, they are perhaps to be
regarded as an addition to theJ narrative, if they were not first added
to the JE narrative after it had already been combined.
The results which we have obtained from the concluding passage
—the juxtaposition of J and E and the secondary additions—are
confirmed by the large central section 3.1-4.17. We can see how the
passage 3.1-16 is formed from both J and E by the strikingly abrupt
changes between the divine name Yahweh and the word ‘God’. An
examination of the details leads to the following division:J: 3. 1aba,
2, 3, 4a, 5; E: 3.1bb, 4b, 6. At the same time it becomes clear that the
E variant has not been preserved in all its entirety, as at least its
introduction is no longer intact, having been partially suppressed by
elements from the J narrative. In what follows, 3.7 f. and 3.9 ff. are
again clearly doublets; the divine name Yahweh shows that 3.7 f.
belong to J, while the repeated occurrence of the word ‘God’ in
3.9-15 is a feature of the Elohistic narrative. From 3.16 onwards no
further explicit doublets are conspicuous; from now on a single strand
of the tradition, which is certainly that of J, predominates, though
there are various secondary additions which will be commented upon
in the exegesis of individual passages. Only the remark in 4.17, where
Moses is presented with the wonder-working ‘rod’, appears quite
abruptly and has no connection with what has gone before. It seems
to belong to the E narrative. The abrupt occurrence of this verse also
serves to show that here too the E narrative was incorporated only
fragmentarily into the combination of the old Pentateuchal narrative
material and that an Elohistic section, now no longer extant, must
have stood between 3.9—15 and 4.17.
The introduction, 2.11-22, offers little scope for literary-critical
considerations. In essentials the narrative follows a smooth course,
apart from a number of secondary additions which will be noticed
later. Only the subordinate clause 2.23aa, which hangs in the air in
a strange way, offers any difficulty. The following P passage cannot
be its original conclusion as the contents do not correspond at all with
what has gone before. In view of 1.15-21 the phrase ‘the king of
Egypt’ in 2.23aa is reminiscent of E, and in fact the whole clause is
best understood in the context of the E narrative. According to
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 35
4.19 J only lets Moses return to Egypt at the express command of
Yahweh in which the reason given is that the hostility in Egypt which
endangered Moses’ life is now past. According to E, however, Moses
returned to Egypt of his own accord immediately after his encounter
with God (4.18). It is not out of place for the E narrative to say that
the encounter with God in the wilderness only took place once the
‘king of Egypt’ had died. This presupposes that E too had a passage
no longer extant, parallel to the J narrative, according to which
Moses had for some reason fled from the ‘king of Egypt’ into the
land of Midian. Thus as E now stands there is a gap between 1.15-21
and 2.23aa similar to that between 2.23aa and 3.1bé and between
3.g-15 and 4.17.
The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that apart from the
very short summary observations by P the first chapters of the book of
Exodus to a large extent contain the wording of the old narratives J
and E; of these, as far as we can see, J is preserved in a complete and
continuous form, whereas only fragments of E have been incorporated
into the combined narrative work to expand the variant given by J.
It is clear, however, from what still remains of the E narrative that its
original content was very similar to that of J.
[2.11—22] The connection between 2.11 and the story of the birth
of Moses which precedes it is loose; it is assumed that Moses had not
hitherto lived among his fellow countrymen and had not shared their
hard lot. He had to ‘go out’ to them from the surroundings of the
royal court in which he had grown up. In the meanwhile he had
become a grown man; according to Acts 7.23 he would by then
already have been 40 years old, whereas the Old Testament narra-
tive has pictured him as still being quite a young man (P’s informa-
tion about Moses’ age in Deut. 34.7 was still unknown to the old
narrators). The Old Testament tradition has nothing to say about the
time spent at the Egyptian court; it was only at a later date that this
gap in the tradition was filled with the observation that he ‘was
instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’ (Acts 7.22). At the
court of the king of Egypt Moses did not forget that he belonged with
‘his people’, a fact of which he became aware in some way. This he
immediately proves at the first opportunity with an act which, in
spite of all the circumspection employed, is none the less resolute.
The incident also goes to show to what a pitch the bondage of the
Israelites had by this time come; for some apparently trivial reason
an Egyptian can kill an Israelite on the spot (the verb Aikkah must
36 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
surely have the same meaning here as it doubtless has in the following
verse and thus means ‘kill’ and not just ‘beat’). Moses did not see
how ‘his people’ were faring on just one occasion out of curiosity;
from now on they are-to be his concern and so he ‘goes out’ to them
on the following day, only to discover that his action against the
Egyptian has already become common knowledge, at least among
‘his people’, and that the atmosphere is not so much one of joy over
his championing the oppressed as mistrust of his person and his
prompt action.
Once his act has become known Moses is compelled to flee.
Sufficient reason for his flight is given by v. 14b.; once the Israelites
know about the affair it will not remain long hidden from the
Egyptians, who will then take steps about it. Moses withdraws at the
right time. The reference to Pharaoh in v. 15 looks like a variant to
vv. 13 and 14 and probably represents a secondary addition to the
narrative. No reason is given for Moses’ choice of the land of Midian
as his goal. An examination of the history of the tradition explains
this choice. The land of Midian was chiefly known as the scene of
Moses’ first encounter with God, and the story of the flight from
Egypt is intended to allow Moses to reach just this place. The scene
by the well in Midian follows a pattern frequent in Old Testament
stories when a foreigner is to be brought into contact with the people
of the land (cf. Gen. 24.11 ff.; 29.2 ff.). This pattern comes straight
from real life. Watering places are the usual spots for meeting people,
especially in a neighbourhood where there are no fixed dwellings, as
it is from them that water must be drawn every day and to them that
animals, especially the flocks of sheep and goats, must be brought to
drink. Quite often disputes arise at them over the precious water.
Whoever is first there or is able to have his own way guarantees him-
self a considerable share of the water supply, which is perhaps scanty.
The watering places therefore give a strong and upright foreigner the
opportunity to stand up for the weaker ones in the struggle for water.
The womenfolk especially are such weaker ones, as they have to
cope with shepherds whenever they wish to draw water for their
houses and their flocks. In the present instance there are seven daugh-
ters of the priest of Midian who have to pasture the flock for their
father and lead it down to the watering place, because according to
this particular story the priest has no sons at all (Num. 10.29 differs).
They have already drawn water up the well-shaft in their buckets
and have filled the troughs from which the flock is to drink. Then the
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 37
shepherds come along with their flocks and thernselves want to make
use of the water which has been drawn by the womenfolk. At this
stage Moses, who is recognizable as an Egyptian in a foreign land by
his clothing, has the opportunity to interfere. In so doing he makes
the acquaintance first of the daughters of the priest and later of the
priest himself, remains as a protected guest (in Hebrew gér) in the
house of the priest of Midian, becomes his son-in-law and has a son
by his daughter. Verse 18 gives the name of the priest as Reuel, a
name which is given to him only once elsewhere, in Num. 10.29: in
Ex. 3.1; 4.18; 18.1 ff. his name is Jethro. Now in the text of Ex. 2.18
the name Reuel looks very much like an addition, but when this
addition was made—and this presumably happened at quite an early
stage—the Midianite father-in-law of Moses was known in certain
Israelite circles by the name Reuel. The difference in names shows
that the oldest tradition of Moses’ relation by marriage with Midian
gave no name for his father-in-law, who was originally described
merely as the ‘priest of Midian’. This is still the case even in the
present text when he is introduced for the first time in Ex. 2.16. It is
impossible to discover the origin of the different names given to the
priest at a later date. Tradition names the priest’s daughter married
to Moses as Zipporah; this name means ‘bird’ (feminine) and is
certainly to be regarded as just a girl’s name which was not uncom-
mon in old times. It was given to the Midianite wife of Moses as the
story became more concrete. Zipporah was probably never the
subject of special traditions. Gershom, the son of Moses, is however
a different matter. This name cannot be separated from the eponym
of the priestly family at the sanctuary of Dan, who according to the
original text of Judg. 13.30 went back beyond their ancestor
Gershom to Moses, and that at a relatively early period before it
was customary to derive all priests, including the ‘Gershonites’
(cf. Num. 3.17 ff.), from Aaron. Thus Gershom, the son of Moses,
comes from the Danite priestly tradition and we have the rare
occasion of an element of north Israelite tradition finding its way
into the Pentateuchal narrative. Gershom was the only son of Moses
known to theJ tradition. It was quite appropriate to introduce him
at this stage of the story, where the tradition of Moses’ kinship with a
Midianite priest emerges for the first time, and in this way he has a
Midianite woman for a mother, which can hardly have been intended
in the Danite priestly tradition. As usual in folk tales, his name is
explained by Moses’ situation as gé in the land of Midian (see above).
38 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
[3-1-6] The story of Moses’ decisive encounter with God which
now follows is made up of two elements, the narrative of the theo-
phany at a particular place in the wilderness and the narrative of the
sending of Moses. In the E version of course the former narrative
element has faded away completely; God just suddenly calls Moses
by name (v. 4b) and no descriptive details are given either of the
surroundings or of how this calling takes place.* After Moses has
replied to the calling of his name with the customary ‘Here am I’, the
one who calls reveals himself as ‘God of the Fathers’ (v. 6), where-
upon Moses hides his face, presumably by wrapping it in his mantle
(cf. I Kings 19.13), in fear of the sight of God. The wording suggests
that God is thought to have appeared in some visible way. The place
where this happened was the ‘mountain of God’ (in the land of
Midian). The passage in which this is given (v.1bd) certainly belongs
to the E version. The word ‘God’ in the term ‘mountain of God’
could possibly have occurred in J also, but the mention of the
‘mountain of God’ in Ex. 18.5 E suggests that here too the expression
comes from the E narrative. It remains uncertain whether there is
anything else in v. 1 as it has been transmitted which goes back to the
E version. The chief question concerns the name Jethro, as it also
appears elsewhere in E contexts (4.18; 18.1 ff.) and is in any case not
to be derived fromJ (see above on 2.18). If the name Jethro here is
not simply an addition occasioned by later occurrences of the name
and if therefore E is to be given some no longer definable part of the
statements in v. Ia, then E, like J, would have had Moses pasturing
the flock of his Midianite father-in-law and at one stage of his wan-
derings from pasturage to pasturage would have had him going off
into the distance. In doing this Moses would reach a ‘mountain of
God’, apparently unknown before, on which he would be called upon
by God in an astounding way to receive his commission.
The wanderings of Moses in a land still unknown, as he tends the
flock of his father-in-law, which lead to his finding of the place in the
wilderness at which he was addressed by Yahweh, appear more
clearly in the J version as a special element of the tradition. Moses
discovers this place and is told that it is ‘holy ground’ (v. 5) to which
no man may ‘come near’ and whose surroundings may be trodden
only by naked feet, i.e. feet left in their natural condition. In pattern
*[In his own translation of the text Noth encloses the words ‘out of the bush’
(3.4b) in square brackets without comment, thereby implying that they are a later
(secondary) addition. Tr.]
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 39
this story recalls many of the patriarchal narratives, especially the
story of the discovery by Jacob of the sanctuary of what is later to be
the cult centre of Bethel (Gen. 28.11-22 JE). It is therefore probable
that here too we are dealing with an original local tradition to which
the ‘holy ground’ concerned was still known as such at a later period.
The narrative offers no clues towards fixing it in a more definite
locality. All that can be inferred from the context into which this
tradition has been introduced is that the place was in the wilderness,
in particular in the wilderness which lay between Egypt and the
cultivated land of Palestine. This place, which was presumably still
known to later Israelites, at least to those who passed on caravan
trains through the wilderness which spread to the south of their
dwelling-places, was marked out by a ‘burning bush’. As no specific
account is given for this phenomenon, although it is assumed to be
the permanent feature of the place in question, we must look for an
explanation of it. The favourite explanation of exegetes has been a
manifestation similar to St Elmo’s fire, and in fact we must imagine
something of this sort; we cannot, however, regard this as a certain
explanation. It is understandable that such a phenomenon was
regarded as something awesome, as a sign of divine presence. H.
Gressmann is able to produce a whole series of parallels from Syria—
Palestine of stories of bushes which burn yet are not consumed.* This
local tradition of the holy place of the burning bush in the wilderness
has now entered the Israelite tradition to give a concrete background
to the story of Moses’ first encounter with God. We may ask whether
J, who can hardly have known the wilderness of the south from his
own experience, and perhaps even the oral tradition which was
handed down to him, did not look for the holy place of the burning
bush, originally independent, on Sinai. The Hebrew word for ‘bush’
(seneh) which is used here certainly had nothing to do with the name
‘Sinai’ originally; in many Semitic languages it is the recognized
description for a particular kind of thorny shrub, and in Arabic, in
the form sind, it refers specially to the thorny shrub Cassa obovata
which can be found today in Palestine in the neighbourhood of the
Dead Sea. If then there is a concrete local tradition in the back-
ground, the word appears in Ex. 3 because a particular kind of bush
is to be described which can be given this name and only this name
in Hebrew. There is no intention of any sort of mysterious allusion
to the name Sinai. It is however possible that when the story was
* Moses, pp. 26 ff.
40 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

later incorporated into the framework of the Moses tradition the

word sneh was felt to contain an allusion to the name Sinai, with the
result that the scene was subsequently transferred to Sinai. This could
also be the reason for the phenomenon of the fire, which is reminis-
cent of the features which accompany the theophany on Sinai.
PerhapsJ was already thinking of this as a prelude to the subsequent
great theophany on Sinai in which Moses took part. First of all he
has the ‘angel of the Lord’ (Hebrew mal’ ak Yahweh = Greek angelos
Kyriou), a heavenly messenger, acting as the mediator of the divine
power on earth, who is described rather vaguely, appearing to Moses
in the fire of the bush. Later, however, when we have a personal
address to Moses and are dealing no longer with the ‘appearance’ of
God but with his ‘speech’, it is Yahweh himself who acts.*
[3-7-17] Both in actual fact and in the history of the tradition it is
the divine commission to Moses which forms the real nucleus of the
story of Moses’ stay in the land of Midian as told by the old sources
of the Pentateuch. At the same time, this commission is formulated
in the two sources in rather different ways. In JMoses hears Yahweh
announce that he will lead Israel up out of Egypt (vv. 7 f.) and is
ordered to proclaim the divine purpose to the Israelites in Egypt
(vv. 16 ff.). Here Moses is quite simply the messenger of God who
receives the news of what Yahweh intends to do and has to pass on
this news to Israel, in the form of a proclamation in which the
messenger represents the one who sent him and speaks for him in the
first person (vv. 16b, 17). This is reminiscent of the prophets known
to us from a later time, but with the difference that here a redemptive
act of Yahweh is to be proclaimed, whereas the later prophets are
concerned primarily and predominantly with an impending divine
judgment. J formulated the commission to Moses long before the
appearance of ‘classical’ prophecy; thus at this early stage the arrival
of a messenger of God who was sent to precede an imminent divine
action was not unknown in Israel. For E too Moses is an ‘envoy’;
three times in this connection it is said that God ‘sends’ Moses
(vv. 10, 12, 13), and here the same word is used which is to be
employed later by the prophets to describe their office (cf. Jer.
26.12, 15). At the same time however Moses is in E given the com-
mand to ‘bring forth’ Israel out of Egypt (vv. 10, 11, 12) whereas
according to J it is Yahweh himself who will ‘bring up’ Israel out of
Egypt (vv. 8, 17). Of course this is an insignificant difference, as it is
*Cf. Gen. 16.7 ff. and von Rad, Genesis, ad loc.
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 41
certain that E too understands that in the Exodus Moses is no more
man an instrument of the divine action. But the difference is none
the less there. The J description should therefore be regarded as the
thore original, as we have in it the narrative development of the
primitive confession of Israel that ‘Yahweh has led Israel out of
Egypt’. In contrast E presents us with an interpretation of the work of
Moses which has already become a shade more substantial. In both
cases, however, the sole initiative in the events which now begin
clearly remains with Yahweh himself.
According to J (vv. 7 f., 16 ff.) Yahweh’s speech to Moses is simple
and—in its original form—short. Yahweh has already begun to act.
Not only has he heard the s**aqdh of the Israelites, i.e. the cry for help
of the helpless oppressed (v. 7); he has also already ‘come down’
(v. 8). J says quite clearly and unconcernedly that Yahweh comes
down from his dwelling piace in the highest heaven to do something
on earth (cf. also Gen. 11.5, 7 J). The ‘Promised Land’ is indicated
as the immediate goal of the Exodus, albeit by the passing reference
to a ‘good and broad land’ (further remarks made about this land
may be secondary additions). Moses is now to report his encounter
with God to the ‘elders’ of Israel, i.e. probably the heads of the great
families as the representatives and spokesmen of the whole (v. 16),
with the explicit information that Yahweh who appeared to him is
none other than the ‘God of the fathers’ of the patriarchal tradition
who is now beginning to fulfil the promise of land which he made to
the Patriarchs. Moses is to deliver to them the divine proclamation
that the ‘Exodus’ is now imminent. In its original state the J narra-
tive probably reached only as far as v. 17aa. In what follows then
probably not only is the stereotyped description of the Promised
Land (v. 17abb) a later addition but also the detailed description of
the events of the Exodus in 3.18-22. Here the divine proclamation
at this early stage strangely anticipates the later narrative by pre-
dicting the details of coming events, predicting them moreover with
some verbal borrowings from the later narrative (for v. 18 see 5.3;
for v. 21 see 11.3; for v. 22 see 11.2). With these additions the
proclamation of God receives a predictive element whereas originally
it contained only a short announcement of the mighty act of God.
[3-9-15] In E, where between v.6 and v. g perhaps only the
introduction to the divine speech of v. 9 ff. is lacking, Moses receives
the commission to ‘bring forth’ Israel since God has let the cry of the
people of Israel come before him (v. g is parallel to v. 7; the phrases
42 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

‘I will send you to Pharaoh’, v. 10, and ‘go to Pharaoh’, v. 11, some-
what destroy the smooth flow of the narrative and are perhaps expan-
sions). When Moses asks anxiously how he is to achieve this great work
he receives the promise that God will ‘be with him’ and as confirma-
tion of his divine commission a ‘sign’ is presented to him. This is
strongly reminiscent of the stories of charismatic leaders in the time of
the ‘Judges’, and the wording is in part the same. There is for example
the story of Gideon who in the same way ‘is sent’ to perform an
action (not merely to pass on a divine proclamation) and who also
receives for himself the promise that God will ‘be with him’. He too
requests and receives a ‘sign’ as confirmation of his mission (Judg. 6.
14 ff.). The promise ‘I will be with you’ means quite literally that
God will be present. Now of course the ‘sign’ promised to Moses is not
named, as v. 12 has obviously been transmitted in a fragmentary
state. This is evident from the mere fact that the word ‘God’ appears
in the third person in the context of a speech made by God and from
the unjustifiable transition from the singular address made to Moses
to the plural address to the Israelites.* The last clause of this verse
apparently contains something which Moses is to say to the Israelites
and in it ‘this mountain’ is the ‘mountain of God’ of v. 1. Now this
future ‘serving on this mountain’ can hardly be the sign intended in
this context, as it will only take place when the Exodus has already
been accomplished; the sign must therefore originally have stood
after v. 12a. We are as little able to tell what may originally have
been in the gaps now existing in v. 12 as whether the gaps themselves
arose accidentally in the transmission of the text or whether some-
thing contradictory to the J source was omitted by the redactor.
After Moses has been assured by the ‘sign’ of the divine commission
he still requires some proof to give to the Israelites. This proof would
consist in the fact that he is able to tell them the name of the one who
sent him. For in ancient Eastern thought the name of the person
who existed was a necessary part of his existence and one knew of a
reality only if one was able to pronounce its ‘name’. In the same way
Moses will only be able to make the Israelites believe in the reality of
his encounter with God if he is able to tell them the name of the God
who appeared to him. This presents no problem for J, as he has made
use of the divine name Yahweh right from the beginning of his narra-
tive and has also at least from Gen. 4.26 onwards presumed that this
name is known among men upon earth. In his narrative, Moses need
*This transition is of course not so clear in the English version.
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 43
only mention this familiar name (v. 16). E, who usually uses the
word ‘God’ instead of this name, is in a different position. In his
narrative the God who appeared to Moses had first appeared without
a name or just as “God of the fathers’ (v. 6, cf. v. 13); the question
about his name therefore has some point. By letting the ‘God of the
fathers’ answer the question about his name and thus give Moses the
proof he needed for the Israelites E now allows the name Yahweh to
be known, at first only in Israel. In so doing he presumably remained
nearer to historical reality, for in some way the rise of the cult of
Yahweh in Israel in particular is connected with the process of Israel’s
becoming a people before the conquest of Palestine. The giving of the
name follows in wv. 14 f., first and foremost through the mysterious
sentence ehyeh ’*Ser ehyeh, ‘I am who I am’, from which the catchword
ehyeh ‘I am’ is taken as the name of the God who appeared to Moses
(v. 14). This name unmistakably hints at the divine name Yahweh
in so far as an Israelite ear could immediately understand the transi-
tion from ehyeh to yahweh merely as a transition from the first to the
third person (in which the w of yahweh in place of the _y of ehyeh may
have been felt as dissimilation after the initial _y) so that the name
Yahweh would be understood to mean ‘he is’. Verse 15 explicitly
puts forward this connection by inserting the name Yahweh for the
ehyeh of v. 14. We cannot of course completely escape the impression
that there is some overcrowding in wv. 14 f. The threefold introduc-
tion to God’s speech does not look original; this unusual repetition is
stressed rather than explained by the little word ‘also’ at the begin-
ning of v. 15. If then we have both primary and secondary material
in these verses, we must hold the simpler expression to be the original
and thus should not understand v. 15 to be a secondary expansion of
v. 14 in the sense of being an explicit interpretation of the ehyeh
(“Ser chyeh) through the name Yahweh, especially as v. 14 could
hardly have been in need of such an express interpretation. Instead
we should regard the simple giving of the name in v. 15 as an original
answer to the question at the end of v. 13, in the same way as the
sentence in v. 15b, ‘this is my name for ever’, will then take up the
question ‘What is his name?’ in v. 13. Verse 14a would then have
been added subsequently as an explanation of the name Yahweh and
would have been inserted into the context by means of 14b which
verbally anticipates the following clause. In this way the insertion of
the little word ‘also’ at the beginning of v. 15 would eventually com-
mend itself. Should v. 14a(b) then be a secondary literary element
44. THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

in the material of the E narrative the addition could still be quite old
and could go back to a perhaps still older tradition of the explana-
tion of the name Yahweh. Be this as it may, v. 14a(b) however old it
is is of great significance as the only explanation of the Old Testa-
ment name for God which has actually been handed down in the
Old Testament. Thus we can leave aside the question whether the
divine name had had a history before it was used in Israel, perhaps
in conjunction with a pre-Israelite or non-Israelite cult on the
‘mountain of God’ (or Sinai), and likewise the further question
whether the explanation in v. 14 rightly defines the original meaning
of the name. We may just observe that the name Yahweh is in fact
probably to be derived from the stem hwh, frequent in the Aramaic
and Arabic dialects, which corresponds to the Hebrew root hyh “be’.*
It is an important fact that within the framework of the Old Testa-
ment tradition the divine name has been understood in the way in
which it is explained in v. 14. How far this understanding, alongside
which the Old Testament hands on no other possibility of interpreta-
tion, was widespread in Israel we have no means of telling. There is
scarcely any reference to this understanding elsewhere in the Old
Testament except for the strange ehych of Hos. 1.9, which seems once
again to allude to the interpretation of the name Yahweh in Ex. 3.14.
There therefore the divine name is explained to mean ‘He of whom
the saying “I am who I am’”’ is true’. This saying is not simply inter-
changeable with the short ‘I am’. For in view of what has been said
earlier, v. 14b, in which the ehyeh Ser ehyeh of v. 14a appears
shortened to a simple ehyeh, is presumably just a redactional transi-
tion to v. 15 and in no way an authentic interpretation of v. 14a.
Thus the sentence ehyeh **Ser ehyeh, ‘I am who I am’, must be self-
explanatory. It allows of various interpretations between which a
firm decision is hardly possible. It is, however, hard to maintain that
this sentence either refuses an answer or gives an evasive answer to
the request for the name. For not only does the wider context lead us
to understand that the name Yahweh is disclosed to Moses as a real
divine name and not merely as the disguising of a divine name,
especially if v. 14a(b) should be a secondary addition to v. 15; in
addition, the sentence v. 14a does not give itself to be understood in

*The form yahweh in vv. 14 f. is apparently understood as a verbal form, which

indeed it can be (= ‘he is’). But perhaps it was originally a matter of a noun
derived from the root hwh and formed by the prefix ya being added = ‘the being
one’ (cf. L. Koehler, Die Welt des Orients 1 5, 1950, p. 405).
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 45
this way—if it did it would have to run not ‘I am who I am’ but ‘I
am called whatever I am called’. The sentence construction ehyeh
*oSer ehyeh can also be translated as a future, ‘I will be who I will be’,
without making any essential difference, as it is said of the God who
now means to act in the history of Israel. In either event it is accord-
ing to Hebrew linguistic usage meant to express something which
cannot be defined more closely.* Here perhaps the meaning is less
one of pure indefiniteness (“I am someone or other’) than of that kind
of indefiniteness in which something definite is envisaged but is not
meant to be expressed (“I am something, but it will only turn out
later what I am’). Most likely, however, that kind of indefiniteness is
expressed which leaves open a large number of possibilities (‘I am
whatever I mean to be’). Though these different nuances in the short
sentences may be held together and each of them be read out of it
according to circumstances, it is in any case important to note that
the verb hyh in Hebrew does not express pure ‘being’, pure ‘existing’
but an ‘active being’; and in the present instance this certainly means
an ‘active being’ which does not take place just anywhere, but makes
its appearance in the world of men and primarily in the history of
Israel. This perhaps is what is expressed in Ex. 3.14a to explain the
name Yahweh. We must be on our guard against wanting to read
more out of this interpretation than its wording permits.
[4-1-9] In J as well as in E Moses, entrusted with a divine message
to the Israelites, requires some means of authenticating himself to
those to whom the message is addressed; this he receives in a twofold
way by being given the power to do two ‘signs’ which he will be able
to make use of in case of need. Is it a feature of the picture of a
messenger of God here presupposed by J that he be able to show that
he has received the divine commission by the exercise of miraculous
‘power’? We may allow this question all the more as Moses after-
wards never comes into the pressing situation of having to make
emphatic use of this twofold authentication before the Israelites
(cf. on 4.30 f.). Only in the later P narrative does the theme of the
rod transformed into a serpent make a further independent appear-
ance (7.9-12), apparently on the basis of an old tradition, but in
another context, namely in front of Pharaoh. CanJ then in 4.1 ff. be
said merely to have rounded off the picture of Moses as divine
messenger which was present in his mind? The connection in 4.1 ff.
*On this see especially T. E. Vriezen, “ Ehje ’*Ser ’ehje’, Festschrift Alfred Bertholet,
1950, pp. 498-512.
46 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
is not completely smooth. Verse 5, with its verbal repetitions of what
has gone before, is not only superfluous, but is inserted into the
narrative so carelessly, without any new introductory formula for the
divine speech, that it can only be regarded as an addition. But what
can be said of v. 5 can also be said of v. 8 and at the same time of v. 9
which is reminiscent of the ‘plagues’ (cf. 7.14 ff.). Here Moses is
empowered to give as it were a prelude to these plagues, but the gift
of ‘power’ does not correspond with the two gifts of power mentioned
earlier, in so far as in this case Moses cannot immediately perform the
‘miracle’ as a test. [4.10-12] After the messenger of God has received
his commission and the means of proving himself, we find in wy. 10 ff.
that although he has been equipped in this way he nevertheless
objects, objects moreover with an excuse (v. 10) which conceals the
anxiety of man before a task given by God. Later prophecy too knows
the same thing (cf. Jer. 1.6). Moses is taught by Yahweh that he,
Yahweh, is the Creator and thus the real Lord over man and his
facilities for perception and expression (v. 11), that he can therefore
let man serve him with his natural aptitudes and will give him
whatever is necessary to fulfil the task in hand, in this case by
‘teaching’, by showing him what he must say at the decisive moment.
This too recalls the later ‘classical’ prophets, who did not usually
have the content of their message prepared beforehand, but in each
instance received the ‘word’ which they were to say on any occasion
(cf. especially Jer. 28.11 ff.). It is surprising that after this divine
promise Moses has the audacity to repeat his refusal in a still more
brusque way (v. 13), and quite astonishing that the divine wrath,
which thereupon quite understandably flares up (v. 14aa@), neverthe-
less immediately leads to a further promise, that Aaron shall be a
companion for Moses (vv. 14abb-16). Yahweh, who means to do a
great work in which Moses is to serve as his messenger, shows con-
siderable forbearance towards Moses’ human weakness. Now it is of
course true that the section vv. 13-16 represents a secondary addition,
made in any case during the transmission of the tradition and per-
haps even at the literary stage within the J narrative work, which
has the aim of bringing Aaron into the story and uses the repeated
(and heightened) theme of the objections by Moses to form the link.
Here and in what follows the mention of Aaron does not seem to fit
the original form of the narrative. If we have to understand the word
‘brother’ in v. 14 in the narrow sense and not as a general term
‘kinsman’, Aaron appears in this section as Moses’ physical brother;
2.11-4.23] MOSES IN MIDIAN 47
this was not the meaning of the oldest tradition to be fixed in writing
(cf. on 15.20). Nevertheless this addition was made at quite an early
stage, as is shown by the ancient use of the description ‘the Levite’ in
v. 14, which in fact is perhaps older than the use of the name Levi in
2.1. For alongside the designation ‘your brother’, the description
‘the Levite’ is hardly to be understood as giving us information about
his descent; it rather seems to assign to Aaron a function which Moses
himself does not have. Apparently in /éwi we have here an old techni-
cal term. That Yahweh is already leading ‘the Levite Aaron’ to
Moses at the same time as he is speaking to Moses (v. 14b; cf. v. 27) is
a sign that his work is not limited by space. Altogether the subsidiary
section vv. 13-15 presents a picture of the messenger of God remini-
scent of the later ‘classical’ prophecy. Aaron will now be the real
messenger and in contrast to him Moses, who will tell him what to
do, will take the place of God (v. 16b/). Moses will ‘put the words in
his mouth’ (v. 15a) in the same way as God does with the prophets
(cf. Jer. 1.9b) and Aaron will serve Moses as a mouthpiece (v. 16ba)
just as the prophet is the ‘mouth of God’ (Jer. 15.19). Moses’ silence
after v. 12 (v. 16) shows that he is now ready to obey the divine
command.
[4-17] The ‘rod’ appears quite abruptly in v. 17. Moses is to use it
to ‘do the signs’. This remark does not fit at all well with vv. 1 ff.
according to which Moses will need his rod only for one of the two
signs. Verse 17 thus certainly comes from the E version, in which
Moses is apparently given not merely one ‘sign’ (cf. 3.12a) but a
number of signs. In view of the parallel J version, however, the E
tradition has been preserved only in fragments.
[4-18-23] To carry out his task Moses returns to Egypt, as is
reported in two variants (cf. pp. 33 ff. above). According to J
(vv. 19, 20a) he took his wife and children with him; according to E
(vv. 18, 20b) he apparently returned alone (cf. 18.2 ff.) but had with
him the ‘rod of God’ (cf. v. 17) with which to perform the signs, as is
here expressly stated. Yahweh’s speech to Moses in vv. 21-23, which
still presupposes the situation before his departure (cf. on the other
hand v. 20a), is to be assessed in the same way as the section 3.18-22
(see above p. 41). It already hints at the last of the plagues and with
regard to this describes Israel as the ‘first-born son’ of Yahweh,
whose violation Yahweh will avenge on the ‘first-born son’ of
Pharaoh in accordance with the ius talionis. Israel is also named
Yahweh’s ‘son called out of Egypt’ in Hos. 11.1.
48 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

4. THE RETURN OF MOSES AND HIS FIRST

MEETING WITH PHARAOH: 4.24-6.1
24. At a lodging place on the way the Lorp met him and sought to kill
him. 5 Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched
Moses’ feet with it, and said, ‘Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!”
26 So he let him alone. Then it was that she said, ‘You are a bridegroom of
blood,’ because of the circumcision.
[27 The Lorp said to Aaron, ‘Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.’
So he went, and met him at the mountain of God and kissed him. *® And Moses
told Aaron all the words of the Lord with which he had sent him, and all
the signs which he had charged him to do.| ®®° Then Moses [and Aaron] went and
gathered together all the elders of the people of Israel. *° And [Aaron] spoke
all the words which the Lorp had spoken [to Moses], and did the signs in
the sight of the people. * And the people believed; and when they heard that
the Lorp had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction,
they bowed their heads and worshipped.

5 1 Afterward Moses [and Aaron] went to Pharaoh and said, ‘Thus

says the Lorn, the God of Israel, ““Let my people go, that they may hold a
Seast to me in the wilderness.’ *®But Pharaoh said, ‘Who ts the Lorn,
that I should heed his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lory, and
moreover I will not let Israel go.’ * Then they said, ‘The God of the Hebrews
has met with us; let us go, we pray, a three days journey into the wilderness,
and sacrifice to [the Lorp] our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or
with the sword.’ * But the king of Egypt said to them, ‘[Moses and Aaron,]
why do you take the people away from their work? Get to your burdens.’ > And
Pharaoh said, ‘Behold, the people of the land are now many and you make
them rest from their burdens!’ ® The same day Pharaoh commanded the task-
masters of the people [and their foremen], *‘You shall no longer give the
people straw to make bricks, as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for
themselves, ® But the number of bricks which they made heretofore you shall
lay upon them, you shall by no means lessen it; for they are idle; therefore they
cry, “Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.” ® Let heavier work be laid upon
the men that they may labour at it and pay no regard to lying words.’
10 So the taskmasters [and the foremen] of the people went out and said to
the people, ‘Thus says Pharaoh, ‘‘I will not give you straw. ™ Go yourselves,
get your straw wherever you can find it; but your work will not be lessened in
the least.” ? 12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of
Egypt, to gather stubble for straw. 18 The taskmasters were urgent, saying,
‘Complete your work, your daily task, as when there was straw.’ 14 And the
Soremen of the people of Israel, whom Pharaoh’s taskmasters had set over them,
were beaten, and were asked, ‘Why have you not done all your task of making
bricks today, as hitherto?
15 Then the foremen of the people of Israel came and cried to Pharaoh,
4.24-6.1] THE RETURN OF MOSES 49
‘Why do you deal thus with your servants? 18 No straw is given to your servants,
yet they say to us, “Make bricks!” And behold, your servants are beaten; but
the fault 1s in your own people.’ \” But he said, ‘You are idle, you are idle;
therefore you say, ‘“Let us go and sacrifice to the Lorv.”’ 18 Go now, and work ;
for no straw shall be given you, yet you shall deliver the same number of bricks.’
19 The foremen of the people of Israel saw that they were in evil plight, when
they said, ‘You shall by no means lessen your daily number of bricks.’ 2° They
met Moses [and Aaron], who [were] waiting for them, as they came forth from
Pharaoh; *\ and they said to [them], ‘The Lorp look upon you and judge,
because you have made us offensive in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and
have put a sword in their hand to kill us.’
22 Then Moses turned again to the Lorp and said, ‘O Lorp, why hast
thou done evil to this people? Why didst thou ever send me? %3 For since I
came to Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he has done evil to this people, and thou
hast not delivered thy people at all.’ 6 1 But the LorpD said to Moses, ‘Now
you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh; for [with a strong hand he will send
them out, yea] with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land.’

[4.24—26] The brief note about an incident on Moses’ return to

Egypt is very obscure in several respects. Why does it appear at all
in this place? As it deals with the theme of circumcision we would
rather expect to find it connected with the description of Moses’
marriage or even the birth of his son. A definite locality evidently
plays some part here. At a solitary, mysterious place in the wilderness
Moses was fiercely attacked by Yahweh, who here displays a ‘de-
monic’ character and, perhaps in the course of the Old Testament
transference of all supernatural workings to the one God, has taken
the place of the local demon who would originally have been meant
in this passage. For this reason the scene has been inserted here where
Moses, with his wife and child, for the first time wanders through the
desolate wilderness on his return to Egypt. When the tradition arose,
did it still know the definite ‘lodging place’ in the wilderness at which
this strange incident took place? Or did it merely have a quite
general impression of the uncanny atmosphere of the wilderness by
night? The wilderness locality with its demon however only forms
the background for a brief narrative which has been transferred to it
and linked up with it, an aetiological narrative of some kind. It is
expressly said at the conclusion, in v. 26b, that the reason is given for
the expression ‘bridegroom of blood’, a term which it was customary
to use ‘because of the circumcision’, i.e. in the case of those who were
or had just been circumcised. The way in which v. 26b is written
certainly suggests that this expression was for the narrator an ancient
50 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

one, no longer current in his time, but still known from an earlier
period. This expression ‘bridegroom of blood’ indicates a connection
between circumcision and marriage, and the story which explains the
expression understands circumcision as an apotropaic act which keeps
away a nocturnal threat—and here the wedding night may originally
have been envisaged. Some obviously very old customs and ideas
associated with circumcision appear in the story. No reason is given
why in the face of the threat Zipporah should resort to the act of
circumcision in particular; the aetiological aim of the narrative
requires this spontaneous action by Zipporah. Zipporah carries out
the act with a ‘flint’, just as in Josh. 5.2 f. ‘flint knives’ serve to effect
the circumcision; such a primitive sacral act called for the use of an
old and not a ‘modern’ implement. As Moses is the person involved
at the beginning and the end of the story, the appearance of his son
on the scene is completely obscure; it also leaves uncertain to whom
the remark ‘touched his feet’ refers.* One is tempted to assume that
the part played by the son is to be regarded as an addition to the
tradition which was occasioned by the later custom of child circum-
cision, whereas the original material still dealt with the older adult
circumcision, and that by ‘touching the feet’ the act of circumcision
would appear to have been effected symbolically upon Moses. But
these are only vague hypotheses on a section which in this brief form
is quite inexplicable.

[4-27-31] After the nocturnal interlude in the wilderness Moses

reaches Egypt and there fulfils his commission by delivering his
message. To do this he gathers together the elders of Israel (v. 29b)
which was apparently possible without any difficulty as the Israelites
in Egypt lived quite near to one another (cf. above on 1.15 ff.). The
‘people’ represented by the elders also hear the message and believe
it willingly (v. 31a); they bow themselves in worship before their God
who has taken them to himself, and thereby show themselves ready
for whatever God has prepared to happen to them (v. grb). Of
course the wonderful signs of 4.2 ff. are done before the people
(v. gob) but it is not said that they would really have been
necessary.

*['The rendering ‘Moses’ feet’ given in the RSV begs the question; the Hebrew
text has merely an ambiguous third person suffix which is accurately translated in
AV and RV. ‘Feet’ is of course here a euphemistic expression, as elsewhere in the
Old Testament. Tr.]
4.24-6.1] THE RETURN OF MOSES 51
There is no hint of an initial unbelief which had to be overcome;
the wonderful signs are done because they happen to be what was
provided for the authentication of the messenger of God. The
passage is connected with 4.13-16 by the introduction of Aaron and
the mention of him alongside Moses. Here too, in 4.27 ff., the appear-
ance of Aaron betrays itself quite clearly as a secondary addition (see
above pp. 46 f.). According to the present wording of v. 30 Aaron did
the wonderful signs before the people. This is unexpected in view of
what has gone before; according to 4.13-16 Aaron is to represent
Moses merely as a ‘spokesman’, and according to 4.2 ff. the ‘power’ to
do the wonderful signs is given to Moses alone. Thus Aaron has only
subsequently been introduced as a spokesman into v. 30a and Moses
was originally the subject in the whole of v. 30. Then too only Moses
would originally have been mentioned in v. 29. Accordingly the
passage vv. 27 f. must also be regarded as secondary; in fact this does
not fit at this point anyhow. Once again it goes back to the ‘mountain
of God’ (v. 27b) although in the meantime Moses has already been a
long time on his journey from the land of Midian to Egypt. Even if
we wish to leave out of consideration the nocturnal incident in the
wilderness described in vv. 24-26 as a special passage which does not
concern the larger context, according to vv. 18-20—and moreover
in both the narrative versions, J and E—Moses would already have
returned to his father-in-law from the place where he had his en-
counter with God and in any case would be on the point of starting
off for Egypt. Moreover, it is striking that in v. 28 Moses says
nothing to Aaron about the special commission with which according
to 4.13-16 he has specially been entrusted. Here we already get the
impression that the subsequent introduction of Aaron is not the result
of a systematic and well-considered redaction, but that Aaron has
been inserted into each of the old Moses stories as opportunity offered
while Moses has been pushed to one side.* In what follows, therefore,
it is generally tacitly assumed that the mention of Aaron alongside
Moses is usually secondary.
[5.16.1] After the Israelites in Egypt have heard the message from
God brought by Moses, the initiative is placed in their hands with the
*If we ascribe the use of the expression ‘mountain of God’ to the E version
(cf. above p. 38 on 3.1) we shall have to see a mixture of J and E elements in the
language of this verse, as the divine name Yahweh is mentioned in vv. 27 f. In that
case we must assume that the addition which introduces Aaron was made to the
JE narrative after it had been combined, at least in the case of individual parts of
the addition, which is probably not a unity in itself.
52 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

first negotiations with Pharaoh to attempt to secure from him their

release from Egypt. As they are in Egypt as forced labour in the royal
service, only a decision from Pharaoh can free them from their
immediate situation unless they are ready and willing to resort to
force or to deception. Thus the request to Pharaoh and the negotia-
tions with him are the obvious move. Thanks to a simple way of
thinking it is here supposed that the Israelite labour force was able to
speak directly to the Egyptian ruler through their representatives.
The first negotiations turn out very much to the disadvantage of the
Israelites. An appeal to the ‘God of the Hebrews’ (v. 3)—this means
the God of Israel, whose people describe themselves quite appropri-
ately to the Egyptians (see p. 21 above) as a people of ‘Hebrews’—of
course makes no impression at all upon Pharaoh, who worships the
great gods of his country. He diagnoses their request for release as
unwillingness to work (vv. 8, 17), and as a punishment lays increased
quotas of work upon the Israelite forced labour, which he requires for
his building plans and understandably does not mean to set free.
The individual details are described very clearly in a broadly
executed narrative style; we are told how the ‘taskmasters’—1.e. the
Egyptian officials who had to organize and supervise the forced
labour—received Pharaoh’s command not as previously to supply
the Israelites with the straw necessary to mix with the clay for
making wind-dried bricks, and how readily they complied with this
command; how the Israelite ‘foremen’, i.e. overseers who were
responsible to the Egyptian officials for the fulfilment of the tempo-
rarily harsh quota of work, attempt in vain to secure from Pharaoh
the withdrawal of the increased requirements and how in so doing
they submissively describe the Israelites not merely as ‘servants of
Pharaoh’, but—if another reading* of the text of v. 16b is the right
one—in their present situation as ‘people of Pharaoh’, though of
course at the same time they quite boldly point out to Pharaoh that
with such harsh treatment he does wrong to this ‘his people’.
At first sight this vivid narrative gives the impression of being
complete and a unity. A closer examination, however, gives rise to a
number of questions. Few, indeed, are of a literary nature; from this
point of view the section 5.1-6.1 runs quite smoothly. Only v. 4

*[This other reading, which is rendered by Noth in his translation, is that of an

emendation considered probable in R. Kittel, Biblia Hebraica,? 1945, and suppor-
ted by the LXX and the Syriac. In translation it would run ‘. . . your servants
are beaten. And (in so doing) you do wrong to your people.’ Tr.]
4.24-6.1] MOSES’ FIRST MEETING WITH PHARAOH 53
appears strange as it clashes with the following v. 5. This verse speaks
of a thought which came to Pharaoh. This does not of course appear
from the wording of the introduction to the verse, as the Hebrew
wrote “Pharaoh said’ even if he meant ‘Pharaoh thought’. But the
content of v. 5a can only be meant as one of Pharaoh’s thoughts
which he does not express to the Israelites, if we follow the reading of
the Samaritan Pentateuch in place of the barely understandable
Massoretic text.* Pharaoh then means that the Israelites, who have
already grown far too numerous, must be kept under by hard labour
(cf. on 1.11). We can even suppose that the original wording of
v. 5b was ‘And am I to grant them a rest from their burdens?’+
Verse 4 is not completely appropriate before this thought, as it
anticipates a decision which Pharaoh only makes as a result of his
thought in v. 5. Now as v. 4 speaks of the ‘king of Egypt’, whereas
in the previous and subsequent verses the word ‘Pharaoh’ is con-
sistently used, we may see v. 4 as a fragment of E which has been
inserted in the context of the J narrative which otherwise runs from
5.1 to 6.1. Of course this does not explain why this single not very
important verse should have been taken from the E tradition which,
though no longer preserved here otherwise, must also have reported
the negotiations with the king of Egypt and have been added to
expand theJ variant.
It is more important to notice that in the negotiations with
Pharaoh Moses quite remarkably is put in the background. The
intensification of the work quotas required of the Israelites by
Pharaoh after their request for release leads the Israelite ‘foremen’ to
call upon Pharaoh in the name of their kinsmen (wy. 15 ff.), and in
vv. 20 ff. we are surprised to learn that in the meantime Moses has
been waiting outside so as to find out the result of the negotiations
with Pharaoh and to receive the rebukes of the foremen. These com-
plain that Moses’ desire has resulted in their gaining a still worse
reputation with Pharaoh and his officials (v. 21ba) and has given
Pharaoh just one more pretext for still harsher and more murderous
treatment (v. 21bb). At this stage Moses now becomes Israel’s spokes-
man before Yahweh and passes on to Yahweh the rebukes which he
*[This is followed by the RSV. The reading which Noth prefers may be trans-
lated: ‘And Pharaoh thought, ““They are now more numerous than the (native)
people of the land.”’’ Tr.]
+Then originally the reading would have been w«hisbattim; the ’étam would
only have been added subsequently when the consonantal text was read falsely as
whisbatiem.
54 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

has received (vv. 22 f.). Yahweh for his part draws the attention of
Moses to the imminent miraculous divine actions which will lead to
Israel’s release from Egypt (6.1). Now what is astonishing is not only
Moses’ unexpected reappearance in v. 20, but also his almost imper-
ceptible retreat in v. 3. After Moses has required the release of the
people in the name of the God of Israel and has been refused by
Pharaoh (vv. 1 f.), a first person plural suddenly appears in the
speech in v. 3 which can only refer to the Israelites as a whole or to
their representatives. In the text as it now stands this direct transition
is less striking, as in v. 1 Moses and Aaron were named together. But
in view of the content of v. 3b these two cannot originally have been
meant to speak in the first person plural, as it is their intention to take
all the people out into the wilderness to sacrifice to their God. In v. 3
we also have quite clearly a new contribution to the negotiations from
the Israelites, who begin by explaining that their God has met with
them. These several factors force us to the conclusion that underlying
5-13-19 is a piece of narrative in which the Israelites deal collectively
with Pharaoh, perhaps through some such group of representatives
as the ‘elders’, just as later, in vv. 15 ff., the ‘foremen’ of the Israelites
present their case to Pharaoh. We cannot make a literary division
between this passage and its present surroundings; not only does it
form the basis of the further narrative in vy. 20 ff. in which Moses
appears once again, but vv. 1 and 2 which lead up to it and in which
Moses is the chief spokesman to Pharaoh are already connected with
what follows by the mention of a (pilgrimage) feast ‘in the wilder-
ness’, similar to the sacrifice ‘in the wilderness’ envisaged in v. 3. We
shall therefore have to assume that a tradition about the commence-
ment of negotiations with Pharaoh, in which the Israelites as a body
appeared as taking part in the discussion, has found a place in theJ
tradition which is complete in itself. It may be asked why in his
literary work J did not smooth out the tensions which arose in this
way, as this would have been possible without excessive manipula-
tion; to this we can reply that not only did J generally preserve a
conservative attitude towards the individual narrative traditions
which came his way, but in the present instance the essential content
of the scene of the first negotiations with Pharaoh was already so
stereotyped during the process of oral tradition thatJincorporated it
into his work as an erratic block. At the same time, it becomes clear
that although there is general agreement about the basic material in
the tradition of the great events at the Exodus, the individual details
4.24-6.1] MOSES’ FIRST MEETING WITH PHARAOH 55
of this tradition have been narrated in a number of variant forms
which did not arise only when they were given fixed shape in various
literary works, but were already present in the previous stage, that of
oral tradition. The passage 5.3-19, in which Moses is not mentioned,
appears in the literary work of J as an element incorporated from an
older tradition, and it is not outside the bounds of possibility that we
have here a piece of a version of the narrative description of the
Exodus theme which occupies an even earlier place in the history of
the tradition. In any case, in contrast with the later version, which in
general occupies the forefront in the literary sources and gives a
prominent place to Moses, this passage had no knowledge of Moses’
presence at the beginning of the negotiations with Pharaoh.
It is also evident, from a discrepancy between this and the preced-
ing narrative of the call of Moses, that a special and probably very old
form of the tradition lies at the back of Ex. 5. At the call of Moses no
mention was made of a feast which was to be held to Yahweh three
days’ march into the wilderness.* Therefore in the present context
the request to Pharaoh in 5.(2), 3 to be allowed to do this appears as
a false pretext; but we can hardly assume that this was the original
intention in putting forward this request. After the story of his call,
Moses—as in J—was sent tothe Israelites with a message from
Yahweh, after which they were to wait for what their God would do
for them; or he was appointed—as in E—as a charismatic leader for
the Exodus and would now have to carry out his task in a correspond-
ing way. But in 5.3 it is said that the ‘God of the Hebrews’ has met with
the Israelites = ‘Hebrews’. This statement can hardly originally have
been meant to refer to the meeting with God in which Moses alone took
part; only the present context requires this forced meaning. So from
this point too we are driven to the conclusion that a special and pre-
sumably extremely old narrative version underlies 5.3-19, which
began its story of the Exodus from Egypt with the God of Israel
meeting with his people in Egypt and summoning them to a feast in
the wilderness. We have no further information about how this
‘meeting’ took place, as 5.3-19 is just a fragment of an older tradition
which has been amalgamated with the tradition of the call of Moses
in the land of Midian. By 5.1 f. J has created a transition passage
which starts off with an interview between Moses and Pharaoh, but

*We can hardly quote the isolated remark in 3.12bb E in this connection, even
if we disregard the fact that it does not belong to the context of the Jsource which
underlies 5.1 ff.
56 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
which at this early opportunity bases the request for release on the
feast in the wilderness which derives from what follows. And from
v. 20 onwards J again lets Moses enter the chain of events as a
mediator between God and people. After his remonstrances he
eventually obtains the promise of imminent miraculous and powerful
divine aid in accordance with the divine message with which he was
sent to the Israelites at the time of his call (3.16 f.). ‘With a strong
hand’, i.e. ‘with power’, Israel, according to this promise, will be
‘sent’ out of Egypt; thus Pharaoh will be driven not merely to give up
his opposition to the departure of Israel but even to long for this
departure and forcibly demand it. In the way in which the clause
6.1b has been written, the expression ‘with a strong hand’—‘with
power’ cannot refer to the action of Yahweh which would compel
Pharaoh to restrain himself against his real wishes, but to the future
action of Pharaoh. Yahweh will prove himself so powerful that
Pharaoh will ‘send Israel out’, indeed he will even ‘drive them out
with a strong hand’. The double form of the subordinate clause in
6.1b does not look original; in view of the catchword ‘let go’ in 5.1 f,,
a secondary variant which repeats this word* has been placed before
the clause in which the phrase ‘drive out’ is used.

5. ANOTHER CALL OF MOSES: 6.2-7.7

2 And God said to Moses, ‘I am the Lorn. * I appeared to Abraham,
to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the Lorp
I did not make myself known to them. ‘ I also established my covenant
with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they
dwelt as sojourners. ® Moreover I have heard the groaning of the
people of Israel whom the Egyptians hold in bondage and I have
remembered my covenant. ® Say therefore to the people of Israel, “I
am the Lorp, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the
Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage, and I will re-
deem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment,
7 and I will take you for my people, and I will be your God; and you
shall know that I am the Lorp your God, who has brought you out
from under the burdens of the Egyptians. § And I will bring you into
the land which I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; I
will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lorp”’.’ ® Moses spoke thus
to the people of Israel; but they did not listen to Moses, because of their
broken spirit and their cruel bondage.
*[In both 5.1 and 6.1b forms of the same Hebrew verb Salah are used; this
similarity is obscured by the RSV rendering which uses two completely different
words. Tr.]
6.2—7.7] ANOTHER CALL OF MOSES 57
10 And the Lorp said to Moses, ! ‘Go in, tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to
let the people of Israel go out of his land.’ 12 But Moses said to the
Lorn, ‘Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me; how then
shall Pharaoh listen to me, who am a man of uncircumcised lips?’
*8 But the Lorp spoke to Moses and Aaron, and gave them a charge to
the people of Israel and to Pharaoh king of Egypt to bring the people
of Israel out of the land of Egypt.
14. These are the heads of their fathers’ houses: the sons of Reuben,
the first-born of Israel: Hanoch, Pallu, Hezron and Carmi; these are
the families of Reuben. 1° The sons of Simeon: Jemuel, Jamin, Ohad,
Jachin, Zohar, and Shaul, the son of a Canaanite woman; these are the
families of Simeon. !® These are the names of the sons of Levi according
to their generations: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari, the years of the
life of Levi being a hundred and thirty-seven years. 17 The sons of
Gershon: Libni and Shimei, by their families. 18 The sons of Kohath:
Amram, Izhar, Hebron and Uzziel, the years of the life of Kohath being
a hundred and thirty-three years. 19 The sons of Merari: Mahli and
Mushi. These are the families of the Levites according to their genera-
tions. 7° Amram took to wife Jochebed his father’s sister and she bore
him Aaron and Moses, the years of the life of Amram being one hun-
dred and thirty-seven years. 7! The sons of Izhar: Korah, Nepheg, and
Zichri. #2 And the sons of Uzziel: Mishael, Elzaphan, and Sithri.
23 Aaron took to wife Elisheba, the daughter of Amminadab and the
sister of Nahshon; and she bore him Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Itha-
mar. *4 The sons of Korah: Assir, Elkanah, and Abiasaph; these are the
families of the Korahites. 2° Eleazar, Aaron’s son, took to wife one of
the daughters of Putiel; and she bore him Phinehas. These are the
heads of the fathers’ houses of the Levites by their families.
26 These are the Aaron and Moses to whom the Lorp said: “Bring
out the people of Israel from the land of Egypt by their hosts.’ ?? It was
they who spoke to Pharaoh king of Egypt about bringing out the people
of Israel from Egypt, this Moses and this Aaron.
28 On the day when the Lorn spoke to Moses in the land of Egypt,
29 the Lorp said to Moses, ‘I am the Lorp; tell Pharaoh king of Egypt
all that I say to you.’ 3° But Moses said to the Lorn, ‘Behold, I am of
uncircumcised lips; how then shall Pharaoh listen to me?’ 71 And the
Lorp said to Moses, ‘See, I make you as God to Pharaoh; and Aaron
your brother shall be your prophet. * You shall speak all that I com-
mand you; and Aaron your brother shall tell Pharaoh to let the people
of Israel go out of his land. * But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and
though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, * Pharaoh
will not listen to you; then I will lay my hand upon Egypt and bring
forth my hosts, my people the sons of Israel, out of the land of Egypt
by great acts of judgment. ® And the Egyptians shall know that I am
the Lorn, when I stretch forth my hand upon Egypt and bring out the
people of Israel from among them.’ ® And Moses and Aaron did so;
they did as the Lorp commanded them. 7 Now Moses was eighty years
old, and Aaron eighty-three years old, when they spoke to Pharaoh.
58 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

It is immediately obvious that here the narrative theme of the call

of Moses, which has already formed the content of the section 3.1-
4.16, is repeated, and moreover with essentially the same elements of
the story. The only difference which catches the eye is that in 6.2 ff.
the call of Moses, in marked difference from what we find elsewhere,
is clearly thought to take place in Egypt, whereas according to 3.1 ff.
it happened in the land of Midian. The real substance of the narra-
tive is not, however, affected by this difference. But no reason at all is
given for a further call of Moses, which in fact contains nothing new.
Now the section 6.2-7.7 displays all the linguistic, stylistic and con-
ceptual characteristics of the Priestly source (P) of the Pentateuch,
so that there can be no doubt that in 6.2 ff. we have the P version of
the same incident as appeared in the JE version in 3.1 ff. As in the P
version the call of Moses took place in Egypt, the Pentateuchal
redactor who combined the old sources JE with P allowed the call of
Moses in the land of Midian which led up to a first conversation with
Pharaoh to come before the P version of the call of Moses. The result
is that within the sequence of events in the Pentateuch as a whole the
latter call now appears in connection with the promise of 6.1 as a
confirmation of the commission given to Moses and an invitation to
make new demands of Pharaoh. The wording, however, shows that
originally this was an independent treatment of the theme of the one
call and commissioning of Moses. Within the section, in 6.13=30, we
have a great secondary insertion, of which the external distinguishing
mark is the almost literal repetition of v. 12 in v. 30, which is preceded
in vv. 28 f. by a summary reference to the call of Moses and the
commission formulated in v. 11. The passage 28-30 thus serves to
pick up the threads of the narrative at the very place where they had
been let drop in v. 12, before the insertion. The insertion stands
immediately before the first mention of Aaron and serves to introduce
Aaron as the elder brother (in P’s view) of Moses. It is introduced in
v. 13 by the observation that Yahweh did not speak to Moses alone,
but to Moses and Aaron, and that it was to both of them that he gave
the charge to bring Israel up out of Egypt. This introduction has its
counterpart at the conclusion in vv. 26 f. The insertion goes back a
considerable way to introduce Aaron; it begins by enumerating the
sons of Jacob and the families who stem from them according to the
list in Gen. 46.8 ff., which on its part derives from Num. 26.5 ff. But
only the information about Reuben and Simeon is given. These two
are followed by Levi in accordance with the traditional form of the
6.2-7.7] ANOTHER CALL OF MOSES 59
twelve tribe system. From now on the insertion confines itself to a
genealogy of the Levites. For the sons and grandsons of Levi this
genealogy follows in v. 16 ff. the division of Num. 3.17 ff. The only
difference is that in Ex. 6 a secondary addition has been made of
different, but not consistent, details about the ages. The insertion
achieves its real purpose in v. 20 where Moses and Aaron make their
appearance within the framework of the Levitical genealogy in the
third generation from Levi. The name of their mother, which else-
where occurs only in Num. 26.59, is mentioned at the same time. To
make the genealogy complete, however, mention is made of some
further Levites of the same generation, a number of whom appear
only here (vv. 21 ff.), and in v. 23-25 further details are given about
the family of Aaron and his cousin Korah, some of which, as for
example the list of the sons of Aaron, are also known elsewhere (cf.
Num. 26.60 etc.) and some of which occur here only and certainly
derive from post-exilic expansions and elaborations of the Levitical
genealogy.
[6.2—12] The basic P-narrative begins with a lengthy speech from
God to Moses (vv. 2-8). In a sequel to the last previous piece of the
P narrative (2.23abb—25) which told how God was concerned for the
Israelites in Egypt and ‘made himself known to them’,* we are briefly
told, without more details about the circumstances, that God spoke
to Moses, whose well-known figure was not deemed by P to need any
special introduction. Moses is simply presumed to be living among
the Israelites in Egypt and the place of this encounter he has with
God is thought of as being anywhere in Egypt. At the beginning of
the speech God makes himself known and straightway uses the divine
name ‘Yahweh’, uses it moreover, as the following verse goes on to
explain, as a name which is now given for the first time. The detailed
narrative element of the revelation of the name of God to Moses in
3.13-15 E appears in P in this simple form. Whereas even after
3.13-15 E now goes on to use the word ‘God’ in the narrative, P quite
consistently changes the divine title at Ex. 6.2 and from this point
on uses in the story the divine name Yahweh which has now been
revealed. At an earlier time, in the age of the Patriarchs—so v. 3 says
—God had been called ‘El Shaddai’. According to Gen. 17.1 P this

*[The Hebrew in 2.25b, translated by the RSV ‘and God knew their condition’,
is strange and should perhaps be emended in accordance with the LXX, as
Kittel’s text suggests. There is virtually no consonantal change and the resultant
text reads as the translation above. Tr.]
60 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

title of God had been revealed to Abraham in a similar form of dis-

closure to that which we have in Ex. 6.2 with the name Yahweh.
In the account of the primal history P simply spoke of ‘God’; in
the patriarchal stories, too, it usually uses the word‘ God’. Apart from
the passage cited, Gen. 17.1, the solemn divine name ‘E] Shaddai’
occurs in P only in Gen. 28.3; 35.11; 48.3 (and in 43.14 in a
context where the source is doubtful) on special occasions. There is
evidence of it elsewhere in the Old Testament only in Ezek. 10.5.
The shorter name for God, ‘Shaddai’, which is connected with it,
occurs more frequently, partly in very old parts of the Old Testa-
ment (Gen. 49.25; Num. 24.4, 16), partly in late Old Testament
writings (especially in the Book of Job), but in the latter clearly as a
mysterious and archaic name for God. There can be no doubt that
we have here a very old divine title. In the full form ‘El Shaddai’ it is
comparable with other compositions with the word ‘El’ (= ‘God’)
as they occur in the old patriarchal tradition as divine names at
Palestinian sanctuaries which are occasionally well defined (cf. Gen.
14.18-20; 16.13; 21.33; 33.20; 35.7). The title ‘El Shaddai’ too
certainly comes from the group of these old Palestinian divine names,
though there is no cult place mentioned in the tradition at which it
originally had its home. In P it serves as the divine title of the patri-
archal period instead of the large number of titles evidenced in the
old sources. Many different hypotheses have been advanced to
explain the name ‘Shaddai’, but none of them is really convincing.
The LXX usually rendered ‘Shaddai’ by Pantocrator; following this
the Vulgate translated it deus omnipotens, which is a forerunner of the
translation “God Almighty’ in all the English versions. We may ask
whether P still knew the significance of this divine title which had
already been handed down over a long period. In any case this
significance was hardly very important for him. More important was
the fact of a name unknown to the Patriarchs but now newly revealed
to Moses and thus to Israel; and, as a name could not be just empty
sound, a new name necessarily also represented a new revelation. In
Ex. 6.2 ff. P refers to the promise made by God as ‘El Shaddai’ to
Abraham in Gen. 17.1 ff. The promise of land confirmed by a cove-
nant (cf. Gen. 17.8a) is expressly guaranteed (vv. 4, 8) and the
explanation of the firm association between God and people which
is given with the ‘covenant’-formula to Abraham for himself and his
posterity (cf. Gen. 17.7b, 8b) is likewise repeated (v. 7a). But the
new thing which the new divine name signifies is this, that God now
6.2-7.7] ANOTHER CALL OF MOSES 61
means to fulfil the promises which are still outstanding by acting in
history in the Exodus from Egypt (vv. 6, 7b), indeed that he has
already made a beginning in so far as he has already heard the
sighing of the Israelites and has remembered his covenant (v. 5). The
divine name Yahweh is bound up with this great historical action
which now begins as a new revelation of God. Moses is sent as a
messenger from God to proclaim this to the Israelites (vv. 6 ff.).
Moses delivers his message from God, but finds no response from
the Israelites whom P excuses because of their very straitened situa-
tion. Moses is then addressed a second time by God (v. 10) and in
addition to the task of messenger of God, which he had been
originally as in J (3.16 f.), now receives the further task of engineering
the Exodus of Israel from Egypt in person by requiring the release
of Israel from Pharaoh (cf. 3.10 E). In the face of this difficult task
Moses, to avoid the new charge and with reference to the failure of
his proclamation to the Israelites which has already occurred, objects
that he is unskilled in speaking (v. 12). In this context P uses the
drastic expression ‘of uncircumcised lips’ in which the word ‘un-
circumcised’ bears the transferred meaning ‘incompetent’. [7.1=7]
At this point Aaron is given to him as a spokesman, just as in the
secondary section 4.13-16, andvhere too, just as in 4.16, the relation-
ship of Aaron to Moses is explained as that of a prophet to God
(7.1). Aaron is introduced as Moses’ brother, but is nevertheless
clearly supposed to be as well-known a figure as is Moses himself in
6.2. The prediction of the stubbornness of Pharaoh serves to an-
nounce the great divine signs and wonders (7.3) which will eventu-
ally be followed by the great act of God against the still stubborn
Pharaoh, the Exodus of Israel (7.4 f.; cf. 3.18 ff.). The details about
the ages of Moses and Aaron (7.7) fit in with P’s special interest in
chronological information of this sort. The age given for Moses is in
complete harmony with the details in Deut. 34.7 according to which
Moses finally died at the age of a hundred and twenty, after forty
years’ wandering in the wilderness. The ancestor of the priesthood,
Aaron, was known to the later Priestly tradition as the elder brother
of Moses (cf. also 6.20 in the secondary insertion examined above) ;
he is here made three years older in age.
The content and language of the P section 6.2—7.7 raise the ques-
tion of its relationship to the description given in the older sources in
3.1-4.17. The affinities are so close that it can hardly be doubted
that P knew the older narratives, knew them moreover when they
E.-C
62 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

had already been interwoven and had been expanded by secondary

additions. For P, as has been demonstrated in detail above, has in his
composition included elements not only fromJ and E but also from
the additions in ch. 3 and 4. P collected together the older material
and simplified it, but still reproduced the essential content in his own
language. There is a notable deviation in the fact that in P we have
the introduction of Aaron without any derogatory remark being
made about Moses (not so in 4.13-14a4@).

6. DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE THE

STUBBORN PHARAOH: 7.8-10.29
8 And the Lorn said to Moses and Aaron, ® ‘When Pharaoh says to
you “‘Prove yourselves by working a miracle,”’ then you shall say to
Aaron, ‘““Take your rod and cast it down before Pharaoh, that it may
become a serpent.”’ 1° So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did as
the Lorp commanded; Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh and
his servants, and it became a serpent. 41 Then Pharaoh summoned the
wise men and the sorcerers; and they also, the magicians of Egypt, did
the same by their secret arts. 12 For every man cast down his rod, and
they became serpents. But Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods. 1? Still
Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them; as the
Lorp had said.

14. Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh’s heart is hardened, he refuses
to let the people go. 1° Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is going out to the
water; wait for him by the river’s brink, [and take in your hand the rod which
was turned into a serpent]. 1° And you shall say to him, ‘‘The Lorn, the God
of the Hebrews, sent me to you, saying, ‘Let my people go, that they may serve
me in the wilderness; and behold, you have not yet obeyed.’ 17 Thus says the
Lorp, ‘By this you shall know that I am the Lorn: behold, I will strike the
water that is in the Nile [with the rod that is in my hands, and tt shall be turned
to blood], 1® and the fish in the Nile shall die, and the Nile shall become foul,
and the Egyptians will loathe to drink water from the Nile.’ ”’’

1g And the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Say to Aaron, ““Take your rod and
stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, their
canals, and their ponds, and all their pools of water, that they may
become blood; and there shall be blood throughout all the land of
Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.” ’

20 Moses and Aaron did as the Lorp commanded; [in the sight of
Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants,| he [lifted up the rod and ] struck
the water that was in the Nile, [and all the water that was in the Nile turned
to blood]. ** And the fish in the Nile died; and the Nile became foul, so that
the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile; and there was blood
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 63
throughout all the land of Egypt. 2? But the magicians of Egypt
did the same by their secret arts; so Pharaoh’s heart remained hard-
ened, and he would not listen to them; as the Lorp had said. 23 Pharaoh
turned and went into his house, and he did not lay [even] this to heart. 24 And
all the Egyptians dug round about the Nile for water to drink, for they could
not drink the water of the Nile.
25 Seven days passed after the Lorp had struck the Nile. 8 1 Then the
Lorp said to Moses, ‘Go in to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the
Lorn, ‘Let my people go, that they may serve me. ® But tfyou refuse to let them
g0, behold, I will plague all your country with frogs; * the Nile shall swarm
with frogs which shall come up into your house, and into your bedchamber and
on your bed, and into the houses of your servants and of your people, and into
your ovens and your kneading bowls; * the frogs shall come up on you and on
your people and on all your servants.’”’’ ® And the Lorp said to Moses,
‘Say to Aaron, “Stretch out your hand with your rod over the rivers,
over the canals, and over the pools, and cause frogs to come upon the
land of Egypt!” ’ ®So Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters
of Egypt; and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.
7 But the magicians did the same by their secret arts, and brought
frogs upon the land of Egypt.
8 Then Pharaoh called Moses [and Aaron], and said, ‘Entreat the LorD
to take away the frogs from me and from my people; and I will let the people
go to sacrifice to the Lorp.’ ° Moses said to Pharaoh, ‘Be pleased to command
me when I am to entreat, for you and for your servants and for your people, that
the frogs be destroyed from you and ‘your houses [and be left only in the Nile].’
10 And he said, ‘Tomorrow.’ Moses said, ‘Be it as you say, that you may
know that there is no one like the Lorp our God. 4 The frogs shall depart from
you and your houses and your servants and your people; they shall be left only
in the Nile.’ 12 So Moses [and Aaron] went out from Pharaoh; and Moses
cried to the LORD concerning the frogs, as he had agreed with Pharaoh. 1° And
the Lorp did according to the word of Moses ; the frogs died out of the houses
and courtyards and out of the fields. 1* And they gathered them together in
heaps, and the land stank. 1° But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite,
he hardened his heart, and would not listen to them; as the Lorn had said.

16 Then the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Say to Aaron, “‘Stretch out your
rod and strike the dust of the earth, that it may become gnats throughout
all the land of Egypt.” ’ 1? [And they did so;] Aaron stretched out his
hand with his rod, and struck the dust of the earth, and there came
ats on man and beast; all the dust of the earth became gnats through-
out all the land of Egypt. 18 The magicians tried by their secret arts to
bring forth gnats, but they could not. [So there were gnats on man and
beast.] 19 And the magicians said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God.’
But Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them; as
the Lorn had said.
20 Then the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Rise up early in the morning and wait
for Pharaoh, as he goes out to the water, and say to him, “Thus says the Lorp,
 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

‘Let my people go, that they may serve me. *4 Else, ifyou will not let my people
go, behold, I will send swarms of flies on you and your servants and your
people, and into your houses; and the houses of the Egyptians shall be filled
with swarms of flies, and also the ground on which they stand. ** But on that
day I will set apart the land of Goshen, where my people dwell, so that no
swarms of flies shall be there; that you may know that I am the Lorp in the
midst of the earth. ®3 Thus I will put a division between my people and your
people. By tomorrow shall this sign be.’”’’ *4 And the Lorp did so; there
came great swarms of flies into the house of Pharaoh and into his servants’
houses, and in all the land of Egypt the land was ruined by reason of the fies.
25, Then Pharaoh called Moses [and Aaron,| and said, ‘Go, sacrifice to
your God within the land.’ ®® But Moses said, ‘It would not be right to do so;
for we shall sacrifice to the LorpD our God offerings abominable to the Egyptians.
If we sacrifice offerings abominable to the Egyptians before their eyes, will they
not stone us? 2” We must go three days’ journey into the wilderness and sacrifice
to the LorD our God as he will command us.’ 28 So Pharaoh said, ‘I will let
you go, to sacrifice to the Lorv your God in the wilderness; only you shall not
go very far away. Make entreaty for me.’ *° Then Moses said, ‘Behold, I am
going out from you and I will pray to the Lorn that the swarms of flies may
depart from Pharaoh, from his servants, and from his people, tomorrow; only
let not Pharaoh deal falsely again by not letting the people go to sacrifice to
the Lorn.’ 3° So Moses went out from Pharaoh and prayed to the Lorp.
31 And the Lorp did as Moses asked, and removed the swarms of flies from
Pharaoh, from his servants, and from his people; not one remained. ** But
Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and did not let the people go.

9 1 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go in to Pharaoh, and say to him,
“Thus says the Lorp, the God of the Hebrews, ‘Let my people go, that they
may serve me. * For ifyou refuse to let them go and still hold them, * behold,
the hand of the Lorv will fall with a very severe plague upon your cattle which
are in the field, the horses, the asses, the camels, the herds, and the flocks.
4 But the Lorp will make a distinction between the cattle of Israel and the
cattle of Egypt, so that nothing shall die of all that belongs to the people of
Israel.’ ”’? ® And the Lord set a time, saying, ‘Tomorrow the Lorp will
do this thing in the land.’ ® And on the morrow the Lorp did this thing; all
the cattle of the Egyptians died, but of the cattle of the people of Israel not one
died. * And Pharaoh sent, and behold, not one of the cattle of the Israelites
was dead. But the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did not let the people
go.

8 And the Lorn said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Take handfuls of ashes
from the kiln, and let Moses throw them toward heaven in the sight
of Pharaoh. ® And it shall become fine dust over all the land of Egypt,
and become boils breaking out in sores on man and beast throughout
all the land of Egypt.’ 1° So they took ashes from the kiln, and stood
before Pharaoh, and Moses threw them toward heaven, and it became
boils breaking out in sores on man and beast. 1! And the magicians
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 65
could not stand before Moses because of the boils, for the boils were
upon the magicians and upon all the Egyptians. }2 But the Lorp
hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them; as the
Lorp had spoken to Moses.

13 Then the Lorn said to Moses, ‘Rise up early in the morning and stand
before Pharaoh, and say to him, “‘ Thus says the Lorv, the God of the Hebrews,
‘Let my people go, that they may serve me. [14 For this time I will send all my
plagues upon your heart, and upon your servants and your people, that you may
know that there is none like me in all the earth. * For by now I could have
put forth my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would
have been cut offfrom the earth; 1° but for this purpose have I let you live, to
show you my power, so that my name may be declared throughout all the earth.|
17 You are still exalting yourself against my people, and will not let them go.
18 Behold, tomorrow about this time I will cause very heavy hail to fall, such
as never has been in Egypt from the day it was founded until now. 19 Now
therefore send, get your cattle and all that you have in the field into safe shelter;
Sor the hail shall come down upon every man and beast that is in the field and
ts not brought home, and they shall die.’ ’’’ 2° Then he who feared the word
of the Lorp among the servants of Pharaoh made his slaves and his catile flee
into the houses; *4 but he who did not regard the word of the Lorn left his
slaves and his cattle in the field.

22 And the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Stretch forth your hand toward
heaven, that there may be hail im all the land of Egypt, upon man and
beast and every plant of the field, throughout the land of Egypt.’
23'Then Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven; and the LorpD
sent thunder [and hail], and fire ran down to the earth. And the Lorp rained
hail upon the land of Egypt; ** there was hail, [and fire flashing continually
in the midst of the hail,| very heavy hail, such as had never been in all the land
of Egypt since it became a nation. ?> The hail struck down everything that was
in the field throughout all the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and the
hail struck down every plant of the field, and shattered every tree of the field.
26 Only in the land of Goshen, where the people of Israel were, there was no
hail.
27 Then Pharaoh sent, and called Moses [and Aaron], and said to [them],
‘I have sinned this time; the Lorn is in the right, and I and my people are in
the wrong. ?8 Entreat ihe Lorp; for there has been enough of this thunder
and hail; I will let you go, and you shall stay no longer.’ *° Moses said to
him, ‘As soon as I have gone out of the city, I will stretch out my hands to the
Lorp; the thunder will cease, and there will be no more hail, that you may
know that the earth is the Lorv’s. 3° But as for you and your servants, I know
that you do not yet fear the LorD God.’ [81 (The flax and the barley were ruined,
for the barley was in the ear and the flax was in bud. ** But the wheat and the
spelt were not ruined, for they are late in coming up.)] *° So Moses went out
of the city from Pharaoh, and stretched out his hands to the LorD; and the
thunder and the hail ceased, and [the rain] no longer poured upon the earth.
34 But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased,
66 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

he sinned yet again, and hardened his heart, he and his servants. *° So the heart
of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did not let the people of Israel go;
as the Lorp had spoken through Moses.

101 Then the Lorn said to Moses, ‘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 Lorn.’
3 So Moses [and Aaron] went in to Pharaoh, and said to him, ‘Thus says the
Lorn, the God of the Hebrews, ““How long will you refuse to humble yourself
before me? Let my people go, that they may serve me. 4 For if you refuse to
let my people go, behold, tomorrow I will bring locusts into your country, * and
they shall cover the face of the land, so that no one can see the land; and they
shall eat what is left to you after the hail, and they shall eat every tree ofyours
which grows in the field, ® and they shall fill your houses, and the houses of all
your servants and of all the Egyptians ; as neither your fathers nor your grand-
Sathers have seen, from the day they came on earth to this day.’ Then he
turned and went out from Pharaoh.
7 And Pharaoh’s servants said to him, ‘How long shall this man be a
snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the Lorp their God; do you
not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?’ § So Moses [and Aaron were] brought
back to Pharaoh; and he said to [them], ‘Go, serve the Lorp your God; but
who are to go?’ ° And Moses said, ‘We will go with our young and our old;
we will go with our sons and daughters and with our flocks and herds, for we
must hold a feast to the Lorn.’ 1° And he said to them, ‘The Lorp be with
you, uf ever I let you and your little ones go! Look, you have some evil purpose
in mind. 4 No! Go, the men among you, and serve the Lorv, for that is what
you desire.’ And [they] were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence.

12 Then the Lorn said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over the
land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come upon the land of
Egypt, and eat every plant in the land, all that the hail has left.’ 8 So
Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lorp
brought an east wind upon the land all that day and all that night; and when
it was morning the east wind had brought the locusts. 44 And the locusts came
up over all the land of Egypt, and settled on the whole country of Egypt, such a
dense swarm of locusts as had never been before, nor ever shall be again.
15 For they covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened,
and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees which the
hail had left; not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field,
through all the land of Egypt. 18 Then Pharaoh called Moses [and Aaron] in
haste, and said, ‘I have sinned against the LorD your God, and against you.
17 Now therefore, forgive my sin, I pray you, only this once, and entreat the
Lorp your God only to remove this death from me.’ 18 So he went out from
Pharaoh, and entreated the Lorp. 1° And the Lorp turned a very strong
west wind, which lifted the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea; not a
single locust was left in all the country of Egypt. ?° But the Lorp hardened
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 67
Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the children of Israel go.
21 Then the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward
heaven that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, [a darkness
to be felt*].’?2 So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there
was thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days; 2% they did not
see one another, nor did any rise from his place for three days; but all the people
of Israel had light where they dwelt. 4 Then Pharaoh called Moses, and said,
“Go, serve the LorD; your children also may go with you; only let your flocks
and your herds remain behind.’ ®> But Moses said, ‘You must also let us have
sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice to the LorD our God.
28 Our cattle also must go with us; not a hoof shall be left behind, for we
must take of them to serve the Lord our God, and we do not know with what
we must serve the LORD until we arrive there.’ ?7 But the Lorp hardened
Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let them go. 28 Then Pharaoh said
to him, “Get away from me; take heed to yourself; never see my face again;
for in the day you see my face you shall die.’ 2° Moses said, ‘As you say! I
will not see your face again.’

This section on the ‘plagues of Egypt’ is a formal entity. It is built

up in a most symmetrical way and represents an independent whole
even in content. It begins with Moses—after a number of passages
in which he is accompanied by Aaron—coming before Pharaoh to
require by order of his God the release of Israel from Egypt and
confirming this demand by divine signs and wonders. This does not
however lead to any concession from the stubborn Pharaoh. Thus the
same events repeat themselves several times in a similar way, and
at the close the situation is the same as it was at the beginning. The
negotiations are broken off; this is stated expressly in 10.28 f. In
addition, an anticipatory reference is made to 11.9 f., where once
again a retrospective survey of the divine wonders in Egypt is given
and it is finally asserted that the heart of Pharaoh remained har-
dened, just as it had been from the beginning. But it is not the case
that the demands and the miraculous signs from God which Moses
advanced at the behest of Yahweh were unable to achieve their
purpose because everything foundered on the evil will of Pharaoh.
Rather is it Yahweh himself who again and again brings about
Pharaoh’s unwillingness so as to display his wonderful power in
Egypt and to the Egyptians in manifold ways. True, Pharaoh’s
unwillingness is expressed in different ways. Where the ‘hardening’
of Pharaoh’s heart is mentioned it means on the one hand that
*This last phrase is no longer intelligible.
68 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

‘Pharaoh’s heart was hardened’ (7.13, 22; 8.19; 9.35) and on the
other that ‘Yahweh hardened Pharaoh’s heart’ (9.12; 10.20, 27).
Both formulae are thus used without differentiation, though there is
an increasing tendency of the second to take precedence over the
first. As, however, it had already been announced in 7.3 that Yahweh
meant to ‘harden’ (with another Hebrew verb) Pharaoh’s heart, we
shall have to assume the narrator to mean that right from the begin-
ning it was only Yahweh who was really at work. Wherever ‘stub-
bornness’* is mentioned we have a similar case. First of all it is some-
times said that ‘the heart of Pharaoh was stubborn’ (7.14; 9.7)
sometimes that ‘Pharaoh made his heart stubborn’ (8.15, 32; 9.34),
but in 10.1 it is emphatically stated that Yahweh hardened the heart
of Pharaoh and his servants. It is improbable that by this most
inconspicuous change of formula the narrator had meant to express
that what was at first human resistance was eventually followed by
stubbornness caused by God as a punishment which brought about
destruction. Rather does he still mean that from the beginning the
divine demands and wonders stand opposed by the unwillingness of
Pharaoh which is also caused by God. Pharaoh is thus as much a tool
of the divine action on the one side, by acting with it without realizing
this while following the dictates of his will (cf. Rom. 9.17), as is Moses
on the other; all this happens so that many wonderful signs may take
place in Egypt (10.1 f.; 11.9).
While it is now clear that the plagues form the subject of a section
of the narrative complete in itself, it is less so that they are the con-
tents of a single independent element of the tradition. True, they
presuppose in general just the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt and
the refusal of the Egyptian ruler to let them go. This supposition
formed part of the Exodus theme from the beginning. But the story
of the plagues has no real purpose; it ends with Moses’ final departure
from Pharaoh without any change in the situation. The story is
directed exclusively towards the account of the Passover night and
makes no sense without it. But the account of the Passover night is a
separate independent piece of tradition (cf. pp. 88 ff. below), and not
merely just the last section in the series of plagues. This is already
clear from the fact that the preceding story of the plagues is clearly
rounded off (10.28 f.; 11.9 f.) and that the account of the Passover
*[By using the rendering ‘harden’ throughout, the RSV obscures the fact,
brought out here by Noth, that two different Hebrew roots are used in this
expression. Tr.]
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 69
has quite a different construction, no longer following the very
symmetrical scheme of the plague narrative. This situation leads us
to the conclusion that the account of the Passover night occupies a
primary place in the tradition in comparison with the plague narra-
tive. In the Passover night Israel is freed from Egypt by the miracu-
lous intervention of its God. The reason for this event being preceded
by plagues which were shown before Pharaoh, who had been made
stubborn by Yahweh himself, is that Yahweh wished to ‘multiply’
his ‘signs and wonders’ in Egypt. This is said expressly in 7.3 and is
repeated once again in 11.9 in the retrospect over the plague narra-
tive. Whenever in the Old Testament summary references to the
mighty deeds of God at the beginning of the history of Israel speak
in an apparently stereotyped phrase of the ‘signs and wonders’ at the
Exodus from Egypt (Deut. 4.34; 6.22; 7.19; Pss. 105.273; 135.9, etc.)
it is the plagues that they primarily have in mind.
The plague narrative is not a literary unity. At least two different
narrative threads may be clearly distinguished. The mere fact of the
juxtaposition and interweaving of two different expressions for the
same idea which has been indicated above leads us to conclude that
in the form in which the narrative has been transmitted a number of
literary strata are present. We can even recognize two different
narrative frameworks running alongside each other. According to
one of these, which chiefly occurs in a compact narrative sequence in
18.16-19 and g.8-12, Moses and Aaron from time to time initially
receive instructions from God to perform certain actions which by
virtue of the divine power result in plagues. These plagues, however,
make no impression on the heart of Pharaoh, which remains ‘har-
dened’. The other framework, of which the only compact example
can be found in 8.20-32, has as a characteristic element the constant
negotiations between Moses, the spokesman of his God, and Pharaoh.
Each section of the narrative is made to begin with a demand from
Moses to Pharaoh by order of Yahweh that Israel should be released,
and with the announcement of the plague which is in store should
Pharaoh not comply. The beginning of the plague is followed by a
hasty recall of Moses and the request of Pharaoh that he should
entreat with his God for the ending of the plague; but although this
regularly happens the heart of Pharaoh again and again remains
‘stubborn’.
With the help of the characteristics which have been mentioned,
the two original narrative sequences can quite easily be separated
70 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

one from the other; in accordance with their linguistic usage the
former should be assigned to P and the latter to J. The literary critical
question only becomes difficult right at the end of the plague narra-
tive, from 9.13 on. It is clear that for the most part we have here the
J narrative. But not only does the catchword ‘harden’ occur several
times (9.35; 10.20, 27) but so does the scheme of introducing the
narrative sections which is elsewhere characteristic of P (9.22 f.;
10.12 f., 21 f.); the difference is that in these cases the complete P
narrative is no longer preserved, and so we must suppose that, when
the strata were put together, in an unusual way preference was given
to theJ narrative over the P narrative. It has been popular to think
of E in the narrative elements in question, but as the divine name
Yahweh regularly occurs in them (9.22, 35; 10.12, 20 f., 27) this
assumption has little probability. A special problem is the occurrence
of the double expression ‘God Yahweh’ in 9.30. But whether this
completely isolated word ‘God’ (’<lohim) appearing alongside the name
‘Yahweh’ can be used to prove the presence of E elements in the
plague narrative seems very doubtful, especially as the textual tradi-
tion is not in full agreement at this point. The general state of the
plague narrative speaks more for the hypothesis that only the sources
J and P are to be detected in the plague narrative.
In this case we must assign to P: 7.8-13, 19, 20 aa, 21b, 22; 8.5-7,
15abb, 16-19; 9.8-12, 22, 23aa, . . . 35; 10.12, 1gaa. . . 20-22,
. 27; 11.9 f. All the rest is substantially to be assigned to the J
narrative.
In both literary strata the individual plagues belong together in a
sequence and there can be no doubt that right from the beginning of
the tradition ‘many’ divine signs and wonders were mentioned.
Nevertheless we may ask whether in the course of what was primarily
oral tradition the number of signs and wonders has not been further
increased. In any case, towards the end of the narrative a number of
discrepancies are revealed in the fact that occasionally something is
destroyed in one plague which had already fallen victim to an earlier
plague. Now and then attention is drawn to this discrepancy within
the narrative itself, without the discrepancy being done away with.
It remains doubtful whether from the beginning the narrative had
suffered such discrepancies without paying any special attention to
them, in the interest of a large number of signs and wonders, or
whether the discrepancies first arose along with a gradual develop-
ment of the plague theme. There is a further difficulty in the fact that
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 7I
the plagues which extend over the whole land of Egypt must also
affect the Israelites in Egypt, which is hardly the real intention of the
narrative. P generally pays no attention to this difficulty in his
summary narrative. In J it is occasionally expressly said that the
Israelites or their dwelling-places were excepted from the plagues
through a further wonderful act of God (8.22 f.; 9.4, 26) but even in
J this difficulty is not noticed consistently. It is thus evident that even
the set of plague stories is not a well considered literary product but
is derived from living oral tradition of the mighty acts of God towards
his people. It is intended to lay special stress on the fact that it was
the wonderful power of Yahweh alone which was at work in the
Exodus from Egypt without Israel having to, or even being able to,
do anything of itself.
[7-813] In an introductory passage 7.8-13 P reports the first
demonstration of the wonderful power of Yahweh before Pharaoh. It
is the first meeting between Moses and Aaron and Pharaoh which is
explicitly mentioned within the P narrative. According to 6.11, at his
call Moses received the charge to go to Pharaoh and require the
release of Israel; in answer to his objection (6.12) Aaron was given to
him to help to carry out this commission (7.1 ff.). If 7.6 narrates that
Moses and Aaron ‘did as Yahweh commanded them’, this perhaps
presupposes that they had already appeared before Pharaoh with
their request for release, but of course without success. Be this as it
may, they are now sent to Pharaoh and at the same time equipped
with the power to carry out a miracle (7.8 f.). Pharaoh will
require one if he is to believe them. Although it is not said in the
extremely brief P narrative, this supposes that they are to put or
repeat the request for release. In the old Pentateuchal narrative
Moses was vouchsafed to change his rod into a serpent to authenticate
himself as a messenger from God before the Israelites (4.1 ff.). P has
transferred this element of the tradition into the context of the
negotiations with Pharaoh, and has allowed Aaron to take over the
action from Moses. The performance of this charge has the surprising
result (7.10) that at the request of Pharaoh the Egyptian magicians
who have been summoned are able in their turn to do the same
miracle (7.11-12a). The Egyptian magicians—the word hartom which
is rendered ‘magician’ in the RSV is perhaps a loan word from the
Egyptian—of course have this power only by their secret arts, but
nevertheless they have it. Here then is granted the reality of super-
natural miracle-working among the ‘heathen’ which can be achieved
72 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

through ‘secret arts’, i.e. ‘magic’, and which on occasion can be just
the same as the effects produced by the wonderful power of the God
of Israel. True, there is a basic difference in the source of the power,
but this difference does not reveal itself outwardly and can only be
believed and thereafter expressed. For Israel there is only the God
who is experienced in history, from whom alone all working of
miracles stems, and who places his working of miracles at the service
of his actions in history. The miracle-working effected by ‘secret arts’
has moreover—though this of course is a practical and not a funda-
mental difference—definite limits to its potentialities. The legitimate
miracle-working of God is superior to it. This is evident both from the
fact that according to the present section of the narrative the serpent
produced from Aaron’s rod is able to devour the serpents produced
by the Egyptians (7.12), and also from the fact that in the continua-
tion of the P narrative the Egyptian magicians can only just keep
pace with the divine wonders. In this respect P has constructed his
narrative quite methodically and systematically. In the first two
plagues, which now follow, the Egyptian magicians can still act in the
same way as Moses and Aaron do in the name of their God (7.22a;
8.7a), which produces the remarkable effect that the Egyptian
magicians repeat the miracle despite the fact that it has already been
performed and cannot possibly be repeated at that moment and
despite the fact that they themselves seem to be spreading the plague
in question over Egypt. At the next stage they are no longer in a
position to emulate Moses and Aaron and must expressly recognize
that ‘the finger of God’, i.e. the effective working of God (cf. Ps. 8.3),
has a hand in their work and that therefore Moses and Aaron, as it
might at first have seemed to outside eyes, are not for their part
working with magic arts. As the Egyptian magicians could not
attribute to Moses and Aaron a greater magic power than they
themselves have at their disposal they cannot in the end but speak
the truth (8.19). Finally the Egyptian magicians themselves are
affected by the next plague and must retreat from the scene, never
again to make an appearance (9.11).
[7-14-25] In the first real plague we have the tainting of all the
water in Egypt so that it is no longer drinkable—a dreadful blow for
all living beings, who need a daily supply of water. Here there are
two different detailed descriptions of the plague, one alongside the
other. According to one the water in the Nile, which is the source of
Egypt’s water supply, is made foul by a sudden, general death of
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 73
fish, while according to the other all the water in the waterways of
Egypt is turned to blood. The latter idea occurs in the shorter P
version (vv. 19, 20aa, 21b, 22); in this great importance is attached
to the statement that a// the water in Egypt was made foul, hence the
fairly long enumeration in v. 19 and the remark about the water ‘in
the trees and in the stones’* which can only refer to the sap of trees
and the springs which rose from the rocks on the edge of the Nile
valley. In the rather more detailed J version both ideas appear inter-
connected. But the idea of the changing of water into blood was
clearly only inserted from the P narrative into the J narrative at a
subsequent time. Verse 17 in particular shows that all is not well in
the transmitted J text by making a direct transition from a speech
of Yahweh to a speech of Moses. It is moreover the case that in the
formula of proclamation in which a ‘Behold, I . . .’ is followed by a
Hebrew participle, elsewhere Yahweh always appears as the subject
of the thought and the action (cf. 8.2; 8.21; 9.18; 10.4). Verse 17
therefore was originally worded in such a way that Yahweh remained
the speaker right until the end. In that case then v. 20abb also has
been subsequently altered; in this part of the verse Yahweh would
originally have been mentioned as the active subject. Now it is just
these two verses, in which ina J context the water is said to have
been changed to blood, which have demonstrably been altered and
expanded at a later date. As the original conception in J spoke of
Yahweh’s ‘striking’ the water of the Nile, which may have been
meant quite generally as a destructive action in a transferred sense,
the secondary introduction of the narrative element of the ‘striking’
rod would easily commend itself with the difference that in the con-
text of the J narrative, which makes no mention of Aaron, the rod
is placed in Moses’ hand with reference to 4.2—4 J. In connection with
this narrative element reminiscent of P, the changing of water into
blood was also taken over from P.
The original J narrative begins with the affirmation of the
‘stubbornness’ of Pharaoh, which according to J has already displayed
itself in the first negotiations (5.1-6.1). Thereupon in v. 16 explicit
reference is made with quite literal repetition to the demand from
God which has already been made to Pharaoh in 5.1, a demand
moreover which regularly appears in J whenever the plagues are
next announced. It is not said why Pharaoh used to go out to the
*[This is a literal translation of the Hebrew text; there is no justification for the
addition of the words ‘vessels of? in RSV. Tr.]
74 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

water on the Nile bank every morning (so again in 8.20). Could the
Israelite narrator have thought that Pharaoh used to wash himself
every morning in the Nile (on this cf. 2.5 J)? It is immediately
assumed that Pharaoh remained ‘stubborn’ at his meeting with
Moses and therefore the plague is announced without conditions
(not so in subsequent cases). In this way the plague begins, which
from the beginning was intended to last for seven days (v. 25). This
first time Pharaoh allows it to pass silently over himself and over
Egypt by defiantly going ‘into his house’ (v. 23) and remaining stub-
born. In their desperation the Egyptians meanwhile try to dig for
water, but according to the narrator with scant success, so that it
was a very serious plague.
Some have wished to derive the idea of the poisoning of the Nile
water and the changing of it into blood from the polluted appearance of
the Nile and the reddening of its rising water as a consequence of the
various alluvial deposits which it carries along. But this was a process
which repeated itself once a year and which, as even the Israelite far
removed from Egyptian life would certainly have known, did not
make the water of the Nile in any way undrinkable and did not kill
the fish in the river. Rather do we have here a unique divine wonder
which is specially related to the situation in Egypt only in so far as
the Nile and its water are of decisive significance for the whole of
Egyptian life. Moreover, the state of the tradition suggests that in
Israel the story was chiefly told in the version in which the Nile was
polluted by a great death among the fishes (so J). In this case any
connection with the yearly rise of the Nile seems most improbable.
The P version, with the change of all the water in Egypt into blood,
which heightens the miracle and the plague still further, presumably
rests only on a literary process; for as P in 7.8-13 once referred back
to the old narrative 4.1 ff. he presumably allowed himself to be
guided in his description of the first plague by the thought of the
story in ch. 4, which was already known to him with its secondary
expansions, and in v. 9 of which the theme of the changing of water
into blood appears.
It is not considered that the pollution of the Nile water must
necessarily also have affected the Israelites in Egypt.
[8.1-15] The plague of frogs is connected with the first plague in
so far as it once again derives from the Nile or from all the waters of
Egypt. In fact it appears less serious than the first plague; it is just
very disagreeable and inconveniences daily life and activity. This
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 75
plague too fits the special circumstances of Egypt, as the frog is an
extremely well known phenomenon in an Egypt made humid
through the overflowing of the waters of the Nile, and also plays a
part in Egyptian mythology as an embodiment of life-giving power.*
In the Palestinian homeland of Israel, on the other hand, it had no
significance. The word ‘frog’ occurs in the Old Testament only in
connection with the Egyptian plague (apart from the present passage
only in Pss. 78.45; 105.30). Of course, the fact that the frog, instead
of appearing as a representative of the renewal of life, becomes a
fearful plague through its prevalence and its penetration into all the
places in the land is a unique divine miracle. Here too we hear
nothing of how the Israelites in Egypt fared during the plague.
Here too in accordance with his scheme P tells the story quite
briefly (8.5-7, . . . 15abb). The usual note about the ‘hardening’ of
Pharaoh’s heart is omitted from the closing remark 15abb in view of
more explicit information about the ‘stubbornness’ in J (v. 15aa). In
J it is explicitly announced (8.2—4) that if Pharaoh refuses to accede
to the divine demand the plague will follow. The scene is not a meet-
ing on the bank of the Nile, but takes place in Pharaoh’s palace,
where Moses has been instructed to present himself (8.1) after an
interval of seven days, as Pharaoh had withdrawn into the palace in
the face of the first plague. The announcement of the plague vividly
describes the impending infiltration of the frogs right into the most
remote rooms of the houses and into the furnishings and utensils of
everyday life; indeed they will even come up on men, among whom
even Pharaoh himself is included, so that he suffers the greatest
personal inconvenience from the disagreeable plague. In view of the
P section 8.5—7, J’s customary remark that ‘Yahweh did’ as he had
threatened which elsewhere occurs at this point is omitted; it is in
any case assumed that Pharaoh persisted in his refusal although this
is not expressly stated. The plague of frogs, which Pharaoh has to
endure with everyone else, in this instance causes him for the first
time—and thereafter again and again in J—to have Moses sum-
moned while the plague is happening (the name Aaron has in view
of the P narrative been subsequently inserted in many places, but
not absolutely consistently, into the Jtext) and to ask him to entreat
Yahweh to end the plague (8.8). Thus Pharaoh indirectly acknow-
ledges that Yahweh, whom he had in the first negotiations still
boasted that he did not know (5.2), is the paramount author of the
*Cf. H. Bonnet, Reallexikon der dgyptischen Religionsgeschichte, 1952, pp. 198 f.
76 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
plagues and thus is the only one who can put an end to them, and
that as the spokesman of Yahweh Moses must therefore be effective
as an intercessor before Yahweh. He supports his request by a
promise to let Israel go (8.8b) which is neither meant seriously nor
regarded by Moses as being meant seriously. Nevertheless Moses
declares himself ready to accede to the request, for the ending of
the plague will be just as much a sign of the power of God as
the beginning of the plague. And so it happens. To make matters
quite clear, Moses allows Pharaoh to give him a time at which he is
to make his intercession (8.9 f.). Pharaoh will then recognize that,
at the exact moment when Moses makes the agreed intercession, the
plague will cease all at once through the sudden death of countless
frogs, and it will in this way become clear to him that the death of the
frogs did not happen by chance but was the work of the all powerful
God who has none to equal him (8.10b). The death of the frogs then
comes about as was foretold, and we now get a further glimpse of the
extent of the plague from the fact that the dead frogs everywhere
have to be gathered together in heaps (8.14). As soon as the plague
ceases, Pharaoh immediately tacitly withdraws his forced ‘permission’
for Israel to depart; he remains ‘stubborn’ (8.15aa).
[8.16-32] Next there follows a fearful plague of insects. Here too
the two versions P and J appear alongside one another. Each of the
two uses a different word for the insects which come in tremendous
numbers throughout Egypt. P speaks of ‘gnats’, whereas J uses a word
which perhaps just has the general meaning ‘insect’, but which was
understood as early as in the old Greek translation of the Old Testa-
ment to have the special meaning ‘horse-fly’, and is often understood
in this way today. It is clear that we have here mere variants on one
and the same subject. When, however, the redactor came to join the
two strands of the narrative together, the difference in the catch-
words which are used to describe the two plagues led him to think
that two different plagues followed one another, and therefore the
two variants are not inserted one in another as was the case pre-
viously, but are placed side by side. The result is that here for the
first time the two variants are preserved completely intact.
The P variant 8.16-19 has the usual terse form. On Yahweh’s
command Aaron strikes the dust of the earth with his wand and by
the divine working this earth is changed into a swarm of flies. The
word here rendered as ‘dust’ (‘apar) does not really mean what we
understand by dust, but the countless particles in the soil. It is often
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 77
used in the Old Testament as a picture for something innumerable
(cf. Gen. 13.16; 28.14; Isa. 40.12 etc.) and such a thought certainly
plays a part here. If the soil of the land is changed into gnats, the
result must be an enormous number of these insects, and this in its
turn must represent an unbearable affliction upon both man and
beast. Even in this instance we have a connection with a well-known
phenomenon of life in Egypt; flies and gnats have always been a
particularly troublesome feature of the country and at that time of
course they arose in such unprecedented numbers that it was an
overwhelming catastrophe.
J (8.20-32) narrates the course of this plague in his usual manner;
the only difference is that the negotiations with Pharaoh gradually
become longer and longer. For the first time, when the plague is
announced it is also said that the Israelites in the land will be exempt
from the plague. No flies are to come near the ‘land of Goshen’ in
which Israel is pictured as living together, separate from the Egyp-
tians (8.22, 23a), and in this special exception of the ‘land of
Goshen’ Pharaoh is to see particular proof of the miraculous power
of Yahweh.* Now for the first time Pharaoh, whom Moses had this
time once again met in the morning on the bank of the Nile to
announce the plague (8.20), but who is certainly to be found in his
palace on the next day, for which the coming of the plague is
threatened (8.23b), enters into discussion with Moses who has again
been summoned hastily once the plague has begun (8.25 ff.). True,
Pharaoh’s request ‘Make entreaty for me’ in v. 28 looks very abrupt
(according to the usual Hebrew way of speaking we would expect at
least an ‘and now’ before it), so that we are justified in asking whether
the passage 25b—28a is not a later addition to the narrative which
would then originally have been written in the same way as 8.8. But
as the narrative theme of the negotiations with Pharaoh is clearly
heightened as the J narrative continues, we must continue to
maintain the originality of the passage in question in spite of the
formal discrepancy. First of all Pharaoh puts forward the proposal
that the Israelites should be granted the sacrificial feast for their God,
for which they would need to have a few days’ holiday from their
labour; but this feast must be held within the land so that Israel does
not escape against the will of Pharaoh (8.25). Moses makes the
obvious objection to Pharaoh; the nomadic sacrificial customs of the
Israelites would be ‘abominable’ to the Egyptians, i.e. something
*On the ‘land of Goshen’ see von Rad, Genesis, pp. 394 f.
78 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
which gave cultic offence, and would raise a spontaneous and highly
dangerous excitement among the Egyptians. It is here supposed that
the Egyptians would see the Israelite sacrifice, although the Israelites
in fact live by themselves in the land of Goshen. The thought behind
the narrative conceives of quite a narrow space within which the
Israelites and Egyptians were side by side. What would be the
‘abomination’ to the Egyptians is not clearly stated. The way in
which v. 26 is written leads one to think of the special nature of the
kind of sacrifice offered. According to ancient nomadic custom the
Israelites, maintaining this custom in spite of their stay in the agri-
cultural land of Egypt, would offer chiefly animal sacrifice and
especially that of beasts from their flocks. In Egypt the sacrifice of
whole animals including sheep and goats was not completely unknown,
although it was not very usual; by preference a vegetable offering was
made along with poultry and pieces of meat.* The Israelite narrator
may have been thinking of this usual kind of Egyptian sacrifice when
he described the Israelite whole offering of animals from the flock as
‘abominable’ to the Egyptians. At the same time the Israelites for
their part would certainly act contrary to the Egyptian ideas of cultic
propriety in respect of the place of the cult and the sacrificial ritual,
and it is quite rightly supposed that people are usually particularly
susceptible in the case of any cultic ceremonies which are held in
their territory. All this goes to suggest that during their stay in Egypt
up till now the Israelites had not sacrificed to their God. Quite sur-
prisingly, Moses does not object that the Israelites for their part
could not offer sacrifice in Egypt as it was a cultically foreign land
and therefore ‘unclean’ for them. Perhaps the narrator paid no
attention to this point; perhaps too he does not let Moses speak of it
either as it would have made no impression at all upon Pharaoh. In
any case, in advancing this objection Moses rejects Pharaoh’s offer
and repeats the demand of 5.3 that Israel should be released for a
three days’ march into the wilderness to offer sacrifice (8.27).
Pharaoh declares himself agreeable to this proposition with the
proviso that they do not go too far away in case perhaps they do not
come back again (8.28a). As the sequel to the discussion shows, the
narrator to begin with does not take this offer to be meant seriously
(as distinct from the first proposal by Pharaoh). Nevertheless, on this
occasion too Moses complies with the request for entreaty (8.28b) and
shows that he does not trust Pharaoh’s promise by his warning
*Cf. Bonnet, of. cit., pp. 548 f.
7-8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 79
against any repeated deception on the part of Pharaoh (8.29). But in
any case, his God will once again display his power in making an end
of the plague of insects. It is once again agreed that entreaty shall be
made the following day, and events follow the same course as they
did in the previous instance.
[9.17] The story of the plague upon the cattle, which destroys all
the beasts that are in Egypt, is told without variants in only one form,
which is a literary unity. It displays the characteristics of the J
description: the plague is announced as imminent should Pharaoh
refuse, the Israelites are to be exempted from the plague—and this
indeed happens as Pharaoh takes pains to discover through a special
investigation (9.6, 7a), and despite everything Pharaoh’s heart re-
mains ‘stubborn’. Now of course this section displays remarkable
discrepancies and deviations from the narrative scheme of J. In the
first words spoken by Moses there is an abrupt transition from the
usual Yahweh-speech delivered by Moses as a messenger (v. 1) toa
speech of Moses, so that in the announcement of the plague proper
Yahweh is mentioned in the third person (vv. 3 f.). In what follows
we miss the theme of the summoning of Moses while the plague is
raging and the negotiations which lead up to a request for Moses to
make entreaty. In connection-with the latter, it may of course be
said that once the plague had suddenly begun and had done its work
it ended quite of its own accord. But it still remains striking that the
element of negotiation with Pharaoh after the beginning of the
plague is completely lacking. Add to this the formal discrepancies
which have already been noted and we are forced to the conclusion
that the section represents a secondary addition to the J narrative
which, while making use of the customary J formulae, does not fit
into the framework of theJ narrative completely smoothly.
[9.8-12] The story of the boils is told only in P and in a way which
is quite characteristic of P. Here Moses himself performs the action
which leads to the plague; Aaron, whose rod has hitherto played
some part, appears only as the assistant of Moses. The ashes from the
kiln which Moses throws into the air spread out as ‘dust’ (here we
have the proper word for what we call dust) all over Egypt and fall
down on all living beings, causing boils and sores to erupt. Egypt has
always been a land of many skin diseases (cf. Deut. 28.27). It may
have been a popular idea that they were caused by ‘dust’. Here the
special feature is the general extent of the visitation. As elsewhere in
P, we are not told how the Israelites fared, still less how Pharaoh
80 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
himself fared, which is all the more striking as here for the last time in
P the Egyptian magicians appear and are all smitten with boils.
Within the P narrative it is quite understandable that even the
animals were affected; but on looking at the narrative as it has now
been compiled one may well ask how it comes about that there are
still any beasts left in Egypt after the events narrated in 9.1—7 apart
from the cattle possessed by the Israelites.
[9-13-35] The section about the plague of hail is quite extensive;
the main part of it belongs to J, while in accordance with what has
been said above on p. 70 P is only incompletely represented with
the short sentences in 9.22, 23aa, . . . 35. These do however at
least show that P too narrated the plague of hail. In theJ narrative a
great deal of space is taken up with the element of the negotiations
with Pharaoh. Verses 14-16 are striking in connection with the
announcement of the plagues. Their purpose is to explain why hitherto
Yahweh has allowed the divine signs and wonders to have no effect
on Pharaoh: it was Yahweh’s will to display his ‘power’ to Pharaoh
in ever new ways and with ever mounting effect, and thus to know
that his fame was spread over all the earth, as men would still tell
everywhere of the wonders which he did in Egypt. This reflection of
course corresponds to the general meaning of the whole of the plague
narrative, but in this position it appears too early, for we would now
expect it to be followed by the final decisive act of Yahweh. This
expectation is also aroused by the language at the beginning of v. 14;
according to this Yahweh will now ‘send all his plagues upon the
heart of Pharaoh’. What this expression means is questionable. As
the words ‘all my plagues’ can hardly mean ‘the sum of my plagues’
in the sense of ‘the climax of the plagues’ the emphasis should clearly
be placed on the words ‘upon your heart’; the meaning would then
be that Pharaoh should take all the plagues—those which have
already happened and those which are now announced—to heart
(an interpolator, who inserted the clumsily attached reference to the
servants and the people of Pharaoh, already misunderstood it in this
way). The secondary character of the passage is also shown in the
reference to the ‘pestilence’ in v. 15, ie. to the secondary section
g.1-7. But even if vv. 14-16 are cut out as secondary the announce-
ment of the plague still remains unusually lengthy. This is because in
a surprising way Moses goes on to recommend the Egyptians to take
what precautions are possible against the destructive work of the
plague which is announced for the next day. The threatened hail,
7.8-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH BI
which is to fall with unusual fulness and violence (9.18), will of course
destroy the plants growing in the land, but this is not the chief object
of the remark, as it goes without saying and no possible precautions
can be taken. But men and beasts can be brought home for safety
(9.19). That the narrative imagines that men would be able to take
effective safety precautions throughout the whole of Egypt for them-
selves, their workpeople in the field and their cattle once again shows
the narrow bounds within which events are conceived to take place.
In this part of the story the narrator has the Egyptians themselves
confronted with a test of their belief. As distinct from Pharaoh him-
self, who in the view of the narrator shows himself to be ‘stubborn’
even in this special instance, and from a number of his ‘servants’,
there were also ‘servants of Pharaoh’ who took Yahweh’s announce-
ment seriously and followed the recommendations of Moses (9.20 f.).
Here Pharaoh’s ‘stubbornness’ shows him to be particularly stiff-
necked. At the same time, in a very subtle way, the reason is given
why there should still be cattle left in Egypt even after this plague,
as is later supposed in the account of the Passover night. According
to the present sequence of the narrative there should have been no
cattle among the Egyptians even before the plague of hail; but as
g.1-7 proved to be secondary this discrepancy did not occur in the
original J narrative. So the hail comes, accompanied by terrifying
thunderstorms, particularly terrifying because this was something
completely unknown in Egypt; once again the land of Goshen is not
affected (9.23abb—26). At the onset of the plague Pharaoh uncondi-
tionally acknowledges himself to be guilty before Yahweh, who is
in the right in that he has demonstrated with signs and wonders
before Pharaoh that he is the only powerful God (9.27). At his
request, supported by the promise to let Israel go, Moses declares
himself ready to go out of the city, i.e. to the place where the Israelites
are dwelling, as soon as he leaves Pharaoh—and not on the following
day as hitherto—and make entreaty to bring the plague to an end.
The fact does not of course escape him that even this time Pharaoh
did not mean his promise seriously (9.29 f.). So this plague too comes
toanend. Asupplement put in at asomewhat unsuitable place (9.31 f.)
goes on to remark that the late-ripening wheat and spelt had not come
up far enough for them to be ruined by the hail. In this way there
was still something left for the plague of locusts which now follows.
[10.1=20] A plague of locusts is one of the most feared of all catas-
trophes in the East; it usually destroys in the shortest time imaginable
82 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

every green thing that grows, and results in dreadful famine. Such is
the plague which in unparalleled degree (10.6a6, 14b) is inflicted
upon Pharaoh and the Egyptians. In this section too fragments of a
P variant occur again:(10.12, 13aa, . . . 20) according to which the
raising of Moses’ (not Aaron’s) rod at the divine command as in
9.22, 23a lets loose the plague. The J narrative stands to the fore-
front of the section; it is exceptionally detailed, as the element of the
negotiations with Pharaoh is taking up more and more room. On
this occasion Moses, on being ordered to go once again into Pharaoh’s
palace, is told right at the beginning that the reason for this is the
‘stubbornness’ of Pharaoh. This ‘stubbornness’ is the occasion of the
ever-renewed miraculous signs which are afterwards to be handed
down in Israel from generation to generation (10.1 f.). Now too for
the first time, since hitherto J has always supposed that Moses’
execution of the first command goes without saying and has there-
fore made no special mention of it, we are told how Moses goes to
Pharaoh. Also in this context we have the first report of the demand
to which Pharaoh is to accede (10.3—6a) after which special mention
is made of the departure of Moses from Pharaoh (10.6b). In this
skilful way J has purposely effected a heightening of the plague
narrative. The reproachful question at the beginning of the address
to Pharaoh is also new. Moses’ speech expressly refers to the previous
plague of hail and thus notes that the hail had still left some of the
growing plants and trees (10.5b, cf. also v. 15). Nothing was said of
this in the originalJ narrative of the plague of hail. For the first time
Pharaoh is advised by his servants to be reasonable, before the onset
of the plague announced for the next day (10.7). Some of these
‘servants’ had already taken matters seriously as early as the plague
of hail (9.20) and, although even the ‘servants’ are laid under the
constraint of the stubbornness sent by God (10.1), they have not yet
become so foolish after what has happened up till now as to have lost
all common sense. So before the plague begins Moses is recalled once
more for a discussion which in fact comes to nothing. For Moses can
do nothing but request the release of all Israel with all the cattle they
possess, as all the men and all the beasts must come along to ‘hold
a feast to the Lord’ (10.9). Pharaoh refuses him roundly with a
remark which is clearly meant ironically (10.10a) as he—not in-
correctly—suspects that Israel purposes something which in his eyes
is ‘evil’ (10.10b). He will at least—and this proposal is now meant
quite seriously—keep back the families and cattle of the Israelite
7-38-10.29] DIVINE SIGNS AND WONDERS BEFORE PHARAOH 83
men to ensure their return. As Moses (though this is not explicitly
said) naturally does not agree to this, he is sent away once again in
dissension (10.11b). The tension is already reaching a climax. The
plague comes and does its work of destruction with uncanny speed.
So Pharaoh ‘in haste’ (10.16) recalls Moses yet again. Again
Pharaoh acknowledges his guilt and ‘only this once’ requests pardon.
He asks Moses to make entreaty for the ending of the plague without
making any deceptive promise, and Moses as before is quite ready to
accede to the request, in this case immediately. Thus this plague
too comes to an end.
[10.2129] The section about the plague of the ‘darkness over
Egypt’ has been transmitted in a remarkably fragmentary way.
Again we find elements of a short P version in 10.21 f., 27 which in
this case may even have been preserved complete. In it the rod of
Moses (not Aaron) once again plays a part; it is lifted up to heaven
and thereupon brings complete darkness over Egypt for the space of
three days. It has been supposed that the idea of ‘darkness over
Egypt’ is connected with a phenomenon occurring in Egypt in early
summer. The hot south-east wind comes and often for some days
fills the air so strongly with dust that the atmosphere grows dark. In
that case this plague would be envisaged as a rare heightening of a
not altogether unusual happening. Of course this connection is not
very probable. Perhaps we should rather think of darkness as repre-
senting calamity, as being the realm of evil powers of chaos, so that
as the last in the series of plagues the ‘darkness over Egypt’ was a
specially impressive and dangerous visitation even if we hear nothing
of any material damage.
The J version is preserved only in part; its beginning has fallen
victim to the amalgamation with P so that we can no longer establish
how detailed it was in its original form. Perhaps the redactional
omission of the beginning suggests that it was only brief, in which
case after the noticeable heightening in the previous plaguesJ in this
instance made his narrative quite brief so as to indicate that the
possibilities of negotiation were now virtually exhausted. Verse 23
presupposes the announcement and the beginning of the plague,
further details are given about the effect of the plague, and we are
told that in a miraculous way the Israelites in their place were free
from its effects. Pharaoh has Moses summoned to make a last offer.
As an advance on 10.11a he now expresses himself agreeable that all
Israel shall depart; only the cattle of the Israelites are to be left
84 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
behind to guarantee their return (10.24). Moses replies with a
remark which is certainly to be understood ironically (10.25) and
bluntly rejects this last offer of Pharaoh with the pertinent observa-
tion that sacrificial beasts will be necessary for the feast in the wilder-
ness and that only at the place and time will the kind and number of
the sacrificial victims be made known through the proclamation of the
divine will. Thus Israel must have all the cattle they possess at their
disposal and cannot look for sacrificial beasts first, take them along,
and leave the rest of the cattle behind (10.26). Thereupon Pharaoh
breaks off negotiations with a threat which is apparently meant
seriously (10.28). A continuation of the series of plagues as hitherto
now no longer appears possible. Now only a new way of divine
action can take matters further.

7. PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS: 11.1-13.16

11 1 The Lorp said to Moses, ‘Yet one plague more I will bring upon
Pharaoh and upon Egypt; afterwards he will let you go hence; when he lets
you go, he will drive you away completely. ? Speak now in the hearing of
the people, that they ask, every man of his neighbour and every woman of her
neighbour, jewelry of silver and of gold.’ * And the Lorp gave the people
favour in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, the man Moses was very great
in 3 land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants and in the sight of the
people.
4 And Moses said, ‘Thus says the Lorp: About midnight I will go forth
in the midst of Egypt; ® and all the first-born in the land of Egypt shall die,
Srom the first-born of Pharaoh who sits upon his throne, even to the first-born
of the maidservant who is behind the mill; and all the first-born of the cattle.
6 And there shail be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there
has never been, nor ever shall be again. {? But against any of the people of
Israel, either man or beast, not a dog shall growl; that _you may know that the
Lorp makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel. 8 And all these
your servants shall come down to me, and bow down to me, saying, “Get you
out, and all the people who follow you.’? And after that I will go out.? And he
went out from Pharaoh in hot anger.) ° Then the Lorp said to Moses,
‘Pharaoh will not listen to you; that my wonders may be multiplied in
the land of Egypt.’
10 Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh; and the
Lorp hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the people of Israel
go out of his land.
12! The Lorp said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, 2 ‘This
month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first
month of the year for you. * Tell all the congregation of Israel that on
the tenth day of this month they shall take every man a lamb according
II,I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS 85
to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household; ¢ and if the household
is too small for a lamb, then a man and his neighbour next to his house
shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each
can eat youshall make your count for the lamb. ® Your lamb shall be
without blemish, a male a year old; you shall take it from the sheep or
from the goats; © and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this
month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall
kill their lambs in the evening. ? Then they shall take some of the blood,
and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which
they eat them. * They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted; with un-
leavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. ® Do not eat any of it
raw or boiled with water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its
inner parts. 1° And you shall let none of it remain until the morning,
anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. " In this
manner you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet,
and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste. It is the
Lorp’s passover. !* For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night,
and I will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both man and
beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the
Lorp. 18 The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you
are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall
fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
14 “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as
a feast to the Lorp; throughout your generations you shall observe it
as an ordinance for ever. 1° Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread;
on the first day you shall put away leaven out of your houses, for if any
one eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day, that
person shall be cut off from Israel. 1® On the first day you shall hold a
holy assembly, and on the seventh day a holy assembly; no work shall
be done on those days; but what every one must eat, that only may
be prepared by you. +7 And you shall observe the feast of unleavened
bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt:
therefore you shall observe this day, throughout your generations, as an
ordinance for ever. 18 In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the
month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread, and so until the
twenty-first day of the month at evening. 19 For seven days no leaven
shall be found in your houses; for if anyone eats what is leavened, that
person shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a
sojourner or a native of the land. ?° You shall eat nothing leavened; in
all your dwellings you shall eat unleavened bread.’

21 Then Moses called all the elders of Israel, and said to them, ‘Select
lambs for yourselves according to your families, and kill the passover lamb.
22 Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood which is in the basin, and
touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood which is in the basin; and
none of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. ** For the
Lorp will pass through to slay the Egyptians ;and when he sees the blood on
the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LorD will pass over the door, and will
86 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to slay you. [?4 You shall observe
this rite as an ordinance for you and for your sons for ever. *® And when you
come to the land which the LorD will give you, as he has promised, you shall
keep this service. *8 And when your children say to you, “‘What do you mean
by this service?” ®” you shall say, “It is the sacrifice of the LoRD’s passover,
for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he slew
the Egyptians but spared our houses.” ”| And the people bowed their heads and
worshipped.
28 Then the people of Israel went and did so; as the Lorp had com-
manded Moses and Aaron, so they did.
29 At midnight the LorD smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt
from the first-born of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the first-born of the
captive who was in the dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle. 3° And
Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians;
and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where one was not
dead. * And he summoned Moses {and Aaron] by night, and said, ‘Rise up,
go forth from among my people, [both you and the people of Israel]; and go,
serve the Lor, as you have said. ** Take your flocks and your herds, as you
have said, and be gone; and bless me also!’
33 And the Egyptians were urgent with the people, to send them out of the
land in haste; for they said, ‘We are all dead men.’ ** So the people took their
dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls being bound up in their
mantles on their shoulders. ®° The people of Israel had also done as Moses
told them, for they had asked of the Egyptians jewelry of silver and of gold, and
clothing; *8 and the Lorn had given the people favour in the sight of the
Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. Thus they despoiled the
Egyptians,
37 And the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six
hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. *8 A mixed multitude
also went up with them, and very many cattle, both flocks and herds. °° And
they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they had brought out of Egypt,
for it was not leavened, because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not
tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any provisions.
40 The time that the people of Israel dwelt in Egypt was four hun-
dred and thirty years. “4 And at the end of four hundred and thirty
years, on that very day, all the hosts of the Lorp went out from the
land of Egypt. [*? It was a night of watching by the Lor», to bring
them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watch-
ing kept to the Lorp by all the people of Israel throughout their
generations.
43 And the Lorp said to Moses and Aaron, “This is the ordinance of
the passover; no foreigner shall eat of it; 44 but every slave that is
bought for money may eat of it after you have circumcised him. 45 No
sojourner or hired servant may eat of it. 4®In one house shall it be
eaten; you shall not carry forth any of the flesh outside the house; and
you shall not break a bone of it. 47 All the congregation of Israel shall
11.I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS 87
keep it. 48 And when a stranger shall sojourn with you and would keep
the passover to the Lorn, let all his males be circumcised, then he may
come near and keep it; he shall be as a native of the land. But no un-
circumcised person shall eat of it. 49 There shall be one law for the
native and for the stranger who sojourns among you.’
50 Thus did all the people of Israel; as the Lorp commanded Moses
and Aaron, so they did. *! And on that very day the Lorp brought the
people of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their hosts.]

[13 1 The Lorp said to Moses, ® ‘Consecrate to me all the first-born;

whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man
and of beast, is mine.’
3 And Moses said to the people, ‘Remember this day, in which you came
out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage, for by strength of hand the Lorp
brought you out from this place; no leavened bread shall be eaten. * This
day you are to go forth, in the month of Abib. ® And when the Lorv brings
you into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and
the Febusites, which he swore to your fathers to give you, a land flowing with
milk and honey, you shall keep this service in this month. ® Seven days you shall
eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a feast to the Lorv.
? Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days; no leavened bread shall be
seen with you, and no leaven shall be seen with you in all your territory. ® And
you shall tell your son on that day, “It is because of what the Lorp did for
me when I came out of Egypt.” ° And it shall be to you as a sign on your
hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the LoRD may be
in your mouth; for with a strong hand the Lorp has brought you out of Egypt.
10 You shall therefore keep this ordinance at its appointed time from year to
ear.
s 11 ‘And when the Lorp brings you into the land of the Canaanites, as he
swore to you and your fathers, and shall give it to you, * you shall set apart
to the Lorp all that first opens the womb. All the firstlings ofyour cattle that
are males shall be the Lorp’s. 4° Every firstling of an ass you shall redeem
with a lamb, or ifyou will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every first-
born of man among your sons you shall redeem. 4 And when in time to come
your son asks you, ‘‘What does this mean?’ you shall say to him, “By strength
of hand the Lorp brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage. 1° For
when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lorn slew all the first-born
in the land of Egypt, both the first-born of man and the first-born of cattle.
Therefore I sacrifice to the Lorn all the males that first open the womb ; but
all the first-born of my sons I redeem.” 1° It shall be as a mark on your hand
or frontlets between your eyes; for by a strong hand the Lorv brought us out
of Egypt.’|

The Exodus from Egypt comes about as a direct consequence of

the slaughter of the Egyptian first-born on the night of the Passover.
12.41 = 12.51 expressly affirms that in the view of the present
88 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

narrative this happening was the decisive event of the Exodus. This
section was attached to the preceding plague narrative because in
the slaughter of the first-born we have the last plague, which now
produces the intended result, the release of the Israelites from Egypt.
Indeed the aim underlying the plagues which have so far been
narrated is more than achieved; not only does Pharaoh now at last
declare himself ready to let Israel go with all their cattle, but he
drives Israel out of his land with the greatest speed—in the middle
of the night—because the overwhelming power of Yahweh has been
shown to him in the slaughter of the first-born, and he now has to
fear something even more deadly if Israel remains in his land even a
moment longer. Nevertheless the account of the Passover night and
the Exodus is a special element of the tradition which does not simply
continue and conclude the plague narrative. It is even a primary and
independent element of the tradition in comparison with the plague
narrative which forms the basis for the development of the plague
narrative. The story has its own particular arrangement. In the
original form of the story (on 11.7 f. see pp. g2 f. below) the slaughter
of the first-born is not announced to Pharaoh this time in advance; it
takes place, and of course once it has taken place it is hardly a time
for negotiations with Pharaoh. It is announced to Israel alone,
because this time Israel must take precautions so as to be spared from
the destruction which is to go out over Egypt. The precautions are
of a cultic nature; they are described with the term ‘Passover’. Now
such a ‘Passover’ is to be held every year in Israel in the future, and
the present tradition points emphatically to this by joining to the
instructions for the preparation of the ‘Passover’ on that particular
Passover night in Egypt the ordinance that this cultic usage is to be
repeated every year in the future for all time in Israel as a com-
memorative representation of what Yahweh had done in Egypt to
deliver Israel (12.14, 24-27a). There can therefore be no doubt that
the present narrative of the Passover night and the Exodus gained its
shape in the context of the Passover, which was thereafter celebrated
every year; and if we are to understand it properly we must also keep
in mind the later cultic history of the Passover. ‘Passover’ describes
a sacrifice made by night or alternatively the animal used in this
sacrifice. The Old Testament speaks of preparing (‘keeping’) the
‘Passover’ (sacrifice) (12.48 etc.), of killing the ‘Passover’* (12.21
etc.) and of the ‘sacrifice of the Passover’ (12.27 etc.), but not on the
*[The word ‘lamb’, supplied by RSV, is understood in the Hebrew. Tr.]
 II.I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS 89
other hand of a ‘feast of the Passover’ (this expression occurs in the
Old Testament in Ex. 34.25 only and is certainly secondary). Apart
from the meal which is customary at a sacrifice, the chief feature of
this sacrifice is the apotropaic, prophylactic rite with the blood,
which had to be sprinkled on the entrances to the houses. At some
time of which we can no longer be certain, but in any case only on the
soil of the cultivated land of Palestine, the nocturnal Passover sacrifice
was combined with the ‘feast of unleavened bread’ (Mazzoth) which
belongs to a series of agricultural feasts which derive from the pre-
Israelite tradition of the cultivated parts of Palestine (so Ex. 23.15;
34.18). This was a (pilgrimage) ‘feast’ in the proper sense and is con-
sistently described as such in the Old Testament. This combination
of the two customs, which is presupposed in the festal calendars of
Deut. 16 (vv. 1-8) and Lev. 23 (vv. 5-8) may go back to a time when
the Passover sacrifice and the feast of unleavened bread fell approxi-
mately together; there may also have been special impetus towards
it from the fact that at the Passover sacrifice also it was usual to eat
‘unleavened bread and bitter herbs’ (12.8). In its oldest literary form
the account of the Passover night and the Exodus probably itself
stems from this combination of Passover sacrifice and feast of un-
leavened bread (cf. 12.21-23-and 39) but in such a way that the
Passover sacrifice stands continually in the foreground. This sacrifice
has its own special cultic prehistory independently of the feast of
unleavened bread. It stems from a different sphere of life from the
agricultural feast of unleavened bread; for originally it almost
certainly belonged to the milieu of nomadic shepherds and thus
without doubt goes back to the time before they settled in a cultivated
region. In this region, whcre more or less settled possessors of flocks
were a not unsubstantial element of the population, it was still
celebrated and combined with the feast of unleavened bread.
The account of the Passover night and the Exodus now transfers
the origin of the Passover sacrifice into the unique situation of Israel’s
Exodus from Egypt. For the meaning seems to be that then for the
first time Israel was given instructions for a nocturnal rite, hitherto
still unknown to them, which would serve to protect both themselves
and their cattle. Even the name ‘Passover’ seems to be made known
to Israel now for the first time, and its significance is explained
(12.13, 23, 27). Of course this explanation is extremely obscure. It
derives the term pesah (more familiar in English in the adjective
‘Paschal’, formed from the New Testament word pascha which
go THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

reproduces the Aramaic form of the word) from a verb psk whose
meaning cannot be established with any certainty. Etymologically it
could mean ‘to be lame’, ‘to limp’, and it does in fact occur in the
Old Testament in this meaning in II Sam. 4.4 and perhaps also in
I Kings 18.21 (26). It has therefore been popular to render the word
‘limp past’ or ‘leap past’ in the account of the Passover night.But
this appears extremely strained, and the word ‘past’, which is really
essential for the Passover account, is not in fact properly contained in
the word. So we may have a verb which is to be distinguished from
the root ‘to be lame’, ‘to limp’ but whose real meaning is now as
hidden from us as the significance of the word esa. The translation
‘pass over’ in the RSV is hypothetical, as any rendering must be.
The explanations of the meaning of the term Passover do not in fact
imply that then alone the Israelites must have understood what the
‘Passover’ was; they occur here because now the Passover is men-
tioned for the first time. Some expressions sound as though the
Passover was not something completely new for the Israelites at the
Exodus and suggest that it was the case of their performing a rite
which they already knew for a special reason on a special occasion
(12.11bd, 21bd). In fact we must ask whether the Passover
does not belong to an earlier period of history than the Exodus,
and whether it did not have some origin which we can no
longer discover in the primitive dwelling-places of wandering
shepherds. For cultic celebrations which are repeated every year
usually derive from the exigencies of a life lived in a regular rhythm,
and any precise historical reference is as a rule added only at a later
date. We can certainly prove this in the festal calendars of the Old
Testament, with their agricultural feasts, and it is therefore at least
probable that we can do the same with the Passover sacrifice. We
can easily understand the details we know of the Passover sacrifice
from the circumstances of the lives of the nomadic herdsmen who
even today, as always, move out in the spring from their winter
grazing-grounds on the steppes and in the wilderness to summer
pastures which are either in the neighbourhood of or actually in the
cultivated region. Here in the dry season of the year, after the reaping
of the fields, nourishment can still be found for their flocks, and when
the work of cultivation begins again in the autumn they return to
their winter pasturage. The beginning of their travels with the
accompanying dangers for man and beast, especially for the new-born
of whom the first-born were particularly precious, must have been
II.I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS gl

the occasion for a special animal sacrifice, primarily to keep away

evil powers. The apotropaic significance of the Passover sacrifice
then comes out very strongly even in the Old Testament tradition,
where alongside the rite with the blood we have the Passover sacri-
ficed by night, for night was necessarily to a special degree the
season for the attack of evil powers which had to be kept away. The
situation of an imminent departure, which is a presupposition of the
Passover sacrifice, is easily understandable in this context. Here
belongs the preparedness of the participants for the march which was
maintained even when Israel had become a settled nation (12.11),
and here too perhaps also belongs the eating of flat cakes of quickly
baked unleavened bread with the sacrificial meat, for ‘bread baked
quickly was unleavened’.* According to Bedouin custom it would
have been baked fast on hot stones or on glowing ashes without any
baking utensil.
In view of all this we should assume that the Passover sacrifice was
already known, in the time before Israel became settled and before
the stay in Egypt, as a cultic ceremony performed before the spring
departure to the summer pasturage. It then acquired a particular
historical reference as a constantly repeated cultic representation of
the one great ‘departure’, namtly the departure from Egypt, with
the result that at the same time the account of the Exodus as now
handed down at the Passover sacrifice was shaped along the lines of
the Passover rite. A particular example of this is the element in the
tradition which portrays danger completely surrounding Israel, who
were protected by the apotropaic action of the sacrifice, danger
which threatens the first-born of both man and beast. The mere fact
that although the danger is really directed only at human first-born
in the ‘houses’ (12.23b, 30b) reference is made, of course incidentally,
but nevertheless consistently, to the first-born of beasts as well
(11.5b; 12.12,29b; 13.15a) shows that the independent Passover ritual
has had some effect on the Exodus narrative. This is evident most of
all in the figure of the ‘destroyer’ (12.23b and less vividly also
12.13b),t for whose appearance no reason is given and whose
relationship to Yahweh remains obscure. As it is improbable that
this ‘destroyer’ was only introduced subsequently to avoid attributing
to Yahweh the act of destroying the Egyptians, since it is generally
said quite unthinkingly that Yahweh himself ‘smote’ Egypt, we must
*G. Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Paldstina IV, 1935, p. 53-
+ [Hebrew ‘blow of the destroyer’ for RSV ‘plague to destroy’. Tr.]
92 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

clearly regard the ‘destroyer’ as an old element, derived from the

thought-world of the Passover sacrifice, which has not been com-
pletely integrated with the remarks about Yahweh’s personal action
against the Egyptians. Therefore ‘destroyer’ will have been the
original name for the demonic power which the Passover sacrifice had
the effect of keeping away. In this way the tradition of the slaughter
of the first-born in Egypt may have derived from the Passover ritual
and the ideas associated with it and may in its turn have formed the
basis for the plague narrative. It was the occasion of the Passover
ritual, the departure of the herdsmen with their animals, which led
to its association with the Exodus from Egypt.
The section 11.1~-13.16 is not a literary unity. This is shown in par-
ticular by the juxtaposition of 12.1 ff. and 12.21 ff. which clearly
indicates the presence of doublets. In 12.1-20 we have the usual
linguistic characteristics of P, and this is directly preceded in 11.9 f.
by the conclusion of the plague narrative in the style of P. After
12.20 the language characteristic of P occurs again in 12.28 and then
once more in 12.40—51. In this last section the almost verbal repetition
of 12.41b in 12.51 is striking. Such a repetition leads us to assume that
what lies in between represents a later addition to P at the end of
which the P narrative is taken up again with its last sentence. The
contents of the passage 12.43-50 are also strange, as the passage
almost completely ignores the situation in Egypt and presupposes
the settlement of Israel in a cultivated area. The individual note
12.42 is also to be counted an addition to P as it falls lamely after the
closing formulas of 12.40—-41. Alongside this P material there is also
an apparently older narrative which from its character is certainly
to be regarded as Yahwistic. In it we come up against all kinds of
inconsistencies. ‘The difficulties begin immediately, in 11.1-8. Quite
surprisingly, in I1.4 we are not told to whom the divine message
delivered by Moses applies. According to the first clauses this
message can only be directed to Israel, but as it goes on the situation
imperceptibly changes; now ‘Yahweh’ and the ‘Israelites’ are
spoken of in the third person and Pharaoh is addressed (11.7-8a).
Thereafter, the closing observation 11.8b presupposes a further
conversation with Pharaoh which is in no way possible for Moses in
J after 10.28 f. So in any case we must regard 11.7 f. as an ill-
considered addition made without any regard to the narrative
context—that is, if the whole passage 11.4-8 is not itself perhaps a
whole set of additions; it does not form an indispensable link in theJ
II.I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS 93
narrative. The passage 12.21 ff. in any case belongs to theJnarrative.
12.21-23 is here followed in 12.24-27a by a section with such
striking elements of deuteronomistic language that we must certainly
assume it to be a deuteronomistic addition to the J narrative, all the
more so as we Can again trace the contribution of a deuteronomistic
commentator in ch. 13. In 12.29-39 apart from a few individual
additions we have the compact and virtually complete J account of
the Exodus. Thus we must assign to the originalJ narrative 11.1-6;
12.21-23, 27b, 29-39. Ch. 13 displays a deuteronomistic style
throughout and is a deuteronomistic addition to the old narrative of
the Exodus, which in a loose connection with this narrative puts
forward regulations for the eating of unleavened bread and the
sacrifice of the first-born. It is easy to understand how in the locus
classicus of the Passover and feast of unleavened bread all sorts of
material for regulating the performance of these ceremonies should
have found a place.
[xx.1-8] To the report of the last meeting between Moses and
Pharaoh J directly attaches the divine proclamation of the decisive
blow against Egypt which will lead to the speediest possible release of
Israel from Egypt. Nothing is said, however, in this context about
what form the blow is to take (11.1). In connection with the prepara-
tions for this event there now first of all appears a subsidiary theme
of the Exodus narrative, the account of the outwitting of the Egyp-
tians, in themselves well-meaning (11.2 f.). At the divine command
the Israelites are to obtain from the Egyptians, among whom they
are here pictured as living in neighbourly community, precious
articles* which may perhaps be imagined as vessels or even pieces
of jewellery. As when this theme is taken up again later it is observed
that in this way the Israelites ‘despoiled’ the Egyptians (12.36b), it
is supposed that the Egyptians, who first had no inkling of the
imminent Exodus and then would hardly have been thinking of their
valuables amidst the shrieks of the night of the Passover and the
Exodus, were originally of the opinion that they would get the
precious articles back again. Thus the ‘request’ (11.2; 12.35 f.) is to
be understood as asking for a loan. It is not said how this borrowing
on the part of the Israelites is to be justified. The Israelites are not
reported as having acceded to the divine demands, but this is pre-
supposed in v. 3 where the success of this action is implicitly
*[While the Hebrew word «li can be used of jewellery, it is normally quite
general in meaning and therefore the RSV rendering is perhaps too precise. Tr.]
E.—-D
94 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

confirmed. At the same time the opportunity arises of throwing light on

Pharaoh’s exceptional stubbornness and malice towards Israel; this
was by no means caused by a wicked and provocative attitude on the
part of the Israelites; for in themselves the Israelites, supported by
the appropriate working of their God, were well liked in Egypt, and
the manly form of Moses (‘the man Moses’) was highly regarded even
among the ‘servants of Pharaoh’, even though these last could not
help supporting Pharaoh (but cf. 9.20; 10.7 J). The theme of the
‘despoiling’ of the trustful Egyptians, completely alien to our way of
thinking, is to be derived from the delight of the Israelite narrator in
the successful deception of foreigners. No judgment of the subjective
conduct is even considered; the only fact involved is that at this time
Egypt was a power hostile to Israel.* Otherwise it is just a matter of
an explicit subordinate theme in the Exodus narrative.
Moses now announces—apparently to the Israelites—in the form
of a divine message which he has received and is handing on that
as a final blow all the first-born in Egypt will be slain on the very
next night (11.4-6). If this passage is original in J it gives the reason
for the instructions which then follow in 12.21-23. The addition
11.7 f. (see pp. 92 f. above) after the example of 8.22 f.; 9.4 (10.23b)
promises a special action which will exempt Israel, but overlooks the
fact that in this case Israel is to receive further instructions for special
precautions against the plague, which after 11.7 would be super-
fluous.
[x1.9-12.20] There now follows in 11.9-12.20 a great compact P
section. After the final words of P in the plague narrative (11.9—-10),
in 12.1-14 detailed instructions are given for the preparation and
performance of the Passover sacrifice. The reason for these instruc-
tions is only given at the end. The breadth and comprehensiveness of
the instructions envisages the Passover sacrifice as later celebrated
each year in peaceful times in a cultivated land and takes scant
consideration of the critical situation of Israel immediately before
the Exodus. The introductory remark about the beginning of the
year interrupts the connection between v. 1 and v. 3; it corresponds
to the form of delivering instructions and laws through Moses or
through Moses and Aaron which is elsewhere usual in P (cf. eg.
25.1). It is certainly an addition and is intended to provide a definite
ruling that the year begins in the spring, a custom taken over in
Israel from Mesopotamia in the eighth or seventh century Bc, instead
*Cf. Gen. 30.25 ff. and von Rad, Genesis, ad loc.
II.I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS 95
of in the autumn, as in ancient Israel (cf. 23.16; 34.22). Secondarily
it provides a cultic justification for this by placing Passover and
Mazzoth in what is now the first month of the year. The instructions
given for the Passover in wv. 3 ff. presuppose accurate calendar dates
(vv. 3, 6) which were usual for festivals and feast days in the post-
exilic period; in the older time the dates were determined by the
natural course of the year. “This month’ in wy. 3, 6, if v. 2 is not
original, means the current month, and that was for P even without
v. 2 the first month of the year beginning in the spring, corresponding
to the month Abib in the old Israelite calendar (cf. 23.15; 34.18).
For the Passover sacrifice young male animals from the flock, i.e.
sheep or goats, without any blemish, were necessary (vv. 3, 5) and
this doubtless corresponds with old sacrificial custom. Likewise the
offering of the sacrifice by families also belongs to the original rite
(vv. 3b, 4), perhaps because the flocks, whom the sacrifice was
chiefly to protect, were a family possession. It was only temporarily
interrupted by the Deuteronomic demand for the centralization of
even this cultic custom (Deut. 16.2, 5—7) but was later reinstated on
the grounds of the old tradition, as the present P text shows. The
casuistic* instructions, giving the most accurate details possible for
the numbers to share in each lamb, and the consequent joining
together of two smaller neighbouring families which is in some cases
necessary, leads one to think rather of peaceful circumstances than
of the situation of the Israelites in Egypt. The same is true of the
ordinance that the animal must be taken as early as the tenth day
of the month (v. 3) and then is to be ‘kept’ until it is killed on the
fourteenth day of the month (v. 6). Do we perhaps have in this a
secondary ‘fragmentation’ of the cult act on the occasion of a dif-
ference in the dating, which may have arisen from the false co-
ordination of a new calendar to the rhythm of a natural year (cf. the
separation of the Day of Atonement, to be observed on the tenth day
of the seventh month, from the Feast of Tabernacles, which begins on
the fifteenth day of the seventh month according to Lev. 23. 27, 39) ?
On the evening of the fourteenth day there follows the killing which
begins the nocturnal sacrifice. It is said that the whole ‘congregation
of Israel’ takes part in this killing (v. 6b) in so far as all the families
act at the same time. The mention of the ‘congregation’ again recalls
the later (post-exilic) Israel, whereas in Egypt Israel was not really a
cult community, even for P. In the present chapter the word
*On casuistic law see pp. 174 f. below.
96 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
‘congregation’ occurs for the first time in the Old Testament, in
connection with an act of sacrifice reported by P, who by way of an
exception allows it to take place even before the founding of the
legitimate cult on Sinai. Elsewhere P knows of no cultic action
before the giving of the Law on Sinai. True, in the present section P
avoids the real sacrificial terminology which he usually employs, but
he can hardly have failed to understand that the Passover was a
sacrifice, even if according to the original custom it was celebrated
in the houses of the families and not in a (central) sanctuary. The
old tradition of the Passover night at the Exodus from Egypt was
so important that P could not but take it up, even if it could not be
made completely to agree with his ideas of the beginning of the
legitimate cult in Israel. The stipulation that the Passover sacrifice
may not be boiled in water but must be roasted on the fire without
being cut up (v. g) is in conflict with the Deuteronomic ordinance of
boiling (Deut. 16.7). In this point too, as earlier in the question of
the place where the Passover victim is to be killed, P goes back
behind the Deuteronomic law to the doubtless original rite. The
demand that any meat remaining over on the next day is to be
burned so that it is not profaned (v. 10) also certainly belongs to this
original rite, as does the demand that all should be ready to depart
(ve1T)s
After all the necessary instructions have been issued, the reason
for them is given in wv. 12 f. “This night’ (v. 12), on which all the
first-born in Egypt are to be smitten, means the Passover night which
has been described in the preceding instructions. According to wv. 3
and 6 at least a further five days must elapse between the moment of
the proclamation and ‘this night’. This does not agree with the J
narrative, which in its announcement means the night immediately
following (11.4-6). P wanted all the requirements of the Passover
ritual to be observed accurately even in the situation before the
Exodus. Whether something special is imagined in the ‘judgments’
which Yahweh will on that fateful night ‘execute on all the gods of
Egypt’ (v. 12), or whether it simply means that Passover night will
prove the powerlessness of the Egyptian gods, we can no longer
decide. In v. 13 the meaning of the Passover sacrifice is described by
P in old, derived and very solemn formulas (cf. v. 23 J); even the
‘destroyer’ occurs here, though in the context of a very vague
expression.*
*On this verse cf. pp. gtf. above.
 II,.I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS 97
On the basis of the later connection between the Passover sacrifice
and the feast of Mazzoth, vv. 15-20 enjoin the eating of unleavened
bread for seven days beginning with Passover night. It is of course
hard to imagine how the Israelites in Egypt could have kept the
commandment to eat unleavened bread quietly for seven days after
the fateful night, especially with a cultic assembly on the first and
seventh days (v. 16). This passage again visualizes the situation in
Palestine as also appears from the formal phrase ‘a sojourner or a
native of the land’ (v. rgb). According to cultic usage feast days are
counted from evening to evening (v. 18) so that the Passover night
coincides with the first half of the first day of Mazzoth. The chief
days of the feast of Mazzoth are the first and the last, for which a rest
from work is enjoined with a solemn cultic proclamation (v. 16).
This does not hold for the days of the feast which lie in between, as
they are singled out only by an extremely emphatic demand for the
eating of unleavened bread (vv. 15b, 19). In origin the feast of
Mazzoth was a cult feast in the agricultural tradition of Palestine at
the beginning of the grain harvest, at which the first produce of the
land was offered for the cultic consecration of the harvest and eaten
still uncontaminated by the addition of leaven.
[12.28] P’s long instructions about the Passover sacrifice and the
eating of unleavened bread close with the brief remark in 12.28 that
all was carried out. The remark at the same time implies that the
Egyptian first-born were also killed as was announced in the divine
proclamation as the reason for the Passover sacrifice (12.12 f.), a fact
which is not once observed elsewhere in P.
[12.21-27] The J narrative begins again in 12.21. After the
announcement of the decisive blow against the Egyptians which is
to take place on the coming night (11.4-6), Moses assembles the
elders as the men responsible for the action which is to be taken
among the families (clans), to give them instructions for the Passover
sacrifice (vv. 21b—23). These instructions are chiefly concerned with
the apotropaic smearing of the entrances to the houses with the
blood of the sacrificial victims and once again add the prohibition
against leaving the houses in view of the nocturnal destruction which
is being wrought outside. The silent and worshipful accepting of the
instructions by the ‘people’ (v. 27b) tacitly presupposes that the
instructions are handed on by the elders. The deuteronomistic
supplement vv. 24-27a, within which v. 24b is demonstrably an
addition because of its singular address, which does not fit the
98 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT
framework, requires the retelling of the story of the Exodus at the
Passover sacrifice which is to be repeated every year and thus
presupposes this custom.
[12.29-39] In contrast to P, J reports the Exodus of Israel in com-
paratively great detail. After Israel had complied with the instruc-
tions for Passover night (though this is not explicitly remarked in J),
and after the first-born, as was announced in 11.4-6, had been killed
(v. 29), Pharaoh and all Egypt with him were so overwhelmed with
the fearful action of the God of Israel-(v. 30) that despite the final
breaking off of negotiations, which according to 10.28 f. he had
desired, he now has Moses called once again, immediately and while
it was still night (v. 31), not for further negotiations but to give him
immediate permission to depart with all the conditions which he had
required (vv. 31 f.). Indeed he even asks that Israel will procure for
him the blessing of the God of Israel at the feast which they purpose
in the wilderness and thus indirectly recognizes that up till now he
has been under the powerful and effective curse of this God who has
visited him with all the plagues right up to this last one. Now he can
no longer say, as he had in 5.2, that he does not know Yahweh; he
has come to know him in all his fearful reality. Does he expect even
now that the Israelites will return and bring with them the blessing
of their God? Perhaps not. But the blessing of the God who has
power even over Egypt will in any case have its effect upon him and
upon the Egyptians even without the presence of the Israelites. So far
for the Israelites the way of departure is free and the Egyptians, who
now no longer think of the valuables which they have lent (vv. 35 f.;
cf. pp. 93 f. above), urge Israel to depart quickly in the fear that some-
thing even more dreadful might come upon Egypt (v. 33). But the
Israelites were not prepared for the need to depart so quickly; they
had not provided themselves with food for the journey, but on the
Passover night had only prepared the dough which they would bake
the next morning for their daily needs, as they were used to do day
by day. So now in their sudden departure by night they had to take
the bread with them in the kneading bowls (v. 34) before it had even
been mixed with the leaven, and on the following day could only
bake bread from that while they were on the way, bread which would
only be unleavened cakes as they had no leaven to hand (v. 39). This
is how J explains the combination of the Passover sacrifice and the
feast of unleavened bread which follows. Here we are clearly con-
cerned not with the perhaps very ancient custom of eating un-
II.I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS 99
leavened bread at the Passover sacrifice, but with the eating of
Mazzoth after the Passover night. J too therefore begins from the later
combination of the two originally independent cultic ceremonies of the
Passover sacrifice and the feast of unleavened bread. Now his
explanation is much more enlightening than that of P. Whereas in P
there is no reason at all why the Israelites should continue to eat
unleavened bread in Egypt for seven days after the Passover night
and we are given no idea of how this was at all practicable, J gives a
completely pertinent explanation of the historical situation. P was
interested in the cultic ordinances as such, and even where he
derived them from a definite event in history on the basis of an old
tradition he still gave a complete formulation of these cultic ordi-
nances as they were valid for his time, even at the cost of historical
probability. J seems to have envisaged only one day of eating un-
leavened bread after the Passover night. This may correspond with
the original and more ancient festal custom, in which case the
extension of the feast to seven days is the result of a later develop-
ment, in the course of which the cultic character of the ceremony was
as in other feasts heightened and increased. We can no longer tell
the origin of the number given in v. 37b for the departing Israelites,
but in any case it exceeds enormously what is even in the slightest
degree historically probable. We can no longer make out who the
accompanying ‘mixed multitude’ are thought to be (v. 38; cf. also
Num. 11.4). Perhaps at the root of it lies the quite correct idea that
other elements besides the Israelites were customarily employed as
forced labour in Egypt and that they now took the opportunity to
escape in similar fashion. The departing Israelites began their journey
from the neighbourhood of the town of Raamses (cf. on 1.11) and
first went to Succoth (v. 37a). ‘Succoth’ represents the Hebraising
of the Egyptian town-name J7kw. The ruins of this Tkw are to be
found on the present ¢ell el-maskhita in the wadi tumélat east of Pithom
(cf. on 1.11); it is therefore situated in approximately the middle of
the isthmus between the gulf of es-suwés and the Mediterranean Sea
(cf. further 13.20 J).
[12.40=51] With 12.40 f. P concludes the account of the Exodus.
The detail of the four hundred and thirty years for the stay of the
Israelites in Egypt is probably connected with the whole chronolo-
gical system of the Priestly writing and has been constructed on this
basis.* Nearest to it is the mention of four hundred years in Gen.
*Cf. von Rad, Genesis, p. 67.
 100 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

15.13b which is, however, an addition there and more probably is

the result of the rounding off of the number four hundred and thirty.
This figure does not fit in with the observation in Gen. 15.16 accord-
ing to which the fourth generation would already have left Egypt;*
moreover, the addition to P in Ex. 6.13~-30 only counts on four
generations from the sons of Jacob to Moses. From a historical point
of view this last calculation, which gives us a period of round about a
century, is certainly much nearer the truth than the estimate of four
hundred years or more, which has all historical probability against it.
Along with this chronological information P reports briefly and
ceremoniously the ‘Exodus from Egypt’ without even hinting at the
connection between this event and the happenings of Passover night
(v. 41); the knowledge of this connection is tacitly assumed. “That
very day’ can really only refer to the day last described in the pre-
ceding narrative, which would be the last day of the feast of un-
leavened bread—the twenty-first day of the month. In view of the
earlier mention of the seven days of unleavened bread the reference
of a remark such as ‘that very day’ is in fact obscure (so too the same
expression in 12.17).
The addition about the ‘night of watching’ (12.42) surely means
that on the Passover night—for this must be meant—Yahweh ‘kept
watch’ to a special degree, as indeed he never either slumbers or
sleeps, and that as a commemoration of this the Israelites afterwards
kept this night every year as a night of ‘watching’. This is evidently
also meant to provide the explanation of an expression used at a later
date, ‘a watch for Yahweh’, which certainly refers to the Passover
night.
The additional Passover regulations, which are principally con-
cerned with the question of admission to the Passover sacrifice, quite
ingenuously presuppose the later situation of an agricultural com-
munity with the mention of ‘natives of the land’, ‘sojourners’ and
‘strangers’, and with the assumption that the Israelites had slaves and
day labourers. Strangers staying in the land of Israel are to have the
same rights as Israelites if they submit to the regulations about
circumcision which apply to Israel. Bought slaves belong to the
familia of their master; they are to be circumcised and then they too
may take part in the Passover sacrifice. Foreigners, on the other hand,
remain excluded, as do ‘sojourners’ and ‘hired servants’ whom we
should think of as being primarily merchants and foreign workers.
*Cf. von Rad ad loc., p. 182.
II,I-13.16] PASSOVER NIGHT AND THE EXODUS 101
The domestic character of the Passover is stressed in v. 46, as is the
necessity that the slaughtered and roasted Passover victim be left so
whole and intact that not a bone of it is broken. John 19.36 refers to
this last regulation, which also occurs in Num. 9.12.
[13.1-16] The deuteronomistic section 13.1-16 is hardly all of a
piece, but has apparently been inserted gradually; this is clear from
the division of the regulations for the first-born at the beginning and
end of the section and from the appearance of a plural address in
wy. 3 f. in the middle of a passage which is otherwise written in the
singular. In connection with the eating of unleavened bread at
Succoth (soJ 12.39) it is ordained that every year unleavened bread
is to be eaten in the month of the Exodus when in the future the
Israelites live in Palestine (vv. 5-10). Unleavened bread is moreover
to be eaten for seven days (as 12.15 ff. P) with a pilgrimage feast on
the last day (12.16 requires rest from work on the first and last day).
All is to serve as a ‘memorial’ of the Exodus and a re-enactment of
its happenings (cf. 12.24-27a deuteronomistic). To explain the term
‘remembrance’, metaphorical language is used; ‘a sign on the hand’
and ‘a memorial between the eyes’ (v. 9). This would originally mean
tattooing on the hand and jewelled ornaments which hung over the
forehead down as far as the bridge of the nose. In v. 16 (asin the related
passages Deut. 6.8; 11.18) the technical term /dtapdt is used to
describe these ornaments; its root meaning ‘drops’ indicates the
droplike shape of such articles. The original significance of these
things, which has receded right into the background in the Old
Testament narratives, is that they were the signs of membership of
definite cults and were at the same time prophylactic amulets; later
they were used only as ‘signs of remembrance’ of something, and in
this sense Deuteronomy and the deuteronomistic literature occasion-
ally speak metaphorically of them. Later Judaism once again
understood this metaphorical language literally and based the custom
of ‘prayer bands’ on hand and forehead upon the Old Testament
passages which have been just cited. The passage with the plural
address, vv. 3 f., gives the month of Exodus its old Hebrew name Abib
(otherwise P in 12.[2], 18 with the numbering of the months), with-
out however giving the exact day of the month for the eating of un-
leavened bread (otherwise P in 12.18). On 13.3-10 cf. especially
Deut. 16.1—8.
The regulations about the first-born (cf. 34.19-20a and on this
pp. 263 f. below), which are loosely attached to the narrative of the
102 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

killing of the Egyptian first-born and hardly suppose that the

Passover was really a sacrifice of the first-born, stem from the general
clause (vv. 1 f.) that all first-born (from the mother’s point of view)
and in particular all male first-born (so expressly vv. 12, 15 and
Deut. 15.19 with respect to the first-born of beasts) belong to God
and are to be consecrated to God, not only the beasts, but also the
men (cf. 22.28b). As with the fruits of the land, so too with living
beings, each first produce is claimed by the deity who is the giver of
the blessing which lies in fertility; originally it would have been
intended that every first produce was to be sacrificed. There is no
conclusive evidence that there was ever sacrifice of first-born humans
in Israel which was regarded as legitimate. Instead, the sacrifice of
the human first-born which was basically required of all men was
replaced by a sacrifice of cattle and thus ‘redeemed’ (cf. 13b; on this
see the traditional basis of Gen. 22). The special regulation for the
corresponding redemption of the first-born sacrifice in the case of an
ass rests on the fact that among the domestic animals the ass was not
counted as a potential sacrifice (this is to be inferred from Lev. 11.
1 ff.; Deut. 14.4 ff.). In this case therefore a substitute offering had to
be made, or otherwise the first-born of the ass, not being suitable for
sacrifice but still claimed as the property of the deity, was killed and
thus withdrawn from profane human use (v. 13a). The keeping of
these ordinances about the first-born was again to be a ‘memorial’ of
the divine action in killing the first-born of the Egyptians (vv. 14-16).

8. THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA*: 13.17-14.31

17 When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the
land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, ‘Lest the people
repent when they see war, and return to Egypt.’ 18 But God led the people
round by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea. And the people of
Israel went up out of the land of Egypt equipped for battle. 19 And Moses
took the bones of Joseph with him; for Joseph had solemnly sworn the people
of Israel, saying, “God will visit you; then you must carry my bones with you
Srom here.’ 2° And they moved on from Succoth, and encamped at Etham, on
the edge of the wilderness. ®! And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar
of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar offire to give them
light, that they might travel by day and by night; ®? the pillar of cloud by day
and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people.
* Cf. Introduction, p. 11 n.
13.17-14.31 | THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA 103
14' Then the Lorn said to Moses, 2 ‘Tell the people of Israel to turn
back and encamp in front of Pi-ha-hiroth, between Migdol and the sea,
in front of Baal-zephon; you shall encamp over against it, by the sea.
For Pharaoh will say of the people of Israel, ““They are entangled in
the land; the wilderness has shut them in.’? 4 And I will harden
Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them and I will get glory over
Pharaoh and all his host; and the Egyptians shall know that I am the
Lorp.’ And they did so.
5, When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, the mind of
Pharaoh and his servants was changed toward the people, and they said, ‘What
is this we have done, that we have let Israel go from serving us?’ ® So he made
ready his chariot and took his army with him, 7 and took six hundred picked
chariots and all the other chariots of Egypt with officers over all of them. ® And
the Lorp hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt and he pur-
sued the people of Israel as they went forth defiantly. ® The Egyptians
pursued them, all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots and his horsemen and
his army, and overtook them encamped at the sea, by Pi-ha-hiroth,
in front of Baal-zephon.
10 When Pharaoh drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes,
and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were in great
fear. And the people of Israel cried out to the Lorn; ! and they said
to Moses, ‘Is 1t because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us
away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, in bringing us out
of Egypt? 1° Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, “Let us alone and let
us serve the Egyptians?” For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians
than to dte in the wilderness.’ 1% And Moses said to the people, ‘Fear not,
stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lorp, which he will work for you
today; for the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. 14 The
Lorp will fight for you, and you have only to be still.’ * The Lorp said to
Moses, ‘Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward.
16 Lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide
it, that the people of Israel may go on dry ground through the sea.
17 And I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians, so that they shall go
in after them and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, his
chariots, and his horsemen. 18 And the Egyptians shall know that Iam
the Lorn, when I have gotten glory over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his
horsemen.’
19 Then the angel of God who went before the host of Israel moved and
went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood
behind them, ?° coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And
there was the cloud and the darkness;* and the night passed without one coming
near the other all night.
21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lorp
drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry
land, and the waters were divided. ?2 And the people of Israel went into
the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on
*See p. 115 n.
104. THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

their right hand and on their left. 2 The Egyptians pursued, and went
in after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots,
and his horsemen. 24 And in the morning watch the Lorp in the pillar
[of fire and | of cloud looked down upon the host of the Egyptians, and dis-
comfited the host of the Egyptians, *° clogging their chariot wheels so that
they drove heavily; and the Egyptians said, ‘Let us flee from before Israel ;
for the Lorn fights for them against the Egyptians.’
26 Then the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over the
sea, that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their
chariots, and upon their horsemen.’ #7 So Moses stretched forth his
hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its wonted flow when the morning
appeared; and the Egyptians fled into it, and the Lorp routed the Egyptians
in the midst of the sea. 8 The waters returned and covered the chariots
and the horsemen and all the host of Pharaoh that had followed
them into the sea; not so much as one of them remained. ?9 But the
people of Israel walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters
being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.
30 Thus the Lorp saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians;
and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore. *+ And Israel saw the
great work which the Lorn did against the Egyptians, and the people feared
the Lorp; and they believed in the Lorp and in his servant Moses.
After Israel’s release from Egypt has been effected through power-
ful and terrible divine signs and wonders, there unexpectedly comes
a further conflict with the Egyptians which is extremely dangerous for
Israel. For although Pharaoh consented to the release of Israel, he
nevertheless now summons up his powerful battle-strength in order to
pursue the Israelites who have journeyed into the wilderness east of
the delta and bring them back by force, not because he had already
heard or could possibly have heard that they were not going on the
pilgrimage into the wilderness which they had purposed (so J), but
because afterwards he regretted his release of Israel. In the frame-
work of the present narrative context this event acts as a postlude
which in consequence of the miraculous divine help given to the
Israelites comes to nothing. Of course in actual fact and within the
history of tradition it is something more than just a postlude; in con-
trast it is the very act which was first and chiefly meant when Israel
confessed Yahweh as ‘the God who led us up out of Egypt’. In Israel
one could speak in hymns of praise of the God who brought about the
Exodus from Egypt and in so doing merely make concrete reference
to the miracle at the sea (cf. for example Ex. 15.21; Ps. 114.1 ff.).
From this point all the previous acts of God against the Egyptians
seem like a prelude which culminates in the decisive event at the sea.
In this way then the narrative of the deliverance at the sea is to be
13.17-14.31] THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA 105
regarded as the real nucleus of the Exodus theme, and in the present
tradition it forms not only the end but also the goal and climax of the
whole, although at least in P the catchword ‘come out’ (Exodus) has
already been discontinued earlier (12.41).
The narrative itself is quite short, but is nevertheless not a literary
unity. We should not be surprised to find traces in this central section
of all the different narrative voices which we have observed up till
now. It is however immediately noticeable that there are different
concrete presentations of the event itself; it is further striking that the
word ‘God’ occasionally appears alongside the divine name Yahweh,
which is used most frequently (13.17-19; 14.19) and that ‘the king
of Egypt’ also occurs alongside the usual ‘Pharaoh’ (14.5a). The
characteristics of the different sources are so clear and numerous that
we can complete the literary-critical analysis with relative certainty.
The P narrative is by far the most obvious. In 14.1-4 and 14.15-18
we have two pieces that belong together, each with the familiar
linguistic characteristics of P. 14.5 cannot have been the original
continuation of 14.1-4, as it refers to facts over and above what has
already been said in P. On the other hand 14.8 represents the
smoothly-fitting, direct continuation of the narrative strand of
14.1-4. 14.9ad is a doublet to what has already been reported in 14.8.
The rest of 14.9 is however to be assigned to P in view of the reference
to 14.2. 14.10bd leads up to 14.15 and is therefore—perhaps together
with 14.10a—likewise a piece of the P narrative. From 14.15-18 P
onwards the continuation of this narrative strand is easy to follow.
14.2taab—23 refer to the instructions and announcements of 14.15-
18. The instructions of 14.16a find their counterpart in 14.26-27a, to
which then the continuation 14.28 and the closing statement 14.29
belong. Thus the P material occurs complete and without a gap in
14.1-4, 8, gabb, 1oabd, 15-18, 21aab, 22 f., 26, 27aa, 28 f. Between
these P passages stand the elements of older narratives. ‘These begin as
early as 13.17-22. In this section the juxtaposition of two originally
different descriptions is unmistakable; v. 20 comes too late after
v. 18, moreover the word ‘God’ occurs continually in vv. 17-19, and
the divine name ‘Yahweh’ in wv. 20 f., from which v. 22 is not to be
separated. Thus we are to explain the passage 13.17—19 as Elohistic,
and are supported in this by the fact that v. 19 refers to Gen. 50.25 E;
so it may be established that here the E source again appears after a
long interval. Verse 20(—22) joins on directly to 12.37(—39) J and is
certainly to be assigned to J. In the pre-Priestly material of 14.5-7
106 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

we can again clearly distinguish two sources, indeed as early as v. 5.

After it has been said in 14.3 P that Pharaoh seized what seemed to him
to be a favourable opportunity to bring the Israelites back again, v. 5
says on the one hand that he received an obviously unexpected report
which changed the situation for him (so v. 5a) and on the other hand
that he changed his mind by repenting of the release which he had
reluctantly granted without any astonishing news being necessary
(v. 5b). Add to this the fact that v. 5a speaks in an unusual way of the
‘king of Egypt’, whereas directly afterwards we have ‘Pharaoh’ again
in v. 5b, and there can be no doubt that v. 5 is composed of two
different sources. As the ‘king of Egypt’ in 1.15 ff. belonged to a piece
of the Elohistic source (see p. 23 above), 14.5a must be assigned to
E and therefore 14.5b to J. It is next clear that we have a doublet in
vv. 6 and 7, even if definite indications are lacking for assigning them
to Jand E. We cannot assert with certainty any discrepancies in the
passage 14.11-14, but it is nevertheless striking that the answer of
Moses in vv. 13 f. does not fit the reproach of the people in wv. 11 f.
at all. Now as vv. 13 f. (with the divine name ‘Yahweh’) join
smoothly on to v. 1oba (‘and they were in great fear’), we can pre-
sume that vv. 11 f. come from E, even though there are no positive
indications of this. 19a and 19b are again apparent doublets; as
the word ‘God’ is used in v. 19a and the pillar of cloud is mentioned
in 19b (cf. 13.20-22 J) the division of sources is here plain. 19b has
a continuation in vv. 20 and 24, and in between v. 21 ab (with
‘Yahweh’) is anotherJ piece in which a different word for ‘dry land’
is used from that in vv. 16, 22, 29 P (‘dry ground’). The two Hebrew
words here used for ‘to be dry’ are distributed between J and P in
exactly the same way as they are in the story of the flood. In v. 27abb,
where again there is a clear doublet to v. 28 P, we have a piece of J
(‘Yahweh’), and as this piece is connected with v. 25b this last half
verse too (with ‘Yahweh’) is to be given to J; there are no indications
in v. 25a which enable us to assign it to a source. The closing passage,
wy. 30 f., is again certainly fromJ (cf. vv. 13 f. J). Thus we have a J
narrative which has been preserved complete and continuous in
13.20-22; 14.5b, 6 (or 7), gaa, robb, 13 f., 19b, 20, 21ab, 24, 25b, 27
abb, go f. E on the other hand is preserved only in fragments, in
13.17-19; 14.5a, 6 (or 7) . . . Iga. It is uncertain whether we are to
assign 14.11 f. and 14.25a to J or to E.
[13-17-19] The E section 13.17—19, introduced by a subordinate
clause (v. 17aa) which is presumably only redactional and serves
13.17-14.31 | THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA 107

as a connection, answers the obvious question why on their

departure from Egypt the Israelites did not choose the most direct
route to the cultivated land of Palestine which had been promised to
them as their possession, that is, the well trodden trade and military
route which from the eastern edge of the Nile delta crossed the
wilderness of Sinai near the Mediterranean coast and reached the
coastal plain of Palestine at the south-west corner, to lead first of all to
Gaza, the first large city in Palestine. In this city of Gaza and in other
cities of the same south-west coastal plain of Palestine the Philistines,
coming from the Mediterranean world, settled themselves as over-
lords after they had conquered it, and so it was possible to call this
part of Palestine lying nearest to Egypt ‘the land of the Philistines’.
In a part of his narrative which is no longer preserved, E must have
reported that Israel, hard pressed in Egypt (cf. 3.9 E) had left the
land (cf. also below on 14.5a). Israel now began the march into the
wilderness of Sinai under the guidance of God, which was exercised
in a way of which we are not told. God now does not lead Israel to the
land of the Philistines, because there Israel might expect to fight with
the inhabitants of the land who would want to deny them access.
The mention of the designation ‘land of the Philistines’, and the idea
that certain fighting was to’ be expected on this particular way of
approach, shows that E imagines the south-west coastal plain of
Palestine to be inhabited by the Philistines with a warrior power
which was justifiably feared by the Israelites for a long time. That is
an anachronism, as the Philistines began to settle in this neighbour-
hood.only at the beginning of the twelfth century Bc, by which time
the occupation of Palestine by the Israelite tribes was virtually com-
plete. Still, even before this the Palestinian coastal plain had been
settled particularly densely with strong and powerful cities. If Israel
—so argues E—was to recognize the difficulty of entering the Promised
Land from this side when it was actually there, the people would in
all probability have preferred to return to Egypt, although they had
been uncomfortable enough under the oppression (3.9 E). But this
was not to happen, for it was not at that time a question of Israel
making its own decision about its future, but of the fulfilment of the
divine plan of salvation, by which Israel was now to come into the
Promised Land. Therefore Israel was led by God round by the ‘way
of the wilderness to the reed (not Red) sea’ which was thus in any case
not the direct way to Palestine. Unfortunately we can no longer make
out where E located the ‘reed sea’, that is if he had any idea at all
108 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

about geographical relationships in a neighbourhood far removed

from the later habitations of Israel. The name ‘reed sea’ (yam sip), in
which the word ‘reed’ (sap) is probably borrowed from the Egyptian,
is too general to give a certain reference to the place. In I Kings 9.26,
as is clear from the context, the gulf of e/-‘agaba on the east side of the
Sinai peninsula is described as the ‘reed sea’. But this does not
demonstrate for certain that in the Exodus tradition the same gulf of
el-‘agaba was understood as the ‘reed sea’, especially as the north end
of it is more than 120 miles as the crow flies from the eastern edge of
the Nile delta. The indefinite description ‘reed sea’ in the Exodus
tradition could also refer to the gulf of es-suwés on the west side of the
Sinai peninsula or to the stretch of sea north of es-suweés; a ‘way of the
wilderness’ also leads there from the eastern arm of the Nile, viz.
from the wddi tumélat, and, moreover, in a south-easterly direction.
The uncertainty of what E means by the ‘reed sea’ also affects the
scene of the miracle at the sea; for with the information in 13.18 E
doubtless means at the same time to bring Israel to the place at which
the decisive rescue of Israel from the power of the Egyptians took
place. The reflection by E in 13.17 f. rests on a consideration of the
three themes, the Exodus from Egypt, the journey into the wilder-
ness and the entry into the Promised Land. Originally the Exodus
theme dealt only with the release of Israel from Egypt and their
journey into the wilderness east of the delta. Historically too, it so
happened that the Israelites on their departure from Egypt first of all
aimed for the regions inhabited by nomads south of the settled land
of Palestine, regions from which they had originally come.—The
details of 13.19, like the remark which leads up to them in Gen.
50.25 E, derive from the fact that already in Old Testament times
(cf. Josh. 24.32), as still today, there was a Palestinian local tradition
which knew of a ‘tomb of Joseph’ at Shechem.
[13.20-22] From the neighbourhood of Succoth, where they had
eaten the cakes of unleavened bread on the day after the Passover
night (12.3739 J), the Israelites according to J on the next day reach
‘Etham, on the edge of the wilderness’. The name ‘Etham’ pre-
sumably represents the Hebraising of an Egyptian place name, but
the basic Egyptian form can no longer be discovered and so the
situation of this ‘Etham’ is completely unknown. If, as is probable,
in the stereotyped formulations of 12.37a and 13.20 J was thinking of
a day’s march, he looked for ‘Etham’ a day’s march from Succoth;
the explanatory comment ‘on the edge of the wilderness’ also leads us
13.17-14.31 | THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA 109
to think of a place only a short distance from the cultivated land of
the Nile delta, the wad: tumélat. This brings us, if the details inJ are
based on any concrete notion of geographical positions, to the sea-
board north of es-suwés. As J provides no more geographical indica-
tions before his account of the miracle at the sea, unless a piece of
his narrative has been lost in the redactional interweaving of the
sources, and has therefore with 13.20 brought Israel to the scene of
the great saving act of Yahweh, the ‘sea’, which he mentions in
14.21ab, 27abb, 30 was for him at the same place as ‘Etham, on the
edge of the wilderness’. He apparently presumes this to be known, as
he does not explicitly state it. It is thus probable thatJ thought of the
area mentioned as the scene of the miracle at the sea. The report of
the pillars of fire and cloud in 13.21 f. is a retrospective description
of the guiding of Israel to ‘Etham’, but has a significance over and
above this, as the iterative imperfect in v. 22 shows, as a preliminary
indication of the whole of the divine guidance of Israel in the wilder-
ness. The narrative element of the pillars of cloud and fire in all
probability derives from the Sinai tradition. Smoke rising like a
cloud and fire are features of the theophany on Sinai (19.18 J), and
the phenomenon of the pillars of cloud and fire presumably goes back
to observation of an active volcano, to which allusion is without doubt
made in the account of the events on Sinai. The pillars of cloud and
fire showing the way which is to lead Israel to Sinai are already given
to the Israelites as a divine guide, in J, from the Exodus onwards.
[14.14] P connects Pharaoh’s decision to pursue Israel in 14.1-4
with the route of the departing Israelites. The Israelites do in fact
alter their route at a special command from Yahweh. In P’s view had
they originally intended to take the usual direct route to Palestine?
In any case, they are now directed away from the route originally
planned to a place which is extremely accurately described in 14.2.
Unfortunately we can no longer give the exact locations of all the
places which are named there. In particular, the place with the
apparently Egyptian name Pi-ha-hiroth is not known elsewhere and
therefore can no longer be established; for this reason it is also
irrelevant whether the Hebrew expression is to be translated ‘in front
of Pi-ha-hiroth’ (as RSV) or ‘east of Pi-ha-hiroth’. The place which
we can locate most certainly is ‘Baal-Zephon’, by which a sanctuary
is clearly meant.* This sanctuary of Baal-Zephon, on whose site in
*See O. Eissfeldt, Baal Zaphon, Zeus Kasios und der Durchzug der Israeliten durchs
Meer, 1932.
IIo THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

the Hellenistic-Roman period a Zeus Kasios was worshipped, lay on

a low hill in the now uninhabited place mahammadije on the western
end of the coastal beach belt which separates the lagoon of what in
classical times was called the Sirbonian Sea, the present sebhat
berdawil, from the Mediterranean Sea. The region concerned is thus
near to the Mediterranean coast east of the mouths of the Nile. If
then in the closing clause of 14.2, which is obviously rather surprising
but not necessarily secondary because of its address in the second
person plural, it is expressly stressed that Israel is to camp ‘in front of
Baal-Zephon’, the scene is meant to be the neighbourhood of the
the western shore of the Sirbonian Sea. The further explanation
‘between Migdol and the sea’ also points to this. Migdol, which
occurs as early as the Egyptian sources, lay on the usual route from
the delta to Palestine not far north-east of the Egyptian border-
fortress Jr and is probably to be located at the present tell el-hér,
whereas in this context the ‘sea’ must almost certainly be understood
to be the Mediterranean Sea. The information given in 14.2 there-
fore in any case leads us to the neighbourhood of the direct route
from Egypt to Palestine; but Israel is to leave the route at first
proposed, in order to go into the region between this route, which
still runs at some distance from the Mediterranean, and the Mediter-
ranean (or the Sirbonian) Sea, there to encamp in front of Baal-
Zephon. Now the Sirbonian Sea lay before Israel to the east, and
this is certainly what is meant in the following passage by the hin-
drance which prevented Israel from continuing their journey away
from Egypt. It is striking that it is in P, the latest of the sources, that
we have such accurate information about the scene of the miracle,
information moreover which leads towards an area different from
that which is probably indicated by the somewhat indefinite de-
scriptions in the older sources. We must therefore ask whether P here
reproduces a very old and perhaps even authentic local tradition
unknown to J and E, or whether we have here a secondary localiza-
tion which locates Israel’s deliverance at the sea in what seemed to
be an appropriate place near the road connecting Palestine with
Egypt which was much travelled at all times. No certain answer can
be given to this question, but we must at any rate reckon with the
second possibility as well. Pharaoh is now—this is certainly the
meaning of P—informed, in some way of which we are not told, of
the change in route of the departing Israelites, and concludes that
they are now completely ‘entangled’ in the wilderness which no
 13.17-14.31 | THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA ITI
longer offers them any track to follow. This seems to him to be a
favourable opportunity for falling upon them with his army and
dragging them back; Yahweh himself has strengthened him in this
resolve and in this sense has ‘hardened his heart’, because he now
means for the last time to show his glory in sight of Pharaoh and all
his proud host.
[14-5-9] Other reasons are given for Pharaoh’s decision in the
older sources. In v. 5a E reports that Pharaoh was ‘told’ that ‘the
people had fled’. This is an extremely surprising statement after every-
thing which we have been told up till now; for hitherto it has not been
said and could not be said that Israel had ‘fled’ from Egypt, i.e. had
left the land without the knowledge and permission of Pharaoh, as
the climax of both the plague and the Passover narratives is that the
obstinate Pharaoh was finally compelled to consent to the departure
of Israel. Now we can hardly assume that the use of the word ‘flee’ by
the Elohist was just a lapsus linguae and that he—albeit in a clumsy way
—had only meant to say that Israel had departed against Pharaoh’s
better judgment; for even the reference to the fact that Pharaoh
was ‘told’ shows that here some change in the situation for
Pharaoh is indicated. Thus the phraseology of the clause v. 5a, short
though this clause is and isolated though its position may be, must
be taken seriously in that here we have the expression of a tradition
which knew the story of a ‘flight’ of Israel from Egypt. Then there
only remains the question whether E narrated an eventual ‘flight’
from Egypt, although the negotiations with Pharaoh were really
aimed at another outcome, or whether from the beginning he had
separated the events in Egypt from the eventual ‘flight’ of Israel. We
should at any rate notice that there is no certain indication of the
presence of E in the whole of the plague and Passover narratives. As
far as we are positively able to establish, E has only accounts of the
subjection of the Israelites in Egypt (1.15 ff.), the divine charge to
Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt (3.1, 4b, 6, 9 ff.), the return of
Moses to Egypt with this charge (4.17 f., gob) and perhaps a fruitless
interview between Moses and Pharaoh about a relaxation of the
harsh forced labour (5.4). The account of a ‘flight’ from Egypt could
have fitted in well with this, but of course, in view of the now
extremely fragmentary condition of the E material in the combined
Pentateuchal narrative, the force of such an argumentum e silentio
should not be overestimated. The fact, however, remains that E
spoke of a ‘flight’, and in so doing preserved a trace at any rate of
14 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

what is doubtless a very old form of the Exodus tradition, whether

it be that E consistently followed this form of the tradition and thus,
as occasionally elsewhere, has preserved a particularly old stage in
the development of the tradition, or whether it be that in this case E
combined old traditional material with more recent developments.
In any case it is clear that a ‘flight’ from Egypt by the Israelites pro-
vides an especially clear reason for the pursuit by the Egyptian host,
and that in fact the story of the deliverance at the sea is very closely
connected with the traditional theme of the ‘flight’. As a reason for
the pursuit, J says that Pharaoh ‘changed his mind’ (v. 5b) and thus
once again picks up an element of the story which he had already
used in the plague narrative, though this particular expression did
not occur there; under the pressure of the plagues Pharaoh had
already made all sorts of concessions which he took back again when
the plagues ceased. Now he had consented to the release of Israel;
but once the fearful Passover night was over he changed his mind.
In this way, then, the pursuit has been set in motion in all three
sources. At the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom the chief feature
of the Egyptian host was its chariots; these are now sent out. The
language of v. 6b sounds as though Pharaoh himself went out with
them in person, but the other remarks do not allow us to draw this
conclusion with any certainty. Verse 7b says that there was also an
‘officer’ (Hebrew ‘third man’) on each of the chariots, so that all had
their full complement; in making this observation the Israelite
narrator does not have in mind the peculiarly Egyptian way of
manning chariots, where the custom was to have a crew of two, one
to drive the chariot and the other to fight from it, but the Hittite-
Palestinian way according to which there was also a ‘third man’ on
the chariot to act as aide and shield bearer to the warrior. In v. 8 P
uses the particularly solemn phrase ‘the Pharaoh, king of Egypt’,
which occurs occasionally elsewhere in his writings (cf. 6.11). At first
the Israelites have no idea of the danger which threatens them; they
carry out their Exodus ‘with a high hand’ (so Hebrew; RSV para-
phrases ‘defiantly’), i.e. still in confident self-assurance (the same
expression also occurs in Num. 15.30 and there means ‘deliberately’).
As soon as the Israelites become aware of the Egyptian pursuit,
they quite understandably become extremely afraid; they ‘are in
great fear’ (v. 1oba J), they ‘cry to Yahweh’ for help (v. 1obd P), they
reproach Moses (vv. 11 f. E?). The chief thought here is certainly not
that Israel is in an inextricable position because of the sea which
13.17-14.31] THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA 113
prevents them from making any further progress; the mere fact that
they are being pursued by a swift and powerful Egyptian chariot
force is quite sufficient to make their situation appear hopeless. The
complaint to Moses (vv. 11 f.) which is frequently repeated in a
similar fashion in the later wilderness stories and which perhaps has
its origin in the tradition in those stories, is here striking in so far as
it refers explicitly to remonstrances made by the Israelites to Moses
while they were still in Egypt, remonstrances which, however, have
not yet occurred in the previous narrative. If there is an E fragment
in vv. 11 f. we could assume that there is here a reference to a
passage in the Elohistic narrative which is no longer preserved, but
it is also conceivable that a later ‘murmuring’ of the people in a
difficult situation should be expressed in a false reference to a fear
which was supposedly expressed earlier. According to J, Moses
meets the fear of the people with that cry of ‘Fear not’ which used to
introduce the powerful intervention of Yahweh to protect his people.*
Yahweh himself will lead the war, and Israel need only stand there
and witness the victory of Yahweh over the enemy (vv. 13 f.). This
then is what Moses dares to say. Just as in J Moses is only the
messenger sent to the Israelites in Egypt to announce to them the
acts of Yahweh (3.16 f. J), so-also now Yahweh himself will do
everything. And it will be a sole occurrence; Israel will never again
see the Egyptians defeated and annihilated so miraculously as this
time (the r° item must be understood in the sense of a futurum exactum,
which is quite possible from a linguistic aspect; for if we wanted to
refer the ‘see’ in the subordinate clause to the present pomp of the
Egyptian host, still in all its pride, the following expression ‘never
again’ in the main clause would not really make sense).
[14.15-31] Now there follows the decisive section about the
wonderful act of Yahweh. According to P, Yahweh first answers the
‘cries’ of the Israelites (v. 1obd) with a reproachful question; here
Moses is addressed as the spokesman of the ‘crying’ Israelites (unless
perhaps we are to assume that in the original text there stood “Why
do you [pl.] cry to me?’) ¢After this, the Israelites, who had at first
‘encamped’ at the place which is fully described in v. 2, are instructed
to depart (vv. 2, gabb). But their route as they do so, which is still
thought of as being in an easterly direction, was—as we are to infer
from what immediately follows—blocked by ‘the sea’; and here P
*Cf. G. von Rad, Der Heilige Krieg im alten Israel, 1951, pp. 9 f.
t [The present Hebrew verb is singular. Tr.]
114 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

may have thought of the lagoon of the Sirbonian Sea. Thereupon

Moses immediately receives the command to hold up his rod, which
had already played a similar role in the plague narrative in P; by
this action Moses is to ‘divide’ the sea so that a passage now appears
through its midst. In v. 16a P has chosen a formula which might
suggest that the rod had a purely magical effect, but his real meaning
was certainly that Yahweh himself intended the ‘division’ of the sea
which he effected to follow directly upon the raising of the rod which
he had commanded. Thus the way is made clear for Israel, and it is
indicated at least in hints that an overwhelming catastrophe is to
come upon the pursuing Egyptians. The further course of events is
pictured plainly and simply in P. Moses obeys the command
(v. 21aa), the promised consequences follow (v. 2tb), the Israelites
enter the passage (v. 22) and the Egyptian host comes after them
(v. 23). After the Israelites have gone through the passage and have
again reached dry land proper on the other side, as is said in v. 29 in
retrospect, Yahweh once more lets Moses raise his rod (v. 26), and
as a consequence of this action (v. 27aa) the waters now begin to
flow back, covering and completely overwhelming the Egyptian
host, which is still in the passage (v. 26). So by a great wonder
wrought by Yahweh Israel was finally saved from the danger that
threatened them and from all the power of Egypt.
The narrative of the older sources is not so simple. All that is left
of E is of course the fragment v. 19a. According to this the E descrip-
tion began in a similar way to that of J; the ‘camp’ of the Israelites
was protected against the pursuing Egyptians by the interposition
of a manifestation of the divine presence. In E this is the ‘angel of
God’ who, as we learn here, used after the Exodus to go before the
Israelites to lead them on their way. This ‘angel’ (literally ‘messenger’)
‘of God’ represents the divine presence itself; he is an ambassador of
God, conceived of as in human form, who above all mediates the
action of God which turns towards men and helps them.* He
appears when God wishes to be near to earth and acts in the same
way as God himself. E especially has spoken of him several times
when it has been a question of God having dealings with men, so
that excessively human expressions are not used of God himself. If
then in E Israel is led in the wilderness by the ‘angel of God’, this
means that God himself leads his people in this form, visible indeed,
but nevertheless mysterious. Now according to v. 1ga this ‘angel of
*Cf. von Rad, Genesis, pp. 188 f.
13.17-14.31] THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA 115
God’ appeared before the pursuing Egyptians and behind the
Israelite camp so as to prevent the Egyptians falling upon them
speedily, so therefore the ‘angel of God’ was a form which the
Egyptians too could see and respect. Whether E went on to describe
events in the same way as J is completely beyond our knowledge.
In J too the representation of the divine presence—in this case
the pillars of cloud and fire (cf. 13.21 f.)—completely separates the
two camps from each other by leaving its place as guide at the head
of the Israelites and placing itself behind the camp of Israel and thus
between the Israelites and the Egyptians. Thus the Egyptian host had
also made camp in the meanwhile, in immediate proximity to the
Israelites, who were encamped at ‘Etham’ (13.20); for it was
evening, and the Egyptian attack was apparently planned only for
the next day. So as to prevent a possible night attack, the pillar stood
between the two camps and made an approach from either side
impossible. It would thus have been seen by the Egyptians as well as
by the Israelites. Unfortunately we can no longer reconstruct the
original wording of the clause v. 20a) with any certainty.* Should
its original meaning have been that on this particular night the pillar
did not light up as a pillar of fire but remained dark, J may well
have imagined that the space between the two camps was shrouded
in such a complete and uncanny darkness that no one could, and in
view of the miraculous nature of the phenomenon dared, penetrate
it. Now in v. 21ab J surprisingly speaks of the ‘sea’ which must be
sought in the immediate vicinity of the two camps, though no more
accurate information is given about its exact position. Nor can we
make for ourselves any exact picture from the geographical data that
are given, as we are unable to say where J located the event. What
now happened to this ‘sea’ was only important as events proceeded ;
for the time being it is just said that all that night, while the two
camps stood opposite one another, Yahweh ‘drove back’ the sea by
means of ‘a strong east wind’ and ‘made the sea dry land’. According
to the usual exegesis this is supposed to mean that the water receded
from a bight or tongue of the ‘sea’ so that at this place the sea bed
now lay free and waterless. Of course the wording really means that,
*The transmitted text is completely incomprehensible at this point and is
certainly incomplete. I suggest an original hehstk in place of wehahosek, and count
wayya’er as an addition caused by the thought that the pillar must really shine by
night. [For RSV ‘And there was the cloud and the darkness; and the night passed’,
Noth would translate ‘and the cloud remained dark on this night’, making the
omission he suggests above. Tr.]
116 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

under the effect of the east wind sent by Yahweh, the water com-
pletely disappeared from a sea of perhaps quite a moderate size, only
later to reappear suddenly in similar fashion (v. 27abb). In any case
J is clearly speaking here of a divine miracle; and it is extremely
questionable whether it is appropriate to look for a ‘natural’ parallel
for the events he describes and thus seek to explain the whole
‘naturally’. Even J can hardly have found any basis in his experience
for the fact that a wind, even if it was a ‘strong’ wind, could “drive
back’ a ‘sea’, even if the sea was only some shallow water, so that the
divine action had only consisted in the coming of the strong
east wind just at the right time and its being particularly effective.
Likewise, the idea that a hot east wind, a sirocco, such as usually
appears in spring and autumn in Syria-Palestine, could have dried
up a ‘sea’, despite its well-known drying power, even if its effect was
thought to be greatly heightened at the divine command, must be
completely unjustified by any possible empirical observation. In that
case the words of J in v. 21ab could much more easily lead us to
think of a mirage, the strange phenomenon which, when the hot
(eastern) air comes into the desert, makes ‘water’ appear and then
disappear again before a man’s eyes. We could then imagine thatJ
remembered this phenomenon when he was writing the description
of the wonderful events at the ‘sea’. In no case does the language of J
indicate that he is thinking of the movement of the tide, of which he
is probably not unaware elsewhere and which scholars have occasion-
ally read out of his words, for a ‘strong east wind’ would have no
connection with this, as J should certainly have known. Even a
combination of the pillars of cloud and fire with the ‘departure’ of
the sea in the sense that an earthquake and a disruption of the sea
connected with a volcanic eruption resulted in a back-flow of the
water at a particular place on the coast is not suggested by J’s
words; and if it is correct that forJ the pillars of cloud and fire are the
representation of the divine presence, which derives from the his-
torical tradition of Sinai, he would hardly have envisaged volcanic
phenomena at the scene of the miracle at the sea. In short, it must
remain uncertain what Jmeant to express when he said that ‘the sea
was driven back’ and with what phenomenon from what realm of
experience he connected it. In view of what has been said, our chief
and sole question must be that of the way in which J wished his own
words to be understood; the historical question of what really
happened is thus outside our scope. Anyway, J provides the first
13.17-14.31 | THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA 117
decisive material for his description in v. 24. Towards the end of the
night—the ‘morning watch’ is the last of the three ‘watches’, i.e.
watching periods, into which the night is divided—Yahweh by
merely ‘looking down’ drives the Egyptian host into a panic. Accord-
ing to Job 40.11 f., the fact that God’s ‘look’ is sufficient to throw
down the proud is a special proof of his deity. It is repeatedly said
in the Old Testament that it is with such a fear of God that Yahweh
conquers his enemies and those of his people, by putting them into
so great a panic that they are ready to destroy themselves.* In most
cases we are not told in any detail how this ‘looking’ and ‘panic’comes
about. In the miracle at the sea, it is at least hinted that some part
was played by the appearance of the pillar of cloud, in which the
Egyptians now in some way recognized the presence of Yahweh. As
both the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire are mentioned in the
text of v. 24a we may, if the conjecture about v. 20ab advanced above
is correct, think that according to J, after complete darkness had
prevailed hitherto during the night, now fire was suddenly to be
seen, fire which brought about the fear of God. But if that had been
J’s meaning he would have said it rather more clearly; and so we
ought rather to assume that the word ‘fire’ in v. 24a has subsequently
been inserted in view of the usual connection between the pillar of
cloud and the pillar of fire. The fate of the Egyptians is sealed with
the panic caused by the ‘looking’ of Yahweh which is bound up with
the pillar of cloud; they can now only run away in headlong flight
and therefore pass this cry from mouth to mouth, at the same time
expressing the recognition that it is Yahweh himself who is fighting
against them (v. 25b). Within this closely knit sequence of events the
observation in v. 25a has a disruptive effect, and it also occurs too
early, as it already presupposes the flight of the Egyptians, to which
they resort only in v. 25b. So in v. 25a we may see an isolated fragment
of E which was incorporated into the combined narrative because it
contained a motif which does not occur elsewhere in the narrative;
alternatively, it may be regarded as a secondary addition. It is
supposed that a further inexplicable divine act was the reason why the
wheels of the Egyptian chariots were clogged in a miraculous way,
so that the Egyptians did not succeed in their attempted flight; the
narrator hardly had a ‘natural’ cause in mind (marshy land or the
like). We can imagine how the episode in v. 25a would have con-
tinued; the Egyptians, held up in their progress, were completely
*Cf. G. von Rad, Der Heilige Krieg im alten Israel, p. 12.
118 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

submerged by the returning sea. J describes the events in a different

way in v. 27abb; here the Egyptians, flying headlong in the fear of
God, rush right into the sea in their confusion and blindness. This
was Yahweh’s victory over them, and in this way he ‘shook off’ (see
RSV margin) the Egyptians in the midst of the sea (the same
language is used of the miracle at the sea in Ps. 136.15). Now
according to J it also happened that, when morning broke, the sea,
which had been ‘driven back’ during the night, had ‘returned to its
wonted flow’. Thus the idea in J’s mind must have been that the
Egyptians had been confused still more by this, though of course we
must ask at this point how the Egyptians could have noticed the sea
being ‘driven back’ in the darkness of the night, so that they were now
not reckoning on the ‘return’ of the sea. It is clear that for J the
‘driving back’ and the ‘return’ of the sea is only a subsidiary element
of the story which is not absolutely essential for his description of
events and which does not fit into it at all smoothly. The essential
thing for him is the fear of God which causes the Egyptians to rush
into the sea near where they and the Israelites were encamped. From
this we must go on to conclude thatJ incorporated in his description
elements of a variant narrative of the miracle at the sea which
depended upon the ‘driving back’ and the ‘return’ of the sea, and
which therefore perhaps told how the Egyptians had encamped at
a place from which the sea had gone away and how they were then
overwhelmed by the ‘returning’ sea. According to J, Israel did
nothing during the decisive events, just as Moses had announced,
according to vv. 13 f. J, that they had only to stand by and see the
acts of their God. J does not speak of a passage of Israel through the
sea. Israel remained in their camp and according to v. 30 perhaps
saw nothing at all of the actual flight and catastrophe of the Egyp-
tians, but merely its consequence—the dead Egyptians which the
sea threw up on its shores. In this way the accomplishment of the
great saving act of Yahweh was made known, and Israel learnt to
fear their God and to ‘believe in’ him (v. 31). For this God had
displayed himself in power, bringing fear upon the Egyptians, and
he required of his own people also that they should fear him;
moreover he had shown himself true to his promises, at the same time
confirming ‘his servant Moses’ as a real messenger of God. In this
way he could claim trust both for himself and for his messenger.
Israel had already ‘believed’ (4.31) the first proclamation of
Yahweh’s promise which had been brought by Moses; now the
13.17-14.31 | THE MIRACLE AT THE SEA 119
promise of the ‘Exodus’ has been fulfilled, and if J once again speaks
of the ‘belief? of the people, he in fact means that Israel was convinced
that the destruction of the Egyptians, which they themselves had
not witnessed, was the work of their God who had spoken to them
through Moses.
The different variants of the story of the miracle at the sea wrought
by Yahweh which are in part certain, in part only demonstrable with
probability, clearly disagree in their representation of the details
of the event. But the essential elements of the contents are the same
in all forms of the story; and this similarity shows itself all the more
clearly against the background of the differences in the individual
narratives. All agree in speaking of an act of God in which it was
God alone who acted;J expressed this particularly strongly (vv. 13 f.
and go f.), but P too has expressed himself clearly enough in this
respect by making the whole chain of events follow from the harden-
ing of Pharaoh’s heart by Yahweh (v. 4), and then, in what follows,
having Moses and the Israelites acting exclusively at the command of
Yahweh (vv. 15 f., 21aa, 26, 27aa). All agree in handing down as the
nucleus of the story that the fatal danger to the Israelites journeying
from the delta to the Sinai peninsula consisted in their being pursued
by the Egyptians, and that the Israelites were saved from this danger
by the annihilation of the Egyptians in a ‘sea’. Now this annihilation
is represented in different ways; the most simple, but at the same
time the most imposing, is that of P who tells how the sea was
‘divided’, how first the Israelites passed through and how the Egyp-
tians wanted to follow. J is more mysterious; in his main narrative
the Egyptians are driven into the sea through the fear of God, but
alongside it he has preserved the traces of what is probably another
version, according to which the Egyptians, presumably encamped,
were engulfed by the return of a sea which had at first been ‘driven
back’. Common to all these variants is the thought that the event
must be described as a concrete happening, which really took place in
space and time. As there was not and could not have been a recorded
description of the way in which things happened, this basic thought
led to these very differences in the concrete presentations. On the
other hand, we are exercised by the historical question of what
actually did happen, even if the answer to this historical question
cannot be extended beyond the establishing of variant traditions
which at an early stage are not clear, and probably not even in
agreement, on the location of the event; evenJ does not, as used to be
120 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

widely assumed earlier, describe the events in a basically ‘natural’

way, so that we cannot just make a number of deletions in his
account to obtain an essentially ‘rational, historical’ report. Every-
where we have simply variants of the single theme of the destruction
of the Egyptians in ‘the sea’. This fact of the saving of Israel through
the destruction of an Egyptian chariot force in ‘the sea’ forms the
historical basis of the tradition.

g. THANKSGIVING FOR DELIVERANCE: 15.1-21

15! Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lorn,
saying,
‘I will sing to the Lorn, for he has triumphed gloriously;
the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.
2 The Lorp is my strength and my song,
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
my father’s God, and I will exalt him,
3 The Lorp is a man of war;
the Lorn is his name.
4 “Pharaoh’s chariots and his host he cast into the sea;
and his picked officers are sunk in the Red Sea.
5 'The floods cover them;
they went down into the depths like a stone.
6 Thy right hand, O Lorp, glorious in power,
thy right hand, O Lorp, shatters the enemy.
7 In the greatness of thy majesty thou overthrowest thy adversaries;
thou sendest forth thy fury, it consumes them like stubble.
8 At the blast of thy nostrils the waters piled up,
the floods stood up in a heap;
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
® The enemy said, “I will pursue, I will overtake,
I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.
I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.”
10 ‘Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them;
they sank as lead in the mighty waters.
11 “Who is like thee, O Lorn, among the gods?
Who is like thee, majestic in holiness,
terrible in glorious deeds, doing wonders ?
12 Thou didst stretch out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them.
13°Thou hast led in thy steadfast love the people whom thou hast
redeemed,
thou hast guided them by thy strength to thy holy abode.
15.1-21] THANKSGIVING FOR DELIVERANCE TDi

14 The peoples have heard, they tremble;

pangs have seized on the inhabitants of Philistia.
18 Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;
the leaders of Moab, trembling seizes them;
all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.
16 Terror and dread fall upon them;
because of the greatness of thy arm, they are as still as a stone,
till thy people, O Lorn, pass by,
till the people pass by whom thou hast purchased.
17 Thou wilt bring them in, and plant them on thy own mountain,
the place, O Lorn, which thou hast made for thy abode,
the sanctuary, O Lorp, which thy hands have established.
18 The Lorp will reign for ever and ever.’
19. For when the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his
horsemen went into the sea, the Lorp brought back the waters of the
sea upon them; but the people of Israel walked on dry ground in the
midst of the sea. 7° Then Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron,
took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with
timbrels and dancing. 4 And Miriam sang to them:
‘Sing to the Lorn, for he has triumphed gloriously;
the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.’

[zo—21] The oldest element in this section is the short passage

vy. 20 f. Of course we cannot establish any recognizable connection
between it and any of the known sources. Because it is in all probability
of relatively great age it is most often assigned to the source J, but
there is no conclusive argument in favour of this. Its nucleus is
formed by the short hymn v. 21b which is in any case of independent
origin from the narrative tradition and which has been handed down
within the framework of the cult. Its brevity suggests that it stems
from a very early date, and we may reckon with the possibility that
we have here the oldest formulation preserved to us in the Old
Testament of the account of the divine miracle at the sea, especially
as we may also assume that the Exodus theme, like others in the
Pentateuch, was first expressed in liturgical praise and was always
repeated within the framework of liturgical ceremonies. In v. 21b we
have a hymn of solid structure which begins with an invitation,
directed to the assembled worshippers, to praise God, and then bases
this invitation on a reference to acts of God which have already
taken place and been experienced. In the present case this reference
is limited to the miracle at the sea, and we may imagine that
wherever the Exodus was recalled in the oldest Israelite worship this
122 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

hymn had a principal place. The language of the hymn, which

avoids any individual details and could only fully be understood if
the broad outlines of the events of the Exodus were known, in fact
stands very close to the J description in Ex. 14, despite other
independent means of expression, in that it says that the Egyptian
chariots were ‘thrown’ into the sea and that it was Yahweh who did
this. The brevity of this cultic confession makes it easy to understand
how, in order to perpetuate the account of the acts of God from
generation to generation and at the same time to explain such a
confession, someone ‘narrated’ the story of the miracle at the sea and
of the other events of the Exodus in rather more detail, thus making
it the subject of a ‘narrative’ tradition. In vv. 20-21a the hymn
has been given an introduction, according to which it was sung for
the first time immediately after the event itself. This introduction
assumes the custom, not very appropriate to the historical situation
at the sea, that the women ‘went out’ from their homes to meet their
victorious husbands on their return, greeting them with song and
dance and singing them a song of victory (cf. I Sam. 18.6 f.); in this
one of the women was leader of the singers who ‘sang to them’, 1.e.
the returning warriors, the song which was then taken up and
repeated by the choir formed by the rest of the women. Miriam,
whose name is mentioned for the first time, appears as leader of
the singers in Ex. 15.20 f. She is also introduced with the explanatory
remark that she was Aaron’s sister (cf. the connection between
Aaron and Miriam in Num. 12). It is thus supposed that Aaron was
an already well-known figure. This was probably not the case in the
basic material of the J narrative in which Aaron would as yet have
made no appearance; he is first introduced by J in secondary material
in 4.14 and then repeatedly mentioned alongside Moses. In 15.20, on
the other hand, it is not thought that Aaron was the brother of
Moses; otherwise Moses would surely have been named there
instead of Aaron or at least alongside him. The relationships which
are assumed in the late tradition (cf. Ex. 7.1 P; Num. 26.59) are not
yet known here. Should Aaron be described in 4.14 as the physical
brother of Moses (see pp. 46 f. above) we would have even in this
passage (secondary J) a later stage of the tradition than in 15.20.
The state of affairs which has been described speaks against any
idea that 15.20 f. is to be assigned to the basic material of theJnarrative.
Aaron and Miriam belong in the tradition to the group of those
figures surrounding Moses about whom only remnants of an origin-
 15.1-21 | THANKSGIVING FOR DELIVERANCE 123

ally much richer tradition remains, and whose originally independent

role we can therefore no longer detect. In time they have been made
relations of Moses. In 15.20 Miriam is described as a ‘prophetess’;
she should thus presumably be characterized as an ecstatic. This
corresponds to her appearance at this stage, for ecstasy and (cultic)
song belonged closely together in ancient Israel (cf. I Sam. 10.5 f.).
[x-19] The great ‘Reed Sea Hymn’ in 15.1~-19 is a relatively late
piece; we cannot give a more accurate indication of the time at which
it was composed. In its present form it is no longer a unity. For the
most part it is a hymn, and moreover a ‘solo hymn’ with a single
speaker in the first person, but it has also incorporated elements ot
the thanksgiving form. It was not composed to fill the place it now
occupies in the narrative, but is an originally independent hymn
which began with the old hymn 15.21, slightly altered, and then sang
in praise of the miracle wrought by God at the sea, celebrating in
considerable detail one of the most popular subjects of Old Testament
hymns. It is therefore probable that the insertion into the present
context is secondary. The clause which introduces the hymn, which
is loosely attached to the preceding narrative, puts it into the mouth
of Moses and the Israelites. The reason for this was the special
mention of Moses through the ‘I’ which appears in the hymn. The
form of the hymn is not very strict. It is relatively long, and we
cannot certainly discern a series of strophes in it. The rhythm
changes; verse lines with a 4: 4 stress (as in 15.21b) keep recurring
from beginning to end, but are frequently replaced by verse lines of
another measure. If we are to assume the original to have been a
hymn with a regular rhythm, we must postulate a basic form
markedly different from the material that has been transmitted.
Probably, however, we must reckon with a form which was not very
consistent from the beginning.
The old hymn transmitted in v. 21b is placed at the beginning as
a theme (1b), but with a change of the hymnic invitation to the
assembled crowd. This now becomes the intent of an individual to
praise God, a feature which derives from the individual thanks-
giving. A formula from the thanksgiving also occurs in v. 2a and is
extended still further in v. 2b (cf. Ps. 118.14; Isa. 12.2b) with which
the person giving thanks acknowledges the ‘help’ which has been
vouchsafed to him by God. Verse 3 marks a transition to objective
hymnic expressions, first of all to the bold expression that Yahweh
himself is a ‘man of war’ and that the mention of his name includes
124 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

this very thought. This is not meant to designate Yahweh as a ‘God

of war’; but what it says is that Yahweh is experienced by Israel as the
one who acts by fighting for his people himself (cf. 14.14 and the
recognition expressed by the Egyptians in 14.25b), who leads the
‘war of Yahweh’ (Num. 21.14; cf. also I Sam. 18.17; 25.28). The
general remark of v. 3 becomes in vv. 4 f. a special allusion to the
‘sinking’ of the Egyptian chariot force in the sea. Then, with an
address to Yahweh which is maintained right up to v. 17, follows a
general song in praise of Yahweh’s overwhelming power, terrible to
his enemies (and those of Israel); here in the customary concrete
language of the Old Testament we are told of his right hand and his
wrath. The wrath of Yahweh against the enemy is also given as the
reason for his wonderful act at the sea, which is now given special
mention again in vv. 8-10; for the ‘blast of his nostrils’ (v. 8) refers to
his raging anger. Moreover the expressions ‘piled up’, ‘stood up’,
‘congealed’, of the waters are reminiscent of P’s description of the
miracle at the sea in 14.15 ff. The haughtiness of the enemy (v. 9)
was in a moment laid low by the power of Yahweh (v. 10). It is not
absolutely clear what is meant by the word rendered ‘wind’ of
Yahweh in v. 10; it could mean his wrath, as in v. 8, but as the
Hebrew word used is riéah, which is also the usual word for ‘wind’,
a real wind could be imagined which made the sea come and go. In
that case there would be a reference to a part played by the wind in
the miracle at the sea similar to that in the element of theJ narrative
which speaks of the ‘strong east wind’ (14.21ab). The ‘Hymn of the
Reed Sea’ does not seem to have any concrete picture of what
happened in the miracle at the sea, but instead a number of variant
narratives are combined together; this is clear from the fact that on
the one hand we hear that the Egyptians are ‘covered’ in the sea
(vv. 5a, 10a) and on the other they are directly afterwards said to be
‘sunk’ in the sea (vv. 5b, rob). The theme of the miracle at the sea is
virtually concluded in v. 11 by the question ‘Who is like thee?’, a
traditional element frequent in the hymn form which exalts the God
to be praised as unique among the circle of ‘gods’. Thus its ultimate
origin is in non-Israelite polytheistic ideas. Perhaps, following the
emendation suggested in Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica, v. 11ba should read
‘Who is like thee majestic among the holy ones?’; if this is correct,
and it is supported by the parallelism, the mention of the ‘holy ones’,
i.e. the heavenly beings who stand around God, interprets the
parallel expression ‘gods’ in the sense of ‘divine’ beings and thus
15.1-21 | THANKSGIVING FOR DELIVERANCE E25

completely excludes the originally polytheistic background of the

question. With a brief reference to the three themes of the saving act
at the sea, the guidance through the wilderness and the conquest,
vv. 12 f. make a transition to the second main theme of the ‘Hymn
of the Reed Sea’, the Entry into the Promised Land. Despite the
startling nature of the expression, ‘the earth swallowed them’
surely refers to the overwhelming of the Egyptians in the sea; they
thus vanished from the face of the earth and entered the realm of the
dead under the earth. Yahweh led Israel along the way through the
wilderness to his ‘holy abode’ (v. 13). This is a general reference to
the land promised to Israel. The word n:wéh, rendered as ‘abode’,
originally described the pasturage, then the resting place in general.
The ‘n*wéh’ of Yahweh in II Sam. 15.25 is meant as a special refer-
ence to the Jerusalem sanctuary, but in Jer. 25.30 the expression
apparently has a more comprehensive though at the same time
indefinite meaning and may most probably refer to the whole land
of Israel; this latter application is also likely in the present passage,
as the whole of the land of Yahweh is also mentioned in what follows,
in the sense that it is the possession of Yahweh, the ‘place which he
has made for his abode’ (v. 17), and so the land of God into which
the people of God are now being led. Here, however, the idea of the
land as the possession of God in which the Israelites are the ‘strangers
and sojourners’ of Yahweh (Lev. 25.23) conflicts with the concept
of the ‘Promised Land’.* Yahweh has built Israel a road into this
land by letting great fear come over the people who live in the neigh-
bourhood of this road. After the ‘people’ have been mentioned in
completely general terms (v. 14a), we surprisingly hear first of all
about the ‘inhabitants of Philistia’, i.e. the Philistines (v. 14b). This
is perhaps because they were settled in that part of Palestine which
borders immediately upon Egypt and therefore must have been the
first to hear of the Exodus of the Israelites. The mention of Edom
and Moab which follows (v. 15) refers to the great detour made by
Israel through southern Trans-Jordan (cf. Deut. 2.1 ff). Canaan
refers to the whole of the region in which Israel later settled. This
area is characterized as a mountain in v. 17 because Israel settled
chiefly in the hilly parts of the land. Here Israel was in Yahweh’s
‘abode’, for in view of the context the expression ‘the place which
Yahweh has made for his abode’ (v. 17a) must clearly describe the
*See G. von Rad, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palaestina-Vereins 66, 1943, pp. 191-
204.
E.—E
126 THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT

whole of this region. But then we are not to understand the word
‘sanctuary’ in v. 17b as a single holy place, which would compel us
to think of Jerusalem, but we are to see the whole land, because it is
the possession of Yahweh and the ‘abode of God’, as a holy realm.
Here the song ends, as v. 19 is a prose addition following 14. 23, 28 f.
P. The final verse, v. 18, expresses again in objective hymnic style
the eternal kingship of Yahweh which has manifested itself in the
great deeds of God to Israel.
 Ul
THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE
IN THE WILDERNESS

15.22 — 18.27
1. THE FIRST STOPPING-PLACES: 15.22-27
22 Then Moses led Israel onward from the Red Sea, and they went
into the wilderness of Shur; they went three days in the wilderness and found
no water. *° When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water of
Marah because it was bitter; therefore it was named Marah. *4 And the
people murmured against Moses, saying, ‘What shall we drink?’ »® And he
cried to the Lorp; and the LorD showed him a tree, and he threw it into the
water, and the water became sweet.
[There the Lorp made for them a statute and an ordinance and there he
proved them, *® saying, ‘Ifyou will diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord
your God, and do that which ts right in his eyes, and give heed to his command-
ments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases upon you which
I put upon the Egyptians ;for I am the Lorv, your healer.’|
27 Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of
water and seventy palm trees; and they encamped there by the water.
At the beginning (v. 22aa) and at the end (v. 27) of the section
there are sentences with stereotyped phrases which are usual in P
and which continue to occur in similar fashion in what follows within
the framework of the narratives in P. We must therefore assign these
sentences to P, whereas the passage lying in between does not display
P’s characteristic peculiarities. The story of the water of Marah
(v. 22abb-25a) in all probability derives from J. In v. 26 such
marked deuteronomistic phrases occur that we must suppose it to be
a deuteronomistic supplement to the older Pentateuchal narrative;
the only question is whether we are also to assign v. 25b to this
supplement or whether to connect it with the precedingJ narrative.
As in this half verse too only very general expressions are used (for
127
128 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

the first clause see Josh. 24.25), we may decide in favour of the first
alternative.
[22aa, 27] P mentions the departure and arrival, from stopping
place to stopping place, after the fashion of an itinerary. The
starting place is the ‘reed sea’ (v. 22aa) which has not hitherto been
given this name in P, so that we may ask whether P did not use a list
of the stopping places which had come to hand to describe the
journey through the wilderness. According to P, the first stopping-
place in the wilderness is ‘Elim’ (v. 27), which is described as a small
oasis where Israel finds the necessary water. The description surely
rests on local knowledge. We have, however, on our part no point of
reference for determining the locality of this Elim, and the position
is made more uncertain by the fact that we cannot know definitely
that the series of stopping-places put forward by P and perhaps drawn
from a source really rest on the knowledge of a definite route through
the wilderness. Instead they may well be a vague collection of names
of some well known places in the wilderness of Sinai. P had no
definite tradition of the journeying in the wilderness which could be
connected with the stop at the oasis of Elim.
[22abb—26] J first of all brings the Israelites into the ‘wilderness
(of) Shur’ (v. 22ab); this may describe a part of the wilderness of
Sinai lying close to Egypt. The name Shur is connected with a
locality in the wilderness which, according to Gen. 25.18 and I Sam.
15.7 (cf. also I Sam. 27.8), lay ‘opposite’ or ‘before’ (RSV ‘east of’,
‘to’) Egypt (seen from the Asiatic side). In this part of the desert
Israel first had to cross over a long waterless stretch until the water-
hole of Marah was reached. Here, however, the water was undrink-
able. At this point there occurs for the first time in J the narrative
motif which is to occur frequently from now on in the stories set in
the wilderness, the ‘murmuring’ of the people, directed against
Moses, who is made responsible for everything, and against God, on
whose orders Moses has consistently acted and is still acting. This
motif has its roots in the realization of the miserable conditions of
life in the wilderness with its constant privations, above all the
shortage of food and water; at the same time it brings out the fact
that Israel did not follow the way of the Exodus from Egypt by free
choice (cf. 14.11 f.) but followed the guidance of their God with which
they were not completely happy from the very beginning (cf. 5.20 ff.),
so that God’s universal plan of salvation might be carried out even
16.1-36] QUAILS AND MANNA 129
against the will of Israel (cf. Gen. 12.1-3). The ‘murmuring’ of the
people of course always leads through the mediation of Moses to the
gracious aid of Yahweh. So too it happens in the present instance.
Moses is shown a remedy by Yahweh; a ‘tree’, i.e. a piece of desert
vegetation which is available there at that time, when thrown into
the water of the spring, makes the water ‘sweet’ and thus drinkable.
The whole rests upon a local tradition. In their later dwelling-places,
bordering on the wilderness of Sinai, the Israelites knew of a water-
hole whose name ‘Marah’ indicated that the water of the spring
must be ‘bitter’, just as there were similar ‘bitter’ springs in the salty
ground of the wilderness; this one, however, was sweet, because it had
been made sweet at the time of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt. Where
this water-hole of Marah lay we can no longer discover. The
deuteronomistic addition in vv. 25b, 26 is attached only loosely to
what goes before. If v. 25b belongs with v. 26, Yahweh must already
be meant as the subject in v. 25b. The giving of a ‘statute and
ordinance’ is certainly meant to do no more than create a foundation
for the deuteronomistic warning in v. 26. The rather vague observa-
tion that Yahweh ‘proved’ Israel, i.e. put them to the test, is a play
on the place-name Massah, which does not come into this story at
all (cf. on 17.1-7). The actual‘connection between the addition and
the old ‘Marah’ story probably lies in the reference to the sending of
the ‘disease of the Egyptians’ which is threatened as a punishment
for disobedience (for this cf. with another formula Deut. 7.15; 28.
27,60), which was probably associated in some way with the bitter
water. ‘The deuteronomistic addition apparently means that only if
Israel observes the ‘statute and ordinance’, and thus passes the test
which he has imposed, wiil Yahweh help the people in the future
as he has done in Marah, and that he alone can help, as only he is
the ‘healer’ for Israel.

2. QUAILS AND MANNA: 16.1-36

16! They set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the people of
Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai,
on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from
the land of Egypt. 2? And the whole congregation of the people of Israel
murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, % and said to
them, ‘Would that we had died by the hand of the Lorp in the land of
Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you
have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with
hunger.’
130 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

4 Then the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Behold, I will rain bread from heaven
for you; and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day,
[that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law or not.] ° On the
sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as
they gather daily.’ ® So Moses and Aaron said to all the people of Israel,
‘At evening you shall know that it was the Lorp who brought you
out of the land of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you shall see the
glory of the Lorp, because he has heard your murmurings against
the Lorp. For what are we, that you murmur against us?’ [§ And
Moses said, ‘When the Lorp gives you in the evening flesh to eat
and in the morning bread to the full, because the Lorp has heard your
murmurings which you murmur against him—what are we? Your
murmurings are not against us but against the Lorp.’]
g And Moses said to Aaron, ‘Say to the whole congregation of the
people of Israel, ““Come near before the Lorn, for he has heard your
murmurings.”’ 1° And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the
people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the
glory of the Lorp appeared in the cloud. “ And the Lorp said to
Moses, 12 ‘I have heard the murmurings of the people of Israel; say to
them, “‘At twilight you shall eat flesh, and in the morning you shall be
filled with bread; then you shall know that I am the Lorp your God.”’’
13 In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the
morning dew lay round about the camp. 14 And when the dew had
gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine, flake-like thing,
fine as hoarfrost on the ground. When the people of Israel saw it,
they said to one another, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it
was. And Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread which the Lorn has given
you to eat. 1® This is what the Lorp has commanded: “‘Gather of it,
every man of you, as much as he can eat; you shall take an omer apiece,
according to the number of the persons whom each of you has in his
tent.’?’ 17 And the people of Israel did so; they gathered, some more,
some less. 18 But when they measured it with an omer, he that gathered
much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; each
gathered according to what he could eat. 1* And Moses said to them,
‘Let no man leave any of it till the morning.’ ?° But they did not listen
to Moses; some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and
became foul; and Moses was angry with them. 7! Morning by morning
they gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when the sun grew
hot, it melted.
22 On the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers
apiece; and when all the leaders of the congregation came and told
Moses, 7% he said to them, ‘This is what the Lorp has commanded:
“Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy sabbath to the Lorp; bake
what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over
lay by to be kept till the morning.” ’ 24 So they laid it by till the morn-
ing, as Moses bade them; and it did not become foul, and there were
no worms in it. 2° Moses said, ‘Eat it today, for today is a sabbath to the
Lorp; today you will not find it in the field. #6 Six days you shall gather
16.1-36] QUAILS AND MANNA 131
it; but on the seventh day, which is a sabbath, there will be none.’
27 On the seventh day some of the people went out to gather, and they
found none. 7° And the Lorp said to Moses, ‘How long do you refuse
to keep my commandments and my laws? ?°® See! The Lorp has given you
the sabbath, therefore on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days; remain
every man of you in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh
day.’ °° So the people rested on the seventh day.
31 Now the house of Israel called its name manna; it was like coriander
seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey. 32 And Moses
said, ‘This is what the Lorp has commanded: ‘‘Let an omer of it be
kept throughout your generations, that they may see the bread with
which I fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you out of the
land of Egypt.” ’ 33 And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar, and put
an omer of manna in it, and place it before the Lorp, to be kept
throughout your generations.’ °4As the Lorp commanded Moses,
so Aaron placed it before the Testimony, to be kept. *° And the people
of Israel ate the manna forty years, till they came to a habitable land;
they ate the manna, till they came to the border of the land of Canaan.
[8* (An omer is the tenth part of an ephah.)|

The theme of quails and manna appears once more outside the
present chapter, in Num. 11.4 ff. There we are told how the people
had grown tired of the monotonous manna and longed for flesh,
whereupon Yahweh made thé quails come. In Ex. 16 we have both
the quails and the manna at the same time, but the quails are men-
tioned only briefly and the chief interest is in the manna. The
discrepancy between Ex. 16 and Num. 11 may be explained on
literary-critical grounds. In Ex. 16 the language of P predominates,
whereas in Num. 11 there is no indication of P. P thus dealt with
the theme of the feeding of Israel in the wilderness once and for all,
right at the beginning of the story of the journey through the
wilderness—since the departure from the Reed Sea P has previously
only mentioned the stopping-place at Elim, very briefly (15.27). In
so doing P combined all the narrative traditions which he had
received, and simplified the older Pentateuchal material which
first of all only mentioned the manna and then introduced the story
of the quails only at a much later stage. It is clear that the older
material already spoke of the manna at an early stage of the narrative
from the fact that it is also represented in fragments alongside the
predominant P. The lack of literary unity in Ex. 16 is chiefly apparent
from the occurrence of striking repetitions. Verses (28) 29-31 say
once again what has already been mentioned previously; even the
naming of the ‘manna’ (v. 31a) had already been reported (v. 15a).
132 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

On the other side, in vv. 4 f. something is anticipated which is

first reported in vv. 21 f. as something new and surprising. The two
pieces just mentioned (vv. 4 f. and 28-31) lack the linguistic and
stylistic characteristics of P which otherwise appear throughout, and
therefore they would seem to derive from the older traditional
material and should certainly be regarded as fragments from J.
Moreover there are also apparent doublets in v. 35a and 35b which
say the same thing; of these one is to be assigned to P and the other
it;
The stories of the quails and the manna are each related to actual
phenomena which may be observed on the Sinai peninsula even
today. There will be more to be said at Num. 11.4 ff. about how
the quails appear in flocks along the Mediterranean coast of the
Sinai peninsula on their spring and autumn journeys. The ‘manna’
is, at least in the old narrative material, so concretely described (cf.
especially v. 31b and further Num. 11.7 f., but also v. 14b P) that
we get the impression that it was known directly, or at least indirectly,
to the narrator. In fact there is still manna today in the inland
region of the Sinai peninsula, and it is even called mann by the
nomadic inhabitants of this region. It is a sort of droplike formation
on the leaves of the tree or shrub, native to the wilderness, of the
tamarisk, in particular the ‘manna-tamarisk’ (tamarix mannifera)
formed of the secretions produced by the sting of a tree louse. It falls
from the leaves on to the ground from where it can be picked up
after it has grown relatively hard in the cool of the night. As it has a
low melting temperature it dissolves in the heat of the day and so is
best gathered in the early morning. It has a sweet taste and is still
a favourite food of the inhabitants of that particular part of the
barren desert-land.* We cannot overlook the fact that the Old
Testament story of the manna fits in very accurately with what can
now be observed on the Sinai peninsula and what was doubtless also
observable as long ago as in the time of the prehistory of Israel. At
that time Yahweh fed Israel with the manna of Sinai, which was
something new and surprising for the Israelites coming from the
agricultural land of Egypt. One peculiarity was that through a
miraculous rhythm in the provision of the manna Israel was both
shown the keeping of the sabbath rest on each seventh day and was
obliged to keep this divine ordinance; this narrative element already
*Cf. most recently A. Kaiser, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palaestina-Vereins, 53,
1930, pp. 69 ff.
 16.1-36| QUAILS AND MANNA 133
occurs in the old Pentateuchal material and is emphatically and
purposefully repeated by P.
{1-12] The introduction to the story tells of the ‘murmuring’ of
the people because of the lack of food in the wilderness and of the
divine announcement of a remedy. P first of all produces details
about the stopping place and an exact dating (v. 1), as he frequently
does in the ensuing sections. The wilderness of Sin occurs only
in this context (Num. 33.11 f. is literarily dependent on Ex. 16.1;
17.1) and cannot more exactly be defined. P observes that it is to be
found ‘between Elim and Sinai’, but this is no more than a reference
to his list of stopping places. We should probably assume that the
name of the desert area of ‘Sin’ is connected with the name ‘Sinai’,
and that P’s distinction between the ‘wilderness of Sin’ and the
‘wilderness of Sinai’ (19.1 f.) is purely artificial. In ‘allowing one and
a half months to have passed between the Exodus from Egypt and
the arrival at the ‘wilderness of Sin’, P has either reckoned on a
lengthy stay at Elim and lengthy marches between the stopping places
or has assumed further intermediate stopping places which he either
was unable or thought it unnecessary to mention in detail. The story
of the quails and manna which follows has no special reference to
the stopping place mentioned. After the rich oasis of Elim the wilder-
ness of Sin was the first stopping place in which the lack of sustenance
in the desert would have made itself felt. Now there follows, for the
first time in P, the ‘murmuring’ of the people (vv. 2 f.) who rebel
against the leadership of their God. At this stage the people saw their
good life in Egypt in rather too rosy a light. For the slave labour in
Egypt would hardly as a rule have eaten boiled ‘flesh’ by the
‘fleshpots’; nevertheless they had never had such pressing hunger as
now in the wilderness. The P introduction has forced out a corres-
ponding section of the J narrative; for in the J passage wv. 4 f.
report is given of an announcement by Yahweh which was originally
in fact a reply to a complaint by the people. Yahweh promises bread
which is to come as ‘rain’ ‘from heaven’ and which then can be
gathered each day by the people from the ground. Such a coming of
the manna ‘from heaven’ is not expressed in P but occurs in Ps.
78.24 f., where in this context we find ‘bread from heaven’ and
‘angels’ food’; later Paul made an allusion to the manna in I Cor.
10.3 with the expression pneumatikon broma. J’s idea was probably
simpler. ‘Heaven’ in the Old Testament originally means the air
space above the earth, and not yet the special domain of God and of
134 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

divine beings. J has the manna falling upon the earth like rain or
dew. Moreover, in the very first announcement J draws attention to
the double supply of manna in the sixth day (of each week). This is
remarkable, as there can then be no surprise at this provision of
manna at a later date because this particular arrangement had
already been spoken of now (not so P). In wv. 6 ff. P reports in some
detail the answer of God to the murmuring of the people which is
handed on to them, of course at the command of God, by Moses and
Aaron. God promises powerful aid, by which Israel is to recognize
that the Exodus from Egypt is still a work of their God and that his
‘glory’ accompanies them along their way (vv. 6, 7a). In vv. 7 f. we
have some obvious overcrowding. Verse 8 looks to be a secondary
variant to v. 7abb; the incomplete sentence 8a in it is a variant of
7ab, and 7b recurs in another form in 8b. In v. g the conditions of a
future cultic order are anticipated; the future first priest Aaron is to
assemble the community at the command of Moses ‘before Yahweh’,
although there is as yet no place in the Israelite camp where God
is present or appears, but perhaps just a place of assembly, the place
of the future sanctuary. And now Yahweh acts quickly. But the
instructions to Aaron are not carried out, as the ‘glory’ of Yahweh is
already seen in ‘the wilderness’, i.e. somewhere outside the Israelite
camp, appearing in the sign of the cloud as is usual in P (v. 10).
After the congregation has assembled—P must be understood to
mean this, though he does not say it explicitly—and perhaps also
the manifestation of the presence of Yahweh has entered the
camp, Moses, as the mediator between God and people, receives
from the manifestation of the presence of God the announcement of
quails and manna for that very evening and the next morning.
[13-21] The promise of God is fulfilled. Quails come up (from
the horizon) and, obviously in large quantities, ‘cover’ the camp, so
that Israel now has flesh in abundance. No further mention is made
of the quails. There is no indication whether the coming of the
quails was a sole occurrence or whether it was repeated each evening.
The manna, however, is described in much greater detail. It is there
on the next morning and is found after the dispersion of a miraculous
cloud of dew which had covered the wilderness round about the camp
and had concealed the miracle of the divine gift of manna from
human eyes. The Israelites do not know what to make of the ‘fine,
flakelike’ thing which is ‘like hoarfrost on the ground’, which lies
there in great abundance, and by their surprised question ‘What is
 16,1-36] QUAILS AND MANNA 135
it?’ give their name to the phenomenon by using for ‘What?’ the
word man(na), which, while not occurring elsewhere in the Hebrew,
was perhaps used in Canaanite dialects. The divine gift thence-
forward bears the name ‘What?’. This is a popular etymology. We
can no longer give a certain etymological explanation of the word
man, manna with which men from as early as Israelite times (up till
today) have described the phenomenon with which we are concerned.
Moses has to explain to the Israelites what this ‘What?’ is (v. 15b)
and he invites the fathers of families to gather an omer apiece for
themselves and their relatives. The omer, really a small clay vessel,
is a dry measure which occurs only in the present chapter and which
according to the gloss in v. 36 represents the tenth part of an ephah,
i.e. about six-and-a-half pints. Thus an astonishingly large quantity
of manna was collected every day. In the collecting of manna there
was now the remarkable fact that however much or however little
each man might have gathered he had still collected sufficient for
the requirements of his family, as was sometimes found out after-
wards if the amount of manna collected in any kind of container was
measured at home. God always gives, as Israel is meant to learn,
what is requisite for the needs of the moment, the ‘daily bread’, no
less and no more (vv. 17 f.). Nothing is even to be kept for the morrow,
perhaps through worry and anxiety (v. 19). “Tomorrow will take
care of itself’, i.e. God will provide what is needful day by day. A
number of disobedient persons, who still attempted to keep some-
thing over, had to learn on the next morning that their supply had
goné rotten (v. 20). The whole passage certainly makes sense by
itself, but it nevertheless reaches its climax in the story of the following
sabbath, and it is there that the tradition has its roots. The pre-
Priestly story had already connected the gift of the manna with the
ordering of the sabbath rest (vv. 5, 29 f. J), and thus had already
introduced the narrative motif of a definitely regulated allocation of
manna. P further expanded this narrative motif in the way that has
been described.
[22=—36] In connection with the gift of manna there now follows
the ‘revelation’ of the divine requirement of the sabbath rest. The
word ‘sabbath’ here occurs for the first time in the Old Testament.
According to theJ fragment in vv. 29 f., Moses explained the double
quantity of manna on the sixth day, which had already been
announced (v. 5), by saying that Yahweh had given the sabbath rest
to Israel in this way and that they were to remain resting on the
136 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

seventh day (of each week). J does not of course put this forward as
the reason for the sabbath rest, but introduces it as an ordinance
which God wills to be valid for Israel both now and even after they
have left the wilderness. Here we have presumably the oldest Old
Testament passage about the sabbath; and as early as this passage
the sabbath is designated as a day of rest and its name Sabbdt is
connected with the Hebrew verb for ‘rest’ (bt v. 30). This derivation
of the word sabbat probably does not represent the origin of the
word, but it is extraordinarily close to the Hebrew. The deuter-
onomistic gloss v. 28, which rebukes the Israelites in conventional
phrases, supposes that in the original story in J there had earlier
been a remark about the double quantity of manna on the sixth day.
P follows the facts of the J narrative once he has prepared for
the sabbath episode. As in P the quantity provided on each of the
first days had corresponded to the need, the doubling of this quantity
appears all the more striking; it stirs up the ‘leaders of the congrega-
tion’ (for this description cf. Num. 1.16 and pp. 187 f. below on Ex.
22.28) and they obtain from Moses the explanation that they require
(vv. 22-23a). The special divine purpose behind this doubling of the
quantity is subsequently further confirmed by the fact that on the
seventh day the supply of manna kept over from the previous day
did not go bad, even if it had not been prepared in some way, either
by baking or by cooking (vv. 23b, 24), as it had done on the previous
days (v. 20), and that on the seventh day no manna was to be found,
as was discovered by those who in spite of Moses’ warning had gone
out either through unbelief or through curiosity to collect manna
(vv. 25-27). Thus even for P it was at that time that God made
known to the Israelites his requirements for the sabbath. By
‘resting’ on the seventh day after the creation (here too we have the
verb Sbt mentioned above) and at the same time ‘blessing’ and
‘hallowing’ it (Gen. 2.2-3 P) God had ‘completed’ this his ‘work’ of
creation by ‘rest’, and had given to his creation at the same time the
ordinance that each six days of ‘work’ are to be ‘completed’ by a
seventh day of rest;* but at this time this ordinance of creation had
not yet been made known to men—at any rate there is no indication
of this. It was only with the giving of the manna—as P reports on
the basis of the old tradition—that the Israelites learnt that now and
on every future seventh day they were to observe the ‘holy sabbath to
Yahweh’ (v. 23). Finally, P has one sample of the wonderful manna
*See von Rad, Genesis, pp. 59 ff.
17.1-7] WATER FROM THE ROCK 137
preserved as a tangible sign of the feeding of Israel in the wilderness
for all posterity; P does not make the obvious remark that this
particular day’s ration of an omer of the manna, preserved at the
command of God, did not ever rot away. The jar with this manna
was placed ‘before Yahweh’ (v. 33) or ‘before the Testimony’ (v. 34);
here too the future ordering of the cult is anticipated. Such an
ordering was certainly not in existence at the time, for it was only
later that there was to be a local place where God manifested himself
and a place ‘of the testimony’ (‘the law’) consisting in the holy ark
and the two tables. Nevertheless we are not to assume that P
originally had the story of the quails and the manna only after the
account of Sinai; for the rather vague formulation ‘before Yahweh’
(v. 33 and as early as v. 9) shows that P could not yet name here the
concrete sanctuary which is rather thought of as in the future. We
may ask whether the preservation of the manna is a pure fabrication
or whether perhaps in the post-exilic temple which P had in mind a
‘jar’ with manna was in fact displayed as a remembrance of Israel’s
journey through the wilderness. In the conclusion of both sources it
is expressely said that the manna remained the food of Israel during
the whole period of the wanderings in the desert (v. 35). On the
‘forty years’, which probably belong to the P variant, cf. Num.
14.33-34 P. Josh. 5.12 refers to v. 35b.

3. WATER FROM THE ROCK: 17.1-7

17! All the congregation of the people of Israel moved on from the
wilderness of Sin by stages, according to the commandment of the
Lorp, and camped at Rephidim; but there was no water for the people
to drink. * Therefore the people found fault with Moses, and said, ‘Give us
water to drink.’ And Moses said to them, ‘Why do you find fault with me?
[Why do you put the Lorn to the proof?|’ * But the people thirsted there for
water, and the people murmured against Moses, and said, ‘Why did you bring
us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?’
4,So Moses cried to the Lorp, ‘What shall I do with this people? They are
almost ready to stone me.’ ® And the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Pass on before
the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel; and take in your hand
the rod with which you struck the Nile, and go. ® Behold, I will stand before
you there on the rock at Horeb; and you shall strike the rock, and water shall
come out of it, that the people may drink.’ And Moses did so, in the sight of the
elders of Israel. 7 And he called the name of the place [Massah and] Meribah,
because of the faultfinding of the children of Israel, [and because they put the
Lorp to the proof by] saying, ‘Is the LoRD among us or not?”
138 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

The nucleus of this short piece is formed by the tradition of a

spring, of a similar type to the story of Marah in 15.22abb-25a.
Despite its brevity it is clearly by no means a literary unity. At the
beginning [1aba] there is a note from P about a stopping-place on
the Israelites’ route from the ‘wilderness of Sin’ to Rephidim; the
next mention of a stopping place in P, 19.1—2a, is directly connected
with this. We have no certain information about the location of this
place Rephidim, which is elsewhere attested presumably as a gloss in
v. 8 and in the information given at Num. 33.14 f. which has a literary
dependence on the present passage. As the derivation of the list of
stopping-places in P is completely obscure, and as we cannot with
surety assume an internal connection within it, the argument that
according to 19.1-2a P seems to have located Rephidim in the
neighbourhood of Sinai is not conclusive, quite apart from the fact
that we can give no decisive answer to the question of the location of
Sinai itself. Against the conjecture made by A. Musil,* that
Rephidim should be identified with the mountain ridge now called
er-rafid on the east coast of the gulf of el-‘agaba and thus already on
the near side of the traditional Sinai peninsula, a supposition which
would suggest some connection with the Sinai tradition, no decisive
objection can be made; but of course there is as little positive evidence
to recommend it. The detail in P about the stopping-place originally
had nothing to do with the following story. True, this story is
apparently based on a local tradition, but there are no traces of a P
narrative in it and thus it has been attached only at a later stage to
the detail of the stopping-place in P. This has happened because it is
the last such detail about a stopping-place before the Sinai narrative
begins, and all the old Pentateuchal material which stood before the
Sinai narrative had to be brought in after it.
[1bb-7] The story of the water springing out of the ‘rock’ in
v. 1bb—7 is again not in itselfa unity. This is principally demonstrated
by the fact that there are clear doublets in v. 1bJ—2 and v. 3; v. 3 isan
obvious new beginning connected with geographical details which
had come immediately before (‘there’) and which must have
described a definite place at which the Israelites arrived. These
geographical details, like the similar ones which should precede
v. 1bb-2, have been crowded out by the description of the stopping-
place which has been prefixed by P. The result is that we now have
the old story in its two versions without any details of its location.
* The Northern Hegaz, 1926, p. 269.
17.1-7]| WATER FROM THE ROCK 139
Apart from this we have no clear criteria for distributing the trans-
mitted material between the two versions which can be detected in
v. 1bb-2 and v. 3. All that is clear is that v. 1bb-2 and v. 7 belong
together because of the catchword ‘find fault’ (rib). It is plausible to
suppose that in the combination of two versions E once again appears
alongside J, but there are no positive indications of this. For we shall
have to assign to J the verse in which the divine name ‘Yahweh’
appears, so that only v. 3 remains as quite certainly Elohistic; this
would have been incorporated into the combined narrative because
in it the ‘finding fault’ with Moses had been framed in definite words.
It is further striking that in v. 7 the waterhole receives a double name
“Massah and Meribah’. This is hardly original. As the catchword
‘find fault with’ (rib) stands in the foreground of v. 2, the story was
certainly originally directed towards the name ‘Meribah’. Meribah and
Massah were two different places, each with its special local tradition
from the time of the wandering in the wilderness. In contrast to
Meribah, Massah does not occur elsewhere in the Pentateuchal narra-
tive material, but it does (alone, and without Meribah) in the Deuter-
onomic literature (Deut. 6.16; 9.22). Now as Meribah and Massah
are named alongside each other in poetic parallelism in Ps. 95.8 and
Deut. 33.8 without being identified the one with the other, a later
hand inserted the name Massah into the old story of Meribah in
Ex. 17 and made an allusion to this name Massah in v. 2 and v. 7
with the catchword ‘put to the proof’ (nzssah). In the old basic
material of the story the Israelites came in their wanderings in the
desert to a place where once again they did not find the water which
they so needed. Thereupon followed the usual faultfinding, the
‘murmuring’ against Moses (vv. 1bd, 2aba, 3). Inv. 3 the juxtaposition
of ‘I’ and ‘we’ is striking;* presumably the ‘we’ arose under the
influence of v. 2 and originally the first person singular was consis-
tently used in v. 3. When Moses cries for help (v. 4), Yahweh promises
his ready help. At the very place there was a ‘rock’. Yahweh will
stand on this rock, though it is not said whether he will make himself
invisible or in some way visible in this place. Moses is now to go to
this rock with the rod which had played a part in the plague narrative
at the striking of the Nile (7. 17, 20ab J), and to take with him some
of the elders as witnesses; it is thus supposed that the rest of the
*[This distinction is not brought out in the RSV translation; the speech of the
people in the Hebrew reads ‘Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill me and
my children and my cattle . . .’ Tr.]
140 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

people are not to join in seeing the miracle (this is also implied in
the first sentence in v. 5). Then when Moses strikes the rock with his
rod Yahweh will make water come out from it. And thus it happens.
Thereupon Moses names the place Meribah (‘place of faultfinding’)
because there Israel had ‘found fault’ with him (v. 7). The story of
Meribah is told once again in Num. 20.1-13. It is connected with a
definite place in the wilderness which was doubtless still known to the
Israelites at a later date. It was the place where there was a spring
with the name Meribah; this name originates from the time when
nomadic shepherds of the wilderness used to assemble at the spring
of Meribah and there determine their ‘disputes at law’. The spring of
Meribah gushed from a rock in a way which so surprised those who
went there that they could only think that at one time the rock had
been made to produce water in a miraculous way. According to v. 6
this water-producing rock of Meribah would have been situated ‘at
Horeb’. But the detail ‘at Horeb’ is here, as in 3.1, so lame (cf. above
pp. 31 f.) that we must regard it as a subsequent addition, especially
as it also clashes so much with the preceding word ‘there’. In fact the
composite name ‘Meribah-Kadesh’ witnessed in Num. 27.14;
Deut. 32.51; Ezek. 47.19; 48.28 shows that the water-hole Meribah is
to be sought in the neighbourhood of the Kadesh(-Barnea) region,
i.e. in the area of springs which lay about fifty miles south-west of
Beersheba in the wilderness of Sinai, which has preserved its old
compound name Kadesh(-Barnea) right up to the present day in
the name of the spring ‘én gedés which flows there. All historical
probability suggests that in the time before the conquest of agri-
cultural Palestine the Israelites had stayed in this neighbourhood,
characterized by a number of strongly-flowing springs which
provided the necessary water both for a large number of men and for
their cattle. Within this neighbourhood it is hardly possible to give a
more exact location to the spring of Meribah.

4. THE VICTORY OVER THE AMALEKITES: 17.8-16

8 Then came Amalek and fought with Israel [at Rephidim]. ® And Moses
said to Foshua, ‘Choose for us men, and go out, fight with Amalek ; tomorrow
I will stand on the top of the hill [with the rod of God in my hand].’ 1° So
Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Amalek ; and Moses, Aaron,
and Hur went up to the top of the hill. 1 Whenever Moses held up his hand,
Israel prevailed; and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. 12 But
Moses’ hands grew weary; so they took a stone and put it under him, and he
17.8-16] THE VICTORY OVER THE AMALEKITES 141
Sat upon it, and Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the
other on the other side; so his hands were steady until the going down of the
Sun. ieAnd Joshua mowed down Amalek and his people with the edge of the
sword.
14 And the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Write this as a memorial in a book and
recite tt in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of
Amalek from under heaven.’ © And Moses built an altar and called the name
of tt, The Lorp is my banner, 18 saying, ‘A hand upon the banner of the
Lorp/ The Lorp will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.’

This piece belongs to the old narrative material and shows no

trace of being composed of different narrative strands. It may derive
from J. A battle between Israel and the Amalekites in the wilderness
forms the background of the narrative which is apparently aimed at
the altar built and named by Moses. The Amalekites were a con-
federacy of nomad tribes in the wilderness of Sinai. In the wilderness
it was easy to come into contact with parts of this tribal confederacy,
especially at the scanty water holes and cattle pasturages. Even after
they had settled in the agricultural land of Palestine the Israelites
still had fierce encounters with the inhabitants of the neighbouring
wilderness, who threatened the settled land and its inhabitants. We
finally hear of them in thé account of Saul’s victory over the
Amalekites (I Sam. 15) and in the reports from the time when David
was leader of a band of mercenaries in Ziklag (I Sam. 27.8; 30.1 ff.).
[8-13] According to the present narrative Israel was one day
attacked by the Amalekites (v. 8). The description of the place ‘at
Rephidim’ is very probably taken from v. 1abd P. It looks out of place
at the end of the verse; had the story of the battle against the
Amalekites in its original form had some place-name to describe
the scene of the action, we should surely have had an introductory
remark that Israel was encamped at such and such a place. Joshua
appears quite abruptly and without any introduction in v. g. He also
occurs from time to time elsewhere in the old Pentateuchal narrative
material as a companion of Moses (Ex. 24.13; 32.17; 33.11; Num.
11.28), always appearing most unexpectedly. Only in the present
story does he appear as leader of the Israelite battle-force in the time
of Moses. He is supposed to be a well-known figure. Of course the
Joshua of the tradition preserved in the Book of Joshua is meant;
it is inferred from this tradition that he was already among the
Israelites in Moses’ time. On the instructions of Moses, who is the
supreme commander, he engages battle with the attacking Amalekites
142 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

and eventually defeats them (v. 13). The decisive result is of course
brought about not by him but through the action of Moses, who on
the day of the battle (the ‘tomorrow’ in v. 9 shows that the prepara-
tions had been made on the day before) ascends ‘the hill’ and there
effects Israel’s victory by holding up his hands. The mention of ‘the
hill’ gives us to understand that the narrative envisages a quite
definite locality which was still known when the story was formulated.
From this hill it was possible to look right over the field of battle. The
observation about the ‘rod of God’ at the end of v. 9 is certainly an
addition, as this rod has no part at all in what follows. Moses lets
Aaron and Hur accompany him up the hill. These two appear as
abruptly as did Joshua earlier. In the J narrative Aaron has oc-
curred up till now only in secondary passages, while Hur has not
been mentioned at all. Aaron and Hur appear once again along-
side each other in 24.14, immediately after Joshua has been named
as servant of Moses (v. 13), and moreover apparently as pro-
minent Israelites. This role, which in the tradition as we now have
it is very much diminished, was certainly once far clearer in an
older tradition which is no longer known to us. On the hill, Moses by
raising his hands now exerts an influence on the battle which allows
the Israelites to prevail; without this the Amalekites of themselves
would have proved superior, as is clear from the fact that as soon as
Moses lets his hands fall the Amalekites, who are perhaps thought of
as being numerically very strong, begin to prevail (v. 11). In the
story the lifting up of the hands appears to have a strikingly im-
personal magical effect. Yahweh is not mentioned at all in the whole
section vv. 8-13, not even as having given Moses the instructions for
his action. A mysterious power seems to come from Moses which is
focussed in the direction of the Israelite force, visible from the hill
and thus reachable in a straight line by the beam of power. We may
compare Joshua stretching out the spear against the city of Ai which
he meant to sack in Josh. 8.18, 26. There is no indication that the
raising of the hands is to be understood as a gesture of prayer (the
customary expression for this in the Old Testament is to ‘spread out’
the hands) though the action of Moses was perhaps quite early,
albeit only secondarily, understood in this way. In spite of the
influence emanating from Moses, the battle against the Amalekites
was so hard that it lasted a whole day before the Amalekites were
defeated; because of this Moses had to have his raised hands sup-
ported by Aaron and Hur (v. 12). In doing this he sits upon a stone,
 17.8-16] THE VICTORY OVER THE AMALEKITES 143
and this (stool-like) stone is presumably significant for the story in
so far as it was the only permanent visible sign of the war against the
Amalekites and could be pointed out as such on ‘the hill’ even at a
later date. [14-16] Further memorials of the war against the
Amalekites are mentioned also in the two closing notes, v. 14 and
vy. 15 f., both of which speak of a special enmity between Yahweh
and the Amalekites. These notes thus derive from a time and a
sphere of activity in which the Amalekites appear as particularly evil
and particularly dangerous opponents of the people of Yahweh (cf.
also Deut. 25.17-19). Such a situation would suit the Israelites
living on the southern border of the hill country west of Jordan in
the neighbourhood of the wilderness of Sinai and, from what we
know of their history, in the early period up to the time of Saul and
David. According to v. 14 Moses is to write a report of the victory
over the Amalekites (one of the rare occasions on which it is said that
Moses is to write an individual piece of the Pentateuchal tradition)
and is further to impress the story upon Joshua by talking to him
(clearly oral tradition) so that the hostility of the Amalekites, once so
dangerous, may still be remembered even when Yahweh, as is here
expected, shall one day have destroyed them completely. The second
note in vv. 15 f. stands only in’a loose connection with what has gone
before. Moses is to erect an altar, still at the place of the victory over
the Amalekites. This altar was surely still known at a later date. It
is quite feasible that this remark may refer to the stone in v. 12, in
which case we may suppose that there are here preserved two
different explanations of this stone, connected with the memory of
the victory over the Amalekites, firstly as the seat of Moses during
the slaughter and secondly as the altar erected by Moses after the
slaughter. But this is not certain and it may also be a case of two
different local occurrences. The question is hard to answer, as the
name which Moses gave to the altar he erected is not fully preserved.
This name is in fact clearly connected with the saying which Moses
utters at the naming of the altar (v. 16). In v. 15 the name runs
yahweh nissi (“Yahweh is my banner’) and the saying in v. 16 says that
one is to lay his hand on késyah; this is a very obscure expression
which even the old translations have understood to mean kisséyah—
‘the throne of Yahweh’. Now it is at least clear that originally the
‘banner of Yahweh’ or the ‘throne of Yahweh’ were mentioned in
each case (in this case the original text of v. 15 must be assumed to
have been Yahweh kis’ i—‘Yahweh is my throne’). Should the latter
144 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

be right, then the equation of the altar, whose name contains the
word ‘throne’, with the stone seat of Moses in v. 12 would be very
probable. But what argues against this possibility is simply the state
of the text; for even in v. 16 the word ‘throne’ does not stand in the
text at all, but must be provided by some emendation, albeit slight;
and in face of this the alteration of the present késyah into a pre-
sumably original nés yah is hardly more extensive, especially as the
transmitted text in v. 15 can then remain completely unaltered.
There is further the point that the expression ‘Yahweh is my throne’
is very difficult and hardly explicable as the name of the altar, and
the same may be said of the saying ‘A hand upon the throne of
Yahweh’. The name of the altar was then almost certainly “Yahweh
is my banner’.* Here we must remember that bands of warriors used
to assemble around banners and standards which bore pictures or
symbols of their gods. There were certainly no images of God in Israel
but there may have been some signs of the divine presence. The
saying ‘Yahweh is my banner’ expresses the fact that Israel (for
Israel is surely here at least originally the ‘I’ of the saying) assembles
for warlike action in the name of Yahweh, and the altar with this
name may in fact have been a point of assembly in the Amalekite
wars. There is also evidence elsewhere of an altar being given its
own particular name (cf. Gen. 33.20; Judg. 6.24). The saying in
v. 16 which requires Israel to assemble at the ‘banner of Yahweh’
because Amalek is the enemy of Yahweh will have been a rallying
cry with which it was customary to give a summons to battle against
the Amalekites.

5. THE MEETING WITH THE PRIEST OF MIDIAN;

18,1-27

18 1[Fethro,| the priest of Midian, Moses’ father-in-law, heard of all

that God had done for Moses and for Israel his people, [how the Lorp had
brought Israel out of Egypt.| * Now [Fethro,] Moses’ father-in-law, had taken
Aipporah, Moses’ wife, [after he had sent her away| 3 and her two sons,
of whom the name of the one was Gershom [( for he said, ‘I have been a so-
Journer in a foreign land’)], *and the name of the other, Eliezer [(for he said,
‘The God of my father was my help, and delivered me from the sword of
Pharaoh’). ® And [Fethro,| Moses’ father-in-law, came with his sons and

*[Thus the RSV conjecture is quite plausible. Tr.]

18.1-27] THE MEETING WITH THE PRIEST OF MIDIAN 145
his wife to Moses in the wilderness where he was encamped at the mountain
of God. ® And when one told Moses, ‘Lo, your father-in-law [Jethro] is
coming to you with your wife and her two sons with her, 7 Moses went out
to meet his father-in-law, and did obeisance and kissed him; and they asked
each other of their welfare, and went into the tent. ® Then Moses told his
Sather-in-law [all that the Lorp had done to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians
Sor Israel’s sake,| all the hardship that had come upon them in the way, [and
how the Lorp had delivered them. ® And Fethro rejoiced for all the good which
the Lorp had done to Israel, in that he had delivered them out of the hand of
the Egyptians.
10 And Fethro said, ‘Blessed be the Lorp, who has delivered you out
of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh.| ™ Now I know
that the Lorp is greater than all gods, because he delivered the people from
under the hand of the Egyptians, when they dealt arrogantly with them.’ 12 And
[Fethro,| Moses’ father-in-law, offered a burnt offering and sacrifices to God;
and Aaron came with all the elders of Israel, to eat bread with Moses’ father-
in-law before God.
13 On the morrow Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood about
Moses from morning till evening. 14 When Moses’ father-in-law saw all
that he was doing for the people, he said, ‘What is this that you are doing
Sor the people? Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand about you from
morning till evening? 1° And Moses said to his father-in-law, ‘Because
the people come to me to inquire of God; 18 when they have a dispute, they come
to me and I decide between a man and his neighbour, and I make them know
the statutes of God and his decisions.’ 17 Moses’ father-in-law said to him,
‘What you are doing is not good. 18 You and the people with you will wear
yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you; you are not able to perform
it alone. 1° Listen now to my voice; I will give you counsel, and God be with
you! You shall represent the people before God, and bring their cases to God;
20 and you shall teach them the statutes and the decisions, and make them know
the way in which they must walk and what they must do. 21 Moreover choose
able men from all the people, such as fear God, men who are trustworthy and
who hate a bribe; and place such men over the people as rulers of thousands, of
hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. ®® And let them judge the people at all times;
every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide
themselves ; so it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you.
23 If you do this, and God so commands you, then you will be able to endure,
and all this people also will go to their place in peace.’
24 So Moses gave heed to the voice of his father-in-law and did all that
he had said. 2° Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads
over the people, rulers of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. ®® And
they judged the people at all times; hard cases they brought to Moses, but any
small matter they decided themselves. 2” Then Moses let his father-in-law
depart, and he went his way to his own country.

The occasion of this chapter is the meeting of Moses with his

father-in-law in the wilderness. Within the framework of this meeting
 146 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

there are two main events, firstly a cultic act with sacrifice and
sacrificial meal (vv. 1-12) and secondly a new arrangement for the
administration of justice (vv. 13-27). These two proceedings, which
the narrative divides between two consecutive days (v. 13) of course
have an extremely close connection in fact in so far as the administra-
tion of justice—at least in certain cases—is a sacral act and takes
place at some holy spot. The chapter is not a complete literary unity.
True, the second part (vv. 13-27) gives us no cause to suppose any
literary disunity but offers a smooth, self-contained narrative se-
quence; the first part (vv. 1-12) however displays striking discrepan-
cies and repetitions. The basis of this first part is in details and
language so clearly connected with the second part that we must
derive this basis along with the second part from one and the same
source. As the word ‘God’ (and not the divine name Yahweh) is used
in particularly important places (especially v. 12) in the first part,
and exclusively throughout the second part, the chapter is in
essentials to be derived from E. The question now is only whether
another source—which could only be J—is recognizable in the
repetitions of the first part, especially where the divine name Yahweh
appears (vv. 1b, 8 end, g-11). In fact the repetitions which have
been indicated appear to be so little elements of a continuous narra-
tive, even one which is only partially recognizable, that we do better
to regard them just as secondary ‘J’ expansions of the E material.
Thus we have here the occasion, rare in the middle of the Pentateuch,
of an E passage still preserved complete which was incorporated into
the combined Pentateuch narrative as special material from E
because it apparently had no counterpart in the other sources.
In the first part the constant periphrastic description of Moses’
interlocutor is remarkable. Throughout the second part we hear
quite simply of his ‘father-in-law’; this is also the case in the first part
in vv. 7 f., and where the proper name Jethro appears here it is still
explicitly added that he is the father-in-law of Moses (the same
thing happens as early as 3.1; 4.18). The proper name Jethro only
appears all by itself in vv. 9 and 10, where the appearance of the
divine name Yahweh by itself suggests that these are secondary
expansions. This position leads us to suppose that the proper name
Jethro was first added subsequently, and that probably the father-in-
law of Moses was still unnamed in the basic material of E. A traditio-
historical investigation in any case reveals that originally no name
was known for the father-in-law of Moses and that later different
18.1-27] THE MEETING WITH THE PRIEST OF MIDIAN_ 147
names arose for him (cf. above p. 37 on 2.18; 3.1). On the other
hand, the observation that it was the priest of Midian whom Moses
had for a father-in-law, made only once in the introduction, is
certainly original. True, it had already been mentioned in 2.16 J
(cf. also 3.1) and had presumably been narrated previously in E as
well, but it was important expressly to recall this fact in this chapter,
as family concerns are discussed only here at the beginning; the main
section deals with sacral matters, for which it is less important that
the man is related to Moses than that he is a priest of Midian. The
tradition definitely derives from the fact of a meeting at a definite
place in the wilderness between Israel and the priest of Midian; in
comparison with this the theme of Moses’ kinship is secondary. The
local associations belong to the original material. First of all in v. 5
there is a somewhat vague description of a camping place of Israel
‘in the wilderness’; this is very indefinite and is perhaps meant to
characterize Israel’s situation rather than to indicate a concrete
locality; it must have been said somewhere previously where Israel
was then ‘encamped’. This is not the case in the text as we have it
now, and, even if we ignore the fact that the preceding narratives
derive from other sources, we have to take into consideration the
universal principle that each of the ‘wilderness’ stories is a self-
contained entity, and that therefore the local associations of these
narratives may not be transferred from one to another. The conse-
quence of this is that the mention of the ‘mountain of God’ at the end
of v. 5, which appears rather lame after the remark about the
camping place of Israel ‘in the wilderness’, and thus seems to be
secondary, does not in fact clash with this remark but represents the
original details about the location which belong to the present
tradition. The tradition presumes that this ‘mountain of God’ ‘in the
wilderness’ is known, so that there is no need to define the place
more accurately. There is now of course the problem of where we are
to locate this ‘mountain of God’. It would seem most obvious to
think of the holy mountain of the Sinai tradition and perhaps this
was already the meaning of E. For the portion of E which is still
preserved has the account of the great theophany immediately after
the present story without giving us any new geographical details
(19.2b, 3a; cf. also pp. 31 f. above on 3.1 ff. E). But this does not of
course give a conclusive answer to the question whether the pre-
literary tradition had already meant by the ‘mountain of God’ the
same mountain which stands at the centre of the special Sinai
148 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

tradition. We can hardly give a full explanation of this question.

Probability argues that in the end it is the same mountain, though at
the same time it remains striking that a nameless ‘mountain of God’
was mentioned outside the Sinai tradition. Now in any case in Ex. 18
this ‘mountain of God’ does not play the role of the scene of a theo-
phany, but is a place where there was a meeting between Israel and
the ‘priest of Midian’. Even in this role the ‘mountain of God’ was a
holy mountain, as is shown not only by its name but also by the fact
that sacrifices were offered upon it, whether at its foot or at its sum-
mit. The tradition of the meeting at the ‘mountain of God’ probably
presupposes that such meetings—at least from time to time—
regularly took place in the form of common participation in certain
cultic acts. On the ‘mountain of God’, wherever it is to be located,
Israelites and Midianites (for whose dwelling-places and pastures see
above p. 31) from time to time assembled. Thus the ‘mountain of
God’ ‘in the wilderness’ with its holy place was the goal of a pil-
grimage and was approached from different sides. The tradition of
the encounter between Israel and the priest of Midian during the
journey through the wilderness, and of Moses’ kinship with the
priest, has its root in these Israelite-Midianite meetings on the
‘mountain of God’. The role of the priest of Midian indicates that the
holy place on the ‘mountain of God’ was a proper Midianite sanc-
tuary; it is the priest of Midian who according to v. 12 offers sacrifice.
[1-12] The narrative in Ex. 18 is connected with the story of the
marriage of Moses to the daughter of the priest of Midian, the story
in the E version which is now no longer extant, having been forced
out by the J version in 2.16—22; it is however presupposed in 4.18,
20b E. On hearing of the mighty acts of God (v. 1) the father-in-law
of Moses seeks Israel out in the wilderness (v. 1b is a badly attached
gloss which is striking because of the mere fact of the occurrence of
the divine name Yahweh); on this occasion he brings to Moses his
wife and his two sons. According to E they had stayed with the
priest when Moses had returned to Egypt (cf. above p. 47 on 4.18,
20b.); according to J Moses had at that time taken them with him
(4.20a). In view of this remark by J, v. 2b speaks of the ‘sending
away of the wife, as though Moses had sent his wife and two sons
back home again from Egypt. This is certainly just a redactional
addition to smooth out the differences between J and E. According
to E Moses had at that time two sons, whereas J knew only of one
son (2.22). In vv. 3 f. the names of the two sons are given and ex-
18.1-27] THE MEETING WITH THE PRIEST OF MIDIAN 149
plained very wordily. The verbal correspondence with 2.22b J is
very striking in the explanation of the first name, so that we can ask
whether it was not taken over from J and then a corresponding
explanation of the second name was subsequently added. Moses
greets his father-in-law on his arrival with all possible courtesy
(vv. 6 f.). After this domestic introduction there follows the real
substance of the tradition. Moses narrates to the Midianite priest the
mighty acts which Yahweh has done for Israel, whereupon the
priest makes his recognition of Yahweh. Now this section (vv. 8-11)
is obviously overfull, as can be seen from the frequent repetition of
the same quite general expressions; and there is above all the
question whether the original basis should not be held to be merely
a part of v. 8 and perhaps v. 11, as according to v. 1 the father-in-law
of Moses had already ‘heard of all that God had done’. But in v. 8 the
remark about the ‘hardship’ experienced on the way should be
regarded as original, because of its unusual phraseology, especially
as the anarthrous juxtaposition of two objects in this clause indicates
that the first of these objects is an addition. On wv. g f. cf. above
p. 146. It is hard to assess v. 11, because the conclusion has been lost.
It is possible that in Moses’ father-in-law’s solemn confession the
divine name Yahweh, which‘is not unknown even in E (cf. 3.13-15),
could have been mentioned once again in the Elohistic narrative,
especially as the scene is set on the ‘mountain of God’, and thus at
the place of the revelation of the divine name. With respect to the
content of this confession the recognition of a ‘polytheistic-
comparative’ exaltation of Yahweh over ‘all gods’ such as still
occurs occasionally in traditional language, especially in the Psalms,*
is here put in the mouth of a Midianite whom the divine acts have
led to ‘enlightenment’. The priest of Midian thereupon prepares a
sacrificial feast, which forms the starting point for the whole of the
story in the tradition, in which ‘Aaron with all the elders of Israel’
take part as representatives of Israel. It is not said what role Aaron is
thought to play. The special mention of him must stem from special
Aaron traditions which were once current but have no longer been
preserved (cf. also above pp. 122 f.). At the communal sacrificial meal
‘before God’, i.e. at the holy place, Moses is of course in the present
context thought of as being there; it is, however, striking that he is
not explicitly mentioned, as it seems now as though we had a cultic
meeting only between the priest of Midian on the one side and Aaron
*Cf. L. Kohler, Old Testament Theology, ET 1957, pp. 36 f.
I50 THE BEGINNING OF ISRAEL’S LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

and the elders of Israel on the other, whereas the kinship between
Moses and the priest was in fact the reason for this meeting.
[13-27] The new ordering of the administration of justice which is
derived from a practical, matter-of-fact counsel by the father-in-law
of Moses is certainly meant by this time to be of permanent validity
for Israel; indeed it was probably the practice in Israel at one time.
It rests on a division between sacral and ‘civic’ justice, viz. on a
separation of ‘civic’ justice from the sacral sphere. The narrative will
certainly be right in supposing that this division was at one time a
novelty. To sacral justice, and thus in the present instance to Moses,
is reserved ‘converse with God’ (v. 19) i.e. the proclamation of
divine statutes and decisions, the publishing of directives for the
right ‘way’ (vv. 16, 20) and the ‘inquiring of God’ (vv. 15,19) which
was provided for especially in the judging of ‘hard cases’ (v. 26; of
this cf. for example 22.7-10). All the rest is to be handed over to
trustworthy men who are to be appointed as the rulers of thousands,
of hundreds, of fifties and of tens. The division of the whole which is
thus envisaged certainly does not derive from any judicial ideas, but
from the organization of the levy. Thus the subordinate commanders
of the host will by this have ‘civic’ justice delegated to them. This
points to a time in which there was an organized Israelite levy.
Moreover, the formulation at the end of v. 23 seems to presuppose
that Israel is firmly settled. In that case we must ask who played at a
later date the part here envisaged for Moses. We might think of the
‘Judges of Israel’ (cf. Judg. 10.1-5; 12.7-15). This would bring us
to soon after the settlement. In addition, this quite remarkable
derivation of the ordering of Israelite justice from the counsel of a
priest of Midian suggests that the present tradition may have arisen
at a very early period, in which there were probably still friendly and
neighbourly relations between the southern Israelite tribes and the
Midianites.
 IV
THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON
SINAI & THE FIRST DIVINE ORDINANCES

19.1 — 40.38

1. THE THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH THE

DECALOGUE 19.1-20.21

1g' On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone forth
out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of
Sinai. 2 And when they set out from Rephidim and came into the
wilderness of Sinai, they encamped in the wilderness; and there Israel
encamped before the mountain. * And Moses went up to God, and the Lorp
called him out of the mountain, saying, ‘Thus you shall say to the house of
Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: * You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,
and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. ® Now there-
fore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own
possession among all peoples; for all the earth 1s mine, ° and you shall be to me
a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall
speak to the children of Israel.’
7 So Moses came and called the elders of the people, and set before them
all these words which the Lord had commanded him. ® And all the people
answered together and said, ‘All that the Lorv has spoken we will do.’ And
Moses reported the words of the people to the Lorv. ® And the Lorp said to
Moses, ‘Lo, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when
I speak with you, and may also believe you for ever.’
[Then Moses told the words of the people to the Lorp.] 1° And the Lorp
said to Moses, ‘Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow,
and let them wash their garments, 4 and be ready by the third day; [for on
the third day the Lorp will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all
the people.| 12 And you shall set bounds for the people round about, saying,
“Take heed that you do not go up into the mountain or touch the border of it ;
whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death; 1% no hand shall touch him,
but he shall be stoned or shot; whether beast or man, he shall not live.’? When
the trumpet sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.’ \4 So
151
152 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

Moses went down from the mountain to the people, and consecrated the people ;
and they washed their garments. © And he said to the people, ‘Be ready by
the third day; do not go near a woman.’ ;
16 On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings,
and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all
the people who were in the camp trembled. 17 Then Moses brought the people
out of the camp to meet God ; and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain.
18 And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD descended upon
it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole
mountain quaked greatly. 18 And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and
louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. ®° And the LORD came
down upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain; and the Lorp called
Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. *+ And the LorpD said
to Moses, ‘Go down and warn the people, lest they break through to the Lorp
to gaze and many of them perish. ?? And also let the priests who come near to
the Lorp consecrate themselves, lest the Lorp break out upon them.’ *® And
Moses said to the Lorp, ‘The people cannot come up to Mount Sinai; for thou
thyself didst charge us, saying, “‘Set bounds about the mountain, and con-
secrate it.”’ 24 And the Lorp said to him, ‘Go down, and come up bringing
Aaron with you; but do not let the priests and the people break through to come
up to the Lorp, lest he break out against them. *° So Moses went down
to the people and told them.

20 1 And God spoke all these words, saying,

2 ‘I am the Lorp your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out
of the house of bondage.
3 ‘You shall have no other gods before me.
4 ‘You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything
that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water
under the earth; ® you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the
Lorp your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, ® but
showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my com-
mandments.
7 ‘You shall not take the name of the LorD your God in vain; for the
Lorn will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
8 ‘Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. ° Six days you shall labour,
and do all your work; 1° but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LorD your
God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your
manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within
your gates; 4 for in six days the LoRD made heaven and earth, the sea, and
all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the
sabbath day and hallowed it.

12 ‘Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in
the land which the LorD your God gives you.
13 ‘You shall not kill.
14 ‘You shall not commit adultery.
19.1-20.21] THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH DECALOGUE 153

15 ‘You shall not steal.

16 ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
17 ‘You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your
neighbour’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass,
or anything that is your neighbour’s.’
18 Now when all the people perceived the thunderings and the lightnings
and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid
and trembled; and they stood afar off, 1° and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us,
and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.’ 2° And Moses
said to the people, “Do not fear; for God has come to prove you, and that the
Sear of him may be before your eyes, that_you may not sin.’
21 And the people stood afar off, while Moses drew near to the thick cloud
where God was.

The account of the theophany on Sinai, which belongs to the

basic stratum of the special history of Israel, is divided into a number
of sub-sections. Remarks about the arrival of the Israelites at
Sinai (19.1 f.) are followed first by a general divine address about the
purpose of God, delivered to Israel by Moses, and then by an answer
from the people (19.3-9). Moses next receives instructions about the
preparations for the theophany (19.10-15) which now takes place
(19.16-20). After a number of warnings against coming up on the
holy mountain (19.21-25) God makes known the ‘Decalogue’
(20.1-17); thereupon the people, terrified by the theophany, ask
Moses to act as mediator for them (20.18-21). Even this preliminary
sketch, though on the whole consistent, contains some inconsistencies.
It is striking that, after the need to observe the holiness of the
mountain has already been strongly stressed in the section describing
the preparations for the theophany, the subject is taken up once
again after the following theophany. It is even more striking that the
people’s request for Moses to act as mediator only comes after God
has already delivered the whole Decalogue. Many other peculiar
details reveal themselves at a closer inspection. The ascent and
descent of Moses is repeated remarkably often and, moreover, in a
way which is not always consistently connected with the position of
Moses which is from time to time presupposed in the course of the
narrative (cf. 19.3a with 19.3b and 19.8b with 19.9b). There is also
the repeated change of the divine name for no apparent reason
(cf. 19.3a with 19.3b; 19.17, 19 with 19.18, 20) and the appearance
of conspicuous doublets (cf. 19.2ab with 19.2b). We can therefore
recognize the juxtaposition of different, originally independent
154 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

strands of narrative which have subsequently been interwoven. The

language of the introductory notes in 19.1-2a clearly demonstrates
that they belong to P, which then makes no further appearance in
what follows, first appearing again in ch. 24. In 19.2b-20.21 we have
primarily to deal with the sources J and E and must employ their
usage of different names of God to separate them. The word ‘God’
cccurs in 19.3a, 17, 19; 20.1, 19-21. In these verses, to which a
number of connected passages (in which no name for God appears)
belong (19.16b; 20.18) the source E may be present. It is in any case
clear that only fragments of it have been incorporated in the later
combined narrative. It appears to be peculiar to the E narrative that
the mighty signs of the divine presence appear immediately after the
Israelites arrive at the holy mountain (19.16b, 17, 19) whereupon
the people in terror keep their distance and ask Moses to act as
mediator (20.18-21), whereas in the other variant the people have
to be warned emphatically before the theophany against coming too
near to the mountain (19.12 f.). In this other variant we must see the
essentials of the J narrative (with the divine name Yahweh). Of
course it is no longer possible to make a smooth and satisfactory
division of the whole between the two older sources. This is not
surprising, as it is easily understandable that the important central
section of the tradition of the theophany on Sinai should frequently
have been worked over and provided with expansions. Thus the
section 19.3b—9a (gb) in particular looks like a later addition, be-
cause it anticipates the theophany and, as early as v. 5, speaks of the
keeping of the covenant which has not as yet been concluded. We
also certainly have a number of additions in 19.21-25, which add a
number of supplementary details to the theme of the approach to the
holy mountain. Perhaps the hardest question to answer is that of
whether the Decalogue has its original literary setting in the narra-
tive context which it now occupies. Although itself using the divine
name Yahweh, it is framed by ‘Elohistic’ passages (20.1, 18-21). But
the introductory remark 20.1 is of quite general content, and vv. 18-
21 do not connect immediately with the Decalogue but with the
description of the theophany in 19.16b, 17, 19. The Decalogue is thus
so loosely inserted into the narrative that we are led to the conclusion
that from a literary aspect it is a secondary passage in the account of
the theophany on Sinai. This implies nothing about its age and
provenance, especially as it represents in any case a self-contained
and independent entity which originally certainly had its own
19.1-20.21] THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH DECALOGUE 155

tradition-history. We can no longer answer the question of the stage

of the literary development of Ex. 19-20 at which it might have been
incorporated. Its position between ‘Elohistic’ pieces—at times
people have been inclined to call it the ‘Elohistic Decalogue’ to
distinguish it from the “Yahwistic Decalogue’ in Ex. 34— implies very
little, especially in view of the fragmentary character of 19.21-20.1.
We can thus only come to the negative conclusion that the Decalogue
did not originally stand in any of the old narratives of the theophany
on Sinai, but was only inserted into them during the course of time.

[19.1-2] The P introduction in 19.1-2a names first of all, as

apparently the most important information, the circumstances of the
arrival at Sinai; P immediately follows this in ch. 24 with the appear-
ance of the ‘glory of Yahweh’ and the ascent of Moses up the moun-
tain to receive the divine instructions. As Israel had come outof
Egypt at Passover and the feast of unleavened bread in the first
month (cf. p. 95 above on 12.3), they therefore arrived at Sinai in
the third month (reckoning the new year in the spring), and more-
over on the day of the new moon, i.e. the first day of this month; the
reference in v. 1b to a definite day shows that the first word in v. 1a
does not have the general meaning ‘month’, but is meant in the
special sense of the ‘day of the new moon’. These details may rest on
tradition and may show that the Sinai event was fixed and celebrated
on this very day. They were apparently so essential for P that he puts
the note about the itinerary (v. 2a), which connects with 17.1 aba,
as an addition after them, although these notes about the itinerary
usually stand at the beginning and even belong there. The ‘wilder-
ness of Sinai’ takes its name from the mountain and is a general
description of the desert region in the neighbourhood of the
mountain. It is no longer possible to ascertain the location of Sinai
with certainty. From the Byzantine period one of the very high
mountains in the southern part of what is today called the Sinai
peninsula has been recognized as the scene of the Old Testament
theophany, either the ‘Mountain of Moses’ (jebel miisa, 7,647 ft) or
‘Mount St Catherine’ (jebel qaterin, 8,649 ft) at whose foot stands the
Greek Orthodox monastery of St Catherine. It is evident, from the
numerous inscriptions by Nabataean pilgrims on the approaches to
this mountain chain, that this neighbourhood was the goal of pagan
pilgrimages even in the pre-Byzantine period, and it is possible that
the holiness of this region and the pilgrimages to it go back to a still
156 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

earlier time, although concrete evidence for this is completely

lacking. We can no longer decide whether the Byzantine choice of
Sinai could have been connected with an old and genuine tradition
which may perhaps have existed in Israel and then in Judaism, or
whether it merely represents a secondary localization of the Old
Testament Sinai tradition on an imposing mountain of traditional
holiness. The Old Testament reports of Sinai are mostly too indefinite
to be of help in the question of identifying the holy mountain. The
notes in the Priestly itinerary (Ex. 15.22aa, 27aa; 16.1a; 17.1aba;
19.2a; Num. 12.10 etc.) give details of places, but these do not help
us much as the places mentioned are unknown to us. Moreover, they
are a relatively late element of the tradition and may well belong to a
late attempt to fix a definite route for the journey of the Israelites
(cf. also p. 110 above on the P localization of the miracle at the sea).
As the theophany on Sinai is the subject of a special element of the
tradition we must be careful in any attempt to determine its location
on the basis of geographical details given in other elements of the
tradition. The pilgrimage to Sinai was in any case a special event, and
its goal may have been far removed from the places of the Exodus
and the rest of Israel’s journey through the wilderness. Men have
never been afraid of long and difficult journeys to find a holy place,
and the journey to Sinai was indeed for Israel just such a pilgrimage
to a famous holy mountain, even if Israel did not know beforehand
what decisive event was to confront them on this holy mountain. It is
therefore not completely irrelevant to adduce the only concrete
information in the Old Testament about the character of the holy
mountain, the fact that volcanic eruptions were to be seen on it
(cf. 19.18, 20, and also p. 109 above on 13.21 f.), to answer the
question of its location. In that case of course we should no longer
look for it on the present ‘Sinai peninsula’, for there have never been
any active volcanoes upon it in historical times. Instead we must go
quite a long way from the normal routes between Egypt and
Palestine, right over to the other side of the gulf of e-‘agaba in the
north-west part of what is now Saudi Arabia, where in the neigh-
bourhood of the place tebak which lies on the great road to Medina
and Mecca—in roughly the same latitude as the southern part of the
Sinai peninsula—there are volcanoes which are still active today.
These might have a bearing on the question if the description of
volcanic phenomena in Ex. 19 does not merely represent the
acceptance of traditional elements of a theophany description but
19.I-20.21] THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH DECALOGUE 157
has preserved some character of the experience of Israel at Sinai. As
we can give no certain answer to this latter question (see p. 160
below) there is even here no completely reliable clue for the localizing
of Sinai and the ‘wilderness of Sinai’ in which the Israelites ‘en-
camped’. The repetition in v. 2b of the remark about this encamping
in v. 2ab indicates a fragment from the introductory phrases of one
of the older sources which has in other respects fallen out in favour of
Ps
[19-3—9] After an Elohistic note about the ascent of Moses ‘to God’
(v. 3a) which has no direct continuation in the extant passages of the
E narrative strand and was perhaps originally followed by a first
announcement of the theophany to Moses, there comes an initial
command from Yahweh, for Moses to pass on a message from him
to the people (vv. 3b-6). This message, formulated in ceremonial
language (cf. the parallelismus membrorum as early as the formula of
command), is from the point of view of its style alone remarkable in
the brief narrative style of the older sources; it contains deuterono-
mistic phrases, particularly in v. 5, and with the surrounding material
represents a later addition, especially as it anticipates the report of
the concluding of the covenant and the imparting of the law. It recalls
to the people of Israel the deeds of their God in bringing them out of
Egypt and guiding them through the wilderness and makes the
obedience of Israel the condition of the special place among the
nations which is marked out for her. The image of the eagle (or
vulture) who can safely carry its young on its mighty wings (v. 4) also
occurs in Deut. 32.11; so safely has Yahweh brought Israel ‘to
himself’, to his (dwelling) place, i.e. in the present context to Sinai.
Israel is to be the special possession of Yahweh (v. 5), to whom the
whole earth and so all nations belong; she is therefore a ‘holy’
people, i.e. set apart from the rest of the nations (v. 6). The singular
expression ‘kingdom of priests’ (v. 6) obviously also refers to this.
There is no particular emphasis on the word ‘kingdom’ in this
expression; it may be understood to mean ‘state’ in just the same way
as the nations on the earth are usually organized into states. Israel
is to have the role of the priestly member in the number of earthly
states. Israel is to have the special privilege of priests, to be allowed
to ‘draw near’ God, and is to do ‘service’ for all the world (cf. also
Isa. 61.5 f.); this is the purpose for which Israel has been chosen, as
has been demonstrated by the earlier acts of God towards the people.
Thereupon the people pledge themselves to obedience (vv. 7 f.), and
E.-F
158 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

then Yahweh announces to Moses his impending appearance and

converse with him, with the purpose of authenticating him before the
people and confirming his full power of mediator by the message
which he brings; for ‘belief’ in Moses cf. 14.31 J. There is an addition
in v. 9b which does not fit the context very well and which is meant
merely to adjust the transition to the new speech of Yahweh in
vv. 10 ff.
[19.10-15] In 19.10-15 we have the account of the preparations
for the theophany according to the J variant. Moses, who is here
presumed to be on the mountain (cf. v. 14a)—a previous remark
about this in J has been lost—receives instructions about the neces-
sary precautions and hands them on to the people. These are first to
be consecrated for the theophany which is announced for the third
day, i.e. to observe the ritual purificatory actions which are custo-
mary in the cult, among which special mention is made of washing
their garments and also presumably the observance of certain
regulations concerned with continence (cf. v. 15b where sexual
restraint is enjoined, albeit in a remarkably lame way which perhaps
suggests an addition). Then they are strictly to observe the dangerous
holiness of the mountain as the place of the impending theophany.
An inadvertent or a wilful violation of this holiness would result in
death. The formulation of v. 12b suggests that here the punishment
of the transgression with death is required, whereas in v. 13a, which
looks like a variant to 12b, it is imagined that the holiness of the
mountain is in itself fatal in its effect on any living being who comes
too near. The occurrence of Yahweh in the third person in the middle
of a speech of Yahweh in vy. r1b is striking; perhaps it is an explana-
tory gloss. Verse 13b is barely comprehensible. The blast of the ram’s
horn, which has given its name to the year of ‘jubilee’ (Lev. 25.8 ff.),
customarily introduced a feast day in the cult and the cultic cere-
monies which took place on it; here it is apparently to serve to
announce the appearing of God. The emphatic ‘they’ in v. 13b is the
most remarkable of all; it appears to designate a definite group of
people who do not, however, occur in the text in its present state.
These are to ascend the mountain at the given sign. We therefore
have in this passage a fragment from a narrative sequence no longer
extant, which appears to have some factual connection with Ex.
24.1 f., g-11, where a clearly defined group of people are said to
ascend the mountain.
[19.16-20] In 19.16-20 we have the report of the theophany on
19.1-20.21 | THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH DECALOGUE 159

Sinai in very compressed narrative form, and moreover in two

variants which may be very clearly distinguished by the difference
in their designation of God and the difference in their ideas of the
natural phenomena which accompany the theophany. In this
section, v. 16aa might belong to theJ version (vv. 18, 20) as it refers
to the three-day period of preparation which had already been
mentioned by J in v. 11a. In that case vv. 16abb, 17, 19 are left over
for E. In the original Hebrew text of the passage vv. 16 aa, 18, 20 we
have a single sentence construction which contains in v. 16aa a
preliminary introduction giving an indication of the time; v. 18
pictures the circumstances with a clear descriptive clause which is
then fully developed, and v. 20 contains the most important of the
statements. The description of the circumstances speaks of three
manifestations, the smoke on the whole mountain, the fire which is
connected with the descent of Yahweh and the great quaking of the
whole mountain. To illustrate the first manifestation we have the
special simile of the smelting oven, which used to consist of a space
walled up with stones or tiles tapering into a cone at the top. In this
the smelting fire was kindled, whose smoke, occasionally with
ascending flame, escaped through a funnel-like opening made in the
top. The manifestations mentioned point quite clearly to a volcanic
eruption. This natural occurrence was the sign for the ‘descent’ of
Yahweh on the summit of the mountain—so v. 20. Thus according
to this idea the mountain was not the divine abode but the place of
his appearance to which he descended from his heavenly dwelling
(cf. Gen. 11.5 J), and Moses is immediately ordered to the summit of
the mountain to meet Yahweh.
The E variant first of all speaks of thunder and lightning and a
thick cloud, which lay on the mountain; it thus apparently imagines
a tremendous storm-appearance (v. 16ab). For E then the trumpet
blast, which grows louder and louder all the time, is particularly
important; it is evidently to be understood as a sign of the divine
presence. The trumpet blast (again a ram’s horn, but a different
word is used from that in v. 13b) served chiefly to sound the alarm,
but was also used as a summons to a cultic assembly and ceremony
(cf. e.g. Josh. 2.15; Ps. 81.4 and also Isa 27.13). It is this last usage
which is here intended. The trumpet blast makes the people in the
camp tremble before the presence of the God who now proclaims
himself. Nevertheless Moses leads the people from their camp to the
foot of the mountain ‘to meet God’. Here God seems to be thought to
160 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

be living on the mountain (cf. also v. 3a). Immediately a conversation

between Moses and God begins; we are told nothing at all about its
content but it leads to a direct meeting between God and Israel. The
fact that the two variant narratives describe the natural phenomena
accompanying the theophany in different ways raises the question of
what really happened at Sinai. Now the reference to a volcanic erup-
tion is surely more unusual and original in comparison with that to a
storm. We may therefore be inclined to think the tradition of the
volcano to have its original roots in the Sinai tradition and to see the
storm tradition as a subsequent weakening of it, especially as the
tradition of the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire (13.21 f.) can
hardly be explained except as resting on the observance of an active
volcano. Nevertheless we cannot be completely sure, as the other
variant narrative always existed; we must always reckon with the
possibility that both the volcanic and the storm traditions are
derivative ways of describing a theophany. Therefore we cannot
obtain any completely reliable reference to the situation of Sinai even
from the existence of the volcano-tradition.
[19.21-25] The passage 19.21-25, already recognized to be
secondary, brings a number of additions to the theme of the danger-
ous holiness of the mountain which is to be respected, a theme
already treated in vv. 12, 13a. The preparatory ‘consecration’ and
the reverent keeping of a distance from the mountain is expressly
enjoined upon the priests also (vv. 22, 24b). The instruction that
Aaron also is to accompany Moses on the mountain (v. 24a) is
completely isolated and without sequel. Verse 25 is a fragment.
[20.1-17] The Decalogue in 20.2—17, which is loosely joined to the
narrative of the theophany on Sinai by the quite general introduc-
tory sentence v. I, consists of a short and therefore easily memorable
series of clauses of the so-called apodeictic law, i.e. a law which
advances requirements written in the form ‘You shall (not)’,
requirements which are unconditional and valid without any ‘if? or
‘but’. The fact that there are ten of these commandments, from
which has arisen the description ‘Decalogue’, which has been
customary since the time of the early Christian Church (cf. also
34.28), will belong to the original design of this collection, although
in the form in which it has been transmitted the enumeration of the
commandments is not completely clear. Similar brief ten- or twelve-
membered series of legal clauses also occur elsewhere in the Old
Testament (cf. especially Ex. 34.14-26 and—with different language—
19.1-20.21 | THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH DECALOGUE 161

Deut. 27.15-26). There are some noticeable discrepancies in Ex.

20.2-17. The alternation between commandments formulated
positively (vv. 8, 12) and prohibitions formulated in the negative
(all the rest) is not among them; such an alternation also occurs
elsewhere (cf. e.g. Ex. 34.14-26) and is sometimes rooted in the
matter expressed. But the disproportion between the commandments
formulated with the utmost brevity in vv. 13-17a and the command-
ments which have been more or less extensively expanded by
explanations, reasons and recommendations in wv. 3-12 (also v. 17b)
is remarkable. If we add to this the fact that the quotation of the
Decalogue in the secondary introduction to the Deuteronomic Law
(Deut. 5.6—21) at least in essentials corresponds almost verbally with
Ex. 20.2-17, but goes its own way in giving reasons for the sabbath
commandment (cf. Deut. 5.14bb-15 with Ex.20.11), we are driven
to the conclusion that the expansions of the commandments which
stand at the beginning represent a secondary and variable element,
added here and there from time to time. We have to look for the
original material only in the brief legal clauses themselves. In any
case the expansions must have been added at quite an early date, as
apart from the one instance mentioned they also occur in Deut. 5 in
essentially the same scope and wording as in Ex. 20. A further dis-
crepancy consists in the change between divine speech and human
speech, i.e. between the ‘I’ of God and the mention of God in the
third person, both in the brief legal clauses (cf. v. 3 with v. 7a) and
in the expansions which are attached in some places (cf. vv. 5 f. with
vv. 7b, 10-12). This discrepancy is hard to explain; it arouses the
suspicion that the beginning of the Decalogue is no longer in its
original form but has subsequently been altered in connection with
the preliminary remark of v. 2, which is also written with the ‘T’ of
God. When a piece which, like the Decalogue, represents a cate-
chism-like collection of the fundamental requirements of God, has
been handed down over a long period and has often been repeated,
the secondary appearance of expansions and alterations is not to be
wondered at.
[20.2] In referring to the acts of God at the Exodus from Egypt the
prologue to the Decalogue in v. 2 advances an ‘introductory formula’
which was native to the proclamation of divine law in Israel, divine
law which is to be thought of in a cultic setting. This formula, especi-
ally with the completely pertinent expansion, recalls that the action
of God towards Israel, which is already indicated by the divine name
162 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

Yahweh, precedes the commandments and is the justification for

them. [20.3] The prohibition of ‘other gods’ (v. 3) is the basic
demand made of Israel, who is addressed here, as in what follows, in
the collective second person.* The unconditional exclusiveness of the
recognition and worship of the God of Israel stands rightly as the
most important point at the beginning of the series of divine com-
mandments. The expression which is rendered in the RSV ‘before me’
probably points to the cultic sphere, in so far as it contains the
concept of the ‘face’ of God (‘before’ in Hebrew is literally “before my
face’), which frequently describes the presence of God which is
encountered in the worship of him. Where this presence of God
appears, i.e. in all the cult of Israel, there may not be other gods; and
as the Decalogue certainly does not reckon with the possibility of a
non-cultic worship of God, this means that no other gods may exist
for Israel at all. Apart from the ‘Tl’ formulation mentioned above, the
expression ‘other gods’, which is current in the Deuteronomic-
deuteronomistic language, is noteworthy; we may think of a later
paraphrase of a prohibition originally expressed rather differently.
Nevertheless, it is certainly to be assumed that the series right from
the beginning commenced with a prohibition of any conceivable
worship of foreign deities (on the possibility of another formulation cf.
34.14aa).
[20.4] The prohibition of images (v. 4aa) uses here an expression
for any plastic representation, and as we have not to reckon with any
painted pictures this means an expression for any representation at
all. The word is to be understood quite generally. As the possibility
of a merely ornamental art is surely not envisaged this means a cultic
image, be it of the god to be worshipped, of a being which serves him,
or a power which is subordinate to him. As the strict prohibition of
other gods has already been expressed previously, the prohibition of
images is hardly concerned with the images of strange gods but with
any images which might possibly be made for the legitimate worship
of Israel. We should hardly look for the reason for the prohibition
of images in a ‘spiritual’ conception of God which forbade the
introduction of any creaturely being from the sphere of the ‘world’, as
is delineated in the additional explanation in v. 4abb, to portray God
or the divine realm. The basis for it rather lies in the idea, widespread
in the ancient world, that an image had a firm connection with the
*[Modern English usage does not allow this distinction to be made, so it is not
perceptible in the RSV. Tr.]
19.1-20.21] THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH DECALOGUE _ 163
being it portrayed, and that with the help of an image a man might
gain power over the being represented in the image. Israel is forbidden
any image so that the people cannot even make the attempt to gain
power over God or that which is of God.
[20.5-6] The explanations in vv. 5 f., in which again God appears
in the first person, probably belong to the later expansions of the
Decalogue. In form and content they belong rather to v. 3 than to
v. 4aa and in the way they are formulated they again recall the Deu-
teronomic-deuteronomistic style. The ‘jealousy’ of the God of Israel is
mentioned as the reason for the demand of strict exclusiveness in
divine worship; God is spoken of in a human way which is not
unusual in other places in the Old Testament. In praise of the power
of God it is said that his punishments and his rewards reach far
beyond the single individual. It is evidently not realized here that
this gives rise to the problem of a ‘just’ individual divine retribution.
The Hebrew participial phrases in vv. 5bé and 6 certainly correspond
in form but not in content. Verse 5bb speaks of the extension of the
punishment of God over several generations of those who ‘hate’ him,
i.e. do not love him and therefore do not keep his commandments;
in v. 6 the steadfast love of God is generally promised to ‘thousands’,
i.e. an inconceivable number; here however no reference is made to
the sequence of generations. For the thought that love towards God
is shown in the keeping of his commandments (v. 6b), cf. Deut. 6.5 ff.
and I John 5.3.
[20.7] In the original form of the Decalogue the prohibition of
images is followed appropriately enough by the prohibition of speak-
ing the divine name ‘in vain’ (v. 7); here the term ‘in vain’ is synony-
mous with the term ‘evil’. Behind it lies the idea that the name is a
part of the being who bears it, and that the bearer of the name is
therefore present in some mysterious way in the name. Anyone who
knows a divine name can make use of the divine power present in the
name to effect blessings and curses, adjurations and bewitchings and
all kinds of magical undertakings. To this extent the divine name is
comparable with the divine image. The divine image was forbidden
to Israel (v. 4aa) ; the divine name was revealed for the praise of God
and for calling upon him, but it must be protected from possible
misuse. This is done in the apodeictic commandment v. 7a, which is
formulated in a very general way and is therefore comprehensive.
The word of warning in v. 7b emphasizes this, but in view of what has
been said above this may be a secondary addition.
164 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

[20.8] The sabbath commandment (v. 8) is hard to understand

because we are so much in the dark about the pre-history and early
history of the sabbath, which are perhaps quite complicated. Even the
form of the commandment itselfin Deut. 5.12a differs slightly from
Ex. 20.8 in so far as in the former the ‘observance’ of the sabbath day
and in the latter the ‘remembrance’ of the sabbath day is required.
There is hardly any difference in content, as ‘remember’ means that
the sabbath day is not to be overlooked, not to remain unnoticed,
and this comes to the same thing as ‘observe’, ‘keep’. In both cases the
mode of expression indicates that the sabbath day was not marked
out by definite exterior characteristics, such as cultic actions, so that
Israel had expressly to be commanded that it was not to pass un-
observed. The explanatory definition means that this day is to be
‘kept holy’, that it is to be distinguished from the series of ‘profane’
days for which there are no distinguishing or prohibitory ordinances.
[20.9-10] The following explanation, which was certainly added
later, says in words which correspond in essentials in Ex. 20.9-10
and Deut. 5.13-14aba that the sabbath is a ‘sabbath of Yahweh’ and
thus a day which is in some way specially devoted to Yahweh, and
that this is to be every seventh day, on which there is to be rest from
everyday work. This last is also presupposed in two of the other
relatively early Old Testament passages in which the sabbath occurs
(Amos 8.5; II Kings 4.23; at both places, as elsewhere in the older
tradition of the Old Testament, the sabbath is mentioned alongside
the new moon). It is not expressly said in the demonstrably early
passages of the Old Testament that the sabbath was every seventh
day (cf. however 16.29; 23.12), but perhaps this is generally pre-
supposed throughout, so that we can reckon that the additional
explanation given to the sabbath in the Decalogue is in fact con-
cerned with the significance of the day which is at all times binding
upon Israel. [20.11] ‘The reason given for the sabbath command-
ment in Ex. 20.11—in contrast to the ‘social’ reason given in Deut.
5.14bb-15—1s based on a reference to the Priestly account of the
creation (Gen. 1.1-2.3) which for its part, by a division of the work
of creation into six days of work and a seventh day of rest, seeks to
provide a reason for the already existing institution of the sabbath
rest on each seventh day. The explanation in our passage may have
been added at quite a late stage. We must, however, regard the
‘keeping holy of the sabbath day’ itself, a phrase whose meaning can
no longer certainly be ascertained with the help available from
19.I-20.21] THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH DECALOGUE _ 165
accounts both within and without the Old Testament, as a custom
which was probably already very ancient in Israel. The frequent
juxtaposition of ‘new moon and sabbath’ in the Old Testament
might suggest that it was connected with the phases of the moon, but
this is questionable, as the continuous seven-day week, which deter-
mines the sabbath in the Old Testament wherever it is mentioned
in rather more detail, does not correspond accurately with the
interval in the phases of the moon. We must therefore assume that a
former association with the phases of the moon has subsequently for
reasons unknown to us been dissolved and that to replace it the
smooth seven-day week has been introduced.*
Up to the sabbath commandment the requirements of the Deca-
logue are concerned directly with Israel’s worship of God. Com-
mandments follow which deal with the life of the human community
in Israel. [20.12] The commandment about parents (v. 12a) which
again has been expanded by a promise and a warning (v. 12b) does
not apply to children who stand under the patria potestas but to adults
who themselves exert the patria potestas and are to show due honour
to their aging parents. [20.13] The prohibition against killing
(v. 13) uses one of the two words current in Hebrew for ‘doing to
death’. These verbs apparently express no distinction between
premeditated murder and unpremeditated killing, but both evidently
include the concept of the arbitrary. It was customary in Hebrew
for other expressions to be used both for the execution of the death
penalty imposed by legitimate trial and for the killing of an enemy in
war (in the former case one says ‘put to death’ [so for example
Ex. 19.12b] and in the latter ‘smite’). [20.14] The prohibition of
adultery (v. 14) is clear. The verb there corresponds in fact closely
enough to our ‘commit adultery’, so that we are only left to realize
that for the Old Testament the very fact of betrothal is a ground of
marriage in law and that therefore the betrothed comes under the
scope of this commandment just as much as the wife. [20.15] In the
commandment against stealing (v. 15) the unnamed object is not so
clear as in the two preceding commandments. The position of this
commandment among a group of commandments which are con-
cerned with the person of the ‘neighbour’ (see below), and the
difference in content which is to be assumed between this command-
ment and the last in the Decalogue suggests that, as elsewhere when
this particular verb occurs, a human object is imagined (cf. e.g.
*On other aspects see p. 190 below on 23.12.
166 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

Gen. 40.15). It probably therefore has in mind the loss of freedom,

particularly of free Israelites; it is forbidden to enslave free Israelites
by force whether it be for one’s own use or to sell to another.*
[20.16] In its present wording, the following commandment is
concerned with bearing false witness in legal trials; in the period of
settled life in an agricultural community these took place in the
setting of the local legal assembly which used to meet “at the gate’,
the relatively spacious meeting place, and to which all free Israelites
belonged. The term ‘neighbour’ appears in this commandment;
without expressing a definite legal relationship it means the man
with whom one lives and comes into contact in the conditions of life.
[20.17] The commandment in v. 17 is formulated with a verb
which is rendered ‘covet’. But it describes not merely the emotion of
coveting but also includes the attempt to attach something to oneself
illegally. The commandment therefore deals with all possible under-
takings which involve gaining power over the goods and possessions
of a ‘neighbour’, whether through theft or through all kinds of
dishonest machinations. The first object to be named is the neigh-
bour’s house. The term ‘house’ can in a narrow and special sense
describe the dwelling-place, primarily the built house but also in
every case the tent-‘house’ of the nomad; it can, however, also be
used in a more or less wide or transferred sense to mean, for instance,
the family, or to sum up everything which is included in the house.
The last-named possibility deserves primary consideration in the
present passage, especially if we see v. 17b as a subsequent interpre-
tation of the commandment. And we must do this, because in view
of the surely intended number ten v. 17b cannot be counted as an
independent commandment (the parallelism with v. 17a also
militates against this), while on the other hand the brevity of the
commandments, which must be regarded as original, prohibits the
whole of v. 17 from being counted as the original material of the last
commandment. Verse 17b paraphrases the whole inclusive term
‘house’, as meaning ‘possession’, beginning with the wife, who
according to the Old Testament law of marriage was the possession
of the husband, and ending with a quite general formulation which
saves other individual enumerations. By the addition of v. 17b the
word ‘house’ in v. 17a of course becomes superfluous, but it is
appropriately given a more precise definition.
The Decalogue contains a brief collection of the basic demands
*Cf, A.Alt, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel I, 1953, pp. 333-440.
19.I-20.21] THEOPHANY ON SINAI WITH DECALOGUE _ 167
made by God on Israel in respect of worship and the life of the human
community. In form and content it does not stand quite alone in the
Old Testament, but is nevertheless unique in its concentration on
what is fundamental and essential; this leaves open the possibility of
a far deeper interpretation (cf. the exegesis by Luther in the Kleine
Katechismus). The lack of special cultic requirements is noteworthy.
This corresponds to the fact that in the Old Testament cultic action
is indeed generally presupposed as a possible, even a requisite way of
worship, but that the special and unique element in the relationship
between God and Israel is not evident in the cultic sphere but in the
obedience to the one God and his demands which pertain to human
relationships. Even the sabbath commandment is no exception here,
for whatever may have been the significance of the sabbath in the
view of the Decalogue it was at all events not thought of as a cultic
feast. There are no reliable criteria for answering the question of the
age and derivation of the Decalogue. As the literary inclusion of the
Decalogue in the narrative of Ex. 19-20 cannot contribute to solving
the problem of the date (see pp. 154 f. above), there remains only the
content of the Decalogue itself as a basis for argument. But this
content is so little bound by time and so directly rooted in the special
permanent relationship between God and Israel that it offers only
a little information towards a definite date. It is probable that the
Decalogue—and by this is meant the basic material before it has
been expanded by additions—derives from the time before classical
prophecy. This is supported first by the fact that the Decalogue does
not yet contain social requirements in the narrower sense, that ele-
ment which was so important even for the earliest prophets, and
secondly by the further fact that the prophets appear to presuppose
the knowledge of the Decalogue in Israel (cf. especially Hos. 4.2).
But for the pre-prophetic period all possibilities of dating remain open.
We cannot even answer the question whether the Decalogue derives
from a time before or after Israel took possession of Canaan. It has
already been said that the occurrence of the word ‘house’ in v. 17a is
not conclusive in this respect, nor does the sabbath commandment
give us any further help in view of the obscurity of the origin and
original significance of the sabbath. The Decalogue is the only legal
entity in the Old Testament which indicates no certain reference to
the conditions of life in an agricultural community, but we cannot of
course conclude from this negative statement that the basic material
of the Decalogue came into being in the time before the conquest.
168 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

Even the inclusion—whenever it took place—of the Decalogue in the

Sinai narrative may not be advanced as an argument, as almost all
the Old Testament laws have been drawn into this narrative, even
those which demonstrably only derive from the period after the
settlement. This is because of the quite appropriate idea that the
whole of Old Testament ‘Law’ has its basis in the relationship
between God and people which has its foundation in the covenant on
Sinai, even if some happens to be later re-formulations of this law.
In fact the question of the dating of the Decalogue is less important
than that of its nature and its significance. God has of course always
been regarded as the ‘author’ of the Decalogue, even if the Decalo-
gue, which in its original form was probably consistent (see p. 161
above), mentions Yahweh in the third person. Therefore the question
of its human author (thus even the question of its ‘Mosaic’ origin) is
not of fundamental importance. It is Israel that is addressed, even
if the individual requirements (especially vv. 12-17) with the
address in the second person singular in fact are meant for the
individual Israelite, who as a member of the whole is for his part
responsible for the obedience of all Israel.
[20.1821] The section 20.18—-21 goes back beyond the Decalogue
to Ex. 19 and moreover, as we evidently have here an Elohistic piece,
to its E element. Verse 18 with the zeugmatic connection of the verb
‘see’ with some inappropriate objects* and with the mixture of
elements of the J and E narratives (‘the mountain smoking’) is a
secondary derivation which was necessary after the insertion of the
Decalogue. Verse 18b has the people of their own accord standing
far off from the terrifying phenomena of the theophany; according
to this version there was evidently no need to warn the people as in
19.12—-13a J. 20.18b could originally have been attached directly to
19.19 E if the statement at the beginning of 20.18b was meant to
read ‘the people were afraid’ (instead of ‘the people saw it’), which
is quite possible with the Hebrew consonantal text as it has been
transmitted. + Moses takes over the role of mediator (v. 21) as has
been requested by the people (v. 19) after he has approved the
attitude of the people (v. 20) with the remark that they have with-
stood the ‘proving’ which God has laid upon them; the people have
shown the right ‘fear’ of God and have not attempted to go too near
the theophany.
*(‘The RSV rendering ‘perceive’ obscures this discrepancy. Tr.]
{ [This reading is in fact accepted in the RSV text. Tr.]
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 169

2. THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT: 20.22-23.33

22 And the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the people
of Israel: “You have seen for yourselves that I have talked with you
from heaven. *° You shall not make gods of silver to be with me, nor
shall you make for yourselves gods of gold. 24 An altar of earth you
shall make for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your
peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen; in every place where I
cause my name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you.
2° And if you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn
stones; for if you wield your tool upon it you profane it. 26 And you
shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not
exposed on it.”
211 ‘Now these are the ordinances which you shall set before them.
2 When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the
seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. ® If he comes in single, he shall
go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with
him. 4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daugh-
ters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out
alone. ° But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and
my children; I will not go out free,”’ § then his master shall bring him
to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost; and his
hag shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him
or life. 7
7 ‘When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as
the male slaves do. ® If she does not please her master, who has desig-
nated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have
no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt faithlessly with
her. ° If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a
daughter. 1° If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish
her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. 14 And if he does not do
these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment
of money.
12 ‘Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death.
13 But if he did not lie in wait for him, but God let him fall into his hand,
then I will appoint for you a place to which he may flee. ‘4 But if a man
wilfully attacks another to kill him treacherously, you shall take him
from my altar, that he may die.
15 ‘Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death.
16 ‘Whoever steals a man, whether he sells him or is found in
possession of him, shall be put to death.
17 ‘Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death.
18 ‘When men quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or with
his fist and the man does not die but keeps his bed, 19 then if the man
rises again and walks abroad with his staff, he that struck him shall be
clear; only he shall pay for the loss of his time, and shall have him
thoroughly healed.
170 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

20 ‘When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the
slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. *! But if the slave sur-
vives a day or two, he is not to be punished; for the slave is his money.
22 ‘When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that
there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her
shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him;
and he shall pay as the judges determine. ?° If any harm follows, then
you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
foot for foot, 2° burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
26 ‘When a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and
destroys it, he shall let the slave go free for the eye’s sake. *” If he knocks
out the tooth of his slave, male or female, he shall let the slave go free
for the tooth’s sake.
28 ‘When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be
stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be
clear. 2° But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its
owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man ora
woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.
3° If a ransom is laid on him, then he shall give for the redemption of
his life whatever is laid upon him. *! If it gores a man’s son or daughter,
he shall be dealt with according to this same rule. ** If the ox gores a
slave, male or female, the owner shall give to their master thirty shekels
of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.
33 ‘When a man leaves a pit open, or when a man digs a pit and
does not cover it, and an ox or an ass falls into it, #4 the owner of the
pit shall make it good; he shall give money to its owner, and the dead
beast shall be his.
5 ‘When one man’s ox hurts another’s, so that it dies, then they
shall sell the live ox and divide the price of it; and the dead beast also
they shall divide. °° Or if it is known that the ox has been accustomed
to gore in the past, and its owner has not kept it in, he shall pay ox for
ox, and the dead beast shall be his.
221 If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall
pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. He shall make
restitution; if he has nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft. * If the
stolen beast is found alive in his possession, whether it is an ox or an ass
or a sheep, he shall pay double.
2 ‘If a thief is found breaking in, and is struck so that he dies, there
shall be no bloodguilt for him; ® but if the sun has risen upon him, there
shall be bloodguilt for him.
5 ‘When a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed over, or lets
his beast loose and it feeds in another man’s field, he shall make resti-
tution from the best in his own field and in his own vineyard.
6 ‘When fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that the stacked
grain or the standing grain or the field is consumed, he that kindled the
fire shall make full restitution.
7 ‘Ifa man delivers to his neighbour money or goods to keep, and it
is stolen out of the man’s house, then, if the thief is found, he shall pay
20.22-23.33]| THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 171
double. § If the thief is not found, the owner of the house shall come
near to God, to show whether or not he has put his hand to his neigh-
bour’s goods.
g ‘For every breach of trust, whether it is for ox, for ass, for sheep,
for clothing, or for any kind of lost thing, of which one says, ‘‘This is it,”’
the case of both parties shall come before God; he whom God shall
condemn shall pay double to his neighbour.
10 ‘If a man delivers to his neighbour an ass or an ox or a sheep or
any beast to keep, and it dies or is hurt or is driven away, without any
one seeing it, 14 an oath by the Lorn shall be between them both to see
whether he has not put his hand to his neighbour’s property; and the
owner shall accept the oath, and he shall not make restitution. 12 But
if it is stolen from him, he shall make restitution to its owner. 1° If it is
torn by beasts, let him bring it as evidence; he shall not make restitution
for what has been torn.
14 ‘Ifa man borrows anything of his neighbour, and it is hurt or dies,
the owner not being with it, he shall make full restitution. ! If the
owner was with it, he shall not make restitution; if it was hired, it came
for its hire.
16 ‘Ifa man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed, and lies with her,
he shall give the marriage present for her, and make her his wife. 17 If
her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equiva-
lent to the marriage present for virgins.
18 ‘You shall not permit a sorceress to live.
19 ‘Whoever lies with a beast shall be put to death.
20 ‘Whoever sacrifices to any god, save to the Lorn only, shall be
utterly destroyed.
21 ‘You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were
strangers in the land of Egypt. ?? You shall not afflict any widow or
orphan. 9 If you do afflict them, and they cry out to me, I will surely
hear their cry; 74 and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the
sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children
fatherless.
25 ‘If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you
shall not be to him as a creditor, and you shall not exact interest from
him. 2° If ever you take your neighbour’s garment in pledge, you shall
restore it to him before the sun goes down; 27 for that is his only cover-
ing, it is his mantle for his body; in what else shall he sleep? And if he
cries to me, I will hear, for Iam compassionate.
28 ‘You shall not revile God, nor curse a ruler of your people.
29 ‘You shall not delay to offer from the fulness of your harvest and
from the outflow of your presses.
‘The first-born of your sons you shall give to me. °° You shall do
likewise with your oxen and with your sheep: seven days it shall be with
its dam; on the eighth day you shall give it to me.
31 ‘You shall be men consecrated to me; therefore you shall not eat
any flesh that is torn by beasts in the field; you shall cast it to the dogs.
23} ‘You shall not utter a false report. You shall not join hands with
172 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

a wicked man, to be a malicious witness. 2 You shall not follow a multi-

tude to do evil; nor shall you bear witness in a suit, turning aside after
a multitude, so as to pervert justice; ? nor shall you be partial to a poor
man in his suit.
4 ‘If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall
bring it back to him. 5 If you see the ass of one who hates you lying
under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it, you shall
help him to lift it up.
6 ‘You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his suit.
7 Keep far from a false charge, and do not slay the innocent and
righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked. * And you shall take no
bribe, for a bribe blinds the officials, and subverts the cause of those
who are in the right.
9 ‘You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart ofa stranger,
for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
10 ‘For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield;
11 but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor
of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild beasts may eat.
You shall do likewise with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.
12 ‘Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall
rest; that your ox and your ass may have rest, and the son of your bond-
maid, and the alien, may be refreshed. 18 Take heed to all that I have
said to you; and make no mention of the names of other gods, nor let
such be heard out of your mouth.
14 “Three times in the year you shall keep a feast to me. #® You
shall keep the feast of unleavened bread; as I commanded you, you
shall eat unleavened bread for seven days at the appointed time in the
month of Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt. None shall appear
before me empty-handed. !® You shall keep the feast of harvest, of the
first fruits of your labour, of what you sow in the field. You shall keep
the feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from
the field the fruit of your labour. 17 Three times in the year shall all
your males appear before the Lorp God.
18 ‘You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread,
or let the fat of my feast remain until the morning.
19 “The first of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring into the
house of the Lorp your God.
“You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.
20 ‘Behold, I send an angel before you, to guard you on the way and
to bring you to the place which I have prepared. #! Give heed to him
and hearken to his voice, do not rebel against him, for he will not
pardon your transgression ;for my name is in him.
22 ‘But if you hearken attentively to his voice and do all that I say,
then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your
adversaries.
23 ‘When my angel goes before you, and brings you in to the
Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the
Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, 4 you shall not bow
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 173
down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do according to their work, but
you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces.
2° You shall serve the Lorp your God, and I will bless your bread and
your water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of you. 28 None
shall cast her young or be barren in your land; I will fulfil the number
of your days. ?7 I will send my terror before you, and will throw into
confusion all the people against whom you shall come, and I will make
all your enemies turn their backs to you. 28 And I will send hornets
before you, which shall drive out Hivite, Canaanite, and Hittite from
before you. ?° I will not drive them out from before you in one year,
lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against
you. °° Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you
are increased and possess the land. #4 And I will set your bounds from
the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the
Euphrates; for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand,
and you shall drive them out before you. *? You shall make no covenant
with them or with their gods.$% They shall not dwell in your land, lest
they make you sin against me; for if you serve their gods, it will surely
be a snare to you.’

Apart from the addition in 23.20-33, we have in Ex. 20.22-23.33

a collection of judgments of differing form and differing content
which in view of 24.7 are customarily described as the “Book of the
Covenant’. It is probable that this collection once formed an inde-
pendent book of law which has been inserted into the Pentateuchal
narrative as an already self-contained entity. We can no longer say
with certainty at what stage of the literary growth of the Pentateuch
this insertion was made; no clear relationship to any one of the
Pentateuchal narrative ‘sources’ is recognizable. The beginning of
the section in 20.22 is indeed connected without a break to the
narrative which precedes it, but right in the introductory verse 20.22
the divine name Yahweh is used, and thus we can hardly assume an
original connection with 20.18-21 E. Instead we must consider a
connection with the narrative passage 24.3-8 which speaks of the
‘words of Yahweh’ brought down by Moses to the people and then
written down to produce the very ‘Book of the Covenant’ mentioned
in 24.7. But it is questionable to which source this narrative passage
itself should be assigned (cf. pp. 198 f. below). All that we may say then
is that at some time which can no longer be discovered with any
accuracy the ‘Book of the Covenant’ has been inserted into the Sinai
section at the place between the narratives of the theophany (19.1-
20.21) and of the making of the covenant (24.1-11). It must therefore
be interpreted as a self-contained unity. The addition 23.20-33,
174 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

which is evidently secondary to the law-book proper (20.22-23.19),

may already have been in existence at the time of the insertion, as
this is the only explanation of the discussion of the question of the
presence and activity of God in the impending conquest at so early
a stage. In the following narratives this question is in fact only dealt
with later in Ex. 33. Now as this addition is formulated in deuterono-
mistic style we certainly cannot imagine the incorporation of the
Book of the Covenant into the Pentateuchal narrative in the period
before Deuteronomy.
The addition refers the Book of the Covenant to the impending
conquest. It is right in this in so far as the majority of elements of the
Book of the Covenant in fact presuppose the circumstances of an
agricultural land. We must draw the conclusion from this that the
groups of judgments which are united in the Book of the Covenant
have for the most part been formulated only after Israel became a
settled nation. The Book of the Covenant as a whole therefore derives
from this period, even though some groups of judgments which have
been incorporated in it may be still older. This is not, however,
demonstrable with certainty. A date during the time after the
settlement is also supported by the fact that certain parts of the Book
of the Covenant display very close relationships in form and content
with the tradition of law in the ancient East. Now this tradition of law
was doubtless the custom in the agricultural lands of the ancient
East and surely only became known to Israel on the soil of the
agricultural land of Palestine. A connection with the ancient oriental
tradition of law is chiefly evident in the sphere of ‘casuistically’ formu-
lated judgments which stand alongside those which are formulated
‘apodeictically’ in the Old Testament ‘Law’ and are represented in
considerable number in the Book of the Covenant. If the apodeictic
clauses with their ‘You shall (not) . . .’ put forward unconditional
demands (cf. for instance the Decalogue, Ex. 20.2-17), the casuistic
sentences in their protases introduced by ‘if’ envisage definite cases
at law whose treatment is regulated by the following apodosis. As a
definite case can be treated differently if there are special circum-
stances, further special conditions, introduced by the words ‘in case’,
‘but if, ‘then if’ etc., are frequently added to such a sentence intro-
duced by ‘if’. This follows because casuistic law is essentially compli-
cated and requires far more detailed formulations than apodeictic
law. The ‘casuistic’? judgments are generally concerned with civil
affairs. They represent an apparently codified common law and
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 175
serve for use at trials held by the legal assembly ‘at the gate’ by setting
out the legal consequences of cases which may occur or at least
offering the basis for an appropriate application of the law. In the
Old Testament the casuistic judgments also are valid as the divine
requirements for Israel, even if in them the divine purpose of law is
not expressed so clearly as in the apodeictic clauses. For, clearly
though the difference between apodeictic and casuistic law meets the
eye, there is nevertheless no difference between the two in the Old
Testament; apodeictic and casuistic sentences stand side by side in
immediate proximity. Only research into the history of law has
taught us how to differentiate between the two.* We have in the
Book of the Covenant a collection of apodeictic and casuistic law
whose judgments were at one time regarded as important and
binding upon Israel.
On the basis of the idea that all the divine legal requirements
made of Israel have their root in the covenant relationship between
God and people (cf. p. 160 above), the Book of the Covenant has
been incorporated into the Sinai narrative although it was only
compiled at the time of the settlement in an agricultural land. As far
as the dating of the book is concerned we can only say with certainty
—and this is quite apart from the question, which is barely answer-
able, of the prehistory of the individual elements of which the whole
is composed—that it is pre-Deuteronomic, as in several respects the
Deuteronomic law shows a more progressive stage in the develop-
ment of the law. As there is no reference in the Book of the Covenant
to institutions of state we may assume that it was compiled before
Israel became a state; there is, however, no proof of this.
[20.22—26] The very brief introduction (v. 22a) is followed by the
remark that Yahweh is speaking ‘from heaven’ (v. 22b), which on its
part gives the reason for the prohibition of (images of) gods of gold
and silver (v. 23). Verse 23 is also connected with v. 22b in form by
virtue of a plural address, which is then followed directly in wv. 24-
26 by an address in the singular.t The speech of Yahweh from
heaven which supposes heaven to be the divine realm is surprising
after the previous narrative both according to the J version, which
has Yahweh descending on Sinai (19.18, 20), and still more according
to the E version in which God is present on the mountain itself in the
*See especially A. Alt, Die Urspriinge des israelitischen Rechts, 1934—= Kleine Schriften
zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel 1, pp. 278-332.
+[Once again this cannot be reproduced in modern English idiom, Tr.]
176 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

thick cloud (19.17; 20.21b). We evidently have here an idea which

is independent of these narratives. The prohibition of ‘gods of silver
and gods of gold’ is a general prohibition of all images of gods, as
such a prohibition would be all the more valid for images of less
value. Images of gods, whether images of Yahweh or images of
strange gods, are not compatible with the God who rules in heaven.
The law of the altar (20.24-26), which immediately follows, stands,
remarkably, before the superscription 21.1 which, as no further
superscriptions follow in the Book of the Covenant, may once have
introduced the whole law book, even if it originally belonged perhaps
only to one subsection of the book. The law of the altar may therefore
have been put at the beginning of the book at a later date. In fact it
would best fit in with the cultic regulations of the Book of the
Covenant in 23.10-19. But as there is no clear reason why it should
subsequently have changed its place we must suppose that in it we
have a subsequent literary addition which appeared so important
that it was placed at the high point of the book. The law itself is of
course old, as it presupposes very simple conditions. An altar of piled-
up earth is normally used for all sacrifices (v. 24a); alongside it an
altar erected of stones is permitted, but the stones must remain
unworked, as working with human tools would do away with their
original condition and integrity and hence their requisite holiness
(v. 25). These ordinances seem to presuppose a country without hills,
as in such a country natural blocks of stone would form the principal
altars (cf. Judg. 6.20f.; 13.19). Of course they do not havein mind a
region of wilderness or steppe, as the word ‘earth’ (v. 24) describes
the cultivated soil of an agricultural land. On the other hand, they
do not mean sanctuaries in places with fixed settlements, but altars
erected in free land. We must therefore suppose this ordinance to
originate perhaps from communities of nomadic herdsmen who
during the summer pastured their animals on the plains of the
cultivated land, animals which consisted chiefly of sheep, though
occasionally including a number of oxen (v. 24a). The ordinances
thus presuppose the conditions of the early life of Israel, which of
course had not completely died out. Verse 24b contemplates a
number of holy places. In fact holy places with altars could not be
founded at whatever place men wished, but only where God ‘caused
his name to be remembered’, i.e. to be called upon in the cult; this
could perhaps happen through theophanies in visions or dreams. But
then God will ‘come’ again to cultic actions at these places, and pour
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 1g
out his blessing, which is the aim of the cultic act. The prohibition of
altar steps (v. 26) which would form part of the altar rests on the
idea that the sexual sphere is part of a dark, mysterious realm, a
realm which played an elevated role in many cults in the ancient
East. For this very reason, however, it was impossible for it to be
associated with the sphere of the holy in Israel (there is a later
regulation of a different kind on the same subject in 28.42 f.).
[21.1—11] The law for slaves in 21.1-11 is an example of a detailed
casuistic judgment. Two main cases are provided for, each introduced
by ‘when’ (Hebrew ki), first that of a male slave (v. 2) and secondly
that of a female slave (v. 7). In both sections regulations are then
made for special circumstances, each beginning with ‘if? (Hebrew
1m). It is said of the male slave that he must be released after six
years (v. 2); of the female slave, on the other hand, that she shall not
be released (v. 7). This distinction, later abolished by the Deutero-
nomic law (Deut. 15.12 ff.), may rest on the view that only the man
is a person, while the woman on the other hand is a possession. In
fact the latter of these two basic vases appears already to be contra-
dicted in the special regulations of the Book of the Covenant (vv.
8-11). In the main judgment about male slaves (v. 2) two technical
terms appear which derive from the ancient legal language of Asia
Minor and are frequently in evidence especially in Mesopotamia and
in Syria-Palestine; their exact meaning, however, is hard to discover.
First of all we have the term ‘bri (“‘Hebrew’, ‘Hebraic’; cf. pp. a1 f.
above). It is certain that this term does not describe membership of a
particular people, but a legal and social status within the framework
of ‘class’ ordering of ancient oriental community life in the second
millennium Bc. The ‘Hebrews’ were people of different nationality
who belonged to the under-privileged or even unprivileged classes
and who undertook, indeed had to undertake, subordinate service,
though this was not, as far as we can see, actual slavery. The de-
scription ‘Hebrew slave’ is certainly meant proleptically in so far as
a ‘Hebrew’ became a slave by being ‘bought’ by an Israelite. The
basis of this ‘purchase’ may primarily have been that such a ‘Hebrew’
was compelled to ‘sell’ himself through financial necessity. In any
case this does not concern prisoners of war, who were customarily
sold into permanent slavery, and whose descendants then were the
‘house-born’ slaves (e.g. Gen. 14.14) who remained the permanent
possession of their lord. The other problematical term is hopSt
(‘freed’). This likewise describes a legal and social status which
178 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

cannot be defined with certainty; in the Old Testament it is used for

one who has been freed from an obligation but in this has apparently
still not reached the full rights of the free man. Now according to
Old Testament law the ‘Hebrew’ slave is only to a limited extent
treated as a thing, in so far as his time of slavery has bounds set to it
without any redemption being necessary (v. 2). The seventh year
here appears as the time for his ‘restitution’ (cf. pp. 189 f. below on
23.10 f.). The special regulations in vv. 3-6 stipulate that if the
‘Hebrew’ on his entry into slavery was the ‘possessor’ of a wife he also
remains the possessor of this wife at his release, but if the master gives
a wife to the slave during the period of slavery—this may primarily
be the case of a female slave ‘born in the house’—the wife, along
with the children born to them in the meanwhile, remains the
possession of the master at the release of the slave. It is in this case
striking that the children follow the mother and not the father; in
this regulation the interest of the owner—without reference to the
marriage law which is valid in the case of the free Israelite—is carried
through at the expense of the slave. Verses 5 f. provide for the case
when the slave does not wish to make any use of his claim to release;
perhaps he ‘loves his master’ because his master has treated him well,
and because he has fared better in this way than he could possibly
expect to fare after his release with no means of subsistence (the
Deuteronomic law attempts to solve the latter problem through a
special regulation, Deut. 15.14); perhaps too he loves his wife and
children who, according to v. 4, belong to his master. In this case his
right of release is lost once and for all and he occupies the position
of a slave for life. This is confirmed by boring through an ear (this
may mean the lobe of the ear, presumably the right) ; the pierced ear
is the sign of slavery, perhaps because the ear is the organ of hearing
and the piercing of it was understood as a removal of its integrity and
thus the original freedom of hearing. The ear is bored through after
the slave has been ‘brought to God’, ‘to the door’ of the house. These
two formulae look like variants and in any case mean the same
thing, for ‘God’ in this evidently very old regulation means a domes-
tic deity who had his place at the door. Thus permanent slavery is
given a cultic seal, and the permanent slave is also drawn into the
cult community of the house.
The section about the female slave (vv. 7-11) has in mind a girl
‘sold’ by her father. Such a transaction would as a rule be for business
reasons. Evidently conditions within Israel are envisaged and in any
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 179
case not the enslaving of women and girls from areas sacked in war.
In normal cases no release is provided for female slaves (v. 7).
Verses 8-11 contain special regulations if the girl in question is to be
given in marriage, for in that case she may no longer be treated
simply as a female slave, i.e. as a ‘thing’, but acquires—at least to a
certain extent—the rights of a wife. This is the case whether the
master himself takes the female slave to wife or whether he gives her
as a wife to one of his sons (v. 9; the former instance is not explicitly
mentioned). If the master should then grow weary of her he cannot
just simply reduce her to her former slavery, nor may he sell her to a
foreigner but must give her up for redemption (by her family or clan,
v. 8). If he takes yet another wife he may not lessen the claims which
his former wife has on him; if he does he must set her free without
recompense (vv. 10 f.).
The Old Testament law, as that of the whole ancient and oriental
world, supposes the presence of the institution of slavery even within
Israel. This basic view may only have arisen with the transition to a
settled life in an agricultural setting. The treatment of male and
female slaves as ‘things’ possessed is already limited in some aspects
in the slave law of the Book of the Covenant.
[21.1217] 21.12-17 contains a list of offences punishable by death in
a stereotyped form which also occurs elsewhere in Old Testament
law. Sometimes a sentence occurs in which the predicate standing at
the end runs mét yimdat (‘shall be put to death’). The participial
subject, to which a number of closer definitions may be added if
necessary, describes the way in which the law is broken. The result is
a compromise between apodeictic and casuistic formulation. The
brevity and absolute nature of these sentences stands close to the
apodeictic formulation; the explicit and emphatic description of the
legal consequences (the condemnation to death) is reminiscent of the
casuistic formulation. In contrast to the casuistic law, however, in the
present instance we evidently have here not a codified common law
but a collection of a series of pregnant judgments which on certain
cultic occasions were proclaimed as the will of God. In content, they
deal with fundamental attacks on the common life of family and
people as ordered according to the will of God. The offences carrying
the death penalty in the present section are the striking of a ‘man’
(v. 12; cf. 20.13—it is here assumed that in practice acts of this kind
only occur among men; the murder of a woman would not go
unpunished), the ‘striking’ (v. 15) and cursing (v. 17) of parents (by
180 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

which is meant even a ‘striking’ which does not result in death—a

different expression is used in v. 12—and a curse as being potentially
of harmful effect), and finally the ‘stealing’ of aman (v. 16; cf. 20.15).
The last-named regulation further contains a special clause which
appears superfluous for the actual case and represents an exposition
in the ‘casuistic’? manner. It is not certain how we are to interpret it.
The RSV translation reproduces the probable meaning, according
to which the case is to be treated in the same way whether the ‘stolen’
man has already been sold as a slave or whether he is still in the
possession of the offender. According to another possible interpreta-
tion, the clause may mean that the proceeds of the sale of the ‘stolen’
man in the hands of the offender count as evidence. The excursuses
to the ‘offences punishable by death’ in the case of killing (vv. 13 f.)
are clearly secondary additions which were perhaps inserted only
after the compilation of the Book of the Covenant. They make the
distinction, not envisaged in the main clause v. 12, between uninten-
tional killing and premeditated murder. The additions, though not
consistent, are formulated in a casuistic way. This is in any case so
with the protases (vv. 13a, 14a). Unpremeditated killing is first
defined negatively in v. 13a as the lack of evil intent and then de-
scribed positively as an inexplicable act of providence which must
be seen where the actions of men are no longer rational. The apodoses
(vv. 13b, 14b) with God in the first person and an address directed to
Israel again diverge from the casuistic style. They provide places of
refuge for the killer in which the blood vengeance may not reach him.
The altars of Yahweh (v. 14b) are such places of refuge (cf. I Kings
1.51; 2.28) in which Yahweh himself protects the killer. Of course the
murderer is to be denied the protection of the altar (v. 14b). Now for
this regulation to be put in practice it is supposed that the question of
the intent or otherwise of the killing has already been determined,
but in what way this question is to be decided is not discussed here
(cf. on this the later but still brief Deuteronomic explanations in
Deut. 19.4 ff., 11 ff, and especially the still later explicit discussions
in Num. 35.9-34).
[21.18-36] This section examines cases of bodily injury which do or
do not result in death. Most of it is written in the casuistic style. By
and large the chief point in the treatment of cases of bodily injury is
the assessment of compensation for the damage that has been
inflicted. This is immediately clear in the case which is provided for
in v. 18 of a hand-to-hand fight between two men in which one of
20.22—23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 181
them is seriously injured. It is not at all obvious whether the action of
the offender in using ‘a stone or his fist’ is relevant to the judgment
in appearing to prove the presence of an evil intent. If death were to
follow it would be a case of murder; if the injured party remains alive
no punishment is inflicted, as is expressly remarked. Only the damage
that has arisen is to be assessed; this damage consists in the time
during which the injured man is unfit for work and the cost of having
him healed. How defective the casuistic law must necessarily be, as it
cannot envisage all possibilities, is clear from the fact that the possi-
bility of a permanent illness is not taken into consideration. The
regulation given in vy. 20 f. in the case of a man ‘striking’ a male or
female slave with his rod, especially if this ‘striking’ leads to death, is
quite remarkable. Should death follow immediately, ‘punishment? is
to be inflicted; if on the other hand death follows only after a day or
two, no punishment is provided for on the ground that the man has
destroyed his own possession and thus has injured himself. The
distinction between intentional and unintentional killing probably
underlies this very different treatment. In the former case the slave is
treated not as a possession, but as a man. The formulation of the
clause 20b is very striking, as it does not lay down a definite punish-
ment as is usual in casuistic law but appears to lay down a quite
general requirement of ‘punishment’. The word used for ‘punish-
ment’ however means blood-vengeance and thus the death of the
killer. It is not said who is to carry out this blood vengeance in the
case of a slave, vengeance which is the duty of the clan of the man
who has been killed. Perhaps blood vengeance, which begins auto-
matically and is therefore not demanded by law, is here required
because it is to be executed for the slave by the legal assembly. The
case provided for in v. 22, which presupposes the not unusual
occurrence of a fight with fists with a circle of people standing round,
is again ruled as a punishment by reparation. The fixing of the
amount of the recompense for the child lost is left to the husband of
the woman concerned. The wording and meaning of the final clause
of v. 22 is most obscure. The translation of the transmitted text runs
‘and he shall pay (it) before the arbitrators’, but there is doubt
whether this text is original. It may perhaps mean that the ‘arbitra-
tors’ are to superintend the payment of the recompense to the amount
required by the husband of the injured woman.* To the word
*[ As can be seen by Noth’s comments above, the RSV translation is somewhat
free, perhaps resting on the emendation of the initial 6 of the last word to a k. Tr.]
182 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

‘harm’, which occurs in v. 22, the lex talionis is loosely attached in

vv. 23-25. This evidently does not specially belong to the case at law
under discussion, but, according to the introduction in v. 23a, is to be
of general validity in cases of ‘harm’, particularly bodily harm. In
form it perhaps derives ultimately from cultic language and there
served to describe the appropriateness of cultic penalties of repara-
tion.* In the Book of the Covenant it is used to formulate the basis
of the appropriate ‘recompense’ for the decision of the judges. This
basis is thus in no way valid for the personal relationship of man to
man but solely for the judgment of the legal assembly in cases of
bodily harm. Of course in the lex talionis we have a basic law which
has been handed down from extreme antiquity. For its wording must
originally have meant that the offender should be punished in
exactly the same way as he had caused bodily harm to another. In
that case the punishment is considered not from the view-point of
reparation, i.e. making good, but of retribution. This is not generally
the case in the casuistic law in the Book of the Covenant, and we
must therefore ask whether this basis for retribution which has been
incorporated into the Book of the Covenant has, in the legal practice
generally presupposed in the Book of the Covenant, been still applied
in its proper sense, or whether the bodily punishment incurred could
not be replaced by some sort of reparation. Reparation is in any case
provided for in the case of bodily harm to a male or female slave
discussed in vv. 26 f., as the demand for release in practice represents
a payment of the purchase price of a slave. Verses 28-32 deal with
the killing of a man by an ox who gores. In this event the ox must in
any case be stoned. The stoning represents the execution of the death
penalty by the community and the solemn exclusion from the com-
munity of one who has ranged himself against it. By killing a man the
ox in effect commits an offence against the community and is
appropriately punished without the question of responsibility being
raised, as by his action he has become taboo and therefore may not
be used for food. The question of responsibility is raised only in
respect of the owner of the ox. He is punished as a deliberate mur-
derer only if he is responsible through his knowledge of the dangerous
character of the ox (v. 29; cf. on the other hand v. 28) ; though in this
case it is left possible for the legal assembly to decide that he must pay
a ransom for the life which he has forfeited (v. 30). In this section
slaves are only valued as property possessed, so that only the usual
*Cf. A. Alt, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel 1, pp. 341 ff.
20.22—23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 183
purchase price of a slave is to be paid to his owner (v. 32); in this
verse the responsibility of the owner of the ox is still presupposed
according to v. 29. Under the catchword ‘ox’ there is loosely attached
in vv. 33 f. the case of an ox or an ass falling into a pit which has
carelessly been left open. In this event the owner of the pit must pay
for any damage that may arise, as he has incurred guilt through his
own carelessness. If an ox is killed by another ox who gores it, the
responsibility is again decided as in vv. 28 f. (vv. 35 f.). In this way
it is determined in what way the damage which has been caused is
to be repaired.
[22.1=17] This section deals with cases of damage to property; not
exhaustively, but by means of instances which probably arose fre-
quently. This would certainly be the case with cattle stealing, which
is discussed in 22.14. As there is always an evil intent in stealing not
only must the reparation for what has been stolen be considered, but
also a punishment, which consists in the repayment of a number of
times the value of the stolen property. From the amount of the fine
imposed in 22.1b it is evident that the theft of an ox was considered
to be more serious than the theft of a sheep. It is regarded as particu-
larly incriminating if the thief slaughters or sells the stolen animal as
quickly as possible, as this betrays a systematic evil intent. If this does
not happen, and the stolen object is still in the possession of the thief
when it is found (22.4), the punishment is milder. The list of animals
in 22.4 in which the ass is inserted alongside the ox and the sheep is
perhaps an addition which commended itself once the special
regulation in 22.2-3a had been added. This now separates the
clauses 22.1 and 4 which in fact belong together* and refer to any
kind of theft, not merely the theft of cattle. The killing of a thief
surprised in the darkness by night does not bring with it bloodguilt
which could give rise to blood vengeance, because not only can no
intent to kill be established in those circumstances, but the person
involved may be deemed to have acted in justifiable necessity, as he
could not be sure of the intention of the thief (22.2). This does not,
however, apply in broad daylight as even the life of a thief is pro-
tected by blood vengeance (22.3a). 22.3b may also be an addition to
22.1 or 22.4; if the thief is unable to pay the fine imposed upon him
he must be sold as a slave and thus meet the sum required with his
own person. The ruling in v. 5 is not easy to interpret, as the verb
translated in RSV ‘to graze over’ (6‘r) has several meanings and
*[The RSV prints vv. 1, 4, 2, 3 in that order. Tr.]
184 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

mostly means to ‘consume by fire’;indeed it occurs with this meaning

in the verse immediately following. The wording which has been
handed down supports the idea that here it means to ‘graze over’, to
‘sraze off’. It is not said in what way anyone can have his own field
or his vineyard grazed upon by his beasts (oxen or sheep). In any
case he must be responsible for the damage which arises if he does not
supervise his beasts properly and they therefore stray and graze on
the field of a neighbour. The same is the case, according to v. 6, if
anyone causes damage by fire, as for example when a fire lit for
baking bread or for any other usual purpose catches hold of heaps of
thorns and from there spreads to a neighbour’s field. 22.7-13 is
concerned with goods which have been delivered for safe-keeping and
are then lost or stolen. If valuables given for safe-keeping are stolen,
then the thief, if he is found, is punished (v. 7). If, however, he is not
found, the owner of the house cannot prove beyond all objection that
he has not misappropriated the deposited goods and that they have
been stolen from him (this last is not expressly said but is pre-
supposed) and must therefore confirm his attestation through an oath
(v. 8). This oath is to be made ‘before God’, i.e. in the (local)
sanctuary, and affirms that the self-cursing in which the oath con-
sists will take effect if the person who makes it is guilty. Thus what
can no longer be determined by human means is handed over to
God for a decision, as the work of the curse which follows from the
oath is in his hands. The same thing is said once again quite generally
in v. 9, in a statement which is not formulated as a legal judgment
but as an axiom and which refers not merely to entrusted goods but
to property disputes in general. It occurs in a very old formulation
which is evidently taken over from pre-Israelite times, as is clear from
the fact that ‘gods’ are mentioned in the plural.* It is supposed that
someone finds in the possession of another something which he
assumes to be his own property, but that the other disputes this. In
contrast to v. 8, the punishment is not left to the working of an oath,
but the question of guilt is determined by a ‘divine judgment’ so that
in the appropriate case the fine provided for in the last words of the
verse may be inflicted by the legal assembly. It is not said in what
way the ‘divine judgment’ is to be obtained. Verses 9-12 deal with
the keeping of beasts delivered for safety. If for any reason such a
*[In the Hebrew of the phrase rendered in the RSV as ‘he whom God shall
condemn’, the word for ‘God’ (’«lohim), which of course always has a plural form,
also takes a plural verb. Hence ‘gods’ is the accurate rendering. Tr.]
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 185
beast should be lost without the person who has had it in his care
being able to prove his innocence, the matter is once again as in v. 8
left to an oath. At this point the Old Testament divine name is
mentioned (‘an oath by Yahweh’), so we may suppose that this
section about beasts delivered for safe keeping is a special Israelite
extension of the law of deposit which was important for the Israelites,
strongly interested in domestic animals even in an agricultural
setting. The oath renders unnecessary any further action on the part
of the legal assembly, as is expressly stated in v. rrb. In wv. 12 f. it is
presumed that, the loss explained, there is no need for an oath. If the
beast entrusted for safe keeping has demonstrably been stolen, there
is nevertheless negligence on the part of its keeper, who, while not
being punished, must make restitution (v. 12). Ifit has been torn by
a wild beast no guilt is incurred so long as the keeper can produce the
savaged beast as evidence (v. 13). Verses 14 f. discuss the hiring of
beasts which must be primarily thought of as working beasts (ox or
ass). If the hired beast is lost or comes to grief, a replacement must be
provided so long as the owner of the beast was not himself present at
the mishap; in that case he could and should have ensured the safety
of his beast (vv. 14, 15a). If a hired man is lent a beast by his em-
ployer (for his work) and then_loses it, the necessary recompense must
be set against his wages.* Among damage to property there is finally
included the ravishing of a virgin who is not yet betrothed and is still
in the possession of her father (vv. 16 f.). The offender must in any
case pay the usual bride price to her father, whether the latter is
prepared to give the girl to him as his wife (v. 16) or whether he
refuses (v. 17), as is his right in this case, as no betrothal ceremony
has yet taken place.
[22.18=31] 22.18 marks the beginning of quite a long sequence of
apodeictic law which is often interrupted by explanations made in
another form. The very first of the sentences (v. 18) has a charac-
teristic form, which then recurs frequently, with the object placed
first and the formulation of the commandment following. For the
belief of the Old Testament, sorcery means trafficking with strange
divine powers or those hostile to God. The prohibition supposes
that it is a feminine practice (cf. I Sam. 28.7 ff.; Ezek. 13.18 ff.).
The negative formulation as a prohibition is characteristic, and is
*[Noth translates a somewhat laconic Hebrew text in a different way from the
RSV, referring the ‘hiring’ to a man and not to the beast. He would translate: ‘If
(the man) is a hired man (the damage) is charged to his hire.’ Tr.]
186 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

preferred even when as in the present instance a positive formulation

would have been more appropriate. In v. 19 follows an isolated mét
ytmat clause (cf. p. 179 above on 21.12) which deals with bestiality.
Verse 20 is similar to it in form and indeed may be based on an
original mét_yiimdt clause which was subsequently distorted: ‘Who-
ever sacrifices to other gods shall be put to death (the word for ‘other’,
’hrm, could easily have been wrongly written as _yfrm ‘he shall be
utterly destroyed’). The ‘utter destruction’ of the present text (lit.
‘put to the ban’) represents exclusion from the community and thus
in practice results in death; ‘to any god’ means strange gods as is
expressly stated in the gloss which follows—the phrase would
originally have been self-explanatory. From v. 21 onwards, apodeic-
tic clauses follow which aim to protect those who are under-
privileged in law, work and society (personae miserabiles). The
‘stranger’ (gér) is one who lives outside his family and his tribe and
entrusts himself to the protection of an individual or a community.
As he is in this situation without his own portion of land and his own
legal representation, it is directed that he should be shown the
customary laws of hospitality and not be ‘wronged’, a phrase which
refers principally to exploitation in work. The second verb in v. 21a
is already presumably a secondary addition; this is all the more so in
the case of the reason given in v. 21b, which goes over to a plural
address.* According to v. 22, even widow and orphan enjoy the
protection of apodeictic law, as they lack the legal protection of
husband and father and are therefore liable to ‘affliction’, as for
example the brutal exploitation of their capacity for work. The plural
address in v. 22 may not be original; it may perhaps have been
occasioned by the presence of v. 21b. The statements in vv. 23 f.,
which again represent subsequent expansions, emphatically promise
divine assistance to widows and orphans; God will hear the cry of
widow and orphan, i.e. the cry for help of those who are unjustly
oppressed, and will relentlessly punish the evil-doer in accordance
with the maxim of the /ex talionis (v. 23a is a protasis formulated in
the singular, to which the relevant apodosis has been lost; the
sentence construction of vv. 23b, 24 is again striking because of its
plural address). In vv. 25-27 there are apodeictic clauses expanded
by being preceded by a conditional clause and thus secondarily being
made into the form of casuistic law. Verse 25 deals with lending
money. Usury is forbidden; this is probably what is meant by being
*[This is again indistinguishable in English. Tr.]
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 187
‘a creditor’ as the gloss v. 25b written in the plural explains in detail.
The practice of charging interest which was usual in trading and
commerce throughout the ancient East is not allowed in dealing
with anyone who is ‘poor’(cf. Lev. 25.36-38; Deut. 23.20 f.); he
borrows money for pressing needs, not to finance himself in com-
mercial undertakings (Deut. 23.21 allows the charging of interest to
foreigners). So a rule of life is put forward and affirmed for Israel,
who is and is to remain separate from the urban character of the
settled lands of the ancient East with their life of business and trade.
Limits are also set to the taking of a pledge against a neighbour
(vv. 26 f.). Once again a poor man is considered who can only give
his ‘garment’, i.e. his long overcoat, as pledge for a loan; this he
needs urgently, at least at night, because he has nothing else to serve
him as an underlay and a covering when he goes to sleep. His coat is
therefore to be restored to him before the sun goes down, in which
case of course the use of the coat as a pledge is completely illusory.
The explanatory, emphatic remarks in v. 27 may be later ex-
pansions.
In v. 28 the juxtaposition of ‘God’ and ndsi’ is noteworthy. No
difference in content can be established between the two words
which are translated ‘revile’ and ‘curse’ (cf. Gen. 12.3) ;we may have
here merely a change of expression. The outrage of cursing God (cf.
Lev. 24.15 and Job 2.9 [with a euphemistic alteration of ‘curse’ into
‘bless’]) has beside it the cursing of a nasi’. The word ndasi’, which
here as elsewhere is translated ‘ruler’, is used later in the Old Testa-
ment, particularly in Ezekiel, as a term for one who bears rule. But
this is evidently a secondary usage, for which there are special
reasons. True, we read in I Kings 21.10; ‘You have cursed (lit.
blessed) God and the king.’ But in the passage with which we are
concerned the word for king does not occur, and there is certainly no
thought of the king here. The word nds?’ will therefore have a special
meaning of its own and appears with this meaning among other
places in Num. 1.16 (as in countless other P passages, e.g. Ex. 16.22).
Although we are in this way dealing with a relatively late tradition,
the word ndsi’ nevertheless appears in a particular concrete signi-
ficance, as is evidently presupposed in Ex. 22.28. We may therefore
apply the late tradition to explain this already old term. According
to this the nasi’ is the representative of the twelve tribes on the
occasions when all Israel is gathered together (in 16.22 above the
word has been translated ‘leader’-—the word ‘spokesman’ might be
188 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

clearer). The apodeictic clause 22.28 may therefore have its founda-
tion in the existence of the old Israelite association of twelve tribes in
the time before the monarchy. The importance of its institutions,
among which the office of ndsi’ belongs, in the setting of the Old
Testament relationship between Israel and God, is clear from the fact
that God and the nds?’ stand parallel alongside each other.
In vv. 29 f. the usual cultic offerings are required; v. 29a appa-
rently covers the offering of the produce of the land; in view of
Num. 18.27; Deut. 22.9, the word ‘fulness’ refers specially to wine,
while the word ‘outflow’, which occurs only here, perhaps refers to
oil. Only the general demand is made, no exact details about the
amount of the offerings are given (cf. in contrast Deut. 14.22; 26.12
etc.). Even the demand for the offering of all first-born is only
formulated as an axiom in vv. 29b, 30a, without a word as to whether
the offering, i.e. the sacrifice, of human first-born is really to be
practised or whether it is not rather to be replaced by a vicarious
offering (cf. pp. tor f. above on 13.1 f., 11 ff.). Verse 31 contains a
plural address and is therefore certainly secondary; it forbids, in view
of the ‘holiness’ of Israel, the eating of the flesh of animals which
might in themselves be eaten but which have been torn by wild
beasts (the mere idea of ‘holiness’, put forward as a reason for the
requirement, suggests a later style of law). The reason for this
requirement, with which Lev. 7.24 and 17.15 (with a divergent
special regulation) are to be compared, is that a savaged beast has
not been slaughtered in the requisite sacral manner, which is the
necessary basis for all permitted eating of flesh.
[23-1-9] Here there are apodeictic regulations for the conduct of
cases at law. They do not represent a ‘model for judges’ in the sense
that they apply to a professional judge, as there was no such person in
ancient Israel (the ‘judges’ of Judg. 10.1-5; 12.7-15 were hardly
concerned with practical justice); they are rather directed towards
all free Israelites who had to discuss and decide together in the local
legal assembly. ‘The principal aim of these requirements is to protect
the poor and the weak against a partisan judgment in favour of the
rich and the powerful; thus they already presuppose the presence of
such distinctions in business and society. Verse 1 first of all makes a
general prohibition of flippant and partisan statements in the legal
assembly, and similarly v. 7 contains a warning against a ‘false
charge’ or a ‘false action’ and forbids unjust judgments; here the
terms saddiq (the one who is in the right) and rasa‘ (the one who is in
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 189
the wrong) are contrasted, the one with the other. This contrast
would be still clearer if the last clause in v. 7 had originally read ‘and
do not acquit the wicked’, which would require the assumption of
only a very small error in the transmitted text. Moreover, it is
emphatically forbidden to exert influence in dishonest ways on
statements and judgments made in the legal assembly, whether
through bribery (v. 8), through a man’s power and prestige (v. 3),* in
which case few men of power and reputation would not succeed in
their suits (v. 6), or through the opinion of the ‘multitude’ in the
legal assembly, who because of error or malicious intent could ‘do
evil’ (v. 2). Finally in v. 9 also in this context the ‘stranger’ (gér) is
given express consideration; he must not be ‘oppressed’, i.e. deprived
of his rights, even if he himself plays no part in the legal assembly
(the fact that the emphatic clause v. 9b which is added to this
requirement is written in the plural shows that it is an obvious
addition). The requirements of vv. 3 and 6, which correspond with
each other in content, are now separated by the regulations of vv. 4 f.,
which are introduced by an ‘if’ clause (cf. p. 186 above on 22.25 f.)
and which deal not with conduct in the legal assembly but with
extra-legal conduct towards an ‘enemy’ or ‘one who hates you’. This
‘enemy’ ‘who hates you’ apparently means a man with whom one
is having or has had a dispute at law or with whom perhaps a dispute
at law is now for the first time imminent, and for this reason these
clauses have been inserted in the present context. It is axiomatic that
a man should not act towards such an adversary in everyday life in
any other way than he would normally act towards his ‘neighbour’,
to whom it is supposed that he would usually accord the assistance
which is mentioned in vv. 4. f. (what is here only presumed is
expressly required in Deut. 22.1-4).
[23.10-13] The regulations about the sabbath year and the sabbath
day (vv. 10-13) bring the Book of the Covenant into the sacral sphere,
for even if the reasons for these ordinances as given in the Book of the
Covenant appear to be of a predominantly social nature, there
doubtless stands behind them the thought of a ‘return to the original
state’, a restitutio in integrum which is to be effected at certain intervals,
as is clearly recognizable in the year of jubilee (the sabbath year of
the sabbath year) of Lev. 25. It is expressly enjoined that in the
sabbath year the produce of the earth is not to be gathered (vv. 10 f.),
*[Reading ‘powerful’ for ‘poor’, in accordance with the emendation suggested
in Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica. Tr.]
E.—G
190 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

and this means at the same time that the cultivation of the land
is to lapse during this year. What grows of its own accord is to
be allowed to the ‘poor’, i.e. in this context particularly those who
have no land of their own; what is left by them is to be left for the
‘beasts of the field’, i.e. those animals which are not domesticated
(cf. RSV ‘wild’). Thus its original ‘rest’ is to be given back to the land,
undisturbed by the hand of man (cf. Lev. 25.4). To let the land lie
fallow from time to time is hardly thought of as having the practical
use of preserving or increasing the productivity. Nothing is said as to
whether the sabbath year is to be observed simultaneously through-
out the land or whether it is to be observed for each piece of land in
rotation. We only hear briefly of the practical enforcement of the
sabbath year in the Old Testament in Neh. 10.31 (but cf. also
I Macc. 6.49, 53). The association of sabbath day and sabbath year
which occurs in this way only here in the Old Testament suggests
that there was also a similar basis to the former. True, in v. 12b the
reason for refraining from work on every seventh day is said to be
consideration for the beasts of burden and all dependent working
men, among whom in a surprising way ‘the alien’ as well as the slave
is included. But there is still the question whether this exhausts all
the reasons for the injunction, or whether the essential point here is
not rather of rest in general in the sense of a return to something
original. Hence we could also understand that express concern is
taken for animals on the sabbath day and in the sabbath year, not
because they were the object of a love which we can hardly pre-
suppose in the ancient world, but because they are an integral part
of the creation which from time to time is to return to its ‘rest’. Verse
13 with its plural address (apart from the last clause) and with its
general warning to observe the divine ordinances and its general
prohibition of ‘other gods’ is a later addition.
[23-14-19] Special cultic regulations follow in vv. 14-19, formulated
in the apodeictic style, like the regulations about the sabbath year
and the sabbath day. First of all a thrice yearly ‘pilgrimage’, i.e. an
assembly of all males (cf. v. 17) at the local sanctuaries of the land,
is enjoined for the three feasts which are enumerated in what
follows. These feasts are to Yahweh, as is explicitly said. The three
feasts derive from the tradition of the cultivated land and are
extremely closely connected with the life of an agricultural com-
munity and the cycle of nature. This emerges clearly from the
description of them. They were thus only taken over by Israel after
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 1g!
the settlement and were now to be celebrated ‘to Yahweh’, who for
Israel is the sole Lord of the land and of its blessing. In the Book of
the Covenant the three feasts are described with their original, or at
least with what are to us the oldest still extant, names as the feast of
unleavened bread, the feast of harvest and the feast of ingathering.
The feast of unleavened bread (v. 15), alongside which there is still
no mention of the Passover sacrifice which was later associated with
it, is the feast of the beginning of the corn harvest in the spring. At
this feast, for seven days, i.e. for a period which is governed by the
recurrence of the sabbath day (see above), bread made from the first
produce of the new crop is to be eaten in its original state, untouched
by leaven. The subordinate clauses in v. 15, which make the regula-
tions about the feast of unleavened bread far longer than the brief
regulations about the two other feasts, are certainly later additions.
The second of these subordinate clauses gives the feast of unleavened
bread a ‘historical’ reference and reason; it is in accordance with the
‘historicization’ of the agricultural feasts which was in time carried
out in Israel, but was probably still lacking in the original form of the
Book of the Covenant. Perhaps all that is original is the detail about
the fixed time, the ‘month of gleaning’ (March/April). The final
clause of v. 15, which requires that no one is to come to the sanctuary
without an offering, has a disruptive effect on the enumeration of the
feasts, and is either an addition (perhaps after 34.20bd) or has
subsequently been put in the wrong place by mistake (it would be
in place after v. 17). The feast of harvest (v. 16a) would certainly
take place at the end of the corn harvest. “The first fruits of your
labour’ means either the whole of the corn harvest as the first gift
which the cultivated land provides in the year or alternatively an
offering of the first-fruits of the grain which is preserved and brought
to the sanctuary at the end of the harvest. The feast of ingathering
(v. 16b) refers to the gathering of fruits from the plants (especially
olives and grapes) ; it takes place in the autumn and therefore at the
turn of the year according to the old system of the autumn new year.
Verse 17 once again requires that all males shall appear three times a
year at the sanctuary; it makes no reference to the three feasts
mentioned above. It is however quite possible that these feasts are
meant as the chief occasions of a general visit to the sanctuary, and it
is here merely added that at those times ‘all males’ shall appear at
the sanctuary. Of course the wording only prescribes a yearly
minimum of visits to the sanctuary for each man, whether at feast
192 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

times or on other occasions. For the visit to the sanctuary the

evidently derived, stereotyped expression ‘see the face of God
(Yahweh)’* is used (cf. also v. 15b). It was at one time originally
meant literally with reference to an image of the god in the sanctuary.
In Israel it has been taken over without prejudice and with no
respect to its original meaning (cf. also 20.4); the Massoretic text has
in fact subsequently altered it slightly because the wording was
objectionable to Israel. A number of individual cultic instructions
follow in vv. 18 f. (in essentials identical with 34.25 f.). The formula-
tion of v. 18a is striking and not fully comprehensible; in its forced
brevity it perhaps means that leavened bread may not be eaten at a
sacrificial meal because the leaven destroys the original character of
the dough (in other kinds of sacrifices leavened bread is not merely
allowed but enjoined according to Lev. 7.13; 23.17; cf. also Amos
4.5). According to v. 18b the fat of the ‘festal sacrifice’ is to be offered
complete (for burning) on the feast day itself; ifit were left over until
the next day, which is evidently no longer counted as a feast day, it
would become deconsecrated. The requirement to offer the best of
the produce of the land at the sanctuaries (v. 19a)—the singular
‘house of Yahweh’ means the sanctuary belonging to the settlement
in question—refers to the arable ground; cf. 22.28a, where especially
wine and oil appear to be meant. Verse 19b presumably forbids a
practice usual in foreign cults. In the section 23.14-19 the unmoti-
vated change between the appearance of Yahweh in the first person
(vv. 14, 15, 18) and in the third person (vv. 17, Iga) is striking; we
evidently have a collection of individual groups of cultic regulations,
already shaped, whose special derivation remains unknown to us.
The addition 23.20-33, which is hardly all one piece, but appears
gradually to have grown to the form in which it has been trans-
mitted, bears a generally deuteronomistic stamp in style and content.
It refers the Book of the Covenant to the impending conquest and
thus has it given to Israel at Sinai. It deals with guidance for Israel
on the way which now lies before them into the Promised Land and
with the future behaviour of Israel towards the previous inhabitants
of the land. No less than three times is it said that Yahweh will send
someone before Israel; a ‘messenger’ (‘angel’, v. 20) to protect Israel
on the way and to lead them to their goal, his ‘terror’, which will
throw the inhabitants of the promised land into a confused panic and
*[The RSV translates the Hebrew expression as ‘appear before’; this follows
the Massoretic pointing of niphal for gal, cf. below; cf. also Isa. 12.1. Tr.]
20.22-23.33] THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 193
put them to flight (v. 27), and ‘hornets’, which will drive out the
inhabitants of the land (v. 28). The ‘angel’ is the ambassador of
Yahweh (cf. ‘my angel’, v. 23) who represents Yahweh himself and
in whom Yahweh himself is present; the latter is expressed in v. 21
by saying that the ‘name’ of Yahweh is present in the ‘angel’ as the
name represents the one who bears it. Therefore Israel must behave
towards the angel as though he were Yahweh himself (v. 21; the first
clause in v. 21b is noteworthy because of its plural address). If Israel
behaves in this way Yahweh himself (in the person of his angel) will
fight for Israel (v. 22) and bring them into the land whose mixture of
inhabitants are described with the usual series of peoples’ names
(v. 23). According to wv. 27 f. the ‘terror’ and the ‘hornet’ (the mean-
ing of this last word is not quite certain) are given by Yahweh to his
people as a means of overcoming the inhabitants of the land. In
contrast to the ‘angel’ who accompanies Israel, this is an idea which
is rooted in the concept of the Holy War, according to which Yahweh
smites his enemies and those of his people by a panic which is caused
in a mysterious way. Once in the land, the conduct of Israel towards
the inhabitants of the land who still remain will be decisive. Only if
Israel keeps well away from the foreign cults of the inhabitants of the
land and destroys their cultic apparatus (v. 24) will it participate in or
remain in possession of the divine blessing which is the basis of its
natural life and gives ‘the number of his days’ to each individual
(vv. 25 f.; this passage is not completely smooth; we find plural
addresses alongside singular and Yahweh both in the third person
and in the first person). Finally in vv. 29-33 the problem of the
groups of old inhabitants still left in the land is raised; this stemmed
from the fact that while the whole of the land was promised to Israel,
in fact these older inhabitants remained in possession of the land or
at least in some parts of it. This problem (on which cf. also Judg.
3.1-6) is here solved by the thought that Yahweh did not want the
land, which at that time Israel could not inhabit fully, to go to waste,
and therefore only allowed the older inhabitants to be driven out
gradually until Israel had so increased that it was able to occupy the
whole land. This of course never happened in history even in
Palestine itself, much less in the substantial part of Syria and the
surrounding territory which is promised to Israel in v.31; the borders
of the territory in v. 31 have in mind the extent of David’s sover-
eignty; the ‘reed sea’ (cf. p. 11 n. above), may here as elsewhere (e.g.
I Kings 9.26) mean the gulf of el-‘agaba, while the word ‘river’, which
194 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

occurs alone in the Hebrew, usually describes the Euphrates in the

Old Testament, as is made clear by the RSV rendering. A further
warning against associating with the earlier inhabitants of the land
and their cults marks the close of the book in vv. 32 f.

3. THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT: 24.1-11

24 1 And he said to Moses, ‘Come up to the Lorp, you and Aaron,

Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and worship afar off.
2 Moses alone shall come near to the Lord; but the others shall not come
near, and the people shall not come up with him.’
3 Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lorp and all the
ordinances; and all the people answered with one voice, and said, ‘All the
words which the Lorp has spoken we will do.’ * And Moses wrote all the
words of the Lorp. And he rose early in the morning, and built an altar at
the foot of the mountain, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes
of Israel. ® And he sent young men of the people of Israel, who offered burnt
offerings and sacrificed peace offerings [of oxen] to the Lorp. * And Moses
took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw
against the altar. * Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the
hearing of the people; and they said, ‘All that the Lorp has spoken we will
do, and we will be obedient.’ § And Moses took the blood and threw it upon the
people, and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lorp has made
with you in accordance with all these words.’
g Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders
of Israel went up, 1° and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under
his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.
11 And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; they
beheld God, and ate and drank.

The theophany on Sinai ends with the solemn making of a cove-

nant between God and the people, which is described in 24.1-11. In
this section two different literary strata may easily be distinguished.
In wy. 1 f. and g-11 the covenant is made on the mountain, in wv. 3-8
on the other hand at the foot of the mountain. Verses 1 f. contain the
introduction to the passage 9-11; these passages, which obviously
belong together, are separated by the narrative vv. 3-8. We are thus
given in this chapter two versions of the account of the making of the
covenant which, while dealing with the same subject, are widely
different in their individual details.
[9-11] According to vv. 9-11 a deputation from Israel ascends the
hill. Apart from Moses, the group consists of Aaron, whose relation-
ship to Moses is not given here (on the question of this relationship
24.1-11] THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT 195
in the old tradition cf. p. 122 above on 15.20), and Nadab and
Abihu, who appear abruptly here without cither an introduction or
any details about their relationship with Aaron or Moses. In the late
source P Nadab and Abihu appear as sons of Aaron (cf. Lev. 10.1 and
the different genealogies, e.g. Ex. 6.23). This late genealogical
arrangement in all probability rests on the juxtaposition of names in
this chapter and not on any old tradition. The abrupt and isolated
appearance in the narrative of Ex. 24, which is in any case old,
suggests that at one time the tradition had more to tell about them
but in the course of the handing down of the tradition their figures
gradually faded. The fact that they appear only in Ex. 24 and in only
one version can hardly be understood otherwise than to mean that
they belonged to an ancient tradition about the making of the
covenant probably along with the seventy elders, whose role as the
representatives of Israel is immediately obvious. If we make a
traditio-historical analysis of the list in v. 9, we may even come to the
conclusion that only the group of seventy unnamed elders belonged to
the first stage (cf. also pp. 54 f. above on 5.3-19) but that, among the
individuals who are named, Nadab and Abihu, who now appear
superfluous alongside Moses and Aaron, in any case represent very
old traditional material which was not completely forced out of this
narrative of the making of the covenant even after Moses and Aaron
had come so much to the forefront in the Sinai narrative, as in the
other narratives of this early period. In v. 10 it is now astonishingly
reported of the deputation of Israelites that they ‘saw the God of
Israel’. True, in what follows only the appearance ‘under his feet’ is
described and it is thus intimated that the deputation did not dare to
raise their eyes to the ‘God of Israel’ himself. But the first expression in
v. 10 isnevertheless there (cf. on the other hand 33.20). The description
of what was ‘under his feet’ certainly indicates the heavens. Sapphire
(if this is a correct rendering of the word sappir) is a sky-blue semi-
precious stone, and a ‘pavement of sapphire stone’ can hardly refer
to anything but a pavement painted and perhaps glazed in a sap-
phire colour, the kind of pavement which was known particularly in
Mesopotamia, and the object so described would at least in respect of
its ‘clearness’ (literally ‘purity’) have been comparable with the ‘very
heaven’. It is thus thought that the summit of the mountain is ‘in
heaven’ and that here ‘in heaven’ the ‘God of Israel’ is present. Verse
11a hints that this meeting was something quite out of the ordinary
by observing that the ‘God of Israel’ did not do any harm to the men
 196 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

who appeared on the mountain, as might have been expected. It was

a unique occurrence that the God who was present on the mountain
allowed the representatives of Israel to come so near. These latter are
here described with a singular and probably old expression as the
‘chief men of the Israelites’; as the application of this description to
Moses and Aaron is most remarkable, we may ask whether in an
older stage of the tradition it did not perhaps refer specially to Nadab
and Abihu (including the seventy elders). The main clause stands at
the end in v. 11b. Once again the men are said to ‘behold God’ and
then in a mysterious way to ‘eat’ and ‘drink’. In this context this can
only refer to a covenant meal which takes place, just as among men
too a common meal can form an effective and valid seal on the
making of a covenant (cf. Gen. 31.46, 54). It is not said and cannot
be said here of course that both partners in the covenant share in the
covenant meal. The fact that God lets the representatives of Israel
hold a meal in his presence on the mountain indicates the making of
the covenant between God and people. The content of this covenant
is now binding on both sides without the need for formulated clauses
which regulate the relationship which is so formed, just as there is no
mention of any such conditions in the present context. As the word
‘God’ is used in the conclusive clause v. 11b (in v. 10 the ‘God of
Israel’) we must assign this narrative version of the making of the
covenant to the E version. In view of the fragmentary remains of this
source it is hard to say just how it is to be fitted into the sequence of
events in E. [1=2] Even the introduction which belongs to it is of no
real help in this, as it obviously no longer presents its original word-
ing. An explicit command from God must certainly have preceded
the narrative in vv. 9-11, for without such a command the deputation
from Israel would not have dared to ascend the mountain. This
command is preserved in wv. 1 f., but hardly in its original form. The
‘to Moses’ which precedes it in v. 1 is evidently attached to a speech
of God directed towards another audience which may now be lost
from the E context. But it is also possible that this formula refers to
the Book of the Covenant which has been inserted in the meantime,
which was regarded as a speech of God designated for the people
even if according to 20.22 it was primarily a divine address to Moses.
But the chief surprise of vv. 1 f. is the occurrence of Yahweh in the
third person, as though some third person was giving the instructions
to go up the mountain ‘to Yahweh’. Who can this third person be?
We might posit an alteration to the text and assume for ‘Yahweh’ an
 24.1-1T] THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT 197
original ‘I’, which in view of the Hebrew text would not be com-
pletely inexplicable. But we might just as well suppose that the whole
passage vv. 1 f. is secondary and has not been appropriately formu-
lated. This is also supported by the content of vv. 1b, 2, which does
not fit very well with vv. 9-11; for according to this latter passage the
whole deputation without any distinction participates in the meeting
with God on the mountain. In that case the unusual and startling
nature of this meeting would only have been diminished at a later
date by the ‘command to ascend’ in vv. rb, 2, so that only Moses was
to go up really near to God while the other members of the deputa-
tion were merely to throw themselves down in worship ‘from afar’.
We thus have in wv. 1 f. a passage which has largely been worked over
in a redactional way, and in which the original command of God for
the ascent of the mountain by the deputation is missing. The incom-
plete E account of the events on the holy mountain may be recon-
structed hypothetically in approximately the following way: after his
arrival Moses ascends ‘to God’ (19.3a), probably to receive the
announcement of the impending theophany. The theophany, which
leads to a ‘conversation’ between God and Moses whose content is
not recorded (19.16b, 17, 19) causes the people who have been led
by Moses to the foot of the mountain (19.17) to request that they
may keep their distance and that Moses alone may act as mediator
(20.18, 19-21*) ; Moses now presumably receives instructions for the
ascent of the mountain by the deputation (24.1 f.*) which is eventu-
ally followed by the solemn making of the covenant on the mountain
(24.9-11). It remains questionable whether perhaps the isolated
clause 19.13b (see p. 158 above) is a displaced piece of the E narra-
tive; it could belong to the instructions for ascending the mountain
which in that case would perhaps have been more detailed than the
remains in 24.1 f. leads us to suppose.
[3-8] According to the version 24.3-8, the act of making the
covenant is completed by a sacrifice at the foot of the mountain—the
one possible form of making a covenant among men. This sacrifice is
now associated with the reading, writing and learning of the words of
Yahweh which Israel is to ‘do’. This refers to definite regulations and
requirements laid down by Yahweh. Now the report of the sacrifice
is an independent entity and could form a proper account of the
making of the covenant even without any reference to the ‘words of
Yahweh’, There is in any case no decisive reason for explaining the
*These verses contain other elements besides E.
198 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

clauses about the ‘words of Yahweh’ as being a secondary literary

addition, and thus we may assume that the obligation to the ‘words
of Yahweh’ was a part of this covenant narrative from the beginning.
The act thus begins with Moses ‘coming’ into the assembly of the
people and handing on to the people the ‘words of Yahweh’ (the
observation that these were ‘ordinances’ is superfluous in this context
and is in fact a completely secondary element of interpretation) ;he
receives from the people a preliminary agreement to these words,
whereupon he writes them down (wv. 3, 4aa). Then an altar is built
and twelve stones (masséboth) are erected in the neighbourhood of the
altar or round about it to represent the twelve tribes. At the com-
mand of Moses sacrifices are offered by ‘young men’ (vv. 4abb, 5).
Hereupon follows the blood rite essential for the concluding of the
covenant; the blood of the communal sacrifice applied to the partners
in the covenant joins them together. The altar here represents the
divine partner in the covenant (v. 6b). The people are only included
in the covenant after a now final obligation to the ‘words of Yahweh’,
which have in the meantime been written down as law and are read
out as the basis of the covenant (‘Book of the Covenant’; vv. 7, 8a).
Then the ‘blood of the covenant’ is sprinkled on the people, not on
the twelve representative pillars, which no longer have a part to play.
This forms a valid conclusion to the covenant, as Moses finally de-
clares in a detailed formulation which is characterized by the use of
the so-called declarative perfect tense (v. 8b). The question of the
larger literary context to which this narrative version of the making
of the covenant belongs is not edsy to answer. The source J, which
suggests itself because of the use of the divine name Yahweh, cannot
be involved, as in it the making of the covenant only follows in the
context of what is narrated in ch. 34 (see p. 260 below). The reference
to the ‘words of Yahweh’ in 24.3-8 presupposes the delivery of such
words. But then the most obvious thing is to think of the words of
Yahweh which have been reported immediately beforehand, i.e. of
the book of the covenant which is in fact proved to be the ‘Book of the
Covenant’ by 24.7. In that case 24.3-8 may be given a literary
connection with the Book of the Covenant, as a covenant narrative
which would once have been attached to the originally independent
‘Book of the Covenant’ to anchor this law book expressly in the
covenant at Sinai. This must already have happened at a relatively
early period, as the narrative is evidently quite old, in any case older
than the addition to the Book of the Covenant in 23. 30-33, as is clear
24.12-25.9] INSTRUCTIONS GIVEN ON THE MOUNTAIN 201

(Gen. 17.8b) find permanent confirmation. God himself regulates

cultic worship down to the smallest detail of its preparation and
performance. Without such ordering cultic worship was not legiti-
mate in P’s eyes. Thus in contrast to the older sources P has no know-
ledge of cultic acts before Sinai.
The sanctuary, erected and equipped by divine ordinance, built
first on Sinai and then carried about on the journey through the
wilderness, is in P quite clearly orientated on the picture of the later
temple at Jerusalem. The only question is whether the model is the
temple of Solomon (which may have been elaborated further during
the period of the monarchy in Judah) or the temple of Zerubbabel, of
whose details we know but little. Whichever it may be, in any case
for P the Jerusalem temple is the only legitimate sanctuary. This
sanctuary is directly derived from the divine instructions given at
Sinai. There was evidently no decisive break in the tradition of the
legitimate sanctuary, as is seen from the fact that the tent-sanctuary
erected in accordance with the ‘pattern’ (25.9) shown to Moses on
the mountain, and used at Sinai and during the wanderings, was
eventually replaced after the conquest by a stone sanctuary built in
Jerusalem roughly in accord with the design that had been given.
[25.1-9] First of all, in 25.2—7, Moses is given instructions to have
the material necessary for the building of the sanctuary brought by a
free-will ‘offering’ on the part of the Israelites. In the detailed
instructions which then follow, this material and the use to which it
is put are mentioned over and over again. Apart from unrefined metal
(25.3b), the chief concern is primarily for raw materials for more or
less costly fabrics (25.4). In ancient times purple-dyed wool was
chiefly manufactured on the Phoenician coast by using dye extracted
from the glands of certain shellfish. The bluish-purple dye (RSV
‘blue’) is described by the word ¢-kélet, which is also known in
Accadian, but whose origin cannot be ascertained with certainty. The
word ’argaman, which likewise also occurs in Accadian and perhaps
derives from Asia Minor, means reddish-purple dye. The scarlet dye
(and the wool coloured with it) is named after the insect from which
it is produced; the special name for this insect is once again a word
which cannot certainly be derived from the Hebrew. An Egyptian
word is used for ‘fine twined linen’, which suggests that it derives
from a special kind of Egyptian linen-weaving. Goats’ hair has been
used at all times to make tent coverings. For making leather not only
rams’ skins but also the skins of ¢:haSim, probably a certain kind of
202 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

dolphin,* are mentioned. The valuable acacia wood is to be used for

the woodwork. The fact that the purpose of the (olive) oil and the
aromatic resin of the balsam shrub is mentioned when they occur
(25.6) shows that they are secondary in this context; their cultic use
is already envisaged. The incomplete and disproportionate mention
of the costly stones for parts of the priest’s clothing in 25.7 is evidently
also secondary.
P apparently gave no thought to where the Israelites were to get
all these precious materials on Sinai. They were, as their names
partly of certain foreign derivation show, expressly the products of
a civilized society and were used in not inconsiderable quantities, as
the following individual details make plain.

(b) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ARK: 25.10-22

10 ‘They shall make an ark of acacia wood; two cubits and a half
shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half
its height. 14 And you shall overlay it with pure gold, within and with-
out shall you overlay it, and you shall make upon it a moulding of gold
round about. !? And you shall cast four rings of gold for it and put them
on its four feet, two rings on the one side of it, and two rings on the
other side of it. 8 You shall make poles of acacia wood, and overlay
them with gold. 14 And you shall put the poles into the rings on the
sides of the ark, to carry the ark by them. © The poles shall remain in
the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it. 1® And you shall
put into the ark the testimony which I shall give you. 17 Then you shall
make a mercy seat of pure gold; two cubits and a half shall be its length,
and a cubit and a half its breadth. 18 And you shall make two cherubim
of gold; of hammered work shall you make them, on the two ends of
the mercy seat. 1» Make one cherub on the one end, and one cherub on
the other end; of one piece with the mercy seat shall you make the
cherubim on its two ends. ?° The cherubim shall spread out their wings
above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one
to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be.
21 And you shall put the mercy seat on the top of the ark; and in the ark
you shall put the testimony that I shall give you. 22 There I will meet
with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two
cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you
of all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.’

The detailed instructions from God to Moses begin with the ark,
which is the central sanctuary proper of the place where the cult is to
be established. It stands first because of this position of importance,
*[The RSV ‘goatskins’ appears to be a conjecture. Tr.]
25.10-22| INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ARK 203

whereas, when the instructions are carried out, the tabernacle for the
ark is made first before the ark itself (36.8 ff.). The command to make
the ark, as all the following commands for the sanctuary as a whole,
is given to Moses in person as the leader responsible for everything,
even if the practical work is carried out by people expressly detailed
for it. There are no solid reasons for doubting that the section on the
ark and those which follow are essentially a literary unity. Only v. 19,
which has a divergent formulation at the beginning of the verse,
gives the impression of being an addition and moreover only
mentions in broad detail what has already been said quite plainly
immediately beforehand. In addition, v. 16 makes a secondary
anticipation of what is reported in v. 21b, evidently in the original
context.
The description of the ark in P derives from the actual presence of
the ark in the Jerusalem sanctuary during the monarchy, after it had
been brought into Jerusalem by David (II Sam. 6) and placed by
Solomon in his temple, in the Holy of Holies (I Kings 8.6 ff.). We
may expect from P neither historical information about the origin of
the ark, which is for us so obscure, nor details of its original form. P
probably knew no more than that the ark had stood in the innermost
part of the pre-exilic temple, and from this made up a picture of the
ark. We are hardly to assume that the ancient shrine of the pre-
monarchical Israelite amphictyony as it had been brought by David
into his new royal city of Jerusalem should have been so richly
adorned with an overlay of beaten gold; and even Solomon would
have incorporated the old traditional shrine into his temple essenti-
ally untouched and unaltered—at any rate there is nowhere any
report of Solomon having decked the venerable ark in a new
splendour. We must imagine the historical ark, about whose appear-
ance we are given no concrete information in the old tradition, as
having been quite simple. Its name alone implies that it was in the
form of a chest, and this underlies the P description (cf. II Kings
12.10 f., also Gen. 50.26).
The description of the ark, as of the other parts of the sanctuary,
contains numerous technical terms which in many cases cannot be
interpreted exactly, as they occur only in this or in similar contexts.
The rendering of the text therefore includes more elements of
interpretation here than elsewhere. For measuring length the unit
chiefly used is the ‘cubit’ i.e., the length of the forearm from the tip
of the elbow—about nineteen inches. No exact definition is possible
204 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

as different ‘cubits’ were known in the ancient East and even within
the Old Testament (cf. II Chron. 3.3). The customary ‘cubit’
appears to have measured eighteen inches; it was further subdivided
into the ‘span’ (half a cubit) and the ‘handbreadth’ (one sixth ofa
cubit).
[10-16] Brief particulars of the body of the ark (vv. 1o f.)—the
‘moulding’ (v. 11b) served only for decoration—are followed by
more detailed specifications for making the ark portable (vv. 12-15).
P has taken great care that all the parts of the sanctuary should be
capable of being moved during the wanderings in the wilderness.
Perhaps we are to imagine the ‘feet’, to which the rings for the carry-
ing poles are to be attached, not as real feet, but merely as the lower
ends of the moulding at the corner. [17-22] The ‘cover’ (RSV
margin) presents a special problem. The body of the text follows the
traditional English translation and renders the word kapporet
standing in the Hebrew text as ‘mercy seat’ because of the Greek
and Latin translation (hilasterion, propitiatorium; cf. also Heb. 9.5).
This translation is based on the assumption that the root of the
Hebrew word, whose original meaning is ‘to cover’, is chiefly used in
the Old Testament in a transferred sense, ‘to absolve’. But it can
hardly be doubted that the simple, original meaning of the root lies
behind the word kapporet. Probably only the box ‘lid’ of the ark is
meant (in vv. 10, Ila it remains open whether a lid to the ark is
already to be included at this stage of the description) and this lid
is only mentioned particularly briefly because the two cherubim are
to be attached to it and they will be described in more detail in
vv. 18 (19) and 20. The joining of the cherubim to the ark once again
has the model of the temple of Solomon in mind. Originally the
cherubim did not belong to the ark, as it is said in I Kings 8.6 that
Solomon had the ark brought into the innermost part of the Jerusa-
lem temple ‘underneath the wings of the cherubim’. Thus the
cherubim first belonged to the furnishings of this inner sanctuary
(I Kings 6.23~28) and here the ark was placed ‘under their wings’.
P then attached these cherubim firmly to the ark and in particular to
its ‘lid’. We cannot form any exact picture of these cherubim from
either Ex. 25.18-20 or I Kings 6.23~-28. In any case they are mixed
beings who were known especially in Mesopotamia as tutelary deities
at the entrances of temples and palaces; P too (v. 20) still speaks of
‘overshadowing’ (cf. also I Kings 8.7 and Ezek. 28.14, 16). Of their
appearance we only hear that they had wings and faces, which cer-
25.23-30] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE TABLE 205
tainly means human faces, but we are told nothing about their
bodies, so we are not certain whether to imagine human bodies;
perhaps the lack of specific information should be understood in this
latter sense. According to v. 21b the ‘testimony’ is to be put in the
ark. This means the law, evidently the law inscribed on the two
tables of stone. Here P is linked with the Deuteronomic tradition
according to which the two tables of stone on which the Decalogue
was written (Deut. 5.22; but cf. pp. 266 f. below on Ex. 34.1 ff.) were
put by Moses in the ark (Deut. 10.1-5). True, P has hitherto neither
reported the Decalogue (on Ex. 31.18 cf. p. 247 below) nor spoken
of the tables of stone, but as a matter of course tacitly assumes that the
Deuteronomic tradition is known. According to v. 22, the place from
which Yahweh will in future ‘meet with’ Moses and give him his
instructions is to be above the cover of the ark containing the ‘testi-
mony’ and between the wings of the cherubim. Two different ideas
meet in this expression, first the conception that Yahweh is present
‘above’ the ark, stemming from the probably original idea of the ark
as the throne of the invisibly present deity (cf. especially Num.
10.35 f.) and secondly the conception of the God who ‘meets with’
Moses and the Israelites, which originally belongs to the ‘tent of
meeting’ (the ‘tabernacle’) but has here been transferred to the ark
(in v. 22 the same Hebrew root is used for ‘to meet with’ as is con-
tained in the phrase ‘tent of meeting’).

(c) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE TABLE: 25.23-30

23 ‘And you shall make a table of acacia wood; two cubits shall
be its length, a cubit its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height.
24 You shall overlay it with pure gold, and make a moulding of gold
around it. 2> And you shall make around it a frame a hand breadth
wide, and a moulding of gold around the frame. ?® And you shall make
for it four rings of gold, and fasten the rings to the four corners at its
four legs. 27 Close to the frame the rings shall lie, as holders for the poles
to carry the table. 2 You shall make the poles of acacia wood, and
overlay them with gold, and the table shall be carried with these.
29 And you shall make its plates and dishes for incense, and its flagons
and bowls with which to pour libations; of pure gold you shall make
them. 3° And you shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before
me always.’

[23-30] The ark is followed by the contents of the sanctuary which

have their place within the tent-‘tabernacle’. The table is imagined
quite simply as a level surface with four legs (cf. v. 26bd) ; the height
206 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

of it then refers to the height of the legs. The frame (v. 25) is to be
imagined as put up around the edges of the table top. Once again
(cf. 1rb) the table top and the frame are given a moulding all round
as decoration. The table is made portable by an arrangement of poles
which is again describéd in quite considerable detail (vv. 26-28). As
the ‘rings’ for the poles are to lie ‘close’ to the frame, the ‘corners’ of
the legs (v. 26bd) must mean their upper ends. The table is chiefly for
the ‘bread of the Presence’ (v. 30), i.e. for the cakes of bread which
are to be set down—and renewed daily—as gifts before the ‘Presence’
of Yahweh (the traditional rendering of the AV, “‘Shrewbread’, is not
quite accurate). This custom of setting bread before the ‘Presence’ of
the deity, maintained in the Old Testament simply as a tradition,
originally represents the feeding of the deity. It was known at old
Israelite sanctuaries (cf. I Sam. 21.5) and the temple of Solomon had
a golden table for the ‘bread of the Presence’ (I Kings 7.48, perhaps
also 6.20). The representation on the arch of Titus* shows that such
a table was still among the contents of the temple of Herod. It is
remarkable that according to v. 29 all sorts of golden vessels also
belonged to this table, for libations (drink-offerings) which, as is
expressly enjoined, are not merely to be placed there but are to be
‘poured’, obviously on the ground by the table before the ‘Presence’
of Yahweh. Thus the table serves for all the non-animal offerings to
be brought to Yahweh in his sanctuary.

(d) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE LAMPSTAND: 25.3I-40

31 ‘ And you shall make a lampstand of pure gold. The base and the
shaft of the lampstand shall be made of hammered work; its cups, its
capitals, and its flowers shall be of one piece with it; §? and there shall
be six branches going out of its sides, three branches of the lampstand
out of one side of it and three branches of the lampstand out of the
other side of it; 8° three cups made like almonds, each with capital and
flower, on one branch, and three cups made like almonds, each with
capital and flower, on the other branch—so for the six branches going
out of the lampstand; ** and on the lampstand itself four cups made
like almonds, with their capitals and flowers, * and a capital of one
piece with it under each pair of the six branches going out from the
lampstand. °° Their capitals and their branches shall be of one piece
with it, the whole of it one piece of hammered work of pure gold. 8? And
you shall make the seven lamps for it; and the lamps shall be set up so
as to give light upon the space in front of it. 88 Its snuffers and their
*Cf. H. Gressmann, Altorientalische Bilder zum Alten Testament,? 1927, plate 205,
fig. 509; L. H. Grollenberg, Atlas of the Bible, 1956, p. 138, fig. 407.
25.31-40] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE LAMPSTAND 207
trays shall be of pure gold. 3 Of a talent of pure gold shall it be made,
with all these utensils. #° And see that you make them after the pattern
for them, which is being shown you on the mountain.

The description of the ingenious seven-branched candlestick is

extraordinarily complicated, first because the author obviously lacks
the means of expression to put everything clearly (the marked
paucity of the verbal element in the description is particularly
noticeable and results in a style which is nothing but the catchwords
strung together) and secondly because numerous words occur in a
derived meaning as technical terms, so that their exact meaning
cannot be determined. Despite a fulness of detail which is in part
circumstantial (cf. especially v. 35), the description is still not com-
plete enough to give us a really clear picture of the lampstand. Now
it is in fact clear that the lampstand described here was a pre-
decessor of the lampstand in the temple of Herod which is portrayed
on the Arch of Titus (cf. previous note). Therefore despite a number
of different characteristics which were evidently peculiar to the
Herodian lampstand, this portrayal can help to elucidate the
description given here.
The lampstand of Ex. 25 evidently represents an innovation which
was presumably introduced into the temple of Zerubbabel. The
temple of Solomon had ten lampstands, each presumably with one
lamp (I Kings 7.49; it cannot be established with any certainty
whether the lampstand with seven lamps set on the rim of a bowl,
described briefly in the setting of the account of a vision in Zech. 4.2,
is described along the lines of a lampstand set up in the later pre-
exilic temple or whether it is to be understood as a free representation
of a lampstand burning with seven lamps). It goes without saying
that the interior of the Jerusalem temple needed one or more lamp-
stands just to provide light.
The section 25.31-40 can be regarded as essentially a literary
unity, even though the word for ‘lampstand’ is used differently, first
to describe the whole apparatus (so v. 31) and secondly in a simplified
way to describe the central piece (so vv. 33b, 34 f.). These different
usages do not cause any confusion. It is surprising to find in vv. 37, 39
verbs in the third person whose subject must be the craftsman who
makes the Jampstand, and it is noticeable that in v. 40 the reference
to the pattern shown to Moses deviates from the setting in which it is
put elsewhere (v. 40 has moreover a formal connection with v. 39).
208 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

As it is hardly permissible to smooth out the language and make it

more simple by emending the text, vv. 37b-40 (including v. 38,
which stands in isolation) should be regarded as a secondary
addition.
[31-40] The lampstand, to be made out of beaten gold, has first a
central shaft whose ornamentation is not to be attached but is to be
built up out of it (v. 31). What is meant by ‘base’ is questionable;
ought this word perhaps to be read as a plural (this is possible without
changing the consonants) and is the ‘base’ meant to be a form of
three- or four-legged stand, which is needed but not mentioned
elsewhere? The ornamentation of the shaft (cf. vv. 34 f.) is to consist
of hammered (calyx) cups. The term ‘cup’ is from time to time
explained by ‘capital and flower’ (vv. 31, 33 f.). Now the peculiarity
of the lampstand consists in the fact that three arms (‘branches’) are
to go out from the shaft on each of the two sides (v. 32), running
obliquely upwards and arranged one above the other, as is shown by
the representation of the Herodian lampstand (as no other remarks
are made, the description in Ex. 25 suggests straight arms, so that the
curving of the arms is perhaps to be regarded as a characteristic
peculiar to the Herodian lampstand). The ‘branches’ are further so
arranged that their upper ends form a straight line with the top of
the central shaft. Hammered ‘cups’ serve to decorate both the
branches and the shaft and usually consist of a ‘capital’, i.e. a swelling
with a ‘flower’ which is evidently placed upon it (v. 33-35). These
cups are described with a technical term which is usually rendered
‘made like almonds’, but this translation is extremely dubious. The
cups are to be arranged along the arms, one above the other at
intervals. In any case this is so on the shaft (v. 35); here the cups are
placed each under the branching of a pair of arms. In these cases
sometimes only the ‘capital’ is mentioned, so that it must be assumed
that the branching pair of arms takes the place of the ‘flowers’ or that
the flowers are attached directly above the branching of the pairs of
arms. The fourth cup on the shaft (cf. v. 34) is to be imagined below,
or better above, the branching pairs of arms. Verse 36a is not fully
comprehensible as there is no reference which is suitable for the
plural possessive pronoun ‘their’; if we are not to give up all hope of
an explanation, we cannot reach any solution without assuming some
distortion of the text. The ‘simplest’ solution would be to assume that
the text originally ran ‘its (viz. of the lampstand, i.e. of the shaft)
capitals and its branches.’ It is impossible to determine whether the
26.1-37] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ‘TABERNACLE’ 209
seven lamps (v. 37a), i.e. the usual containers, pinched in at the side
to make a place for the wick,* are to consist of gold, or whether, as
this is not expressly mentioned, ordinary clay lamps are intended.
In any case, these seven lamp-containers belong at the upper end of
the shaft and of the six arms. The addition (see above) vv. 37b—40
speaks of the ‘space in front’ of the lampstand upon which the lamps
are to shed light; this means that the lamp containers with their
openings for wicks are all to be arranged broadside so that they are
towards the ‘space in front’. Snuffers and trays (v. 38), the latter for
preparing the oil, form the necessary accessories for the lampstand.
According to v. 39 a talent of gold is to be used for the lampstand; the
customary talent (distinctions were made between different scales of
value; cf. II Sam. 14.26) probably weighed something over seventy-
five pounds. It looks as though the addition wv. 37b—40 had forced out
the original conclusion to the section.

(e) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ‘TABERNACLE’: 26.1-37

26! ‘Moreover you shall make the tabernacle with ten curtains of
fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet stuff; with cherubim
skilfully worked shall you make them. ? The length of each curtain
shall be twenty-eight cubits, and the breadth of each curtain four
cubits; all the curtains shall have one measure. 3 Five curtains shall be
coupled to one another; and the other five curtains shall be coupled to
one another. 4 And you shall make loops of blue on the edge of the
outmost curtain in the first set; and likewise you shall make loops on
the edge of the outmost curtain in the second set. ® Fifty loops you shall
make on the one curtain, and fifty loops you shall make on the edge of
the curtain that is in the second set; the loops shall be opposite one
another. * And you shall make fifty clasps of gold, and couple the
curtains one to the other with the clasps, that the tabernacle may be
one whole.
7 ‘You shall also make curtains of goats’ hair for a tent over the
tabernacle; eleven curtains shall you make. ® The length of each curtain
shall be thirty cubits, and the breadth of each curtain four cubits; the
eleven curtains shall have the same measure. ? And you shall couple
five curtains by themselves, and six curtains by themselves, and the
sixth curtain you shall double over at the front of the tent. 1° And you
shall make fifty loops on the edge of the curtain that is outmost in one
set, and fifty loops on the edge of the curtain which is outmost in the
second set.
11 ‘And you shall make fifty clasps of bronze, and put the clasps into
*Cf. K. Galling, Biblisches Reallexikon, 1937, cols. 347 f., figs. 1-4; E. W. Heaton,
Everyday Life in Old Testament Times, 1956, p. 73, fig. 23.
210 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

the loops, and couple the tent together that it may be one whole.
12 And the part that remains of the curtains of the tent, the half curtain
that remains, shall hang over the back of the tabernacle. 1* And the
cubit on the one side, and the cubit on the other side, of what remains
in the length of the curtains of the tent shall hang over the sides of the
tabernacle, on this side and that side, to cover it. }4 And you shall make
for the tent a covering of tanned rams’ skins and goatskins.
15 ‘And you shall make upright frames for the tabernacle of acacia
wood. 1®Ten cubits shall be the length of a frame, and a cubit anda
half the breadth of each frame. 1? There shall be two tenons in each
frame, for fitting together; so shall you do for all the frames of the
tabernacle. 18 You shall make the frames for the tabernacle: twenty
frames for the south side; !° and forty bases of silver you shall make
under the twenty frames, two bases under one frame for its two tenons,
and two bases under another frame for its two tenons; ?° and for the
second side of the tabernacle, on the north side twenty frames, 71 and
their forty bases of silver, two bases under one frame, and two bases
under another frame; 22 and for the rear of the tabernacle westward
you shall make six frames. ?? And you shall make two frames for
corners of the tabernacle in the rear; *4 they shall be separate beneath,
but joined at the top, at the first ring; thus shall it be with both of them;
they shall form the two corners. ?° And there shall be eight frames, with
their bases of silver, sixteen bases; two bases under one frame, and two
bases under another frame.
26 ‘And you shall make bars of acacia wood, 2? five for the frames
of the one side of the tabernacle, and five bars for the frames of the
other side of the tabernacle, and five bars for the frames of the side of
the tabernacle at the rear westward. 8 The middle bar, halfway up the
frames, shall pass through from end to end. ?® You shall overlay the
frames with gold, and shall make their rings of gold for holders for the
bars; and you shall overlay the bars with gold. 3° And you shall erect
the tabernacle according to the plan for it which has been shown you
on the mountain.
31 ‘And you shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet stuff
and fine twined linen; in skilled work shall it be made, with cherubim;
82 and you shall hang it upon four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold,
with hooks of gold, upon four bases of silver. * And you shall hang the
veil from the clasps, and bring the ark of the testimony in thither within
the veil; and the veil shall separate for you the holy place from the most
holy. 34 You shall put the mercy seat upon the ark of the testimony in
the most holy place. ** And you shall set the table outside the veil, and
the lampstand on the south side of the tabernacle opposite the table;
and you shall put the table on the north side.
36 ‘And you shall make a screen for the door of the tent, of blue and
purple and scarlet stuffand fine twined linen, embroidered with needle-
work. 37 And you shall make for the screen five pillars of acacia, and
overlay them with gold; their hooks shall be of gold, and you shall cast
five bases of bronze for them.’
26.1-37] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ‘TABERNACLE’ 211
The ‘tabernacle’ is constructed to house the shrine of the ark and
to provide for cultic worship before it. Yahweh is thought of as the
one who ‘tabernacles’, in the same way as the Jerusalem temple was
built by Solomon as a place where ‘Yahweh had said that he would
dwell in thick darkness’ (I Kings 8.12), a place where, according to a
frequent Deuteronomic-deuteronomistic phrase, Yahweh wished ‘to
make his name dwell there’ (Deut. 12.11 f. etc.). According to P this
‘tabernacle’ is a remarkable composite building consisting on the one
hand of a tent and on the other of a solid building which is however
to be made of wooden frames in such a way that it remains portable.
There is no analogy to this astonishing construction anywhere in
cultic history. We have a design by P which fuses together two
disparate elements, first a tent sanctuary such as has always existed
and still exists among nomadic tribes and peoples, and which was
commensurate with the situation of the Israelites at Sinai as is also
known to the Old Testament tradition, certainly already ancient, of the
‘Tent (of meeting)’ (Ex. 33.7 ff.; Num. 11.16, 24, 26; 12.4, 10), and
secondly the pattern of the Jerusalem temple, which must here be
transformed into a wooden structure capable of being dismantled.
Attempts have been made to make a literary distinction between
these two contradictory elements, and to argue that an original
literary stratum knew only of a real tent sanctuary, while the
wooden construction and the complicated nature of the whole were
only introduced in a secondary literary stratum. But the transmitted
wording offers no plausible scope for such a literary distinction and,
if this distinction is to be carried right through, substantial omissions
from the original material of the older stratum must be posited.
These conditions argue against the hypothesis of two literary strata,
and for this reason difficulties in the content of the description of the
‘tabernacle’ are to be explained not as literary, but as inherent in the
history of the tradition as it has been described.
[15-30] The woodwork, which forms the basis of the whole
construction (vv. 15-30), consists of long individual frames which are
set up vertically next to each other. Two tenons let into the lower
narrow side of each of the frames serve to fit them together (we can-
not properly understand the remark about the ‘fitting together’ of
these two tenons in v. 17a), as the technical term rendered ‘fit
together’ occurs only in this context and so really remains obscure).
The tenons are to be set each in a ‘base of silver’, which is not very
accurately described, so that the frames can stand upright. When the
 3 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

frames are placed alongside each other a larger wall of frames is

constructed; this surrounds a rectangle open on one side (the east).
The narrow western side is joined to the two longer sides by two
corner frames (vv. 23 f.) whose measurements are not given. We have
no exact idea of what they looked like, as the special meaning of the
technical term ‘twins’ (v. 24)* is not known and the significance of
the ‘one’ ring in this context is not explained. These corner frames,
which are to be imagined ‘in the rear’ of the narrow side (v. 23), are
evidently meant to serve to clamp this narrow side to the two longer
sides. Bars (the word used elsewhere for ‘bolt’ occurs, just as the
‘bolt’ of agate or a door is in fact a bar) are made tojoin the frames
firmly together on the three sides when they have been put next to
each other; they are to be put through rings which are attached to
the frames—presumably on the outside (v. 29). The transmitted
wording in vv. 26-29 can only be understood to mean that bars are
imagined arranged parallel, one above another; each of these reaches
the whole length of one side though in that case bars of an extra-
ordinary length must be planned for the two long sides. It is not very
obvious why in v. 28 particular emphasis is laid on the ‘middle bar’,
which is to be attached to the centre of the upright frame. According
to the numbers and measurements given, the space enclosed by the
wall of frames is 30 cubits long and to cubits high; the breadth
should also be 10 cubits (the frames on the narrow side measure
g cubits, but we must add to this the corner frames which also
belong to the narrow side—their measurements are left undefined).
These represent about half the measurements of the temple of
Solomon (cf. I Kings 6.2,20), the only difference being that for
simplification the difference in height between the ‘house’ and the
‘inner sanctuary’ is omitted and the ‘forecourt’ of the temple is left
out. Thus we are to suppose that the installation of the veil, which
in vv. 31 f. is not given a concrete description, divides off a ‘Holy of
Holies’ measuring 10 X 10 X 10 cubits.
[1-14] This wall of frames, which can be dismantled and is there-
fore portable, is given a large awning which is put together from
individual tent curtains. It forms the only roof covering and at the
*[Noth here gives a translation so different from the RSV that the whole verse
must be reproduced here to make his comments intelligible; v. 24 reads ‘and there
shall be “twins” (Zwillinge) beneath and in like manner there shall be “twins” (a
slight emendation is made here following Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica) at the top for
the one ring; thus shall it be. . . .’ For further details of the Hebrew text and its
relationship to these two renderings the reader is referred to Kittel. Tr.]
 26.1-37] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ‘TABERNACLE’
213
same time clothes the two long sides and the rear end (vv. 1-6). Here
we have a tent curtain made from very costly material and em-
broidered with cherubim who are not given any further description
(v. 1); this main curtain consists of two composite pieces, each made
up of five long tent curtains sewn together (v. 3). These are coupled
together by costly ‘clasps’ with the help of loops attached to the inner
edges, but can be taken apart to make transport easier (vv. 4-6).
According to the numbers and measurements given in v. 2, this
whole tent curtain is 40 cubits long and 28 cubits wide. No detailed
description is given of how the tent curtain is to be fitted over the
woodwork. We must understand the measurement of 28 cubits to
signify that when the costly fabric is spread over the woodwork on the
two long sides it ends one cubit above the ground and does not touch
it. We must then, however, ask whether the tent curtain which over-
hangs the rear side is meant to touch the ground there (as the
measurement of 40 cubits would suggest) or whether one cubit is not
to be left spare here also and the then supernumerary cubits are to
hang over on the front side. Perhaps P was not concerned, or had not
thought, that at the two corners of the rear side the fabric would
necessarily have to fall down on the ground. In the same way, it is
remarkable that the costly tent curtain, with its embroidered
cherubim, who are evidently modelled on the carved cherubim on
the panelling of the inner rooms of the temple of Solomon (I Kings
6.29, 32, 35), could only be seen on the ceiling of the inner room, as
it was covered on the outside by the over-curtain which is to be
mentioned immediately. The single over-curtain (vv. 7 ff.) is made
of goats’ hair, the usual material for tent curtains. Like the costly
tent curtain it is to consist of two pieces made of long tent curtains
sewn together and to be coupled to each other; the only difference
is that in this case the material is less valuable in every respect. It
serves to protect the precious first curtain and is therefore also
somewhat larger in its measurements. Its width, 30 cubits, shows
that on the two long sides this over-curtain is to exceed the first,
precious curtain by about a cubit and thus is to fall right down to the
ground. This may also be the intention at the rear side. Now the
length measures the width of eleven tent curtains, i.e. 4 cubits
more than in the case of the first curtain. The chief thought thus
appears to be that the over-curtain should exceed the other curtain
by about a cubit on each side. But if it is made in this way on the
three other sides, there remains a surplus of 3 cubits on the front
214 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

side. Therefore according to v. gb the sixth tent curtain on the front

side is to be ‘doubled over’, so that its breadth only measures 2
cubits. Great care has been taken so that the uniformity of the tent
sections is preserved and it is not necessary to have a tent-curtain of
half-width. Now in wv. 12 f. another arrangement seems to have been
provided for, so that the surplus of a half tent curtain will “hang over
the back’, i.e. in fact lie on the ground so that the ‘doubling over’ of
one tent curtain (on the front side) becomes unnecessary. We must
therefore regard vv. 12 f. as an addition which intends the goats’ hair
tent curtains to be arranged in a rather different way from that in
v. gb. In v. 14 two further covers are enjoined; their measurements
are not given, but they are nevertheless to be spread over the whole.
First there is a large, solid cover made of rams’ skins, which is to be
dyed red for decoration in some unspecified way, and finally a last
over-covering of precious ¢*Aasim skins.*
[31-37] In conclusion another feature of the ‘tabernacle’ is the
veil, which is to be attached by golden nails+ to four acacia pillars
which are set upright on stands (vv. 31-33aa); it represents the
dividing wall between the ‘house’ and the ‘inner sanctuary’ in the
temple of Solomon. A further veil, described as a ‘screen’, shuts off
the front side (vv. 36 f.). It is to be made out of the same costly
material as the inner veil and to be hung on five wooden pillars, but,
as it is only to protect the entrance, it does not need any embroidered
cherubim (cf. in contrast v. 31b), and bronze is sufficient for the
stands of the pillars. The position of the ark in the ‘most holy place’
(v. 33abb) corresponds to that in the temple of Solomon (I Kings 8.6),
but that of the table and the lampstand (v. 35) does not, as P knows
only one seven-branched lampstand instead of the ten lampstands of
the temple of Solomon (I Kings 7.49) and now places the table and
lampstand to one side of the ‘house’, whereas in the temple of
Solomon the table stood right in the middle.

(f) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ALTAR AND THE COURT:

27.1-21
27' “You shall make the altar of acacia wood, five cubits long and
five cubits broad; the altar shall be square, and its height shall be three
cubits. 2 And you shall make horns for it on its four corners; its horns
shall be of one piece with it, and you shall overlay it with bronze. ? You
*[ For these two last items see above pp. 201 f.; the RSV rendering ‘tanned’ of
the rams’ skins is misleading. Tr.]
t[The RSV rendering differs slightly here. Tr.]
27.1-21] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ALTAR 215

shall make pots for it to receive its ashes, and shovels and basins and
forks and fire pans; all its utensils you shall make of bronze. * You shall
also make for it a grating, a network of bronze; and upon the net you
shall make four bronze rings at its four corners. ® And you shall set it
under the ledge of the altar so that the net shall extend half way down
the altar. ® And you shall make poles for the altar, poles of acacia wood,
and overlay them with bronze; ’ and the poles shall be put through the
rings, so that the poles shall be upon the two sides of the altar, when it is
carried. ® You shall make it hollow, with boards; as it has been shown
you on the mountain, so shall it be made.
9 ‘You shall make the court of the tabernacle. On the south side the
court shall have hangings of fine twined linen a hundred cubits long for
one side; 1° their pillars shall be twenty and their bases twenty, of
bronze, but the hooks of the pillars and their fillets shall be of silver.
11 And likewise for its length on the north side there shall be hangings a
hundred cubits long, their pillars twenty and their bases twenty, of
bronze, but the hooks of the pillars and their fillets shall be of silver.
12 And for the breadth of the court on the west side there shall be
hangings for fifty cubits, with ten pillars and ten bases. 1® The breadth
of the court on the front to the east shall be fifty cubits. 14 The hangings
for the one side of the gate shall be fifteen cubits, with three pillars and
three bases. 4° On the other side the hangings shall be fifteen cubits,
with three pillars and three bases. 1® For the gate of the court there
shall be a screen twenty cubits long, of blue and purple and scarlet stuff
and fine twined linen, embréidered with needlework; it shall have four
pillars and with them four bases. 1” All the pillars around the court shall
be filleted with silver; their hooks shall be of silver, and their bases of
bronze. 18 The length of the court shall be a hundred cubits, the
breadth fifty, and the height five cubits, with hangings of fine twined
linen and bases of bronze. 1° All the utensils of the tabernacle for every
use, and all its pegs and all the pegs of the court, shall be of bronze.
20 ‘And you shall command the people of Israel that they bring to
you pure beaten olive oil for the light, that a lamp may be set up to
burn continually. 21 In the tent of meeting, outside the veil which is
before the testimony, Aaron and his sons shall tend it from evening to
morning before the Lorp. It shall be a statute for ever to be observed
throughout their generations by the people of Israel.’

[x-8] The altar—the lack of any closer definition shows that here
only a single altar is intended (the ‘table’ of 25.2330 is not regarded
as an altar)—goes along with the court because it has its place in the
court of the sanctuary, a fact of which nothing is said in the present
context, for the pattern is the altar of burnt offering in the temple of
Solomon. This latter altar was made of stone; here, because the altar
must be portable, it is made of a wooden framework encased in sheet
bronze. No question is asked as to whether such a construction could
216 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

withstand the heat when animal sacrifices were being burnt. The
wooden framework is clearly visualized as an chest, open below. The
measurements given (v. 1) are remarkably small (cf. in contrast
Ezek. 43.13 ff.). According to v. 2 it is to be an altar with ‘horns’.*
We can easily understand that in the case of a stone altar the ‘horns’
situated at the four upper corners should be of one piece with the
altar, but it is hard to visualize this with a wooden structure encased
in sheet bronze. The note about the utensils necessary for the func-
tioning of the altar (v. 3) interrupts the description of the altar and
may be an addition. The arrangements for making the altar portable
(vv. 4-7) appear to have been devised so that a ‘ledge’, to be under-
stood as a kind of ridge, is made half way down the altar which rests
on the bronze grating which goes round the lower half of the four
sides; to this again the rings for the carrying poles are attached at an
unspecified height. Verse 8 once again goes back to the body of the
altar proper, which is described as being ‘hollow, with boards’, as was
already to be inferred from the previous description; this verse, with
its reference to the pattern shown to Moses (cf. on 25.40) may be an
addition.
[9-19] The court (vv. 9-19) is to be a large rectangle measuring
100 by 50 cubits, and the ‘tabernacle’ is clearly to have its place
in the rear half (though nothing is said about this). The stone
enclosing wall of the holy precinct of the Jerusalem temple appears
in the wilderness sanctuary in the form of a system of hangings
which are suspended on pillars. It is noteworthy that P knows only
one court (unlike Ezek. 40.5 ff. and the later temple of Herod). For
‘hanging’ in this context a word is used whose basic meaning is
probably ‘sail’ (another word is used for the ‘curtain’ in 26.31 ff.).
These linen hangings are evidently meant on occasion to hang
between two pillars, so that their size is given by the distance between
the pillars (every 5 cubits) and the indication of their height (5
cubits; v. 18) while the number of pillars and the total length and
breadth measurements reveals how many of these hangings there
were (vy. 9, 11 f., 18). The number of the pillars is the same as that
of the hangings and in this it is not supposed that one pillar is lacking
(at one of the corners). An opening is left in the middle of the front
side, to the east (in v. 16 it is described as a ‘gate’, a term really only
applicable to stone buildings) as an entrance 20 cubits wide. This is
closed with a ‘screen’ (the same word as in 26.36 f.) of costly material
* Cf. K. Galling, Biblisches Reallexikon, cols. 17 ff.
28.1-43] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING PRIESTLY GARMENTS 217

which is likewise hung on pillars. The two side pieces of the system
of hangings to the right and left of the opening on the front side are
described in vv. 14 f. as ‘shoulders’ (RSV ‘side’). Four pillars
are provided for the opening of the entrance, again one pillar
too few, as the distance between pillars should surely measure 5
cubits here also (or, if the corner pillars of the two ‘shoulders’ at the
sides are also to serve for the entrance ‘screen’, one pillar too many).
Insufficient description is given about the way in which the hangings
are suspended. In any case the hooks on the pillars are meant for
them, but it remains uncertain what is meant by the ‘fillets’ (vv. 10 f.)
and the ‘filleting’ of the pillars (v. 17) (if this is in fact the right
translation); does the term refer to the cross-poles between the
pillars to which the hangings are to be attached, or to some arrange-
ment on the pillars themselves, as is suggested by the appearance of
this technical term alongside the hooks in the description of the
individual pillars (vv. 10 f.)? Despite extensive repetitions the
description is on the whole poorly and feebly expressed, and is there-
fore not really sufficient for an accurate reconstruction of the
arrangement described. There are further a number of additions at
the end of the section. The last words of v. 18 are an inadvertent
repetition of the last words of v. 17, and v. 19 represents an addition
which is apparently not a self-contained entity. In content it does not
correspond with what has gone before and in secondary fashion
speaks of ‘pegs’, which were not mentioned earlier—rightly so, as
we are not to regard the ‘tabernacle’, much less the ‘court’, as a
proper tent which needs to be pegged down. [20-21] The passage
about the oil, vv. 20 f., and the lamp on the ‘light’ (the word ‘lamp-
stand’ of 25.31-40 is not used) which is to be filled with it, is clearly
also an addition. According to v. 21 the lamp is evidently only to
burn at night.

(g) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE PRIESTLY GARMENTS:

28.1-43
281 ‘Then bring near to you Aaron your brother, and his sons with
him, from among the people of Israel, to serve me as priests—Aaron and
Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar. ? And you shall
make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty.
8 And you shall speak to all who have ability, whom I have endowed
with an able mind, that they make Aaron’s garments to consecrate him
for my priesthood. * These are the garments which they shall make:
a breastpiece, an ephod, a robe, a coat of chequer work, a turban, and
218 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

a girdle; they shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother and his
sons to serve me as priests.
5 ‘They shall receive gold, blue and purple and scarlet stuff, and
fine twined linen. ® And they shall make the ephod of gold, of blue and
purple and scarlet stuff, and of fine twined linen, skilfully worked. ? It
shall have two shoulder-pieces attached to its two edges, that it may be
joined together. ® And the skilfully woven band upon it, to gird it on,
shall be of the same workmanship and materials, of gold, blue and
purple and a scarlet stuff, and fine twined linen. * And you shall take
two onyx stones, and engrave on them the names of the sons of Israel,
10 six of their names on the one stone, and the names of the remaining
six on the other stone, in the order of their birth. As a jeweller en-
graves signets, so shall you engrave the two stones with the names of the
sons of Israel; you shall enclose them in settings of gold filigree. 1” And
you shall set the two stones upon the shoulder-pieces of the ephod, as
stones of remembrance for the sons of Israel; and Aaron shall bear their
names before the Lorp upon his two shoulders for remembrance. 18 And
you shall make settings of gold filigree, 1 and two chains of pure gold,
twisted like cords; and you shall attach the corded chains to the settings.
15 ‘And you shall make a breastpiece of judgment, in skilled work;
like the work of the ephod you shall make it; of gold, blue and purple
and scarlet stuff, and fine twined linen shall you make it. 1° It shall be
square and double, a span its length and a span its breadth. 17 And you
shall set in it four rows of stones. A row of sardius, topaz, and carbuncle
shall be the first row; 18 and the second row an emerald, a sapphire, and
a diamond; }° and the third row a jacinth, an agate, and an amethyst;
20 and the fourth row a beryl, an onyx, and a jasper; they shall be set in
gold filigree. 24 There shall be twelve stones with their names according
to the names of the sons of Israel; they shall be like signets, each en-
graved with its name, for the twelve tribes. 2 And you shall make for
the breastpiece twisted chains like cords, of pure gold; 78 and you shall
make for the breastpiece two rings of gold, and put the two rings on the
two edges of the breastpiece. *4 And you shall put the two cords of gold
in the two rings at the edges of the breastpiece; *° the two ends of the
two cords you shall attach to the two settings of filigree, and so attach it
in front to the shoulder-pieces of the ephod. ?® And you shall make two
rings of gold, and put them at the two ends of the breastpiece, on its
inside edge next to the ephod. ?? And you shall make two rings of gold,
and attach them in front to the lower part of the two shoulder-pieces of
the ephod, at its joining above the skilfully woven band of the ephod.
28 And they shall bind the breastpiece by its rings to the rings of the
ephod with a lace of blue, that it may lie upon the skilfully woven band
of the ephod, and that the breastpiece shall not come loose from the
ephod. #®So Aaron shall bear the names of the sons of Israel in the
breastpiece of judgment upon his heart, when he goes into the holy
place, to bring them to continual remembrance before the Lorn.
3° And in the breastpiece of judgment you shall put the Urim and the
Thummim, and they shall be upon Aaron’s heart, when he goes in
28.1-43] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING PRIESTLY GARMENTS 219

before the Lorn; thus Aaron shall bear the judgment of the people of
Israel upon his heart before the Lorp continually.
31 ‘And you shall make the robe of the ephod all of blue. 32 It shall
have in it an opening for the head, with a woven binding around the
opening, like the opening in a garment, that it may not be torn. 33 On
its skirts you shall make pomegranates of blue and purple and scarlet
stuff, around its skirts, with bells of gold between them, #4 a golden bell
and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, round about on
the skirts of the robe. °° And it shall be upon Aaron when be ministers,
and its sound shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the
Lorp, and when he comes out, lest he die.
36 ‘And you shall make a plate of pure gold, and engrave on it, like
the engraving of a signet, “Holy to the Lorp.” 37 And you shall fasten
it on the turban by a lace of blue; it shall be on the front of the turban.
38 Tt shall be upon Aaron’s forehead, and Aaron shall take upon himself
any guilt incurred in the holy offering which the people of Israel
hallow as their holy gifts; it shall always be upon his forehead, that they
may be accepted before the Lorp.
39 ‘And you shall weave the coat in chequer work of fine linen, and
you shall make a turban of fine linen, and you shall make a girdle
embroidered with needlework.
40 ‘And for Aaron’s sons you shall make coats and girdles and caps;
you shall make them for glory and beauty. #4 And you shall put them
upon Aaron your brother, and upon his sons with him, and shall
anoint them and ordain them and consecrate them, that they may
serve me as priests. 42 And you shall make for them linen breeches to
cover their naked flesh; from the loins to the thighs they shall reach;
43 and they shall be upon Aaron, and upon his sons, when they go into
the tent of meeting, or when they come near the altar to minister in the
holy place; lest they bring guilt upon themselves and die. This shall be
a perpetual statute for him and for his descendants after him.’

It is hard to understand the individual details in the description

of the ceremonial dress of the High Priest—for the section is chiefly
concerned with him, the ceremonial dress of the other priests being
dealt with quite briefly in v. 40—not only because of the constant
recurrence of technical terms whose meaning is uncertain or obscure
(from time to time the translation is bound to posit a particular
explanation which frequently represents only one possible interpre-
tation), but also because the general appearance of the main items of
this dress are presumed to be known and are therefore inadequately
described. Instead, the description loses itself in explanations of all
sorts of less important details for whose exact understanding a
knowledge of the main items is a prerequisite. The essentials are
however moderately clear.
220 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

The large number of articles of clothing and decoration which

make up the dress of the High Priest is remarkable, most of all be-
cause these pieces do not fit together into a convincing overall picture,
but to some extent stand in the way of each other. This difficulty can
hardly be obviated on literary-critical grounds by positing several
different literary strata, each with a different presentation of the
High Priest’s dress. True, the chapter is not a complete literary unity.
[1-5] The introductory passage (vv. 1-5) has apparently been given
secondary expansions and originally—corresponding with the pre-
ceding sections—gave brief instructions for making the priestly
garments (v. 2); the two closing verses (vv. 42 f.) clearly represent an
addition, as their position after the closing sentence v. 41 indicates.
But otherwise there is no reason for a literary-critical division of the
chapter into various literary strands. The abundance of the indivi-
dual pieces belonging to the dress of the High Priest should instead
be given a historical explanation; i.e. in this dress pieces from
different times and from different backgrounds have become
amalgamated, as can still be demonstrated in part from individual
items. The question then arises whether a High Priest was ever
dressed in the way here described, or whether the description merely
represents an ‘ideal’ pattern in which all possible elements of priestly
and (see below) kingly adornment have been combined. Probability
speaks for the former alternative, because no clear reason can be
found why in this case P should have created a fantasy, with the
possible exception of several individual details; in any case it is to be
assumed that after the reception of P the priestly dress was in some
points along the lines of P. So in fact the post-exilic High Priest bore
in his ceremonial dress the signs of a long history of priesthood.
[6-14] The ‘ephod’, which is first given a name and then de-
scribed with some detail, was a loincloth worn with the aid of a
girdle encircling the body above. It is to be skilfully worked from the
most precious material like the other parts of the High Priest’s
ornaments. Of course this luxury is not in the nature of the object, for
it is to be regarded as an archaic item of clothing. Old and supposedly
original elements are often preserved for a very long time in the cultic
sphere. There is evidence from the ancient East for the cultic naked-
ness of the priest in very early times, but even at this period the
custom was for men to clothe themselves. The loin-cloth of the
priest certainly derives from a time when men were usually clothed
in just this way and it kept its place in the priest’s dress even after a
28.1-43]| INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING PRIESTLY GARMENTS 221

more complete set of clothing had in other respects become the norm.
Thus it is to be assumed that the ephod had once been the only item
of the ceremonial priestly dress, whereas later, as in the case of the
post-exilic High Priest, it appears merely as a traditional part of the
general ceremonial dress. The older position is still fairly clear in
those passages in which the priests are described as ‘bearing the ephod’
(I Sam. 2.28; 14.3; 22.18). The ‘shoulder-pieces’ of the ephod may
be understood as band-like straps running over the shoulders whose
under ends came together (‘were joined together’) at the front and
at the back, to which the ephod was fastened by its front and rear
upper ‘edge’ (perhaps the extremely obscure second clause in v. 7 is
to be understood in this sense). A picture of dancing men from the
Egyptian Old Kingdom shows loin-cloths with straps of this kind.*
The two signet stones set in gold, engraved with the names of the
twelve tribes of Israel, which are to be attached to the two ‘shoulder-
pieces’ and which are described in very great detail, were evidently
of extreme importance for P. We may here ask whether they are a
traditional article of the priestly adornment or just an ‘idea’ of P’s.
True, signets of precious stones set in gold and inscribed with engraved
names were certainly known throughout the Israelite monarchy, while
in the cult of the ‘amphictyony’ the priest had to act ‘in the name’ of the
twelve tribes of Israel and so in a way—in a metaphorical sense—to
use the signet of the tribes. But to carry the twelve names inscribed
on an official dress seems a very artificial objectifying of a situation,
old though it may be. The attachment of the signet stones to the
shoulder-pieces has an equally artificial look; not once is an accurate
indication given of where they are to be placed (up on the shoulders
or more preferably on the front sides) ; for to be attached in this way
contradicts the usual purpose of a signet and its availability for use.
According to v. 12 the High Priest is to bear all Israel ‘in remem-
brance’ with these signets so that Yahweh ‘will remember Israel for
good’ (Neh. 5.19; 13.31) whenever the High Priest comes before him
in his ceremonial dress. The arrangement for hanging the “breast-
piece’ which is not described until the next section, is given as early
as vv. 13 f., as it still belongs to the shoulder-pieces of the ephod; the
arrangement consists of (two) gold rings in the form of signet settings,
on which gold chains hang. Reference is then made to this arrange-
ment in v. 26.
*J. B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament,
1954, p. 66, fig. 210.
E.—H
222 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

[15-16, 30] The literal meaning of the word hésen, translated

‘breastpiece’, which occurs only in P, is obscure to us; the rendering
here rests on the form of this article of equipment, which is still to
some extent recognizable. A piece of fabric, once again made of the
most costly material, which is to be ‘double’ and evidently sewn
together along the sides, forms a ‘bag’ of about g x 9g inches (a
‘span’), into which something can be put (v. 30). The contents are in
fact to be the ‘Urim and Thummim’, lots with which an oracle could
be produced in answer to a question put in the form of two alterna-
tives (I Sam. 14.41 LXX). The words ‘Urim and Thummim’ (RV
marg. ‘lights and perfections’) are unexplained, and the form of the
lots which were ‘cast’ (I Sam. 14.42) is also unknown to us. But in
any case the ‘casting’ of the Urim and Thummim was an old piece of
priestly activity (Deut. 33.8 and also Ezra 2.63 = Neh. 7.65) and in
this way a divine judgment could be obtained (so I Sam. 14). For
this reason the ‘bag’ for these lots is described in Ex. 28.15, 19, 30 as
a ‘breastpiece of judgment’. It is of course quite obvious from v. 30
that P no longer envisages a practical use of this ancient oracle-by-
lot. The Urim and Thummim are merely to rest on the breast (“upon
the heart’) of the High Priest as a symbol of the power of Yahweh,
the righteous judge, over the Israelites. Thus for the post-exilic High
Priest this bag with the lots was merely a traditional inheritance from
the early history of the priesthood. We may perhaps assume that
even in the early period the priest used to carry the lots in a purse on
the breast, which hung from a cord placed round the neck.
[17—21, 29] This does not of course explain the adorning of the
bag with twelve precious stones (vv. 17-21) which gives it the
appearance of a costly breastplate and at the same time supposes that
the bag lay smooth and flat upon the breast (the emphasis on its
square shape in v. 16 is a further indication of this). If this is in fact
to be the case the bag must be stiffened in some way, and this leads
the bag at the same time to take over the function of a breastpiece.
But a breastpiece of this kind in all probability derives not from the
priestly but from the kingly tradition. A royal breastpiece, very
reminiscent of the hdsen of Ex. 28, which despite its Egyptian style
seems to rest on native tradition, has been found in the tomb of a
king of Byblos of the Middle Bronze Age. It consists of an approxi-
mately rectangular gold plate set with precious stones and hangs
from a gold chain which is directly reminiscent of the ‘twisted chains’
of v. 14; true, the precious stones make up an Egyptian pattern on the
28.1-43] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING PRIESTLY GARMENTS 223

plate, but they are also arranged in rows at the edges.* Ezek. 28.13 is
perhaps also to be understood in the light of this ancient Phoenician
royal pectoral; there it is said of the king of Tyre that his ‘covering’
consisted of all kinds of precious stones, whereupon nine stones are
enumerated which all occur in Ex. 28.17-20 (though in a different
order). This number nine would fit the square shape better than the
number twelve, which is occasioned by the reference to the twelve
tribes of Israel. The hésen thus represents a composite article—
perhaps first created in this way by P—in which the old priestly bag
for giving oracles-by-lot has been combined with the royal pectoral.
There is finally added the thought which we already know from
vv. 9-12, that the High Priest bears the signet with the names of the
tribes of Israel to ‘bring them to continual remembrance before
Yahweh’ (v. 29). So the name of a tribe of Israel is to stand on each
of the precious stones, now twelve in number (the interpretation of
the individual names of the stones given in vv. 17-20 is uncertain
throughout). Now in this the precious stones of the dsen clash with
the two signet stones on the shoulder-pieces of the ephod and give
rise to the question which of the two arrangements is to be regarded
as primary and which secondary. True, individual details of the
hosen go back to a very old tradition, but the whole object as de-
scribed here cannot be claimed as old. The incorporation of royal
insignia into the ceremonial dress of the High Priest certainly pre-
supposes the downfall of the monarchy in Israel and the transference
of once royal cultic functions to the chief priest of the once royal
sanctuary in Jerusalem in the setting of a reorganization of the cult
which only resulted after this downfall; only then did the opportunity
arise of reinterpreting the costly stones of the royal pectoral as stones
to bring the tribes of Israel ‘to remembrance before Yahweh’. In any
case, we could imagine that P gave a similar new interpretation both
to the two stones on the shoulder-pieces, which were perhaps purely
ornamental and already extremely old, and to the costly stones on the
royal-priestly pectoral.
[22—28] The description in Ex. 28 takes a great deal of trouble
over the question of the suspension of the hdSen. The instructions in
vv. 22-28 are probably to be understood in the following way: gold
rings are to be attached to the two upper corners of the /ésen, from
which the twisted gold chains are to run to the ‘settings’ on the front
side of the shoulder-pieces of the ephod; these chains occur twice,
*See P. Montet, Byblos et ’Egypte, 1928-29, pp. 162 ff., plates 93 f.
224 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

both in v. 14. and in wv. 22, 24 f., because they can be counted with the
ephod as much as with the hdsen.* Two other gold rings are to be set
at the lower corners of the Aden, at the back, just as the rings for
suspending the above-mentioned pectoral of the king of Byblos are
also attached on the back; a further two rings are to be put on the
shoulder-pieces of the ephod right underneath, close to the band of
the ephod. A cord is to be drawn through these last four rings so that
the hdsen is made fast both above and below and cannot slip; this last
is evidently very important to the author of the description.
[31-35] The robe (Hebrew mil) is represented as a long and
probably armless wrap made out of one piece, as is indicated by the
reference to an opening for the head ‘in the middle’.+ In contrast to
the ephod it is to be of one colour. It is noteworthy that in v. 31 it is
said to be ‘of the ephod’, although it represents a completely dif-
ferent kind of clothing. Elsewhere it was customarily worn by
prosperous and reputable people. We find it worn by kings, Saul in
I Sam. 24.5, 12, ‘the princes ofthe sea’ in Ezek. 26.16 (cf. also I Sam.
18.4, Jonathan, and I Chron. 15.27, David); it was not, however,
particularly a feature of royal dress, though on the other hand it was
hardly characteristic of the priest ; it is specially mentioned in the case
of Samuel (I Sam. 2.19; 15.27 and esp. 28.14), but evidently not to
characterize Samuel as a priest (cf. also Job 1.20; 2.12, Job and his
friends; Ezra 9.3, 5, Ezra). The High Priest has it because he is a prom-
inent man. The chief interest in Ex. 28—apart from the opening for the
head, the careful fashioning of which is specially enjoined—is the
border of ‘pomegranates’ and ‘bells’ at the lower edge of the skirts. The
former are perhaps to be understood merely as decoration and to be
imagined in embroidery along the edge. The golden bells attached at
intervals between these pomegranates are of apotropaic significance
(v. 35), as the terrifying effect produced on demons by bells and gongs
is an idea widespread in the history of religion. In Ex. 28 this effect is
still borne well in mind; the ringing of the bells will protect the High
Priest from the deadly powers of darkness, especially when he enters
and leaves the sanctuary, as thresholds and doors are particularly
*One cannot help suspecting that vv. 13 f. form a secondary addition which
intends that two special ‘settings’ (which in fact have nothing to ‘set’) should be
attached to the shoulder-pieces, whereas originally v. 25 was meant to refer to the
‘settings’ of each of the two signet stones on the shoulder-pieces mentioned in
MsI i. These would also at the same time fulfil the practical purpose of suspending
the hosen.
t[The RSV ‘in it’ is an insufficiently detailed rendering of the Hebrew. Tr.]
28.1-43] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING PRIESTLY GARMENTS 225

threatened by such powers (cf. I Sam. 5.5). The robe goes badly with
the ephod and breastpiece, as we cannot imagine it being worn in any
other way than over the ephod and breastpiece which means that these
are then no longer visible. Ifneed be,v.35 might be understood to mean
that the High Priest wore the robe only when entering and leaving the
sanctuary, leaving it aside in the sanctuary itself; but this is not said
clearly. Whereas the ephod and bag for the lots were traditional items,
whose actual presence in the ceremonial dress of the High Priest is all
that matters, the chief importance of the pectoral was that it should be
seen, and this is prevented by the robe. The piling up of the different
items of the High Priest’s adornment inevitably leads to inconsistency
of this nature.
[36-38] The ‘flower’* of gold, which is to be attached to the front
of the High Priest’s turban by a lace of blue (purple wool), is also
to serve an apotropaic purpose. Here the turban, which has not been
mentioned previously and whose manufacture is quite briefly en-
joined only in v. 39, is presupposed. The inscription ‘Holy to Yah-
weh’ to be engraved on this ‘flower’ is certainly to strengthen its
apotropaic effect; the mention of the divine name serves to ward off
hostile powers both from this piece of attire and from its wearer. The
flower is of course already in itself a prophylactic, as it is an element
of life and life-giving power. When hung at the front of the turban by
the ‘lace’ mentioned above, it is in a clearly visible place ‘upon the
forehead’ of the High Priest and thus protects him from the dangers
associated with the cultic act, as is explained in the somewhat turgid
language of v. 38. The sacrifice which the High Priest offers for the
whole of Israel is—as is said with a cultic technical term— ‘to be well
pleasing before Yahweh’; to this end the ‘flower’ is to be worn.
Should the sacrifice for any reason at all not be ‘well-pleasing’,
perilous ‘guilt’ would result, which the High Priest would have to
take upon himself; the flower is in this case to protect him from the
consequences of this ‘guilt’. Now of course in this special way of
putting the significance of the ‘flower’ we have a secondary trans-
ference to the peculiar functions of the High Priest. For originally the
‘flower’ was a royal badge; the king wears a nézer (II Sam. 1.10;
II Kings 11.12; Ps. 89.39) on his head as a material sign of his kingly
rank. This word is usually translated ‘crown’, but it means only
‘consecrated’, ‘consecration’ and is in fact a ‘flower’. This is particu-
larly clear in Ps. 132.18, where it is promised that the nézer worn by
*[RSV ‘plate’ Tr.]
226 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

the Davidic king will ‘blossom’;* cf. also Ex. 29.6, where the word
nézer stands in the place of sis (‘flower’), as also in Ex. 39.30, and
Lev. 8.9 where the two words are joined together. Just as the
Egyptian pharaohs used to wear on their foreheads the prophylactic
primitive serpent, the kings of Israel wore a ‘flower’ as ‘consecration’,
and eventually the royal insignia of the ‘flower’, like the pectinal
discussed above, passed over to the post-exilic: High Priest and
acquired a special significance with reference to him.
[39] Three further items of the ceremonial dress of the High Priest
are mentioned with remarkable brevity in v. 39. First of all the linen
coat is mentioned in a formula differing from what has been usual;
the coat was a customary piece of clothing and was normally worn by
everyone. In the case of the High Priest, however, the question of its
relationship to the ephod arises. We are not told whether it is
supposed to be worn above or below the loin-cloth of the ephod (and
at the same time as the hésen). The subsequent mention of the turban,
however, is hardly superfluous in this context, as its place in the
attire of the High Priest has already been presupposed in the de-
scription of the ‘flower’. Unfortunately, its appearance is imagined
to be familiar and is therefore not described apart from the informa-
tion that it is to be of ‘fine linen’. This is all the more regrettable as
once again this turban is a most remarkable piece. It is evidently a
head-dress of a special kind and is described in Hebrew as misnepet.
Now apart from the description of the ceremonial dress of the High
Priest this word occurs only once more in the Old Testament, in
Ezek. 21.26, in a description of the ‘prince of Israel’, i.e. the king of
Judah, and once the turban is taken off the deposition of the ruler is
complete. So in the misnepet the post-exilic High Priest wears yet
another piece of royal attire. Finally, the girdle characterizes the
High Priest as a person in office. In any case, the word ’abnét (perhaps
deriving from the Egyptian) used to describe it occurs outside the
description of the priestly dress only in Isa. 22.21 to describe an item
which characterizes a royal official. It is an ornamental girdle, as
distinct from the girdle belonging to the armour of a warrior, which
is described by another Hebrew word.
[40] In contrast with that of the High Priest the dress of the rest of
the priests is very simple and unrelated to royal adornment (v. 40).
It consists just of the usual coat, the decorative girdle pertaining to
their rank and a head-covering which was wound round like a
*[This point is missed in the RSV rendering. Tr.]
29.1-46] INSTRUCTIONS FOR INSTALLATION OF PRIESTS 227

turban (RSV ‘cap’; cf. Ex. 29.9; Lev. 8.13). This last was distinct
from the misnepet, as is clear from the use of another word which does
not occur elsewhere and whose specific meaning is obscure.
[41-43] In its present context the closing sentence of v. 41 antici-
pates by drawing attention to the anointing and ordination of the
priests as well as to their clothing. For this reason it is perhaps to be
regarded as a first addition. In a further addition (vv. 42 f.) all
priests are required to wear breeches, as is also the case in Ezek.
44.18, not on the grounds of general decency, but in view of the
danger to the priests which could emanate from the peculiar holiness
of the altar to that part of the body which is surrounded by un-
canny powers. It was not the custom elsewhere in Israel to wear
breeches, and in Ex. 20.26 this usage is not yet presupposed even in
the cultic sphere; instead, an attempt is made to prevent the same
danger by instructions of a different kind. The wearing of breeches is
evidently only a secondary development, even in the post-exilic
priestly dress, as is shown by the subsidiary character of the passage
Ex. 28.42 f.

(hk) INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE INSTALLATION OF THE PRIESTS:

.29.1-46
29' ‘Now this is what you shall do to them to consecrate them, that
they may serve me as priests. Take one young bull and two rams with-
out blemish, 2 and unleavened bread, unleavened cakes mixed with oil,
and unleavened wafers spread with oil. You shall make them of
fine wheat flour. ? And you shall put them in one basket and
bring them in the basket, and bring the bull and the two rams.
* You shall bring Aaron and his sons to the door of the tent of
meeting, and wash them with water. ® And you shall take the garments,
and put on Aaron the coat and the robe of the ephod, and the ephod,
and the breastpiece, and gird him with the skilfully woven band of the
ephod; ® and you shall set the turban on his head, and put the holy
crown upon the turban. ? And you shall take the anointing oil, and
pour it on his head and anoint him. * Then you shall bring his sons,
and put coats on them, ® and you shall gird them with girdles and bind
caps on them; and the priesthood shall be theirs by a perpetual statute.
Thus you shall ordain Aaron and his sons.
10 ‘Then you shall bring the bull before the tent of meeting. Aaron
and his sons shall lay their hands upon the head of the bull, 4 and you
shall kill the bull before the Lorn, at the door of the tent of meeting,
12 and shall take part of the blood of the bull and put it upon the horns
of the altar with your finger, and the rest of the blood you shall pour
out at the base of the altar. 13 And you shall take all the fat that covers
228 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

the entrails, and the appendage of the liver, and the two kidneys with
the fat that is on them, and burn them upon the altar. 14 But the flesh
of the bull, and its skin, and its dung, you shall burn with fire outside
the camp; it is a sin offering.
15 “Then you shall take one of the rams, and Aaron and his sons
shall lay their hands upon the head of the ram, 1% and you shall
slaughter the ram, and shall take its blood and throw it against the
altar round about. !? Then you shall cut the ram into pieces, and wash
its entrails and its legs, and put them with its pieces and its head, 1* and
burn the whole ram upon the altar; it is a burnt offering to the Lorn;
it is a pleasing odour, an offering by fire to the Lorn.
19 ‘You shall take the other ram; and Aaron and his sons shall lay
their hands upon the head of the ram, ?° and you shall kill the ram, and
take part of its blood and put it upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron
and upon the tips of the right ears of his sons, and upon the thumbs of
their right hands, and upon the great toes of their right feet, and throw
the rest of the blood against the altar round about. ?! Then you shall
take part of the blood that is on the altar, and of the anointing oil, and
sprinkle it upon Aaron and his garments, and upon his sons and his
sons’ garments with him; and he and his garments shall be holy, and
his sons and his sons’ garments with him.
22 ‘You shall also take the fat of the ram, and the fat tail, and the
fat that covers the entrails, and the appendage of the liver, and the two
kidneys with the fat that is on them, and the right thigh (for it is a ram
of ordination), ?3 and one loaf of bread, and one cake of bread with oil,
and one wafer, out of the basket of unleavened bread that is before the
Lorp; #4 and you shall put all these in the hands of Aaron and in the
hands of his sons, and wave them for a wave offering before the Lorp.
25 Then you shall take them from their hands, and burn them on the
altar in addition to the burnt offering, as a pleasing odour before the
Lorp; it is an offering by fire to the Lorn.
26 ‘And you shall take the breast of the ram of Aaron’s ordina-
tion and wave it for a wave offering before the Lorn; and it shall
be your portion. 2?’ And you shall consecrate the breast of the wave
offering, and the thigh of the priests’ portion, which is waved, and
which is offered from the ram of ordination, since it is for Aaron and for
his sons. *8 It shall be for Aaron and his sons as a perpetual due from
the people of Israel, for it is the priests’ portion to be offered by the
pears of Israel from their peace offerings; it is their offering to the
ORD.
29 “The holy garments of Aaron shall be for his sons after him, to be
anointed in them and ordained in them. °° The son who is priest in his
place shall wear them seven days, when he comes into the tent of
meeting to minister in the holy place.
31 “You shall take the ram of ordination, and boil its flesh in a holy
place; *? and Aaron and his sons shall eat the flesh of the ram and the
bread that is in the basket, at the door of the tent of meeting. 33 They
shall eat those things with which atonement was made, to ordain and
29.1-46] INSTRUCTIONS FOR INSTALLATION OF PRIESTS 229

consecrate them, but an outsider shall not eat of them, because they are
holy. $4 And if any of the flesh for the ordination, or of the bread, re-
main until the morning, then you shall burn the remainder with fire; it
shall not be eaten, because it is holy.
35 “Thus you shall do to Aaron and to his sons, according to all that
I have commanded you; through seven days shall you ordain them,
38 and every day you shall offer a bull as a sin offering for atonement.
Also you shall offer a sin offering for the altar, when you make atone-
ment for it, and shall anoint it, to consecrate it. 37 Seven days you shall
make atonement for the altar, and consecrate it, and the altar shall be
most holy; whatever touches the altar shall become holy.
38 ‘Now this is what you shall offer upon the altar: two lambs a year
old day by day continually. ?® One lamb you shall offer in the morning,
and the other lamb you shall offer in the evening; *° and with the first
lamb a tenth measure of fine flour mingled with a fourth of a hin of
beaten oil, and a fourth of a hin of wine for a libation. 41 And the other
lamb you shall offer in the evening, and shall offer with it a cereal
offering and its libation, as in the morning, for a pleasing odour, an
offering by fire to the Lorn. * It shall be a continual burnt offering
through your generations at the door of the tent of meeting before the
Lorp, where I will meet with you, to speak there to you. ** There I
will meet with the people of Israel, and it shall be sanctified by my
glory; 44 I will consecrate the tent of meeting and the altar; Aaron also
and his sons I will consecrate, to serve me as priests. #* And I will dwell
among the people of Israel, and will be their God. 4® And they shall
know that I am the Lorn their God, who brought them forth out of the
land of Egypt that I might dwell among them; I am the Lorp their
God.’
Whereas the instructions in chs. 25-28 bear upon the sanctuary
and its contents and include the requisite dress for the priests, ch. 29
deals no longer with the preparation of the furnishings for the life of
the cult soon to be inaugurated, but with the planning of the cultic
celebration of the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests.
Moreover, as the chapter contains a number of divergencies, albeit
insignificant, in the details of the priests’ dress from those given in the
previous chapter, Ex. 29 is to be regarded as a supplement to P. In
addition, this chapter is not a literary unity. A connection, smooth in
essentials, runs only as far as v. 25. Then follow individual sections
in a rather confusing order, which only have a partial bearing on the
proper theme of the chapter. In this part of the chapter we have
to reckon with numerous secondary expansions without being able
to establish in detail the sequence in which these additions were
made.
[1-3] According to the superscription (v. 1a), the following
230 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

instructions deal with the ‘consecration’ of the priests previously

named (‘Aaron and his sons’), i.e. the priestly ordination through
which the priests are transferred from the sphere of the profane into
that of the ‘holy’. To this end there is need of definite sacrificial
actions for which the materials must be made ready (vv. 1b-3).
[4-9] There then follows the washing, enrobing, and—in the case
of the High Priest—the anointing of the persons chosen for the office
of priest. These acts take place at the entrance to the sanctuary
(v. 4a), as the priests still may not enter the sanctuary before their
consecration. Bodily purity obtained through washing with water
(v. 4b) is at the same time a part of cultic purity and stands in a
mysterious relationship with it. The items enumerated for the dress
of the High Priest are those described in ch. 28; only the girdle is
missing, and also the breeches, which are mentioned in ch. 28 only in
a supplement. The question arises whether the order in which the
items are listed in v. 5 is the order in which they are put on. In that
case it would mean here that the High Priest is to wear the coat and
the robe under the ephod and the Adsen. But it is hard to imagine this
happening in practice, nor can it be inferred with any certainty from
v. 5. In v. 6 the insignia on the turban of the High Priest is described
as a ‘crown’ (nézer), differing from 28.36 where a ‘flower’ (sis; RSV
‘plate’) is mentioned (see pp. 225 f. above). According to v. 7 it is only
the High Priest, and not the rest of the priests, who is anointed with
oil; the oil is poured over his head. That only he should be anointed
is the original custom; it is only later that anointing was extended to
all priests. Even in the case of the High Priest, however, anointing is
a relatively late custom and the only evidence for it is from the post-
exilic period. The Old Testament knows nothing of the anointing of
priests for an earlier period. From the earliest times, however, the
Old Testament witnesses to the anointing of kings. From this it may
be concluded that after the end of the monarchy the act of anointing
as a consecration to an office, along with a number of royal insignia
(see pp. 222 ff. above) was transferred to the post-exilic High Priest,
as he had also to take over the cultic functions of the king. This could
not be the case with the other priests, and these are clothed only with
items described in 28.40 (v. ga). The ‘Aaron and his sons’ in v. ga,
has obviously been added by someone who felt the lack of the girdle
in the description of the clothing of Aaron. At the conclusion in gb
it is said that the hands of Aaron and his sons are to be filled.* To
*[RSV renders the Hebrew phrase here as ‘to be ordained’.]
29.1-46] INSTRUCTIONS FOR INSTALLATION OF PRIESTS 231

‘fill the hand’ is an ancient technical term meaning to install a

priest. It already occurs in what is probably the oldest literary
passage to describe the installation of a priest,* and remains a
stereotyped formula right up to the latest of the Old Testament
writings. The expression ‘fill the hand’, which outside the Old Testa-
ment is in evidence in so early a source as the cuneiform texts of
Mari, originally referred to the payment of certain fees for the per-
formance of certain offices. In the Old Testament the expression is
applied specially to priests and has the formal meaning of instituting
a priest in his office, perhaps with the passage of time losing its
reference to its original etymological significance.
[x0-14] The cultic act in the narrower sense which now follows
begins with a sin offering (v. 14b) which in essentials is to be offered
in accordance with the directions given in the setting of the ‘Law of
Sacrifice’ in Lev. 4. The essential details of the sacrificial act are
the application of part of the blood of the animal to the horns of the
altar and the pouring out of the rest of the blood at the foot of the
altar, along with the burning of certain pieces of fat on the altar, and
finally the burning of the remaining parts of the sacrificial victim
which are not used for the sacrifice outside the sanctuary. An
expiatory effect is ascribed, to this sacrifice. Those for whom the
sacrifice is offered, in this case Aaron and his sons, have to lay their
hands upon the beast before it is slaughtered, a process through
which in some indefinable way the sacrifice is identified as their own.
According to Lev. 4 the sin offering is provided for past sins. Here it is
intended as a prophylactic. Moses officiates in it as a priest; as media-
tor of the divine instructions he evidently enjoys the status of a priest
without further ado. He may thus approach the altar on his own
authority.
[15-18] The first ram is then offered as a burnt offering (v. 18) in
accordance with the instructions for the burnt offering given in Lev.
1. The throwing of blood on the altar and the burning of the whole
beast on the altar are parts of the usual rite. The burnt offering,
which once again Aaron and his sons make their own by laying their
hands on it, is to be regarded as a gift to find divine favour and thus
prepares for the act of ordination proper. [19-25] The second ram
plays a special part in this act, and is therefore expressly described
as the ‘ram of ordination’ (v. 22). In this it has the character of a
peace offering or a community offering, though with a number of
*[Judg. 17.5, 12, where RSV renders ‘install’. Tr.]
232 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

peculiarities to fit the special circumstances of an ordination to the

priesthood. A sacrifice of this kind is meant to achieve a connection
between God and those who offer it, and one feature of it is a cultic
meal (cf. the directions in Lev. 3 and the expansions made to them
in Lev. 7.11 ff., 28 ff.). In the ordination of priests the acts of laying
the hands on the animal and killing it (vv. 19, 20aa) are first followed
by a special blood rite, in which some of the blood of the victim is
applied to some parts of the bodies of those to be ordained which are
important in the performance of priestly actions; the rest of the
blood is thrown against the altar round about (v. 20). This establishes
a mysterious relationship between the altar and those who are to be
ordained priests. In the sprinkling of some of the blood thrown on the
altar and the anointing oil, which here once again makes a surprising
appearance, on the priests and upon their ceremonial dress (v. 21a),
the holiness of the altar is transferred to the priests and to their robes
of office (v. 21b). The prosaic reflection that this would ‘spoil’ the
costly priests’ garments should hardly lead us to the conclusion that
we have here a purely theoretical set of directions which were never
carried out in practice. Indeed we need only imagine a few drops of
blood (and oil) and these were a part of the ‘consecration’ of the
priests and their garments. The meal forms the main part of the
sacrifice proper; part of the meal is burnt on the altar and is thereby
given to God, while the other part is eaten by those who offer the
sacrifice; bread accompanies the flesh of the sacrificial victim. In the
same way certain delicacies from the ‘ram of ordination’ (v. 22),
along with some of the bread prepared according to the instructions
in vv. 2, 3a (v. 23), are burnt on the altar in addition to the burnt
offering already offered as a gift to Yahweh (v. 25), after this gift has
been offered ceremonially through the ceremony of ‘waving’ before
Yahweh by those making sacrifice (here Aaron and his sons). This
‘waving’, which has become a stereotyped cultic technical term, is
effected by moving the offered gift to and fro in the hands; this
indicates the distributing of the food. Now those who are offering the
sacrifice must go on to participate in the cultic meal. [31-32] For this
reason vv. 31 f. surely belong in the present context. The fleshy parts
of the ‘ram of ordination’ still remaining are boiled (v. 31) and eaten
by Aaron and his sons, again together with the bread (v. 32). Thus
the sacrifice with the ‘ram of ordination’ is concluded and the ordina-
tion of the priests complete.
[26-30] Between v. 25 and v. 31 there are some evidently second-
29.1~-46] INSTRUCTIONS FOR INSTALLATION OF PRIESTS 233

ary additions. Verse 26 lays the greatest claim to belong to the

original context. At the ordination Moses acts as a priest, and the
priest customarily received a special portion at the sacrificial meal;
he is therefore to receive the breast of the beast after it too has been
‘waved’ in its turn, as the priest’s portion is basically a part of the
divine side of the sacrificial meal. Verses 27 f. with their extremely
turgid writing are, however, surely secondary; they do not fit with
v. 26 and recall the ruling for the priest’s part in the sacrifice which is
customary in general elsewhere. Verses 2g f. likewise interrupt the
sequence. It is here prescribed that at his ordination, which is to last
seven days (cf. v. 35), cach of the followers of Aaron is to wear once
again the ceremonial dress made for Aaron at his ordination and—as
is tacitly assumed—to continue to wear it generally during his course
ofoffice in the sanctuary.
[33-46] ‘The rest of the chapter (vv. 33-46) also essentially consists
of secondary additions. Verse 33 adds the term ‘atonement’ which
has not occurred hitherto in this chapter, and, as would go without
saying, prohibits any ‘outsider’ from participating in the sacrificial
meal. Verse 34 adds a regulation which derives from the nocturnal
Passover sacrifice, that any of the sacrificial food remaining over until
the morning must be consumed with fire. Verse 35 is most likely to be
the closing formula of the original narrative. It is here specially pre-
scribed that the ‘ordination’ is to last for seven days; in other words,
we are to understand that the whole sacrificial complex which has
just been described is to be repeated on each of the seven days. All
that follows this hardly has any real connection with the theme of the
chapter. This applies both to the ‘atonement’ and consecration of the
‘most holy’ altar (vv. 36 f.), an act of purification which is apparently
conceived as running concurrently with the seven-day ordination of
the priests (according to the present wording the altar appears most
unusually as the object of an ‘anointing’; cf. on this 30.26 ff.), and
more so with the continual daily morning and evening burnt offer-
ings (vv. 38-42a), which are here regarded as having been enjoined
for the first time on the occasion of the priestly ordination (on the
earlier history of this ‘continual offering’, tdmid, cf. II Kings 16.15;
Neh. 10.33; Ezra 9.4; Ezek. 46.13 f.). The closing passage, vv. 42b-—
46, is somewhat unskilfully composed of familiar expressions of P
language; in it Yahweh once again appears in the first person, a
manner of speaking which has sunk into the background in previous
instructions (cf. the constantly repeated formula ‘before Yahweh’).
234 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

(1) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE ALTAR OF INCENSE: 30.I-I0

go! ‘You shall make an altar to burn incense upon; of acacia wood
shall you make it. 2 A cubit shall be its length, and a cubit its breadth;
it shall be square, and two cubits shall be its height; its horns shall be of
one piece with it. 3 And you shall overlay it with pure gold, its top and
its sides round about and its horns; and you shall make for it a moulding
of gold round about. 4 And two golden rings shall you make for it;
under its moulding on two opposite sides of it shall you make them, and
they shall be holders for poles with which to carry it. > You shall make
the poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold. ® And you shall
put it before the veil that is by the ark of the testimony, before the mercy
seat that is over the testimony, where I will meet with you. 7 And
Aaron shall burn fragrant incense on it; every morning when he dresses
the lamps he shall burn it, ® and when Aaron sets up the lamps in the
evening, he shall burn it, a perpetual incense before the Lorp through-
oug your generations. ® You shall offer no unholy incense thereon, nor
burnt offering, nor cereal offering; and you shall pour no libation
thereon. 1° Aaron shall make atonement upon its horns once a year;
with the blood of the sin offering of atonement he shall make atonement
for it once in the year throughout your generations; it is most holy to
the Lorn.’

If even ch. 29 had to be regarded as a supplement to the P narra-

tive (see p. 229 f. above), this is all the more the case—as is generally
agreed—with the various passages of mixed content which stand in
chs. 30 and 31. With special regard to 30.1-10 it should be pointed
out that the instructions here given for the making of an altar of
incense are out of sequence. The proper place for them would have
been in the setting of the instructions of chs. 25-27. It may thus be
established that P made no provision for an altar of incense in the
sanctuary which he himself envisaged. This is remarkable, as cultic
‘incense’, to which a primarily exorcistic significance may have been
attached, is a widespread usage which is also attested in the ancient
East. Of course a special altar of incense would not necessarily have
been needed for this; one would only need suitable utensils such as
incense pans, which archaeological discoveries show to have been
known even in pre-Israelite Palestine. The ‘incense’ in the pre-exilic
sanctuary at Jerusalem which is probably presupposed in Isa. 6.4b
could have been produced by means of such apparatus. Now a golden
altar (of incense) is in fact mentioned in I Kings 7.48 as being part of
the temple of Solomon, and in any case there is archaeological
evidence of stone altars of incense as early as the pre-exilic Israelite
period in Palestine. We must therefore suppose that P deliberately
 30.11-16] INSTRUCTIONS FOR LEVYING A POLL-TAX 235

excluded an altar of incense from his design for the sanctuary,

perhaps envisaging a possible illegitimate attitude to and use of
incense, but that the post-exilic Jerusalem temple (as perhaps even
the pre-exilic sanctuary) had an altar of incense (cf. I Macc. 1.21)
and that in view of this the section 30.1-10 was added.
[1-10] The instructions envisage an altar in the form of a base
about three feet high, square in shape, with a moulding running
round the top and with (four) ‘horns’ on the upper corners; in form
and size this roughly corresponds to the stone altars which have been
found in Palestine.* In respect of materials and the arrangements
for transportation the altar of incense matches the corresponding
furnishings mentioned in chs. 25 and 27. The position before the
entrance to the Holy of Holies, covered with a curtain, may have
been usual in the post-exilic temple. The same goes for the require-
ment of a twice daily ‘perpetual’ (tdmid; see p. 233 above) incense
which is to be burnt by the High Priest (‘Aaron’); we are also told
that the lamps (25.37) are to be ‘dressed’ i.e. to be cleaned and
supplied with new oil, in the morning and ‘set up’, i.e. put on the
lampstand (cf. 25.31 ff.) and lit, in the evening of each day. These
details about the use of the altar of incense go beyond the framework
given in chs. 25-28, which is purely descriptive of the cultic appara-
tus, and thus by themselves reveal the passage to be an addition. It
is now impossible to discover why a warning against the misuse of the
altar of incense should have seemed necessary. The atonement for
the altar of incense which is to be made once a year in fact belongs in
the context of the atonement for the whole of the sanctuary (cf.
Lev. 16.15-19) and here appears as a single anticipated regulation on
the theme of general atonement.

(k) INSTRUCTIONS FOR LEVYING A POLL-TAX: 30.1I-16

11 The Lorp said to Moses, 12 ‘When you take the census of the
people of Israel, then each shall give a ransom for himself to the Lorp
when you number them, that there be no plague among them when
you number them. ™ Each who is numbered in the census shall give
this: half a shekel according to the shekel of the sanctuary (the shekel
is twenty gerahs), half a shekel as an offering to the Lorp, 14 Every one
who is numbered in the census, from twenty years old and upward, shall
give the Lorp’s offering. The rich shall not give more, and the poor
*Cf. K. Galling, Biblisches Reallexikon, col. 19, figs. 7 and 8; J. B. Pritchard, The
Ancient Near East in Pictures, p. 192, fig. 575; E. W. Heaton, Everyday Life in Old
Testament Times, p. 124, fig. 63.
236 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

shall not give less, than the half shekel, when you give the Lorp’s offer-
ing to make atonement for yourselves. 1® And you shall take the atone-
ment money from the people of Israel, and shall appoint it for the
service of the tent of meeting; that it may bring the people of Israel
to remembrance before the Lorp, so as to make atonement for your-
selves.’
[1r-16] This section, like those that follow, is introduced by a
stereotyped formula which is not necessary in the context and points
to the secondary character of the passage. The content of the section
presupposes a numbering (‘census’) of the adult male members of the
cult community which is only enjoined and carried out in Num. 1. A
levy of half a shekel per head is to be levied as ‘atonement money’ so
that no plague (lit. ‘blow’) breaks out among them. The thought
behind this reasoning is that a census is something dangerous, as it
could bring down the wrath of God to threaten the lives of those who
were counted (on this cf. II Sam. 24), but that the danger can be
averted by the payment of an ‘atonement for the life’. In Num. 1 of
course the census is in accord with the explicit command of God and
thus is not dangerous to human life. The present section evidently
deals with a secondary justification of a general poll-tax customary
in the post-exilic community which, remarkably enough, goes back
to primitive ideas. The payment of this tax is to supply the needs of
the cult (so expressly v. 16a) but at the same time is meant ‘to bring
the people of Israel to (a beneficent) remembrance before Yahweh’
(v. 16b). The wording seems to envisage just a single levy; in reality
it may deal with a poll-tax which was currently levied in the post-
exilic community and is described with a cultic technical term as a
‘levy’, i.e. as a sacral gift offered by ‘elevating’ it. As cultic rights are
and are meant to be the same for all, the contribution must also be
the same for all (v. 15) so that the rich, for example, do not lay claim
to more cultic rights and the poor are not displaced. A number of
passages which obtrude themselves either by being repetitive or by
having a second person plural address are later additions.

(1) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING A LAVER: 30.17-21

17 The Lorp said to Moses, 18 ‘You shall also make a laver of
bronze, with its base of bronze, for washing. And you shall put it be-
tween the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it,
19 with which Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet.
20 When they go into the tent of meeting, or when they come near the
altar to minister, to burn an offering by fire to the Lorn, they shall
30.22-33] INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING HOLY ANOINTING OIL 237

wash with water, lest they die. * They shall wash their hands and their
feet, lest they die: it shall be a statute for ever to them, even to him and
to his descendants throughout their generations.’

[17-21] At this point orders have been added for the making of a
bronze laver for cultic ablutions and the placing of it in the sanctuary.
It is remarkable that in the inventory of the sanctuary in chs. 25-27
P made no provision for an object so necessary for the ancient con-
ception of cultic purity. It certainly existed at the time of the post-
exilic temple; it was for this reason that a short descriptive section
was inserted here, giving neither measurements nor a detailed
account. The laver has its place in the court of the sanctuary just in
front of the centre of the ‘tent cf meeting’ (the altar of 27.1-8 is
meant by the term ‘altar’ in v. 18). For cultic ablutions the temple of
Solomon had the ‘molten sea’ and the ‘ten stands’, which had been
set on the sides of the temple building (I Kings 7.23-29); the post-
exilic temple contented itself with a more simple apparatus. The
order for the High Priest and priests to wash themselves is made more
emphatic by the observation that death will follow any performance
of the priestly functions without cultic purity, as the ‘holy’ works
destruction on the ‘unholy’. Here external, bodily purity is thought
to have a mysterious connection with cultic purity and is most
probably a part of it.

(m) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE HOLY ANOINTING OIL:

30.22-33
22 Moreover, the Lorp said to Moses, 2% “Take the finest spices: of
liquid myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet-smelling cinnamon half
as much, that is, two hundred and fifty, and of aromatic cane two
hundred and fifty, 74 and of cassia five hundred, according to the
shekel of the sanctuary, and of olive oil a hin; * and you shall make of
these a sacred anointing oil blended as by the perfumer; a holy anoint-
ing oil it shall be. ?® And you shall anoint with it the tent of meeting and
the ark of the testimony, 27 and the table and all its utensils, and the
lampstand and its utensils, and the altar of incense, ?* and the altar of
burnt offering with all its utensils and the laver and its base; ?° you
shall consecrate them, that they may be most holy; whatever touches
them will become holy. ?° And you shall anoint Aaron and his sons, and
consecrate them, that they may serve me as priests. 34 And you shall say
to the people of Israel, ‘“This shall be my holy anointing oil throughout
your generations. *? It shall not be poured upon the bodies of ordinary
men, and you shall make no other like it in composition; it is holy, and
it shall be holy to you. 33 Whoever compounds any like it or whoever
puts any of it on an outsider shall be cut off from his people”’.
2) 3:
238 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

[22=33] The recipe given here for making anointing oil for sacral
anointings may rest upon a tradition of undefinable antiquity, but in
the present form it doubtless corresponds to post-exilic usage. The
materials listed in vv. 23, 24a produced sweet-smelling juices, which
were mixed with the olive oil. The quantity to be made cannot be
established with any accuracy, as the size of the ‘hin’, a dry measure,
has not been determined when it is used for liquids (about 114
pints, or perhaps about 7 pints). Even in the older Old Testament
tradition (cf. Gen. 28.18b; 31.13a) not only human beings but also
sacral objects were anointed with oil, an act which was originally
understood as the supplying of new life-power mediated through the
oil. According to vv. 26-28 the sanctuary and all that it contains is to
be anointed and thus consecrated, ‘made holy’; also included in the
list are the laver and the altar of incense, objects which only appear
in the additions to ch. 30. Physical contact with the objects “con-
secrated’ in this way makes that which touches them ‘holy’ (v. 29b;
cf. 39.37b); a man who becomes ‘holy’ in this way cannot return
into the sphere of the profane, except by taking special precautions
whose character, however, is not mentioned. After the concluding
sentence v. 29, v. 30 looks like an addition; the anointing of the High
Priest has already been mentioned elsewhere, in 29.7 (on this cf.
p- 230). It is understandable that firm prohibitions are placed on the
use of the holy consecrating oil for the purpose of everyday hygiene
and against the compounding of any oil prepared in a similar way for
such a use or even for sale to an ‘outsider’, i.e. an unauthorized
person or even a foreigner. The punishment for such a betrayal of
the ‘most holy’ must be the uprooting of the offender from the
company of his fellow men (by force). This is said in a presumably
ancient expression which is still directed to the earlier community of
the twelve tribes and not as yet to the post-exilic cult community.
(n) INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING THE INCENSE: 30.34-38
34 And the Lorp said to Moses, “Take sweet spices, stacte, and
onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense (of each
shall there be an equal part), *° and make an incense blended as by the
perfumer, seasoned with salt, pure and holy; 3 and you shall beat
some of it very small, and put part of it before the testimony in the tent
of meeting where I shall meet with you; it shall be for you most holy.
87 And the incense which you shall make according to its composition,
you shall not make for yourselves; it shall be for you holy to the Lorp.
38 Whoever makes any like it to use as perfume shall be cut off from
his people.’
31.1-11] THE APPOINTMENT OF THE CRAFTSMEN 239

[34-38] The recipe for making the material for the ‘incense’ also
may be supposed to come from the post-exilic period, though it may
well have been taken over from an older usage. The wording of v. 36
is probably to be understood in the following way: of the present
supply of substances a part is from time to time to be beaten very
small and of this a further part is to be burnt as incense once a day
(perhaps twice a day according to 30.7 f.). It is remarkable that the
altar of incense of vv. 1—10 is not mentioned in v. 36, so that we get
the impression that here only censing by means of a censer is in-
tended ‘before the testimony’, i.e. before the Holy of Holies and the
‘Ark of the testimony’ that is contained within. It remains striking
that in v. 36 no express mention of ‘burning’ or ‘censing’ is made,
just that the incense is to be brought in front of the Holy of Holies;
we cannot however understand this to mean anything but ‘censing’.
The prohibition of vv. 37 f. corresponds roughly to that of wv. 32 f.
(0) THE APPOINTMENT OF THE CRAFTSMEN: 31.I-II
311 The Lorp said to Moses, 2 ‘See, I have called by name Bezalel
the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: 3 and I have filled him
with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge
and all craftsmanship, 4 to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver,
and bronze, °in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, for
work in every craft. ® And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab,
the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and I have given to all able
men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you:
7 the tent of meeting, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat
that is thereon, and all the furnishings of the tent, ® the table and its
utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of
incense, * and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the
laver and its base, 1° and the finely worked garments, the holy gar-
ments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons, for their service
as priests, 11 and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense for the holy
place. According to all that I have commanded you shall do.’

[1-11] The position of this passage and its introduction by the

stereotyped introductory formula (v. 1) indicates that here too we
have a literary addition to the P narrative. In any case the list in
vv. 7-11 is secondary as it includes—in the same way as the list in
30.26-28—the items which are only introduced as an addition in
ch. 30 (altar of incense and laver, oil of anointing and incense). Of
course this list could itself be secondary in comparison to the passage
vv. 2-6, as it is quite superfluous after the clause v. 6b which sums the
passage and rounds it off. But in view of what has already been said
240 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

the passage vv. 2-6 is already to be regarded as a later addition. We

can unfortunately no longer ascertain the derivation of the tradition
of the two craftsmen under whose direction and supervision the
‘able men’ are to carry out the manifold tasks involved in the making
of the sanctuary and all that it contains. The names of Bezalel and his
father Uri are attested as personal names from the post-exilic period
(Ezra 10.30 and 24 respectively) and the name Hur occurs in I
Chron. 2.50; 4.1, 4 (cf. also Neh. 3.9) in the genealogy of Judah.
This could suggest a post-exilic origin for the tradition. The names
Oholiab and Ahisamach do not occur elsewhere in the Old Testa-
ment, but the latter belongs to a frequent and old type of personal-
name construction, and while the former is unusual it is not neces-
sarily an artificial construction, as there is also evidence of its ele-
ments in West Semitic nomenclature. We must therefore accept
the possibility that behind these names and even behind their
assignation to certain Israelite tribes, there stand the historical
figures of craftsmen who were at one time involved in the furnishing
of the sanctuary. But all clues which might accord them some con-
crete date or description are lacking.

(p) INSTRUCTIONS FOR KEEPING THE SABBATH: 31.12-I7

12 And the Lorp said to Moses, 18 ‘Say to the people of Israel, ““You
shall keep my sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you through-
out your generations, that you may know that I, the Lorp, sanctify
you. !4 You shall keep the sabbath, because it is holy for you; every one
who profanes it shall be put to death; whoever does any work on it, that
soul shall be cut off from among his people. 4 Six days shall work be
done, but the seventh day is a sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lorp;
whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death.
16 Wherefore the people of Israel shall keep the sabbath, observing the
sabbath throughout their generations, as a perpetual covenant. 1? It is
a sign for ever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the
Lorp made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and
was refreshed.” ’

[12-17] The emphasis on the sabbath commandment (cf. 16.22—

27 P, and on that passage pp. 135 f. above) is evidently here to be
understood in connection with what has immediately gone before.
Apart from the position of this section this is principally clear from
the formulation of the opening words of the command in v. 1gab,
where particular reference is made to what has just been said. It
therefore means that rest on the sabbath day is to be observed strictly
31.18-32.35] APOSTASY OF THE GOLDEN CALF 241
even during the work of erecting the sanctuary which has been
enjoined by God; the death penalty will be carried out on any
transgressor. For the sabbath is the ‘sign’ of the peculiar relationship
between God and people by which the whole world is to recognize
the existence of this relationship (v. 13b) which makes Israel ‘holy’,
i.e. which marks Israel off from the other nations. Verse 14 gives the
impression of clumsiness, as v. 14a in effect only repeats something
which has already been said and v. 14b threatens the death penalty
in two different formulations (on the formulation of v. 14ba cf.
p- 179 above on 21.12 ff.; on that of v. 14bd cf. p. 238 above on
30.33). Nevertheless, perhaps these repetitions may be explained by
the emphasis which the author wishes to make in his stressing of the
sabbath commandment. In wv. 15-17, however, we certainly have a
secondary addition, as is evident from the carelessness of the phrasing
alone. In vv. 15 and 17b Yahweh is named in the third person
without any reference to the context, but in between v. 17a has him
speaking again in the first person. This addition is substantially
composed of repetitions of previous verses, variants on the sabbath
commandment of 20.8-11 and a reference to Gen. 2.2 f.; it concludes
with the striking statement that Yahweh ‘was refreshed’ after the six
days of creation. :
5. APOSTASY AND ANOTHER COVENANT: 31.18-
34-35
(a) THE APOSTASY OF THE GOLDEN CALF: 31.18—32.35
18 And he gave to Moses, when he had made an end of speaking
with him upon Mount Sinai, the two tables of the testimony, tables of
stone, written with the finger of God.
32! When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from
the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron, and
said to him, ‘Up, make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this
Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not
know what has become of him.’ 2? And Aaron said to them, “Take off
the rings of gold which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and
your daughters, and bring them to me.’ 3 So all the people took off the
rings of gold which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron.
4 And he received the gold at their hand, and fashioned it with a grav-
ing tool, and made a molten calf; and they said, “These are your gods,
O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ * When
Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclama-
tion and said, ‘Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lorn.’ ® And they rose
up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings and brought peace
offerings ;and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.
24.2 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

7 And the Lorn said to Moses, ‘Go down; for your people, whom
you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves;
8 they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded
them; they have made for themselves a molten calf, and have wor-
shipped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ““These are your gods, O Israel,
who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’’’ ® And the Lorn said
to Moses, ‘I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people ;
10 now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I
may consume them; but ofyou I will make a great nation.’
11 But Moses besought the Lorp his God, and said, ‘O Lorn, why
does thy wrath burn hot against thy people, whom thou hast brought forth
out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 1* Why
should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay
them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’ Turn
from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. 1* Remember
Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou didst swear by thine
own self, and didst say to them, “‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars
of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants,
and they shall inherit it for ever.’ 14 And the Lorn repented of the evil
which he thought to do to his people.

15 And Moses turned, and went down from the mountain with the
two tables [of the testimony] in his hands, tables that were written on
both sides; on the one side and on the other were they written. 1® And
the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of
God, graven upon the tables. 1? When Joshua heard the noise of the
people as they shouted, he said to Moses “There is a noise of war in the
camp.’ 18 But he said, ‘It is not the sound of shouting for victory, or the
sound of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.’ 19 And as
soon as he came near the camp and saw the calfand the dancing, Moses’
anger burned hot, and he threw the tables out ofhis hands and brokethem
at the foot of the mountain. ?° And he took the calf which they had made,
and burnt it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it upon
the water, and made the people of Israel drink it.
21 And Moses said to Aaron, ‘What did this people do to you that
you have brought a great sin upon them?’ 2? And Aaron said, ‘Let not
the anger of my lord burn hot; you know the people, that they are set
on evil. 73 For they said to me, “‘Make us gods, who shall go before us;
as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt,
we do not know what has become of him.”’ 24 And I said to them, ‘“‘Let
any who have gold take it off’’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it
into the fire, and there came out this calf.’
25 And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose [(for
Aaron had let them break loose, to their shame among their enemies)],
6 then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, ‘Who is on the
Lorp’s side? Come to me.’ And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves
together to him. 2? And he said to them, “Thus says the Lorp God of
Israel, ‘Put every man his sword on his side, and go to and fro from gate
31.18-32.35] APOSTASY OF THE GOLDEN CALF 243
to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every
man his companion, and every man his neighbour’’.’ 28 And the sons
of Levi did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people
that day about three thousand men. ?9 And Moses said, “Today you have
ordained yourselves for the service of the Lorp, each one at the cost of his
son and of his brother, that he may bestow a blessing upon you this day.’
30 On the morrow Moses said to the people, ‘You have sinned a
great sin. And now I will go up to the Lorp; perhaps I can make atone-
ment for your sin.’ 31 So Moses returned to the Lorp and said, ‘Alas
this people have sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods
of gold. ** But now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—and if not, blot me,
I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.’ 33 But the Lorp
said to Moses, ‘Whoever has sinned against me, him will I blot out of
my book. *4 But now go, lead the people to the place of which I have
spoken to you; behold, my angel shall go before you. Nevertheless, in
the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them.’
35 And the Lorn sent a plague upon the people, because they made
the calf which Aaron made.

In its present form, ch. 32 must be examined in the context of

the whole complex of chs. 32-34. The theme of the tables, broken
(ch. 32) and then renewed (ch. 34), holds the whole together,
whereas ch. 33 is a further independent development of the subor-
dinate theme of the departure from Sinai which appears at the end
of ch. 32. Apart from small additions in the style of the P narrative,
in chs. 32-34 we are once again dealing with old Pentateuchal
narrative material. Thus the threads of the narrative which were let
slip in ch. 24 are here taken up once more; indeed we were already
prepared for chs. 32-34 by the mention in 24.12-15a that Moses
went up into the mountain to receive ‘tables of stone’ and to stay
there for some time. Thus in any case we must suppose that J is
continued in chs. 32-34; and it is quite generally agreed that at least
the major portion of ch. 34 is to be assigned to theJ narrative, while
most would also add parts of ch. 32 and even of ch. 33. This may be
correct. The state of the sources is certainly extremely confused in this
complex and something further should be said about individual
details. The nucleus of the whole historical tradition is to be found in
ch. 34, the narrative of the making of the covenant based on the
‘words of the covenant’ (34.27 f.) communicated to Moses on the
mountain and then written on the tables. Here—and only here—
we are told what was written on the tables which Moses was sum-
moned up the mountain to receive. On the other hand, the narrative
of the broken tables (ch. 32), about whose inscription the old
244 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

Pentateuchal material has as yet told us absolutely nothing, appears

to be a secondary tradition. The main narrative about the tables,
their contents and their significance stands only in ch. 34. Now if all
that we have here is a renewal of some tables about whose contents
we have been told nothing and which were at one time broken, we
can hardly hold the account to be original. The story of the broken
tables must therefore be regarded as an addition to the historical
tradition, which may go back to the pre-literary period.
To answer the latter question it is necessary to make a literary-
critical and traditio-historical analysis of ch. 32. It is generally
recognized that this section is not a literary unity. First, it is certain
that because of their style vv. g-14 must be regarded as a deuterono-
mistic addition which explains the sparing of Israel—represented
as historical—after their apostasy from cult worship by Yahweh’s
concern for his reputation among the Egyptians (and thus among the
peoples of the world) and also by the oath which he had given to the
Patriarchs, but goes on to anticipate the question of the punishment
of Israel in an inappropriate way.
It is further striking that Aaron’s role is not very deeply rooted in
the narrative. It is quite clear that the subordinate clauses which
refer to Aaron in v. 35 and similarly in v. 25 are secondary additions.
But even the conversation between Moses and Aaron in wv. 21-24 Is
evidently an addition; it is out of sequence after the actions of Moses
reported in vv. 19 f., as Moses would surely have interrogated Aaron
before taking definite steps. Moreover, it is remarkable that Aaron’s
confession had no further consequences for his own person. Now in
this confession Aaron refers to what is reported about him in wv. 1b—
4, but not completely accurately; the difference between Aaron’s
words in v. 24b and the language of the narrative in v. 4a is surely to
be understood as an attempt on the part of the narrator to provide a
rather lame and hollow-sounding exculpation of Aaron. But in that
case we must use vv. 21-24 to question whether the occurrence of
Aaron in wv. 1b~—4 is original and consider whether this passage was
not originally written with the people as the subject of the action
(cf. also vv. 7 f., where the people are likewise mentioned in this role).
This is also supported by v. 5, as the beginning of this verse reads as
though Aaron had hitherto had nothing to do with the matter and
now wished to give a fairly tolerable turn to the proceedings by
guiding them along the lines of a regulated Yahweh cult. Now Aaron
himself of course occurs in v. 5, so that we are driven to assume that
31.18-32.35] APOSTASY OF THE GOLDEN CALF 245
the Aaron additions occur in two different strata. As v. 5 presupposes
a more original text than 1b-4 it is to be assumed that Aaron was
first introduced into the story as one who tolerated the fait accompli
of the people and took part in the proceedings willy-nilly (so v. 5;
v. 25b could also belong to this) and that Aaron’s activity was
emphasized more strongly at a later date—even if the initiative did
come from the people (so the transmitted wording of vv. 1b-4 and
also vv. 21-24 and 35bb). Unfortunately we can no longer ascertain
the time or the circumstances of the addition of these passages. They
must derive from circles in which the (priestly) sons of Aaron were
accused of participating in illegitimate cults and must in any case
have come into being before Aaron had become the ancestor of the
sole legitimate priesthood of Yahweh (thus P).
Even after these secondary elements have been taken away all is
not yet smooth. There are a number of variants, especially with
respect to the reprimanding of the people. According to v. 20, Moses
gave the people a ‘water of cursing’ to drink, while according to
vv. 25-29 the Levites punished the apostasy with the sword, and
v. 34 says that Yahweh postponed the visitation of the sinners to an
unspecified time which he reserves for himself. Now in any case it is
clear that the Levite-passage is to be judged a later addition; its real
aim is not to describe the punishment of Israel but to narrate and
give reasons for the entrusting of the priestly office to the Levites,
and in so doing it presupposes the occasion of this punishment. As the
single mention of Aaron has evidently been added later to the intro-
duction to this section, v. 25b, the section will be older than the
insertion of Aaron into the narrative of the golden calf. But apart
from vv. 25-29 there remains the juxtaposition of the narrative theme
of the ‘water of cursing’ (v. 20b) which would have culminated in a
description of the consequences, now missing, and at best might have
its continuation and conclusion in the extremely vague remark about
the ‘sending of a plague’ by Yahweh in v. 35 aba, and on the other
hand of the reference to a postponement of the punishment in
vv. 30-34. In the explanation of individual details which now
follows it will be necessary to investigate this present difficulty. It can,
however, be said at this stage that this juxtaposition is not sufficient
to justify the assumption that there are two continuous narrative
threads in this chapter, for which there are no clear indications
elsewhere. The situation rather favours the presence of a basic
narrative which has been expanded into several strata by secondary
246 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

additions, none of which prove themselves to be the fragmentary

remains of a second, originally complete, variant narrative. The basic
narrative is certainly—if only in view of its connection with the main
part of ch. 34—to be related in some way to J.
The history of the tradition of the narrative of the golden calf
cannot be separated from the setting up of two ‘golden calves’ in the
sanctuaries of Bethel and Dan by King Jeroboam of Israel, reported
in I Kings 12.28f. This is supported not only by the general corre-
spondence of the main features but also by the explanatory formula
in Ex. 32.(4b) 8bd which is verbally identical with I Kings 12.28bé.
As the reason for the plural phrasing of this formula is that there are
two ‘golden calves’ in I Kings 12 (‘. . . your gods, who brought you
up .. .’) and this would not be appropriate in Ex. 32, it is to be
assumed that the basic narrative of Ex. 32 on its part presupposes the
prophetic narrative of I Kings 12.(13) 14 in at least an already stereo-
typed oral form if not fixed in writing. Its purpose is therefore to
condemn Jeroboam’s measures as apostasy and a breach of the cove-
nant which finds special expression in the breaking of the tables on
which ‘the words of the covenant’ (34.28) were written. It connects
the setting up of the ‘golden calves’ by Jeroboam and the worship
accorded by Israel to these calves with a tendency to disloyalty which
was native to Israel from the beginning. We can ask whether perhaps
Ex. 32 contains an older tradition of a cultic apostasy of Israel even
on Sinai which was only later transformed into a polemic against the
‘golden calves’ of Jeroboam. It is, however, impossible to find any
concrete clues for such an assumption, and so we must therefore
reckon with the possibility that the narrative of Ex. 32 was originally
composed with reference to Jeroboam’s cult-politics. We might then
assume that Jeroboam introduced no innovations, but that there had
already been ‘golden calves’ at cultic places in Israel before his time,
though of course we know nothing of them. Should the connection
with Jeroboam in Ex. 32 be original, there would be difficulties in
assigning the basic matter of the chapter to J if J, as seems probable,
belongs to the time of David and Solomon. In that case either Jmust
be brought down to the post-Solomonic period in respect of Ex. 32
or—and this I hold to be the most probable solution—Ex. 32 must
be regarded as a subsequent literary addition to theJ narrative which
was inserted to accommodate the condemnation of the cult intro-
duced by Jeroboam within the great comprehensive description of
the prehistory and early history of Israel provided by J.
31.18-32.35] APOSTASY OF THE GOLDEN CALF 24.7
[31.18] ‘This verse provides the link between the preceding P nar-
rative and Ex. 32. As, however, the mere position of the temporal
indications in the Hebrew text, which refer specially to what has
gone before, proves them to be an addition, the basic matter of the
verse will belong to the older narrative material (in that case the P
expression ‘tables of the testimony’ is also to be regarded as an
addition) and will originally have been joined to 24.12-15a. In view
of what follows, it is expressly remarked that Moses received the
tables. The statements about the tables are, where they occur,
noticeably different. The most original is surely the tradition that
Moses himself hewed out two tables of stone on the mountain at the
command of God and then also himself wrote upon them (so 34.1,
28). On the other hand, according to 31.18 they were ‘given’ to him
by God, and a similar statement is made at 24.12b; at the same time
it follows from this that 24.12b (to which in that case 24.13a, 14, 15a
also belong) is to be regarded as an introduction to the special
tradition of ch. 32, whereas in 24.12a, 13b we have to find the
literary connection with ch. 34. Deut. 9.10 says, in exactly the same
words as 31.18, that the tables were written ‘with the finger of God’,
and may have been transferred from there to its present position, as
in 32.15-16 the tables are inscribed in a different way.
[32.1-6] According to the hypothesis advanced above, the de-
scription of the preparation and cultic use of the ‘golden calf?
(32.1-6) was originally written with the people as the subject of the
action. To bring in Aaron (in two different strata) only a little
recasting and expansion was necessary (perhaps v. 1b originally ran
‘We will make us gods’). Here as in I Kings 12.28 the ‘calf’ is
explained as a representation of God, indeed as an image of the God
who had brought Israel up out of Egypt. This explanation contains
a pejorative exaggeration of the original circumstances which has
purposely been introduced with polemical intent. As the ancient
Near East (in contrast to Egypt) knows no theriomorphic deities but
only the association of beasts with deities pictured in human form
whose companions and bearers they are, the ‘golden calves’ of the
royal sanctuaries of Jeroboam are also surely meant merely as
pedestals for the God who is imagined to be standing invisibly upon
them. As Moses, who has hitherto been mediator between God and
people and the representative of God, appears to be missing, Israel
will no longer trust the God who is appearing to him on Sinai, but
desire a visible God to lead them on their way. The attitude of the
248 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

people is shown to be rough and coarse. They speak of Moses, to

whom (instead of to God) they ascribe their deliverance from Egypt,
in a contemptuous tone (v. 1). Then they ‘take off’ (v. 3a) their
golden earrings and make out of them a molten calf (v. 4a). The
term ‘calf’ here (as in I Kings 12) is a derogatory description given
by the writer; the image of the bull was quite small, indeed only a
‘calf’ in relation to the God imagined, if not depicted, in human form.
Nevertheless the people of Israel meant it to represent the God who
had led Israel out of Egypt (v. 4b) and who bore the name Yahweh
(v. 5, if a basic element of this verse may be said to have belonged to
the original narrative without Aaron). Special emphasis is laid on the
extravagant celebrations at the cult feast which inaugurates the new
divine worship (v. 6). True, eating (and drinking) form part of the
rite of the communal sacrifice. Here, however, they are expressly
mentioned with a purpose; ‘and rose up to play’ doubtless refers to
sexual orgies (see Gen. 26.8) such as played a part in the Canaanite
fertility cults. The description of the one golden calf in the plural as
‘gods’ (vv. 4b, 5b, 8b) is striking. According to the hypothesis
advanced above, it derives from I Kings 12.28, but there too it already
has a polemic twist in that it represents Jeroboam’s two golden calves
(doubtless contrary to the king’s real intention) as a plurality of gods
and thus as a piece of idolatrous Canaanite cultic practice. In Ex. 32
the one golden calf is condemned with this phrase as an element of
polytheistic worship whose character should not escape us just
because the cult, which begins with a feast, is nominally one of
Yahweh.
[32-7-16] At this point (vv. 7 f.) Moses upon the mountain is
briefly informed of what has happened and is reminded of his
responsibility for the people whom he has brought up out of Egypt
(here too, as in v. 1, he is made the chief actor in the Exodus).
Thereupon (on the addition vv. 9-14 see p. 244 above) he descends
from the mountain with the two ‘tables’ which have been given to
him (31.18). In this context, in vv. 15 f., something more is said about
the tables so as to elucidate the significance of the breaking of the
tables which soon follows. To that extent the description of the
tables at this point makes good sense. But of course we must also
reckon with the possibility that this description of the tables is a
subsequent addition which was inserted in the course of a further
development of the tradition of the tables—perhaps even in several
strata—and that originally only ‘the two tables’ in the hand of Moses
31.18-32.35] APOSTASY OF THE GOLDEN CALF 249
were mentioned (the expression ‘tables of the testimony’ is elsewhere
found only in P). The mere fact that the tables are inscribed on both
sides shows that they are something out of the ordinary, as it was the
custom for inscribed stones (s¢élai) to bear the inscription on one side
only. It is all the more extraordinary that the tables were ‘the work
of God’ and the inscription ‘the writing of God’ (in these contexts the
word ‘God’ is meant generally and could have been used in this way
even by J). The terms ‘work of God’ and ‘writing of God’ do not
necessarily imply that the tables had been made and inscribed by
God; the words could also mean that the tables were of a wonderful
kind, with a sacral form of writing, without the formula, framed so
strikingly in an impersonal way, giving any further information about
their origin. But perhaps the formula is meant to be understood as a
mysterious reference to the divine origin of the tables and the writing.
[32-17-20] The uproar in the Israelite camp is misunderstood by
Joshua, who was introduced in 24.13a as a companion of Moses and
here appears once again as a subordinate companion, to give greater
prominence to the superior knowledge of Moses, who has already
been informed (vv. 7 f.). In Moses’ words of v. 18, which have
poetical form and appear to represent a stereotyped remark, but
whose original Sitz im Leben is nevertheless obscure, the decisive word
is missing in the transmitted text, whether it has fallen out by mistake
or whether it has been suppressed because of its inappropriateness
(perhaps referring to v. 6 bb). Moses’ breaking of the tables at the
foot of the mountain, i.e. before he has entered the camp, means that
he now declares the covenant between God and people to be broken
and therefore null and void. If he then burns and grinds the calf, this
presupposes two different kinds of material. The burning can only
apply to wood. The assumption that the calf was made of a wooden
centre overlaid with plate gold does not harmonize with the expres-
sion ‘molten calf’ (vv. 4, 8). On the other hand, however, it is also
difficult to see in v. 20 an element of a variant tradition of which
there is no evidence elsewhere. Is it perhaps tacitly to be presupposed
that the calf had been set up on a wooden pedestal? Moses grinds the
gold of the calf in the same way as a man grinds corn between two
stones. The narrator evidently has taken no thought as to how this
was technically possible. For him the main thing is that the gold dust
is strewn on the water so that this water becomes a ‘water of cursing’.
For this must be the sense of v. gob. Elsewhere (cf. Num. 5.11-28)
such a ‘water of cursing’ serves to introduce a judgment from God;
250 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

the ‘water of cursing’ produces effects on the guilty which demon-

strate their guilt. In the present case of course it was not necessary to
discover the guilty ones, as all Israel is presumed to be guilty. It is
evidently meant here that Moses with the ‘water of cursing’ hands
over to God the punishment of Israel. Certainly the old ‘water of
cursing’ narrative theme is not continued in the narrative as it has
been handed down to us (cf. p. 251 below on v. 35).
[21-29] According to the secondary section vv. 25-29 (on vv. 2I-
24 see pp. 244 f. above), Moses himself arranged the punishment by
calling together those who had wanted to stand by Yahweh, i.e. the
‘real’ Yahweh, who had had nothing to do with the bull image, and
with prophetic authority (cf. the introduction of his speech in
v. 27aa) commanded them in the name of ‘Yahweh, the God of
Israel’ to pay no attention to bonds of kinship or humanitarian
feeling, but to cause a great massacre with the sword throughout the
Israelite camp. “The sons of Levi’ followed his outcry and his com-
mand. Many questions remain unanswered in this context. Had these
‘sons of Levi’, the ‘Levites’, previously looked on at the erection of the
golden calf and the worship of it without opposition, perhaps even
themselves being concerned in it, and did they only realize later what
was happening? And what had been their status up to now? As they
are to kill even relations and neighbours, it does not seem as though
they were thought of as a ‘tribe’ in the usual sense of a great com-
munity connected at least fictitiously by blood. The question of what
happened earlier is of no interest to the writer. Even the sequel itself
is described only fragmentarily. How great a part of the whole the
three thousand ‘fallen’ (v. 28b) represents, and why only a part were
attacked (as is also stated in the formulation of v. 28b), and on what
grounds this particular three thousand were killed all remains unsaid.
The interest in this section is in the appointment of the Levites to be
priests, as is reported at the close where it is described by the technical
term ‘ordination’ (on this see pp. 230 f.). Evidently the passage derives
from a time when the right of the Levites to be the priests or even
their right to be sole priests was still disputed (cf. Deut. 33. 8-11,
especially v. rrb) and a historical justification was deemed necessary.
The insertion of the section into the narrative of the golden calf may
indicate that the claim of the Levites to priestly privileges etc. had
to be carried through against the priesthood of the royal sanctuaries
of the state of Israel (cf. Jeroboam’s appointment of non-Levitical
priests in I Kings 12.31b). Unfortunately the reasons in v. 29 for the
31.18-32.35] APOSTASY OF THE GOLDEN CALF 251
right of the Levites to the priesthood are no longer preserved intact;
the clause giving the reasons has apparently been transmitted in a
defective form, and there is little possibility of filling the gaps by
conjectures. All that is clear is that the Levites were entrusted with
the priestly office because they paid no attention to sons and brothers
(on this cf. Deut. 33.9a) and—so we must expand the meaning of the
narrative—will have nothing to do with them in the future. Thus it
seems to have been a characteristic of the Levites that they were
loosed from all family ties.
[30=35] In the closing section vv. 30-35 we have an unbalanced
juxtaposition of, on the one side, a brief remark about the ‘plague’
(lit. ‘blow’) of Yahweh with which he punishes the apostasy of the
people (v. 35) and, on the other, the description of the postponement
of the punishment (vv. 30-34). We must see in v. 35 the still extant
continuation and conclusion of the narrative theme of the ‘water of
cursing’ (v. 20). According to this the effect of this water was no
longer thought to be magical but was handed over to the divine
power; Yahweh made it result in a plague for Israel, a term which
we must understand to mean something like a deadly sickness. We
are, however, given no details about the character and extent of this
sickness. In comparison with this information vv. 30-34 must be
regarded as a literary addition. This passage too joins on to v. 20 by
way of an addition, as the temporal details in v. 30 can only refer to
the proceedings described in wv. 19 f. The ‘water of cursing’ has not
yet made its effect felt, for ‘on the morrow’ Moses resolves to make an
attempt at atoning for the ‘great sin’ by offering himself as a vicarious
sacrifice (v. 32). The way in which Moses speaks in v. 32b pre-
supposes that God has a register of the living, and that from time to
time he strikes out from this register those who are to die (cf. ‘the
book of the living’ or ‘of life’ in Ps. 69.28). This offer is rejected with
a reference to the principle that the guilty shall be personally
punished, but this is reserved for the time being; meanwhile Moses
is to lead the people away from Sinai (the indication of the accom-
panying divine ‘angel’ in v. 34 ab is an addition). Thus the punish-
ment is postponed to an unspecified time and an indeterminate place.
This is most remarkable, but can, however, probably be explained
by the reference of the story of the golden calf to the cultic measures
of Jeroboam I; this cultic apostasy must still—so the writer gives us to
understand—be expiated even if this is not apparent at the time. God
has still marked it out for some time. Thus the passage vv. 30-34
252 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

may come from the time before the end of the state of Israel and its
royal sanctuaries. From vv. 30-34, v. 35aba has acquired the sub-
sidiary meaning that Yahweh still ‘smote’ Israel sometime and some-
where, although v. 35aba certainly meant originally that the punish-
ment followed immediately upon the apostasy.
(6) THE PRESENCE OF YAHWEH WITH HIS PEOPLE: 33.1-23
33 The Lorn said to Moses, ‘Depart, go up hence, you and the people
whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, to the land of
which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ““To your
descendants I will give it.” 2 And I will send an angel before you, and I
will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites,
the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 3?Go up to a land flowing with milk and
honey; but I will not go up among you, lest I consume you in the way,
for you are a stiff-necked people.’
4 When the people heard these evil tidings, they mourned; and no
man put on his ornaments. ® For the Lorp had said to Moses, ‘Say to
the people of Israel, ‘“‘You are a stiff-necked people; if for a single
moment I should go up among you, I would consume you. So now put
off your ornaments from you, that I may know what to do with you”’.’
6 Therefore the people of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments,
from Mount Horeb onward.
7 Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far
off from the camp; and he called it the tent of meeting. And every one
who sought the Lorp would go out to the tent of meeting, which was
outside the camp. § Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people
rose up, and every man stood at his tent door, and looked after Moses,
until he had gone into the tent. When Moses entered the tent, the
pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the door of the tent, and the
Lorp would speak with Moses. 1° And when all the people saw the pillar
of cloud standing at the door of the tent, all the people would rise up and
worship, every man at his tent door. 11 Thus the Lorp used to speak to
Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses turned
again into the camp, his servant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man,
did not depart from the tent.
12 Moses said to the Lorp, ‘See, thou sayest to me, “‘Bring up this
people,” but thou hast not let me know whom thou wilt send with me.
Yet thou hast said, “I know you by name, and you have also found
favour in my sight.”’ 18 Now therefore, I pray thee, if I have found
favour in thy sight, show me now thy ways, that I may know thee and
find favour in thy sight. Consider too that this nation is thy people.’
M And he said, ‘My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’
18 And he said to him, ‘If thy presence will not go with me, do not carry
us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favour
in thy sight, I and thy people? Is it not in thy going with us, so that we
are distinct, I and thy people, from all other people that are upon the
face of the earth ?’
33.1-23] PRESENCE OF YAHWEH WITH HIS PEOPLE 253
17 And the Lorn said to Moses, ‘This very thing that you have
spoken I will do; for you have found favour in my sight, and I know
you by name.’ 18 Moses said, ‘I pray thee, show me thy glory.’ 19 And
he said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim
before you my name “The Lorp”’; and I will be gracious to whom I
will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
20 But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and
live.’ #} And the Lorp said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me where you
shall stand upon the rock; ?* and while my glory passes by I will put
you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I
have passed by; 8 then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my
back; but my face shall not be seen.’

The very varied pieces of Ex. 33 are held together by the theme of
the presence of God in the midst of his people, which plays some part
in all of them. This common theme was evidently also the reason for
the collection of all the passages. The whole joins up with 32.34a,
where Moses receives the command to lead the people away from
Sinai. This command raises the question of how the people can pre-
serve the presence of God experienced on the mountain of the theo-
phany once this place has been left behind. As the command 32.34a
stands in the context of a section which is probably already secondary
in comparison with the basic material of ch. 32, we must all the more
hold the sections in ch. 33 to be literary additions. It will be necessary
to make a detailed examination to see whether we can learn any
more about the literary and traditional derivation of these passages.
[1-6] The first section, vv. 1-6, is interspersed with Deuteronomic
phrases and is thus most probably to be accounted of Deuteronomic
origin throughout. It is further not a literary unity. To the instruc-
tions, given in the form of a command directed to Moses, to set off for
the land already promised to the Patriarchs (v. 1) are added words
in which the people are addressed directly (v. 3b), and these words
form the continuation of v. 2a (the intermediary section vv. 2b, 3a
consists of familiar clauses and phrases inserted later), where the
special reference of the ‘you’ in the address remains doubtful. As in
23.20, Yahweh promises that an ‘angel’ (cf. on 23.20) will accompany
them to guide them (v. 2a) and here gives the reason that he himself
will not go with them as his presence would consume the ‘stiff-
necked’ people (v. 3b). This allusion to ‘stiff-neckedness’ refers to
the wilfulness of the people in their apostasy towards the golden calf
(cf. the same expression in the deuteronomistic insertion in 32.9). The
leaving off of ornaments is part of the mourning with which the
E.-I
254 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

people bewail Yahweh’s announcement that he will not go with

them (v. 4). Only the immediate sequel explains why this is expressly
mentioned. Verses 5 f. are only an apparent variant of v. 4; in fact the
command of Yahweh reported in v. 5 is to the effect that the orna-
ments are not merely to be laid aside but to be thrown away com-
pletely. And so the Israelites ‘put off their ornaments’, ‘stripped
themselves’ actually on Horeb (so we are to understand the somewhat
unclear formula at the end of v. 6 in which at the same time the
deuteronomistic name for the mountain—Horeb instead of Sinai—is
noteworthy). This is to be understood as a sincere and lasting repen-
tance on the part of the Israelites, so that Yahweh can now ‘do
something with them’ (v. 5bb). What he can do is of course not
immediately said. According to the transmitted state of the chapter
this allusion refers to the tent discussed in the following section as the
place of ‘meeting’ between God and Moses (viz. the people) and thus
as an occasion of the divine presence, something more than that of
the ‘angel’, which is now vouchsafed to the penitent people. It is
probable that this connection between vv. 5 f. and vv. 7-11 was
originally meant by the text, i.e. that the Deuteronomic excerpt
vv. 1-6 has vv. 7-11 in view from the beginning and forms the
Deuteronomic transition to the section about the ‘tent of meeting’.
Of course it has often been assumed that something has fallen out
after 33.6, namely a description of the making of the ark from the
(golden) ornaments put off by the people, and that the tent described
after it was intended just for this ark. It can, however, be said against
this assumption that there is no positive place in the present text into
which it might fit, though it may at the same time be conceded that
an old narrative about the making of the ark, which is later at Num.
10.35 f. surprisingly supposed to be extant even in the old Penta-
teuchal narrative material, could have been suppressed by a redactor
in view of 25.10-22 P. The principal argument against this, however,
is that according to the wording of vv. 4b, 5b, 6 the Israelites did not
hand over their (golden) ornaments for them to be made into some-
thing, but ‘stripped them off’. Finally, the presence of an ark in the
tent is evidently not envisaged in the section vv. 7-11. Thus the
allusion in vv. 5bd of the Deuteronomic section from the beginning
referred to the section on the tent (vv. 7-11) and therefore pre-
supposed this to be already at hand.
[7-11] In fact we have in vv. 7-11 an old pre-Priestly, pre-
deuteronomistic tradition, traces of which also meet us elsewhere;
33.1-23] PRESENCE OF YAHWEH WITH HIS PEOPLE 255
in the old narrative of Num. 11.24 ff. (cf. also Num. 12.4 f., 10) we
likewise find the ‘tent (of meeting)’, the descending cloud as the
manifestation of the divine presence, and Joshua as the ‘servant’ of
Moses. The tent of meeting also occurs as early as I Sam. 2.22. Of
course the section vv. 7—11 speaks only of the setting up and use of the
tent without anything having been said earlier about the making of
this tent; in this case it is a probable hypothesis that in view of
26.1 ff. P the beginning of the section was subsequently omitted,
especially as the formula at the beginning of v. 7 suggests that
originally mention of the tent had already been made before this
point. The tenses in vv. 7-11 are all imperfects, so we are not con-
cerned here with a single occurrence, but with something which
‘used’ to happen. The question of the derivation of the tradition of
vv. 7-11 is very hard to answer. From a literary aspect the section
could be derived from the J narrative (the divine name Yahweh is
used throughout) but in its present position it can have stood neither
in the basic material of J, which runs from 24.12a, 13b directly to
ch. 34, nor in the secondary stratum, in which the restoration of the
tables in ch. 34 certainly followed directly upon their being broken in
ch. 32.* Now if this is the case, then the whole of the derivation from
J is questionable, and it is more plausible to assume that a special
tradition was subsequently taken up into the J narrative, even in the
pre-Deuteronomic period, so that the writer of vv. 1-6 already found
it in this position. The question of the history of the tradition is also
hard to answer. By its very nature a tent sanctuary belongs in the
milieu of men who are not firmly settled and themselves live in tents;
thus everything is in favour of the tradition of a tent-sanctuary going
back to the time before Israel became settled in a cultivated land.
But it is hardly possible to say more than this, for it is only said in
much later literature (II Chron. 1.3, 13; cf. I Chron. 16.39; 21.29)
that the ‘tent of meeting’ of the time of Moses still existed after the
conquest and was erected in some place. We would thus be dealing
with a tradition handed down from the time of the wanderings of
Israel without any concrete point of attachment.
In a different way from P (25.8) the tent is represented as being
pitched at some distance outside the camp (v. 7a). It was thus
separated from the profane sphere of living, just as in the cultivated
land it was usual for the sanctuaries to lie apart from the settlement’s
dwellings. The tent was thought of as a place of ‘meeting’, thus not
*This chapter contains other elements beside J.
256 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

as a place where God ‘dwelt’ permanently, but where he appeared

from time to time. In this respect the concept of the tent is quite
substantially different from the concepts associated with the ark,
according to which the latter was a place for the constant (invisible)
presence of God (cf. Num. 10.35). The divine presence proclaimed its
approach in a descending ‘pillar of cloud’ (vv. 9 f.; cf. p. 109 above
on 13.21 f.), Whether the pillar of cloud also used to descend if an
individual Israelite inquired at the tent of meeting (v. 7b) is not said.
The whole stress of the narrative lies on the great meetings between
God and Moses which all Israelites witnessed at a distance from their
tents with great awe (vv. 8, 10). At that time Moses used to enter the
tent to await the appearance of Yahweh, who thereupon revealed
himself in the pillar of cloud at the tent entrance (v. 9). Here in the
tent, which is presumably to be imagined as a pointed tent,* Moses
was vouchsafed a unique means of conversing with God which was
not accorded to anyone elsewhere (that is the meaning of v. 11a, with
which in particular Num. 12.6-8 and Deut. 34.10 should be com-
pared). At the end, Joshua appears once again as Moses’ closest com-
panion (cf. 24.13a; 32.17) in his cultic function as keeper of the tent.
[12=17] The rest of the chapter introduces reflections, in the form
of a conversation between Yahweh and Moses, about the means and
possibility of the divine presence in Israel and especially before
Moses. It is loosely joined to the command for departure in 32.34a
(33.1a). Once again it seems as though Moses is imagined as present
on the mountain. The ‘tent of meeting’ of vv. 7-11 is apparently not
taken into consideration, so it must be assumed that the section
vv. 12 ff. was in its present literary context earlier than vv. 7-11 (and
vv. 1-6). But even the connection with ch. 32 is not completely
smooth. Not only does the command to depart run differently in
v. 12aa from that in vv. 32, 34a; also the repeated and emphasized
reference to the fact that Moses has ‘found favour in the sight of
Yahweh’ (vv. 12b, 13, 16 f.) has no special reference to ch. 32 or to
any single Moses story which has anywhere gone before, but is
certainly based just on the frequent dealings which God has hitherto
had with Moses. We may therefore have here a subsequent literary
addition to ch. 32 about whose period and derivation nothing
definite can now be said. The demanding and forceful tone in which
Moses speaks to Yahweh is striking. Faced with the command to
depart, Moses asks to know whom (or what) Yahweh means to send
*Cf. A. Alt, Kleine Schriften III, pp. 233 ff.
33.1-23] PRESENCE OF YAHWEH WITH HIS PEOPLE 257
with him as a sign or guarantee of his presence and his guidance
(v. 12a) and what is his general intention (the ‘ways of God’ in v. 13
are certainly meant in this wider sense). Here the presupposition is
that Sinai is the real place of the divine presence, and that with the
departure from Sinai the further presence of God becomes question-
able for Moses (and for Israel) and in any case needs to be mediated.
In his request Moses appeals to the personal converse which has
hitherto been vouchsafed to him by Yahweh (this is to be understood
from the phrase ‘know by name’, vy. 12b, 17b) and the good will
which has hitherto been shown towards him (‘find favour’, ibid.).
Yahweh explains that his presence is to go with Moses (v. 14). This
verse is often regarded as a question which is not indicated externally
and is expressed only by the tone of voice, because this is the only
way in which the continuation of the conversation is comprehensible.
The present wording does not however favour this conception. The
text rather means that the first, brief promise of Yahweh, which is to
‘give Moses rest’ (v. 14b should be understood in this simple way) is
still not a sufficient reply to Moses’ urgent request and that he
requires an explicit confirmation over and above this. It is not said
how the ‘presence’, the side of the divine being presented to men
which gives a particularly direct representation of this being,* is to
manifest itself in such a way that men may ‘know’ (v. 16a) it to be
there and know that because it is there Israel has been marked out
above all the other peoples upon earth (v. 16b). Perhaps the thought
here is of the worship of Yahweh in the cult at the sanctuaries of
Israel, to which men go to ‘see’ the divine ‘face’ (cf. p. 192 above on
23.17). In this way Yahweh’s ‘face’ reveals its presence in the cult.
[18-23] Moses’ request that he may catch sight of Yahweh’s
‘glory’, i.e. the appearance of the divine majesty, joins on very
abruptly to the closing promise, v. 17. We evidently have here a
supplement which, moreover, is not itself'a literary unity, as is shown
by the threefold beginning to the divine speech in wv. 19-21. As the
word ‘glory’ occurs only once again, in v. 22, the primary continua-
tion of v. 18 may be in wv. 21-23. According to this Yahweh grants
the fulfilment of the request, but only with qualifications. Near to
Yahweh’s abode—so concretely is the event here imagined—there is
a place (perhaps even a ‘holy place’ is meant) ; there on a rock Moses
is to await the passing of Yahweh’s ‘glory’ (v. 21). But while his
*Cf. Isa. 63.9, also Deut. 4.37 and as a summary W. Eichrodt, Theology of the
Old Testament II (ET 1966), ch. 12.3.
258 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

glory passes by, Yahweh will show Moses a place in the cleft of a rock
and at the same time—with a view to the dangerousness of this
moment—will cover him protectively with his hand (v. 22) so that
eventually Moses can only look at the back of the glory when it has
passed by (v. 23a). It must be enough for him to know that the glory
of Yahweh has passed by him. He may not see it ‘from the front’
(v. 23b) ; in this last sentence the word ‘face’ is to be understood in its
context as meaning ‘front side’, but at the same time the word ‘face’
is nevertheless there. With regard to this a later writer has inserted
the sentence v. 20, as no mortal man may see the face of Yahweh. The
reason why Moses is nevertheless granted the request which he
makes in v. 18, at least to the extent that is possible for him as a
mere man, is given in the supplementary v. 19, which says that God
can bestow his grace and mercy upon whom he will, even to the
extent of making his ‘goodness’ (the application of this term to God
is here strange) pass before a man favoured in this way, while at the
same time proclaiming his real name. Although the language is
completely different, the passage vv. 18, 21-23 recalls I Kings 19.9 a,
11-13a. It gives the impression that some definite local knowledge,
perhaps even a local Sinai tradition, underlies it.
(c) ANOTHER COVENANT: 34.1-35*
34.1 The Lorn said to Moses, ‘Cut two tables of stone like the first;
and I will write upon the tables the words that were on the first tables,
which you broke. 2 Be ready in the morning, and come up in the morn-
ing to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the
mountain. 3 No man shall come up with you, and let no man be seen
throughout all the mountain; let no flocks or herds feed before that
mountain.’ 4 So Moses cut two tables of stone like the first; and he rose
early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lorp had
commanded him, and took in his hand two tables of stone. > And the
Lorp descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed
the name of the Lorn. ® The Lorn passed before him, and proclaimed,
“The Lorp, the Lorn, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and
abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love
for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will
by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon
the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth
generation.’ § And Moses made haste to bow his head toward the earth,
and worshipped. ° And he said, ‘If now I have found favour in thy
sight, O Lorp, let the Lorn, I pray thee, go in the midst of us, although
it is a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and
take us for thy inheritance.’
*The material in this section is of uncertain provenance; see the commentary.
34.1-35] ANOTHER COVENANT 259
10 And he said, “Behold, I make a covenant. Before all your people
I will do marvels, such as have not been wrought in all the earth or in
any nation; and all the people among whom you are shall see the work
of the Lorn; for it is a terrible thing that I will do with you.
11 ‘Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out
before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites,
the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 12 Take heed to yourself, lest you make a
covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither you go, lest it become
a snare in the midst of you. 18 You shall tear down their altars, and
break their pillars, and cut down their Asherim ™ (for you shall
worship no other god, for the Lorp, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous
God), 4° lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and
when they play the harlot after their gods and sacrifice to their gods
and one invites you, you eat of his sacrifice, 1® and you take of their
daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their
gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods.
17 ‘You shall make for yourself no molten gods.
18 “The feast of unleavened bread you shall keep. Seven days you
shall eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the time appointed
in the month Abib; for in the month Abib you came out from Egypt.
19 All that opens the womb is mine, all your male cattle, the firstlings of
cow and sheep. ?° The firstling of an ass you shall redeem with a lamb,
or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. All the first-born
of your sons you shall redeem. And none shall appear before me empty.
21 ‘Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest;
in ploughing time and in harvest you shall rest. ?2 And you shall
observe the feast of weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest, and the feast
of ingathering at the year’s end. 2° Three times in the year shall all
your males appear before the Lorp God, the God of Israel. 4 For I
will cast out nations before you, and enlarge your borders; neither
shall any man desire your land, when you go up to appear before the
Lorp your God three times in the year.
25 ‘You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven; neither
shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left until the morning.
26 The first of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring to the house
of the Lorp your God. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.’
27 And the Lorp said to Moses, ‘Write these words; in accordance with
these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.’ ?® And
he was there with the Lorp forty days and forty nights; he neither ate
bread nor drank water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the
covenant, the ten commandments.
29 When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tables
of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain,
Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been
talking with God. 3° And when Aaron and all the people of Israel saw
Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come
near him. 31 But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders
of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with them.
260 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

32 And afterward all the people of Israel came near, and he gave them
in commandment all that the Lorp had spoken with him in Mount
Sinai. 33 And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a
veil on his face; 34 but whenever Moses went in before the Lorp to
speak with him, he took the veil off, until he came out; and when he
came out, and told the people of Israel what he was commanded, *° the
people of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face
shone; and Moses would put the veil upon his face again, until he went
in to speak with him.
It is generally recognized that the basic material of this chapter is
theJ narrative of the covenant on Sinai, and that at the same time it
provides the most explicit details we have in the Old Testament
about the way in which this covenant is made. Yahweh’s announce-
ment in v. 10 that he now intends to make a covenant, and his closing
words in v. 27 that he has now made a covenant, leave no doubt that
it is here that we have the fundamental action of the covenant. In the
Book of Exodus as it has been transmitted these circumstances are
somewhat obscured, as in the present context it seems as though we
have merely the renewal of the broken tables and as according to
other sources there has already been mention of a covenant in 24.1-
11. But no part of 24.1-11 belongs to J, and the story of the golden
calf and of the breaking of the tables is manifestly a later addition to
theJnarrative (see pp. 243 f. above). In J as it was originally written,
the preparations for the theophany on mount Sinai and the theo-
phany itself were first reported in ch. 19, and then the original J
probably had some part of 24.12—15a according to which Moses was
summoned up the mountain. Ch. 34 was at first attached directly to
this point. The references to the first, broken tables at the beginning
of ch. 34 are inserted only loosely into the basic material of the text
and can easily be separated as secondary references to ch. 32. Ch. 34
also seems to have acquired all sorts of secondary additions elsewhere;
they betray themselves through their interruption of the smooth
sequence of events and so can easily be recognized and excised. It is
understandable that a great deal more which seemed as though it
should have appeared in this important passage has been added to
the report of the central act of the covenant by later hands. This is
particularly true of the closing section, vv. 29-35 (on this see p. 267
below).
[1-9] Moses receives the command that he shall ‘cut’ two tables
of stone out of the rock of the sacred mountain, i.e. he is to prepare
stone to make smooth tables with some sort of regular shape. Their
34.1-35 | ANOTHER COVENANT 261
purpose is not at first indicated (only secondarily in v. 1b) but Moses
is presumed to know it. “Be ready’ (v. 2a) probably means a cultic
or ritual preparation for the forthcoming encounter with God (cf.
ig.11a) for which Moses is to present himself the following morning
‘on the top of the mountain’ (v. 2bd). As according to the originalJ
text of 24.12-15a Moses has already climbed the mountain, the
meaning must be that he is to go up from his immediate position
somewhere on the massif of the mountain and climb to the summit, as
the express mention of ‘the top’ makes clear. In that case we are to
regard v. 2ba as an addition which has Moses descending from the
mountain again perhaps at the end of ch. 32 (otherwise it would
have to be assumed that the original J had no part at all of 24.12-
15a); then the prohibition in v. 3 is also to be explained as secondary;
as in view of the imminent theophany (cf. 19.12-13a), so now too in
view of the imminent covenant, it is intended so that the tabu of the
holy mountain may be strictly preserved. The description of the
carrying out of the command in v. 4 in that case means the ascent of
Moses to the summit. Now too Yahweh ‘descends’ on the mountain
just as in the theophany narrated by J (19.18, 20; cf. p. 159 above).
It is hard to decide whether the subject of the clause 5ab is meant to
be Moses or Yahweh. In any case Moses pays Yahweh the cultic
honour of calling upon his name when he appears (v. 5b). According
to v. 6aa, whose authenticity in J is in fact questionable, Yahweh
only passes before Moses when he appears and then speaks to him
from some distant place shrouded in mystery. In any case, v. 8
describes the reaction of Moses to the appearance, or passing by, of
Yahweh. A more lengthy address by Yahweh to Moses, which now
stands in vv. 6 abd, 7, is out of place in front of it; we have here an
addition which is made up of customary, stereotyped phrases (on
v. 6abd see Ps. 103.8 etc. and on v. 7 cf. Ex. 20.5 f. etc.). Verse g is
surely also secondary, as it broaches the subject of the departure from
Sinai, which does not belong here.
[10-13] With lapidary brevity there now follows in the original
text the proclamation of the covenant (v. 1oaa) and the introduction
to a set of ‘commandments’ (v. 11a). This brevity is now obscured by
some obviously later additions. The rest of v. 10 introduces a promise
of awesome ‘marvels’ which God will ‘do with Moses’, which will be
seen by all the people. This promise interrupts the train of thought in
the divine speech, and its purpose remains obscure; perhaps it has in
mind the marvels narrated in the continuation of the theme of the
262 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

desert wanderings (Num. 11 ff.), though in this passage there is no

real occasion for a reference to them. There are additions in vv. 11b-
13 in deuteronomistic language, in which the people are addressed
partly in the singular and partly in the plural; they introduce the
warning, frequent in Deuteronomy and the deuteronomistic writings,
against the inhabitants of the land which is to be taken in possession
and against their cultic institutions. [14-26] Then with v. 14a the
series of ‘commandments’ announced in v. 11 begins. They are once
again interrupted at the beginning in vv. 14b-16 by a lengthy
addition. Now these commandments are, as in 20.2—17, formulated
with apodeictic brevity. Accordingly, this brevity might also be
expected in the first commandment, and the statements which give
reasons for and expand the commandment are here, as in 20.4 ff.,
to be regarded as secondary. Moreover, once again in vv. 14b—-16 we
find a deuteronomistic style, and especially the deuteronomistic
warning against the dwellers in the land and their cults, thus giving
the general prohibition of v. 14a a definite application. The series of
commandments in wv. 14a, 17 ff. is formed by the collecting together
of apodeictic sentences of mixed style and is in this respect compar-
able with 20.2-17;* here, however, the mixture of styles is still more
marked, as among the requirements formulated both negatively and
positively we have the general statement of v. 19a. It has of necessity
to be asked whether the collection is still in its original form. Accord-
ing to v. 28bb Yahweh spoke ‘ten commandments’. The mere
position of this remark, at the end, shows that it is an addition. But
whoever made this addition must have found ‘ten commandments’
in vv. 14-26,* and in view of 20.2-17 the original number of ten is
most probable. The present passage offers more than ‘ten command-
ments’. Now the separation of the instructions for the three feasts
(vv. 18, 22) which in content belong together is in itself particularly
striking. It can lead us to two different conclusions. These particular
instructions might subsequently have been added in the margin and
then have been brought into the text at different places, particularly
in view of 23.14—19, a passage which is extremely closely connected
with 34.10-26. The requirement to appear three times a year before
the face of Yahweh (v. 23) would thus be interpreted in a suitable
way. But alternatively the central passage between v. 18 and v. 22
could be a secondary addition which was unfortunately introduced
into the text between v. 18 and v. 22, which belong together, at a
*This section is derived from more than one source.
34.1-35 | ANOTHER COVENANT 263
later date. This intermediary section also consists of clauses familiar
from elsewhere which could subsequently have been added here. In
either case the result would be an original number of ten command-
ments. It is hardly possible to come to a firm conclusion in choosing
between these two possibilities, especially as the content of the whole
collection does not show any marked signs of arrangement else-
where.
[14a] At the beginning stand the sentences whose content is with-
out doubt the most important. First of all comes the prohibition of
any foreign cult (14a). As ‘worship’ is a feature of the cult of all
deities, the formula of v. 14a is to be understood as a general pro-
hibition against the worship of all other gods. It thus says the same
thing as 20.3, but in a different way. The expression ‘no other god’
presupposes the existence of a definite relationship with God. The
foundation of a lasting relationship between God and the people here
addressed is primary; it is only on this basis that the sentences have
any validity and it is in this context that the first fundamental
sentence has its setting. [x7] After this requirement the ‘molten gods’
of v. 17 cannot possibly refer to foreign deities, which are already
excluded by v. 14a, but only to images in the framework of the Yah-
weh cult (just as in 20.4). We cannot say definitely why the com-
mandment particularly mentions molten images here, for images of
gods made by another technique would hardly be permissible. Does
this commandment in practice only contemplate the danger of the
manufacture of molten images, so that other possibilities can be
ignored? The reason for the commandment is certainly the same as
in 20.4 (see pp. 162 f. above). [18] The clause about the feast of
unleavened bread (v. 18) is almost identical verbally with 23.15a and
may here as there originally have lacked the subordinate clauses
which provide an introduction and justification for it. [19-20] The
wording of the regulations about the first-born of man and beast
(vv. 19, 20aba) recurs almost completely in 13.1 f., 12 f. (for an
explanation of the content see pp. 101 f. above). Only the catchword-
like remarks of v. 19b, which do not fit the context well and were
probably added later, have no close counterpart in ch. 13. The
shorter composition of ch. 34 is surely original in comparison with the
wider presentation of ch. 13, which refers to the slaughter of the first-
born and the Exodus from Egypt. If vv. 19, 20aba belong to the
basic material of ch. 34, it follows on literary grounds that 13.1 f.,
11-16 is of secondary character; even if we have here a supplement
264. THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

to ch. 34 this would still be more original than the parallel piece in
ch. 13. The short regulation v. 20bb is verbally identical with 23.15b.
[21] The formulation of the sabbath commandment (v. 21) corre-
sponds in the first half with 23.12a (another way of expressing this
which still means the same thing occurs in 20.8 and g-11). The
regulation in v. 2rb is unique; it enjoins the sabbath rest in ploughing
time and in harvest also, i.e. in the chief working seasons of the
agricultural year; this is evidently its meaning and not, as can also
be understood from the wording, that the sabbath is only to be kept
at the time specified. With this additional regulation the sabbath
commandment, wherever its origin is to be sought, is in a remarkable
way expressly introduced into the life of people firmly settled as
inhabitants of an agricultural land. [22] The double sentence v. 22
corresponds with 23.16 except that here instead of the description
‘Feast of harvest’, the expression ‘Feast of weeks’, which is
certainly more recent and which became current usage at a later
period, makes an appearance (for an explanation cf. Deut. 16.9), and
the feast is referred especially to the wheat harvest as being the most
important part of the whole of the grain harvest. Moreover, the term
‘turn of the year’ is used instead of ‘beginning of the year’ to define
the time of the autumn festival, although both mean the same thing.
[23-24] Verse 23 is again almost verbally identical with 23.17. In
ch. 34, however, what is certainly a secondary addition has been
made, which is meant to dispel any anxiety among the male Israelites,
a number of whom must be imagined to live a good way from the
centres of population, that the thrice yearly pilgrimages could en-
danger the safety of their land tenure (v. 24). Yahweh promises to
see that no one (who that could be is not said; the formula does not
allow us to think of external enemies) attempts to take over Israelite
possessions; the phraseology at the beginning of this verse is deutero-
nomistic and so the whole verse may well be a deuteronomistic
addition which understands the definition of v. 23 along the lines of
the well-known deuteronomistic requirement of one central sanctu-
ary, whereas the older time envisaged numerous sanctuaries
throughout the land and therefore would have obviated the anxiety
presupposed in v. 24. [25—26] The four clauses of vv. 25 f. also occur
in 23.18-19 (for an explanation of their content see p. 192 above)
in almost exactly the same words. In v. 25a, however, the formula-
tion is rather more harsh than in 23.18, in so far as here we have the
concrete word for ‘slaughter’ which can hardly have blood as its
34. 1-35 | ANOTHER COVENANT 265
object* (the slaying of the victim and the offering of the blood are
here combined in one sentence), and v. 25b makes special mention of
the Passover, which in view of its nocturnal celebration fits very well
with the content here and is presumably original (cf. 12.10); 23.18b
on the other hand speaks quite generally of the ‘feast’ (the word
‘feast’ has almost certainly found its way into the text of 34.25b from
23.18b, for there is quite rightly no mention elsewhere of a ‘Passover
feast’ as the Passover was not a feast but a special sacrificial
usage).
The series of sentences in 34.10-26 has, as has been shown, a very
close relationship with the collection of cultic regulations in 23.
14-19, within the framework of the Book of the Covenant, but at the
beginning it also has unmistakable affinities of content with 20.2-17
(cf. also the original number ten which moreover occurs in similar
fashion in 23.14-19). Nevertheless we can hardly speak of a mutual
literary dependence of these pieces one upon another (apart from
secondary individual additions). We rather have two different series
of clauses of apodeictic law in Israel, each arranged into an easily
understandable, easily memorable group of ten. For this reason we
cannot with certainty define the temporal relationship between the
two passages; they could have stood together and have been handed
down together as early as in the stage of oral tradition. One thing
alone is clear, that in 34.10-26 Israel is presumed to live in an agri-
cultural land with its cultic festivals (the same also applies to 23.14—
19, whereas nothing certain can be established in this respect for
20.2-17). It is customary to distinguish between 34.10—26 as ‘a Cultic
Decalogue’ and 20.2-17 as an ‘Ethical Decalogue’. This distinction
expresses quite pertinently, though in somewhat unhappy termino-
logy, a difference in the predominant interest, but we cannot speak
of a fundamental opposition. J certainly did not for his part collect
together the sentences of ch. 34, but took over the whole from the
tradition which he knew as a collection of the basic divine commands
laid upon Israel and understood it as the foundation of the Sinai
covenant. [27-28] Then ‘in accordance with these words’ the
covenant was made, according to J, with Yahweh (v. 27) and
remarkably enough with Moses. True, ‘with Israel’ still stands at the
end of the verse, but the remarkably lame position of these words
hardly allows us to take them to be original, but requires us to see in
them an interpretation which—naturally enough in fact—lets Moses
* [This harshness is toned down in the RSV rendering. Tr.]
266 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI
stand vicariously for Israel as a partner in the covenant. According
to Jthe covenant is made by Yahweh through a solemn declaration
of his will; the verb in v. 27b is in the so-called declarative perfect,
which is usually employed to express a statement which becomes
binding the moment it is spoken. In this way J has expressed the
one-sidedness of the act of making the covenant in a more unequivo-
cal way than the narratives in 24.9-11 and 24.3-8, which still give
the human partner a share in the making of the covenant by his
participation in a covenant meal and his association in a sacrificial
act. In J, Moses, as representative of Israel, has only to receive the
explanation of the divine will; over and above that there remains
only the task of writing on the prepared tables (v. 28) the ‘words of
the covenant’ which he has been given and which from now on are to
regulate the relationship between Israel and its God. In doing this J
has at the same time firmly kept from the act of making the covenant
on Sinai all thoughts of its being an action which is effective in itself,
and has rooted it exclusively in the word of Yahweh. This word of
Yahweh bases the Law of the Old Testament on the covenant
relationship made by Yahweh, for the ‘words of the covenant’ are the
sentences of apodeictic justice of vv. 10-26 which have just been
given to Moses and which are now binding upon Israel as a partner
in the covenant (cf. 24.8b, where it is Moses who explains ‘all these
words’ as the basis of the covenant relationship). Human law also
knew the making of a one-sided covenant in which someone in a high
position took another person into a covenant relationship which gave
this other the benefit of his protection, advocacy and the like.* The
content of the term ‘covenant’ could thus without any alteration to
its meaning be transferred to the relationship between God and
people which was not a natural one, but which had been brought
about by a one-sided, sovereign declaration of intent and had made
Israel ‘the people of Yahweh’. It is hard to explain the traditional
element of the tables containing the ‘words of the covenant’, as
nothing more is said in the old traditional material of the later fate of
these tables, and only the deuteronomistic and Priestly writings have
them transferred into the ark. Even the old tradition must surely have
started from the fact that Israel took the tables along and that at a
later date they were still preserved somewhere. Could a historic
tradition stand behind the deuteronomistic reports of the ‘great
*Cf. J. Begrich, Zeitschrift fiir die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, NF 19, 1944,
p. I-II.
34.1-35 | ANOTHER COVENANT 267
stones’ with ‘all the words of the law’ (Deut. 27.2 ff.) which were to
be set up on Mount ‘Gerizim’, and should this in fact be connected
with the tradition of the Sinai tables?
[29-35] Also hard to assess is the story of Moses’ ‘shining face’
(vv. 29-35). Despite some elements of P language which can,
however, easily be cut out as additions (‘Aaron’, ‘all the leaders of
the congregation’, ‘the tables of the testimony’) the passage as a
whole does not give the impression of coming from P. But a place
cannot be found for it in J either. In J the presuppositions for ‘going
in’ and ‘coming out’ and ‘speaking’ with Yahweh (vv. 34 f.) are
lacking; they were, however, given through the tent-tradition of
33.7-11. It is therefore probable that we have a special tradition
comparable with 33.7-11 which was perhaps associated with a few
observations by J about the descent of Moses and his report to the
people (v. 29aa, 32b). The story is meant to explain the ‘veil’ (the
Hebrew word occurs only here and etymologically perhaps means the
‘covering’) which Moses was accustomed to put on his face when he
‘came out’ from speaking with Yahweh to speak in the name of
Yahweh to the people. Priests’ masks are well evidenced in the history
of religion; in the Old Testament world they occur in Egypt. With
them the priest assumes the ‘face’ of his deity and identifies himself
with him. This usage is unknown elsewhere in the Old Testament,
though it may be that the so-called t+rdpim originally used to be a
mask for the face. But the present passage, which says nothing at all
about the appearance of this mask, shows that the priest’s mask (for
Moses here appears in a priestly function) was not totally lacking in
Israel even though we can discover no more about the time and
place at which it was used. The Old Testament belief in God could
not of course accept the original significance of the mask. It is there-
fore derived from Moses and explained by saying that because of
Moses’ unique meeting with God the skin of his face shone, so
that the Israelites dared not look upon it and Moses had to cover up
the divine glow on his face. The word used here for ‘become shining’
is rare in this significance; its meaning has to be deduced from the
context. The word has a root similar in sound to the word ‘horn’; for
this reason old translations, among them the Latin Vulgate, speak
here of a ‘horned’ Moses, and this rendering has had well-known
influence in the pictorial arts. This idea cannot, however, be fitted
in with the original sense, as one cannot say that the skin of the face
is ‘horned’.
268 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

6. THE INSTRUCTIONS ARE CARRIED OUT: 35.1 -39.43

35! Moses assembled all the congregation of the people of Israel,
and said to them, ‘These are the things which the Lorp has commanded
you to do. # Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day you
shall have a holy sabbath of solemn rest to the Lorp; whoever does any
work on it shall be put to death; ? you shall kindle no fire in all your
habitations on the sabbath day.’
4. Moses said to all the congregation of the people of Israel, “This is
the thing which the Lorp has commanded. ® Take from among you an
offering to the Lorn; whoever is of a generous heart, let him bring the
Lorv’s offering: gold, silver, and bronze; ® blue and purple and scarlet
stuff and fine twined linen; goats’ hair, 7 tanned rams’ skins, and goat-
skins; acacia wood, 8 oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil and
for the fragrant incense, ® and onyx stones and stones for setting, for the
ephod and for the breastpiece.
10 ‘And let every able man among you come and make all that the
Lorp has commanded: the tabernacle, ! its tent and its covering, its
hooks and its frames, its bars, its pillars, and its bases; }* the ark with
its poles, the mercy seat, and the veil of the screen;!* the table with its
poles and all its utensils, and the bread of the Presence; 4 the lamp-
stand also for the light, with its utensils and its lamps, and the oil for
the light; 15 and the altar of incense, with its poles, and the anointing
oil and the fragrant incense, and the screen for the door, at the door of
the tabernacle; 1° the altar of burnt offering, with its grating of bronze,
its poles, and all its utensils, the laver and its base; 1” the hangings of
the court, its pillars and its bases, and the screen for the gate of the
court; 18 the pegs of the tabernacle and the pegs of the court, and their
cords; }* the finely wrought garments for ministering in the holy place,
the holy garments for Aaron the priest, and the garments of his sons,
for their service as priests.’
20 Then all the congregation of the people of Israel departed from
the presence of Moses. 7! And they came, every one whose heart
stirred him, and every one whose spirit moved him, and brought the
Lorp’s offering to be used for the tent of meeting, and for all its service,
and for the holy garments. 2 So they came, both men and women; all
who were of a willing heart brought brooches and earrings and signet
rings and armlets, all sorts of gold objects, every man dedicating an
offering of gold to the Lorn. ? And every man with whom was found
blue or purple or scarlet stuff or fine linen or goats’ hair or tanned
rams’ skins or goatskins, brought them. 24 Every one who could make
an Offering of silver or bronze brought it as the Lornp’s offering; and
every man with whom was found acacia wood of any use in the work,
brought it. 2° And all women who had ability spun with their hands,
and brought what they had spun in blue and purple and scarlet stuff
and fine twined linen; 2° all the women whose hearts were moved with
ability spun the goats’ hair. ?? And the leaders brought onyx stones and
stones to be set, for the ephod and for the breastpiece, ?8 and spices and
35-1-39.43] INSTRUCTIONS ARE CARRIED OUT 269
oil for the light, and for the anointing oil, and for the fragrant incense.
29 All the men and women, the people of Israel, whose heart moved
them to bring anything for the work which the Lorp had commanded
by Moses to be done, brought it as their freewill offering to the Lorn.
30 And Moses said to the people of Israel, ‘See, the Lorp has called by
name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; 3! and
he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability, with intelligence,
with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship, 22 to devise artistic de-
signs, to work in gold and silver and bronze, 8 in cutting stones for
setting, and in carving wood, for work in every skilled craft. 34 And he
has inspired him to teach, both him and Oholiab the son of Ahisamach
of the tribe of Dan. *° He has filled them with ability to do every sort
of work done by a craftsman or by a designer or by an embroiderer in
blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine twined linen, or by a weaver
—hby any sort of workman or skilled designer. 36! Bezalel and Oholiab
and every able man in whom the Lorp has put ability and intelligence
to know how to do any work in the construction of the sanctuary shall
work in accordance with all that the Lorp has commanded.’
2 And Moses called Bezalel and Oholiab and every able man in
whose mind the Lorp had put ability, every one whose heart stirred
him up to come to do the work; * and they received from Moses all the
freewill offering which the people of Israel had brought for doing the
work on the sanctuary. They still kept bringing him freewill offerings
every morning, ‘ so that all the able men who were doing every sort of
task on the sanctuary came, each from the task that he was doing, > and
said to Moses, “The people bring much more than enough for doing the
work which the Lorp has commanded us to do.’ ®So Moses gave
command, and word was proclaimed throughout the camp, ‘Let
neither man nor woman do anything more for the offering for the
sanctuary.’ So the people were restrained from bringing; ? for the stuff
they had was sufficient to do all the work, and more.
-8 And all the able men among the workmen made the tabernacle
with ten curtains; they were made of fine twined linen and blue and
purple and scarlet stuff, with cherubim skilfully worked. ® The length
of each curtain was twenty-eight cubits, and the breadth of each cur-
tain four cubits; all the curtains had the same measure.
10 And he coupled five curtains to one another, and the other five
curtains he coupled to one another. 1! And he made loops of blue on
the edge of the outmost curtain of the first set; likewise he made them
on the edge of the outmost curtain of the second set; }* he made fifty
loops on the one curtain, and he made fifty loops on the edge of the
curtain that was in the second set; the loops were opposite one another.
13 And he made fifty clasps of gold, and coupled the curtains one to the
other with clasps; so the tabernacle was one whole.
14 He also made curtains of goats’ hair for a tent over the tabernacle;
he made eleven curtains. The length of each curtain was thirty
cubits, and the breadth of each curtain four cubits; the eleven curtains
had the same measure. 1° He coupled five curtains by themselves, and
270 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

six curtains by themselves. 17 And he made fifty loops on the edge of

the outmost curtain of the one set, and fifty loops on the edge of the
other connecting curtain. 18 And he made fifty clasps of bronze to
couple the tent together that it might be one whole. 1® And he made
for the tent a covering of tanned rams’ skins and goatskins.
20 Then he made the upright frames for the tabernacle of acacia
wood. #1 Ten cubits was the length of a frame, and a cubit and a half
the breadth of each frame. 2? Each frame had two tenons, for fitting
together; he did this for all the frames of the tabernacle. ** The frames
for the tabernacle he made thus: twenty frames for the south side;
24 and he made forty bases of silver under the twenty frames, two bases
under one frame for its two tenons, and two bases under another frame
for its two tenons. 2° And for the second side of the tabernacle, on the
north side, he made twenty frames ?° and their forty bases of silver,
two bases under one frame and two bases under another frame. ?? And
for the rear of the tabernacle westward he made six frames. 78 And he
made two frames for corners of the tabernacle in the rear. 7° And they
were separate beneath, but joined at the top, at the first ring; he made
two of them thus, for the two corners. 3° There were eight frames with
their bases of silver: sixteen bases, under every frame two bases.
31 And he made bars of acacia wood, five for the frames of the one
side of the tabernacle, *? and five bars for the frames of the other side of
the tabernacle, and five bars for the frames of the tabernacle at the rear
westward. 83 And he made the middle bar to pass through from end to
end halfway up the frames. *4 And he overlaid the frames with gold, and
made their rings of gold for holders for the bars, and overlaid the bars
with gold.
35 And he made the veil of blue and purple and scarlet stuff and
fine twined linen; with cherubim skilfully worked he made it. 9 And
for it he made four pillars of acacia, and overlaid them with gold; their
hooks were of gold, and he cast for them four bases of silver. ?7 He also
made a screen for the door of the tent, of blue and purple and scarlet
stuff and fine twined linen, embroidered with needlework; *8 and its
five pillars with their hooks. He overlaid their capitals, and their fillets
were of gold, but their five bases were of bronze.
37: Bezalel made the ark of acacia wood; two cubits and a half was
its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its
height. ? And he overlaid it with pure gold within and without, and
made a moulding of gold around it. ? And he cast for it four rings of
gold for its four corners, two rings on its one side and two rings on its
other side. And he made poles of acacia wood, and overlaid them with
gold, ® and put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark, to carry
the ark. ® And he made a mercy seat of pure gold; two cubits and a half
was its length, and a cubit and a half its breadth. 7 And he made two
cherubim of hammered gold; on the two ends of the mercy seat he
made them, 8 one cherub on the one end, and one cherub on the other
end; of one piece with the mercy seat he made the cherubim on its two
ends. ° The cherubim spread out their wings above, overshadowing
35-1-39.43] INSTRUCTIONS ARE CARRIED OUT 271
the mercy seat with their wings, with their faces one to another; to-
ward the mercy seat were the faces of the cherubim.
10 He also made the table of acacia wood; two cubits was its length,
a cubit its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height; and he overlaid
it with pure gold, and made a moulding of gold around it. 12 And he
made around it a frame a handbreadth wide, and made a moulding
of gold around the frame. 1% He cast for it four rings of gold, and
fastened the rings to the four corners at its four legs. 14 Close to the
frame were the rings, as holders for the poles to carry the table. 15 He
made the poles of acacia wood to carry the table, and overlaid them
with gold. 1® And he made the vessels of pure gold which were to be
upon the table, its plates and dishes for incense, and its bowls and
flagons with which to pour libations.
17 He also made the lampstand of pure gold. The base and the shaft
of the lampstand were made of hammered work; its cups, its capitals,
and its flowers were of one piece with it. 18 And there were six branches
going out of its sides, three branches of the lampstand out of one side of
it and three branches of the lampstand out of the other side of it;
19 three cups made like almonds, each with capital and flower, on one
branch, and three cups made like almonds, each with capital and
flower, on the other branch—so for the six branches going out of the
lampstand. 7° And on the lampstand itself were four cups made like
almonds, with their capitals and flowers, 2! and a capital of one piece
with it under each pair of the six branches going out of it. ?* Their
capitals and their branches were of one piece with it; the whole of it
was one piece of hammered work of pure gold. ?* And he made its seven
lamps and its snuffers and its trays of pure gold. 74 He made it and all
its utensils of a talent of pure gold.
25 He made the altar of incense of acacia wood; its length was a
cubit, and its breadth was a cubit; it was square, and two cubits was its
height; its horns were of one piece with it. ?° He overlaid it with pure
gold, its top, and its sides round about, and its horns; and he made a
moulding of gold round about it, 27 and made two rings of gold on it
under its moulding, on two opposite sides of it, as holders for the poles
with which to carry it. 28 And he made the poles of acacia wood, and
overlaid them with gold.
29 He made the holy anointing oil also, and the pure fragrant in-
cense, blended as by the perfumer.
38! He made the altar of burnt offering also of acacia wood; five
cubits was its length, and five cubits its breadth; it was square, and three
cubits was its height. ? He made horns for it on its four corners; its horns
were of one piece with it, and he overlaid it with bronze. ? And he made
all the utensils of the altar, the pots, the shovels, the basins, the forks,
and the fire pans: all its utensils he made of bronze. * And he made for
the altar a grating, a network of bronze, under its ledge, extending half-
way down. ® He cast four rings on the four corners of the bronze grating
as holders for the poles; ® he made the poles of acacia wood, and
overlaid them with bronze. 7 And he put the poles through the rings
272 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

on the sides of the altar, to carry it with them; he made it hollow, with
boards.
8 And he made the laver of bronze and its base of bronze, from the
mirrors of the ministering women who ministered at the door of the
tentofmeeting. .
g And he made the court; for the south side the hangings of the
court were of fine twined linen, a hundred cubits; 1° their pillars were
twenty and their bases twenty, of bronze, but the hooks of the pillars
and their fillets were of silver. 1! And for the north side a hundred
cubits, their pillars twenty, their bases twenty, of bronze, but the hooks
of the pillars and their fillets of silver. 12 And for the west side were
hangings of fifty cubits, their pillars ten, and their sockets ten; the
hooks of the pillars and their fillets were of silver. 1* And for the front to
the east, fifty cubits. 14 The hangings for one side of the gate were fifteen
cubits, with three pillars and three bases. !® And so for the other side;
on this hand and that hand by the gate of the court were hangings of
fifteen cubits, with three pillars and three bases, 1 All the hangings
round about the court were of fine twined linen. 17 And the bases for
the pillars were of bronze, but the hooks of the pillars and their fillets
were of silver; the overlaying of their capitals were also of silver, and all
the pillars of the court were filleted with silver. 18 And the screen for the
gate of the court was embroidered with needlework in blue and purple
and scarlet stuff and fine twined linen; it was twenty cubits long and
five cubits high in its breadth, corresponding to the hangings of the
court. 1® And their pillars were four; their four bases were of bronze,
their hooks of silver, and the overlaying of their capitals and their fillets
of silver. 7° And all the pegs for the tabernacle and for the court round
about were of bronze.
21 This is the sum of the things for the tabernacle, the tabernacle of
the testimony, as they were counted at the commandment of Moses,
for the work of the Levites under the direction of Ithamar the son of
Aaron the priest. ?? Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of
Judah, made all that the Lorp commanded Moses; 23 and with him
was Oholiab the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, a craftsman and
designer and embroiderer in blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine
twined linen.
24 All the gold that was used for the work, in all the construction of
the sanctuary, the gold from the offering, was twenty-nine talents and
seven hundred and thirty shekels, by the shekel of the sanctuary.
*> And the silver from those of the congregation who were numbered
was a hundred talents and a thousand seven hundred and seventy-five
shekels, by the shekel of the sanctuary: ?° a beka a head (that is, half a
shekel, by the shekel of the sanctuary), for every one who was numbered
in the census, from twenty years old and upward, for six hundred and
three thousand, five hundred and fifty men. 2? The hundred talents of
silver were for casting the bases of the sanctuary, and the bases of the
veil; a hundred bases for the hundred talents, a talent for a base. 28 And
of the thousand seven hundred and seventy-five shekels he made hooks
35-1-39.43] INSTRUCTIONS ARE CARRIED OUT 373
for the pillars, and overlaid their capitals and made fillets for them.
29 And the bronze that was contributed was seventy talents, and two
thousand and four hundred shekels; 3° with it he made the bases for the
door of the tent of meeting, the bronze altar and the bronze grating for
it and all the utensils of the altar, #4 the bases round about the court,
and the bases of the gate of the court, all the pegs of the tabernacle, and
all the pegs round about the court.
39' And of the blue and purple and scarlet stuff they made finely
wrought garments, for ministering in the holy place; they made the
holy garments for Aaron; as the Lorp had commanded Moses.
2 And he made the ephod of gold, blue and purple and scarlet stuff,
and fine twined linen. * And gold leaf was hammered out and cut into
threads to work into the blue and purple and the scarlet stuff, and into
the fine twined linen, in skilled design. * They made for the ephod
shoulder-pieces, joined to it at its two edges. > And the skilfully woven
band upon it, to gird it on, was of the same materials and workmanship,
of gold, blue and purple and scarlet stuff, and fine twined linen; as the
Lorp had commanded Moses.
6 The onyx stones were prepared, enclosed in settings of gold filigree
and engraved like the engravings of a signet, according to the names of
the sons of Israel. 7 And he set them on the shoulder-pieces of the
ephod, to be stones of remembrance for the sons of Israel; as the Lorp
had commanded Moses.
8 He made the breastpiece, in skilled work, like the work of the
ephod, of gold, blue and purple and scarlet stuff, and fine twined
linen. ® It was square; the breastpiece was made double, a span its
length and a span its breadth when doubled. 1° And they set in it four
rows of stones. A row of sardius, topaz, and carbuncle was the first row;
11 and the second row, an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond; ” and
the third row, a jacinth, an agate, and an amethyst; }* and the fourth
row, a beryl, an onyx, and a jasper; they were enclosed in settings of
gold filigree. 14 There were twelve stones with their names according
to the names of the sons of Israel; they were like signets, each engraved
with its name, for the twelve tribes. © And they made on the breast-
piece twisted chains like cords, of pure gold; 1® and they made two
settings of gold filigree and two gold rings, and put the two rings on the
two edges of the breastpiece; 17 and they put the two cords of gold in the
two rings at the edges of the breastpiece. '8 Two ends of the two cords
they had attached to the two settings of filigree; thus they attached it
in front to the shoulder-pieces of the ephod. 1° Then they made two
rings of gold, and put them at the two ends of the breastpiece, on its
inside edge next to the ephod. 2° And they made two rings of gold, and
attached them in front to the lower part of the two shoulder-pieces of
the ephod, at its joining above the skilfully woven band of the ephod.
21 And they bound the breastpiece by its rings to the rings of the ephod
with a lace of blue, so that it should lie upon the skilfully woven band
of the ephod, and that the breastpice should not come loose from the
ephod; as the Lorp had commanded Moses.
274 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

22 He also made the robe of the ephod woven all of blue; ?* and the
opening of the robe in it was like the opening in a garment, with a
binding around the opening, that it might not be torn. *4 On the skirts
of the robe they made pomegranates of blue and purple and scarlet
stuff and fine twined linen. 2° They also made bells of pure gold, and
put the bells between the pomegranates upon the skirts of the robe
round about, between the pomegranates; ?° a bell and a pomegranate,
a bell and a pomegranate round about upon the skirts of the robe for
ministering; as the Lorp had commanded Moses.
27 They also made the coats, woven of fine linen, for Aaron and his
sons, 28 and the turban of fine linen, and the caps of fine linen, and the
linen breeches of fine twined linen, ?° and the girdle of fine twined linen
and of blue and purple and scarlet stuff, embroidered with needlework;
as the Lorp had commanded Moses.
go And they made the plate of the holy crown of pure gold, and
wrote upon it an inscription, like the engraving of a signet, “Holy to the
Lorn’. *! And they tied to it a lace of blue, to fasten it on the turban
above; as the Lorp had commanded Moses.
32 Thus all the work of the tabernacle of the tent of meeting was
finished; and the people of Israel had done according to all that the
Lorp had commanded Moses; so had they done. * And they brought
the tabernacle to Moses, the tent and all its utensils, its hooks, its
frames, its bars, its pillars, and its bases; 4 the covering of tanned rams’
skins and goatskins, and the veil of the screen; * the ark of the testi-
mony with its poles and the mercy seat; °° the table with all its utensils,
and the bread of the Presence; 3’ the lampstand of pure gold and its
lamps with the lamps set and all its utensils, and the oil for the light;
38 the golden altar, the anointing oil and the fragrant incense, and the
screen for the door of the tent; °° the bronze altar, and its grating of
bronze, its poles, and all its utensils; the laver and its base; *° the hang-
ings of the court, its pillars, and its bases, and the screen for the gate of
the court, its cords, and its pegs; and all the utensils for the service of the
tabernacle, for the tent of meeting; *! the finely worked garments for
ministering in the holy place, the holy garments for Aaron the priest,
and the garments of his sons to serve as priests. #* According to all that
the Lorp had commanded Moses, so the people of Israel had done all
the work. #8 And Moses saw all the work, and behold, they had done it;
ze the Lorp had commanded, so had they done it. And Moses blessed
them.
Chs. 35-39 report in detail, and for the most part in parallel
wording, how the divine instructions of chs. 25-31, given to Moses
on the mountain, are carried out. We thus meet the P tradition here
once again. Of course this long report of the work does not belong to
the original basic P narrative. The pedantic repetition of the whole
of chs. 25-31, given there in the form of a command and now in the
form of a report on the execution of the work, would not in itself be a
35-1-39.43| INSTRUCTIONS ARE CARRIED OUT 275
valid reason for holding the section to be secondary, for in view of
the character of P as it can be observed elsewhere, such a long
repetition in his work might be deemed quite possible. But it is quite
clear that the secondary literary elements in chs. 25-31, which by
their very position prove to be additions (cf. especially chs. 30-31),
have in chs. 35-39 been worked into the whole and have been
incorporated into a quite probable systematic order. Thus chs. 35-
39 presuppose both the basic material and the additions of chs.
25-31. In some points the narrative in chs. 35-39 has been extended
even beyond that of chs. 25-31. But even here it is not so much a case
of the communication of further independent traditions as of making
obvious narrative constructions on the basis of chs. 25~31. Besides
this there are still in chs. 35-39 a number of secondary literary
passages which have subsequently been added.
[35-1-3] Both these two last features are immediately true of the
beginning of ch. 35. Before a detailed description, developed in
narrative form beyond the relatively brief instructions of 25.1-7, of
the offerings required of the Israelites in ch. 25, the sabbath com-
mandment is stressed in 35.1-3, a passage which by its position be-
fore the introductory formula v. 4 is shown to be an addition with its
own introductory formula (v. 1). Remarkable in this addition is the
special prohibition against kindling fire in the Israelite dwellings
on the sabbath (v. 3). Whether this note, as a literary product very
late, can in fact be regarded, in view of its concrete nature, as being
a primitive sabbath regulation in whose place the general command-
ment for rest from work, elsewhere customary, was only later intro-
duced, unfortunately can no longer be decided because of the lack of
parallels to the passage.
[35-4-36.7] Once the divine command of 25.2—7 has in vv. 4-9
been handed on almost literally to the Israelites, there follows first of
all in vv. 10-19, before it has been said that the command was
carried out, a long list of all the items to be provided, which inter-
rupts the sequence and is probably to be regarded as secondary. Ina
description which has been given quite extensive narrative form,
vv. 20-29 report how the Israelites carried out the orders of vv. 4-9;
these verses are intended to show the zeal of the Israelites in providing
the materials necessary for the building of the entire sanctuary. Men
and women together gave up their pieces of golden jewellery, among
which brooches (or nose-rings), earrings, signet rings and armlets are
mentioned (v. 22; v. 22bé is an addition of quite general content).
276 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

All the men together looked for whatever material they had to
bring, whether it was costly fabric or the hides of beasts or silver or
bronze or acacia wood (vv. 23 f.), while the women, who were
skilful in this, busied themselves in spinning for the costly fabric
and goats’ hair (for the sides of the tent) (vv. 26 f.). Finally, the
leaders, as the most prominent among the Israelites, brought the
necessary precious stones and the costly spices (vv. 27 f.). General
eagerness was so great that it did not even cease once the skilled
craftsmen had gone off to the work for which they had been detailed,
so that these felt themselves compelled to go to Moses to bring a
stop to the surplus of contributions, as there was already more
material than was necessary (36.3b~7). Meanwhile Moses had
handed on to the Israelites the divine choice of Bezalel as the leader
of all works of handicraft (35.30-33 following 31.2—5). According to
the divine command he, together with Oholiab (cf. 31.6a), who is
introduced in a noticeably lame way in 35.34, and also the other
men who are skilled in a craft, are to carry out all the necessary work
(36.1), and therefore once Moses has expressly summoned them to
this work (36.2) they receive the contributions of material made by
the Israelites (36.3a). There are a number of difficulties in 35.34 f.
At the beginning, Moses reveals that Yahweh has given the gift of
teaching to Bezalel and also to Oholiab, who was introduced later.
This apparently means that these two are to instruct the great host of
manual workers who are engaged on the work in their special tasks.
But this is not said in what follows, so that one may assume that in
v. 35 the transmitted text is no longer fully intact and perhaps no
longer quite complete.
[36.8—39.43] Once the necessary preparations had been made, the
great work could begin. From 36.8 onwards it is reported how the
minute instructions of chs. 25-31 were in fact carried out. Here in
36.8 the whole of the body of able men appears as a subject, whereas
in what follows (for the first time in 36.14) a singular subject appears
which according to 37.1 (cf. also 38.22) is meant to be Bezalel. This
discrepancy, which is only of a formal nature and has been taken
over automatically from the transmitted text of 25.10, obviously
escaped the notice of the author. There is a difference in the sequence
of work between chs. 25-31 and chs. 36-39. Whereas in the setting of
the instructions the ark and the remaining contents of the inner
sanctuary stand at the beginning as being the most important, when
the instructions are carried out the making of the tabernacle comes
35-1-39.43] INSTRUCTIONS ARE CARRIED OUT a77
first and, as the real sanctuary would require, progress is made from
the outside inwards, as evidently seemed appropriate to the author
of chs. 35-309.
[36.8-38] Ch. 36.8-38 describes the making of the whole of the
complicated tent construction, generally following 26.1-37 word for
word in the form of a report of the construction. Only in a few places
has the formulation been slightly altered, though without in fact
making any difference. 26.30 and 26.33-35 have consistently been
omitted, as they already anticipate the theme of the equipping and
ordering of the sanctuary; this theme is only mentioned in the report
of the construction in ch. 40. In a more remarkable way, the writer of
the report has omitted 26.9b, 12, 13 also, taking this simple way of
obviating the difficulty of the somewhat conflicting detail in these
verses (see pp. 213 f. above). From this it also appears that he already
found ch. 26 in the form in which it has been transmitted. In other
respects, however, he is completely faithful to his model in ch. 26.
[37-1-24] The position of the report in the section which now
follows of the making of the ark with its covering, the table and the
lampstand (37.1-24) in relationship to the corresponding pattern in
25.1040, is similar. Apart from a few alterations in the formulation
which have little bearing on the content, there is once again the
omission of all details of the positioning and use of the different
cult-items; this is the case with 25. 15 f., 21 f., 30, 37b and 40, in all
of which instances, including 37b—40, the present form of ch. 25 may
already be presupposed.
[37-25-29] There now follows in 37.2528 the report of the making
of the altar of incense in accordance with 30.1 ff. This is consistent, as
the altar of incense belongs with the ark, the table and the lampstand
to the equipment of the inner sanctuary. In 30.1-10 the altar of
incense only appeared among the supplements to the basic P narra-
tive about the sanctuary. In the report on the making of the items the
basic material and the additions have been worked up into a whole
and the altar of incense has been given appropriate place in this
whole. The wording of 37.25-28 corresponds with that of 30.1—5; as
always, the orders for positioning and use which follow in 30.6-10 are
omitted. By way of addition, however, a short note about the making
of the anointing oil and the incense is introduced in 37.29 in which
the instructions of 30.22-33 and 30.34-38 appear quite summarily in
the form of brief extracts from 30.25 and 30.34-35. Thus apparently
the transmitted state of 30.22-38 is once again presupposed as the
278 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

pattern; all, however, is cut down to the minimum. The making of

the incense has been given quite an appropriate place in connection
with the section about the altar of incense. Furthermore, in view of
the proximity and affinity of the passages 30.2233 and 30.34-38 the
notice about the oil of anointing has been inserted at the same time, as
there is no really appropriate place elsewhere in the report about the
making ofthe items.
[38.1-20] The sanctuary proper is followed in 38.1—20 by the fore-
court with the items which it contains (corresponding to ch. 27). The
altar of burnt offering which belongs in the forecourt is described
first of all in 38.1-7. This was named simply ‘the altar’ in ch. 27, as
the basic P material knew only this altar. Once the altar of incense
had been taken out of the supplements of ch. 30 and had been
incorporated in chs. 35-39, it was necessary to give the altar in the
forecourt a closer, distinctive description, and therefore in 38.1 it is
appropriately named the ‘altar of burnt offering’. In other respects,
the detailed description of 38.1-7 once again follows the wording of
27.1-8 with a few discrepancies in language. In 38.8 the bronze laver
and its bronze base make an appearance from the supplements
(30.1821) because they belong to the forecourt along with the altar
of burnt offering. Once again the instructions for positioning and use
of 30.18b—21 are omitted, but a most remarkable note about the
material for the laver and base is added; it is made from ‘the mirrors
of the ministering women who ministered at the door of the tent of
meeting’ (these women also appear with the same description in
I Sam. 2.22). The reason for this note remains obscure, all the more
so as at the point of time here imagined there was still no ministering
at the entrance to the tent of meeting. The description of the tent-
entrance to the forecourt in 38.9—20 once again corresponds with the
parallel section 27.9-19. The alterations to the language are here
rather more marked than usual, in so far as in vv. 17-20 the order of
the pattern has been altered and in fact improved. There are no
differences of content, and for the most part the wording of the
original is also preserved here.
[38.21-31] ‘The report of the making of the items is interrupted in
a most striking way in 38.21-31. Now that the objects for which the
metal was necessary have been described, we have a reckoning of the
amounts of metal that were needed. It can hardly be doubted that
here we have a quite secondary literary passage in which (v. 26) the
use of the result of the census first narrated in Num. 1 is particularly
35-1-39.43] INSTRUCTIONS ARE CARRIED OUT 279
out of place. The same is true of the reference to the special duties of
the Levites under the direction of Ithamar, son of Aaron (v. 21), in
which the regulations first reported in Num. 3 and 4 are anticipated.
In addition, the beginning (v. 21) is formulated in a very turgid way,
that is, if the text is not corrupt at this point (perhaps it originally
read “This is the result of the counting on the basis of the numbering
of the community’), and further is overladen with a lengthy paren-
thetical clause (vv. 22 f.) about the work of Bezalel and Oholiab.
Extraordinarily large quantities are quoted for gold (v. 24), silver
(vv. 25-28) and bronze (vv. 29-31). In silver the quantity is in fact so
great that it would be necessary to exact halfa shekel from every adult
male Israelite according to the total given in Num. 1.46. The
amounts for gold and bronze stand in no rational relationship to the
amount for silver. The use of the silver and bronze is still reported in
summary detail, but this is not the case with the gold. Thus the
section is not fully harmonized throughout.
[39-431] This section deals with the priestly dress on the basis of
ch. 28. The pattern for it was obviously ch. 28 in its present form, the
wording of which has mostly been taken over. Verse 1 forms the transi-
tion from the secondary passage 38.21—31 to the new theme, in which
it is stressed that the items to be made out of the costly materials will
now be enumerated. This transition with its plural subject is certainly
the reason why, particularly at the beginning of some of the main
sections (vv. 2, 3a), 7 f., 22) the singular subject which has hitherto
been customary has still been retained, but in most other places a
plural subject appears. This transition has moreover replaced the
transition passage 28.1—5. In what follows a note has then been inserted
about the making of gold leaf to be woven into the costly fabric
(v. 3a) as have the frequent references to the divine instructions given
to Moses (vv. 5b, 21b, 26b, 29b, 31b), while on the other hand the
references to the significance and use of the individual items of
clothing (28.12b, 29, 35b, 38, 41, 42abb, 43) are omitted, as is the
passage about the chains on which the breastpiece is to be hung
(28.13 f.). It is remarkable that in ch. 39 silence is maintained about
the ‘Urim and Thummim’ (cf. 28.30) which are to be put inside the
breastpiece and that consequently in v. 8 there is also no longer any
mention of the ‘breastpiece of judgment’ (so 28. 15) but merely of ‘the
breastpiece’ (vv. 8ff.). The ‘Urim and Thummim’ (see p. 222 above)
were apparently already completely foreign to the author of ch. 39. Itis
also remarkable that the details of 28.10 f. about the inscription of the
280 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

two precious stones on the shoulder-pieces are omitted, perhaps

because they seemed to be in opposition to the precious stones on the
breastpicce, inscribed with the names of the tribes of Israel. Finally,
presumably a better order has been chosen in ch. 39, in which of
course the distinction between Aaron and his sons (i.e. the distinction
between the High Priest and the ordinary priests) has fallen out; at
the same time the addition about the priests’ breeches which is
manifestly such in ch. 28 has been worked into the whole. Thus v. 27
mentions ‘coats’ for Aaron and his sons (combination of 28.3gaa and
40aa), but v. 28a mentions the turban (according to 28.3g9ad for
Aaron) and the ‘caps’ (according to 28.40b for the sons of Aaron)
without making any further distinction. Moreover there is mention
of ‘breeches’ in v. 28b (after the addition 28.42aa) and finally in
v. 29a the girdle (combination of 28.39b and 40ab). Right at the end
(vv. 30-31a) comes the ‘plate’ (flower) of 28.36-37 without it being
made clear that it was only a part of the turban of the High Priest. In
a remarkable way the word ‘plate’ is glossed with the phrase ‘the holy
crown’ (nézer) (on this cf. pp. 225 f. above). Itis not probable that the
alterations mentioned have any real significance in the sense that the
writer of ch. 39 slightly corrected the scheme of the P narrative in
accordance with the actual circumstances of the post-exilic period.
At best the omission of ‘Urim and Thummim’ could be understood
in this sense; the omission of 28.30 was of course merely consistent,
as the Urim and Thummim were not to be made but just to explain
the use of the breastpiece. But the abandonment of the expression
‘breastpiece of judgment’, which is apparently bound up with this, is
striking. We cannot, however, draw certain conclusions even from
this.
[39-32-43] In the closing section 39.32—43 the whole work is now
explained as completed (v. 32) so that now all the items for the
maintenance of the cult, once again narrated in detail (vv. 33-41),
are brought to Moses. He finds that all has been done well and so can
‘bless’ all those who have played some part (vv. 42 f.). It may be
asked whether, in the general statements of vv. 32, 42 f., there is still
the residue of a short account from the original P narrative, which
said that the instructions given to Moses in chs. 25 ff. were all carried
out correctly and well. The P narrative certainly must once have
contained such an account.
40.1-38] FURNISHING OF THE SANCTUARY 281

7. THE FURNISHING OF THE SANCTUARY: 40.1 — 38

40' The Lorp said to Moses, 2 ‘On the first day of the first month
you shall erect the tabernacle of the tent of meeting. ? And you shall
put in it the ark of the testimony, and you shall screen the ark with the
veil. *And you shall bring in the table, and set its arrangements in
order; and you shall bring in the lampstand, and set up its lamps.
5 And you shall put the golden altar for incense before the ark of the
testimony, and set up the screen for the door of the tabernacle. § You
shall set the altar of burnt offering before the door of the tabernacle of
the tent of meeting, 7 and place the laver between the tent of meeting
and the altar, and put water in it. ® And you shall set up the court round
about, and hang up the screen for the gate of the court. » Then you
shall take the anointing oil, and anoint the tabernacle and all that is in
it, and consecrate it and all its furniture; and it shall become holy.
1° You shall also anoint the altar of burnt offering and all its utensils,
and consecrate the altar; and the altar shall be most holy. 1! You shall
also anoint the laver and its base, and consecrate it. 12'Then you shall
bring Aaron and his sons to the door of the tent of meeting, and shall
wash them with water, 18 and put upon Aaron the holy garments, and
you shall anoint him and consecrate him, that he may serve me as
priest. 44 You shall bring his sons also and put coats on them, 4 and
anoint them, as you anointed their father, that they may serve me as
priests: and their anointing shall admit them to a perpetual priesthood
throughout their generations.’
16 Thus did Moses; according to all that the Lorp commanded him,
so he did. 1” And in the first month in the second year, on the first day
of the month, the tabernacle was erected. 18 Moses erected the taber-
nacle; he laid its bases, and set up its frames, and put in its poles, and
raised up its pillars; 19 and he spread the tent over the tabernacle, and
put the covering of the tent over it, as the Lorp had commanded Moses.
20 And he took the testimony and put it into the ark, and put the poles
on the ark, and set the mercy seat above on the ark; #1 and he brought
the ark into the tabernacle, and set up the veil of the screen, and
screened the ark of the testimony; as the Lorp had commanded Moses.
22 And he put the table in the tent of meeting, on the north side of the
tabernacle, outside the veil, 2 and set the bread in order on it before
the Lorn; as the Lorp had commanded Moses. #4 And he put the lamp-
stand in the tent of meeting, opposite the table on the south side of the
tabernacle, 2° and set up the lamps before the Lorn; as the Lorp had
commanded Moses. 26 And he put the golden altar in the tent of meet-
ing before the veil, 2? and burnt fragrant incense upon it; as the Lorp
had commanded Moses. 28 And he put in place the screen for the door
of the tabernacle. 29 And he set the altar of burnt offering at the door
of the tabernacle of the tent of meeting, and offered upon it the burnt
offering and the cereal offering; as the Lorp had commanded Moses.
30 And he set the laver between the tent of meeting and the altar, and
put water in it for washing, *! with which Moses and Aaron and his
282 THE MAKING OF THE COVENANT ON SINAI

sons washed their hands and their feet; when they went into the tent
of meeting, and when they approached the altar, they washed; as the
Lorp commanded Moses. # And he erected the court round the
tabernacle and the altar, and set up the screen of the gate of the court.
So Moses finished the work.
34 Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the
Lorp filled the tabernacle. *° And Moses was not able to enter the tent
of meeting, because the cloud abode upon it, and the glory of the Lorp
filled the tabernacle. 36 Throughout all their journeys, whenever the
cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the people of Israel
would go onward; %7 but if the cloud was not taken up, then they did
not go onward till the day that it was taken up. 3° For throughout all
their journeys the cloud of the Lorp was upon the tabernacle by day,
and fire was in it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel.

[17] In the description of the furnishing of the sanctuary (v. 1-33)

a clear distinction can be made between three parallel literary strata.
Verses 1-16 contain a detailed divine command which is primarily
concerned with the anointing of the contents of the tabernacle and
the priests; there is a short explanatory note at the end. Verse 17
gives summary details of the erection of the tabernacle, in a passive
form, which are nevertheless complete in themselves. The event is
described once again, in full detail, in vv. 18-33. Now whereas the
sections vv. 1-16 and vv. 18-33 presuppose the secondary additions
to the P narrative, this is not the case with v. 17. This verse may
therefore be assigned to P. In that case, the detailed instructions of
chs. 25 ff. were presumably followed in P by a note, perhaps still
preserved in 39.32, 42 f., on the carrying out of the necessary work
(see p. 280 above) and a note on the furnishing of the tabernacle
in 40.17. The temporal note in v. 17 is the first one given after 19.1 P.
If we allow some time for Moses to go up the mountain and to
receive and hand on the divine instructions, all the work on the
sanctuary, which is here described as the ‘tabernacle’, after its chief
feature (cf. 26.1), until its final completion, took about seven months.
[18-33] Of the two secondary sections, which occasionally over-
lap, and so do not derive from the same hand, the section vv. 18-33
must certainly be regarded as the older. It too takes up the basic
features of chs. 25-31 and the additions made to them. Moses already
begins to offer sacrifices (vv. 27a, 2gba) and in so doing anticipates
the narrative of Lev. 8.9. The constantly reiterated reference to the
divine command given to Moses (vv. 19b, 2tb, 23b, 25b, 27b, 29bd,
32b) looks like a later substitute for a command of God which was
 40.1-38] FURNISHING OF THE SANCTUARY 283
originally missing; it is put in rather a clumsy way, as v. 18 shows
Moses to be the chief subject of the whole section. The details of
vv. 18-33 could stem from a later writer to whom the brief observa-
tion in v. 17 seemed insufficient and who took the material for his
description from chs. 25-31. [1-16] In the same way—though more
briefly than vv. 18-33—vv. 1-16 use chs. 25-31 as a basis for
describing the furnishing of the sanctuary; this provides the basis for
the attached narrative of the anointing and ‘consecration’ both of
Aaron and his sons, and of all the cult items within the gate of the
court. This anointing of the priests is treated in detail and appears to
be the real purpose of this section. It is striking here that the act of
anointing is described separately, first for Aaron (v. 13b) and then
for his sons (v. 15a); here we may still see after-effects of the old
tradition, which knew only an anointing for Aaron himself (see
p. 230 above). In other respects this description of the anointing again
anticipates Lev. 8; and already in this section the question arises
whether it was not added only after the interposition of Lev. 1-7 had
placed the continuation of the narrative in Lev. 8 at some distance.
Perhaps even the division of the Pentateuch into ‘books’ had already
taken place, so that the need arose to bring the theme of the furnish-
ing of the sanctuary to an end of some kind at the end of the Book of
Exodus. ‘
[34-38] This question, presumably to be answered in the affirma-
tive, arises all the more in view of the last section (vv. 34-38), for
here too things are presupposed which are later narrated once again.
The ‘glory’ of Yahweh, which manifests itself in the cloud (on this
cf. 24.15b-18 P), by appearing over the tent of meeting (vv. 34a, 35a)
—and in a mysterious way even in the tabernacle (on the parallel
phrases vv. 34b, 35b cf. I Kings 8.10b, 11)—-gave the sign of legiti-
macy and approval to the newly-built sanctuary and thus represented
the proper conclusion of the whole work. If then it is further said in
vv. 36-38, in anticipation of Num. 9.15 ff., but quite wrongly here,
that the significance of the cloud concerns the departure or non-
departure of the Israelites, it becomes quite clear that here a (secon-
dary) ending has been achieved. In this way the Book of Exodus now
ends with a look towards the progress of the history of Israel which
primarily consists in the further journeys through the wilderness
under the divine guidance.
 Vv * =
Pe.ye ee
: Pee ra 7
= = c
The Old Testament Library
This Library will gradually provide a fresh
and authoritative treatment of every
important aspect of the Old Testament, by
commentaries and general surveys. The
contributors will be scholars of inter-
national standing, who will make available
to students, preachers and teachers much
knowledge at present accessible only in
foreign languages or in technical articles
and monographs.
General Editors
James Barr, University of Manchester
Peter Ackroyd, University of London
John Bright, Union Theological
Seminary, Richmond, Virginia
G. Ernest Wright, The Divinity School,
Harvard University
Already published
A History of Israel
John Bright (505 net)
Genesis
Gerhard von Rad, translated by
John H. Marks (505 net)
Theology of the Old Testament
Volume One
Walther Eichrodt, translated by
J. A. Baker (505 nel)
Exodus
Martin Noth, translated by
John Bowden (405 net)
The Psalms
Artur Weiser, translated by
Herbert Hartwell (70S net)
Iand II Kings John Gray (75s net)
The Method and Message of Jewish
Apocalyptic D.S. Russell (605 net)
I and II Samuel
H. W. Hertzberg, translated by
John Bowden (505 nel)
Leviticus
Martin Noth, translated by
J. E. Anderson (355 net)
Daniel Norman Porteous (30s net)
Deuteronomy
Gerhard von Rad, translated by
Dorothea M. Barton (355 net)
Future titles will include
Theology of the Old Testament
Volume Two Walther Eichrodt
Numbers Martin Noth
The Creation Stories James Barr
First Isaiah Otto Kaiser
Second Isaiah Claus Westermann
Ezekiel W. Eichrodt
 STUDIES IN BIBLICAL THEOLOGY

‘The books in the series have become familiar to all students of

theology, and many of them have been works of real distinction.’
Expository Times

OLD TESTAMENT TITLES a

Biblical Words for Time James Barr

Myth and Reality in the Old Testament Brevard S. Childs
Memory and Tradition in Israel Brevard S. Childs
Prophecy and Covenant (Second impression) R. E. Clements
Man in the Old Testament (Fifth impression) Walther Eichrodt
Studies in the Book of Lamentations
(Second impression) Norman K. Gottwald
Prophets and Wise Men (Second impression) William McKane
Oral Tradition—A Modern Problem in
Old Testament Introduction
(Fourth impression) Eduard Nielsen
Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea
(Second impression) Jj. T. Milik
The Messiah in the Old Testament
(Second impression) Helmer Ringgren
Studies in Deuteronomy
(Fourth impression) Gerhard von Rad
Wisdom in Proverbs R. N. Whybray
God who Acts—Biblical Theology as Recital
(Seventh impression) G. Ernest Wright
The Old Testament against its Environment
(Eighth impression) G. Ernest Wright

SCM PRESS