Introduction to the Book of Exodus (original) (raw)
Related papers
Exodus: A new translation with commentary
Highland Park, IL: The Middle Coast Press, 2021
This translation of Exodus follows a similar approach to my translations of Deuteronomy, Genesis and Samuel. In this, as in my other translations, my priority was always to express the ideas in the text in the most natural way in English, and at the same time to capture the energy and rhythm of the original Hebrew. In this book, my translation style has evolved further towards a true "functionally equivalent" approach. As a result, compared with my other translations, this translation is "freer" and departs further and more frequently from the literal meaning of the text. One unique aspect of all my translations is that they jettison the traditional chapter divisions and instead organize the material according to the Masoretic parashot. Organizing the text in this way, I believe, gets us closer to the ancient writers, and yields numerous insights into their composition approach. The commentary accompanying the translation focuses primarily on issues of translation and language. After the commentary I provide an essay that summarizes my views on the composition history of Exodus and that assigns each of the parashot to one of the four major compositional stages that I identify, which span a period of approximately 250 years, from the early sixth century to the mid fourth century BCE. In my treatment of the composition history, I make a number of unusual proposals. Specifically, I argue that (1) the earliest version of Exodus was composed in the first decades of the sixth century as part of the original composition of the "Deuteronomistic History" (Exodus plus Numbers though Kings in my proposal), and that (2) the Yahwistic priesthoods in Yehud and Samaria were jointly responsible for all other additions and edits made to the book between the late sixth century and the mid fourth century. For those who prefer physical copies of books, the print edition of this book is available at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1733441557/
The Exodus in the Christian Bible: The Case for "Figural" Reading
Theological Studies, 2002
Many Christians find the Christian Bible, comprised of the Old and New Testament, diffuse, lacking unity, and therefore difficult to use in systematic theology. Yet the Bible itself uses a powerful organizing principle that spans both testaments and unites them, namely the Exodus in its dual aspects of liberation and formation. There are three Exodus moments. Exodus I is the thirteenth-century B.C.E. foundational event. Exodus II is its sixth-century renewal. Exodus III is the first-century C.E. climactic renewal of Israel by Jesus.
Reading Acts, 2021
The Discovering Biblical Texts series provides basic introductions of biblical books by focusing on the interpretation and reception of the book, as well as the contents of the book. Ralph Hawkins’s Discovering Exodus introducing readers to the overall canonical shape of the book and briefly introduces them to key interpreting issues The book begins with a chapter on the structure and story of exodus before turning to exodus as literature. In chapter 2, Hawkins describes the rise of source criticism and the paradigm shift to literary criticism. This includes an overview of the origin and development of the documentary hypothesis, a theory which he considers flawed, even though he admits in North America the documentary hypothesis remains conventional wisdom. Following Brevard Childs’s work in the late 1970s, as well as the Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (and similar works), he considers Exodus to be a sophisticated literary work whether or not historical Moses wrote the book. However, in this book, Hawkins is interested in the final form of the text and how Exodus contributes to the whole canon of scripture.
The bible is at odds with ancient textual sources and with archaeology. Egyptian papyri detail the least things about Egyptian events of the time. One explains that two(!) escaping slaves were pursued across the border, yet there is no record of two million Israelite slaves all leaving one night. Uneducated slaves, desperately escaping from the armies of their powerful oppressor in the desert do not sit down each night and write out a diary of the day's events. Nomads keep up their spirits by telling tall stories around their campfires. The story was written by Persian administrators sent to secure the loyalty of the Jews for Persia, not Egypt. They used the myth, presented then as it was ever after as true history, to depict those loyal to the traditional gods and goddesses as apostates and backsliders from the true God of Israel, Yehouah, who had made a covenant with Moses. Scriptural books are warnings to the natives in Palestine to back the god the Persians were introducing as the God of the Israelites. They pretended that the people were always backsliding from worship of the true god, so they invented a history to prove it. Moses was not important in it. The Prophets could not have avoided talking about Moses and the Sinai covenant had it really been a long known and central element of Jewish history. Prophets preceding Jeremiah are mainly silent about Moses and rarely use the word covenant, but criticize the people for disobedience. The saga of Moses must have been one of the last additions to the history. Invented pseudepigraphic prophecies showed God would punish the people for their backsliding. Since they were written after the events they could seem accurate. The Persians depicted Jewish prophets during the monarchy as incessantly warning the people not to apostatize. They always did! Books were written in Greek professing to give accounts of Egyptian and Babylonian culture, but in the light of modern discovery they were inaccurate.