Lecture

Lecture fifteen. In this lecture we turn to the root of the Exodus. The children of Israel had come out of Egypt on the fourteenth of Nisan. Nisan is the month that begins the Jewish religious year, at least. There was a beginning of the year in Nisan in the spring at the time of the vernal equinox, approximately, of course, equal to our Easter, and also a beginning of the year at, some would think of it as a civil year, though that’s not exactly clear, in the fall in what we would have the month of September. This would be the month of Tishrei, the seventh month counting from the spring.

So the children of Israel left in the fourteenth of Nisan and Moses led them out “not through the land of the Philistines,” it says in chapter 13, verse 15. The way of the Philistines would be the short route up across what is now the Suez Canal and across the Sinai Peninsula up by the Gaza Strip and straight into the land of Canaan.

The children of Israel were not ready to go into the land of Canaan. They were a group of people that had been slaves for years. They were not organized, and God wanted them to learn the lessons. He wanted them first to be instructed in their faith, and then to be organized for war and organized also for worship, and so the Lord wanted to get them out into the wilderness where He could deal with them for a while. I guess we have these same ideas when we take young people off on a weekend retreat. The idea is to get them by themselves and teach them in a concentrated way. Well, the Lord wanted to give the children of Israel a wilderness retreat, and He had planned to take them down to Sinai and deal with them there for a whole year.

Well, the Exodus went, of course, east from Egypt, and they crossed, it says, the Red Sea. Just where they crossed the Red Sea, what body of water they crossed, is very much debated. The old theory was that the Red Sea in former days went farther north than it does now and there was an arm of the Red Sea going up toward what is called Bitter Lakes. There are two Bitter Lakes on the route to the present Suez Canal, and the Red Sea was thought to have extended farther up and they crossed this arm of the Red Sea.

We might point out that the word in the Hebrew is Yam Suf, which literally means Sea of Reeds and is attached to several bodies of water east of Egypt. It includes even the Gulf of Aqaba over by Ezion-Geber. It would include the Red Sea. Technically, it would also include the Bitter Lakes. It is a rather general term, this Sea of Reeds. It doesn’t mean that the sea is necessarily shallow. Not at all. These two Bitter Lakes are quite large and they are used for ships to maneuver in, and so on.

This old theory can no longer be held. Dr. Albright has pointed out that there is a village that is on the shore of the Red Sea, which has now been excavated and shown to be older than Moses and, therefore, the Red Sea never was higher than it is today, at least not in historic times. So the Red Sea always was where it is now.

Also, the route of the Exodus took them, it says, past Baal-zephon, and Baal-zephon in Exodus 14:2 seems to be equated to the town of [Zulu]. Zulu in the north part of what would be the Suez Canal.

So where did the children of Israel cross the water and what body of water was it that they crossed? You would want to refer, of course, to biblical atlases. There is the MacMillan Atlas by Aharoni and also the Westminster Atlas, now a little bit old, by George Ernest Wright. Grollenberg’s Bible Atlas is also a very excellent one, and there are other atlases available.

Of course, the question comes up, “Why did the children of Israel cross the sea at all?” You don’t have to cross any body of water, except the Suez Canal now, when you go from Egypt up to Palestine. You can go north of the Bitter Lakes. You can go between the Bitter Lakes. You could got be the southern Bitter Lake and the Red Sea. There were three places that they could go without crossing any body of water at all. The reason why they crossed the water, of course, was grim necessity. Moses was leading the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt and there was sharp hostility between the Egyptians and the Hebrews. There was a string of forts across the eastern border of Egypt, and Moses was trying to pick his way with his group of Israelites, totally defenseless, between and around these forts. And in doing so, he came up against one of these bodies of water.

Albright would argue, and I think rather convincingly, an arm of the Mediterranean going down into a gulf near the town of [Zulu], ancient Baal-zephon, and it would be there that the Israelites were up against this water and were proceeding to go around it. When to their dismay and amazement, they saw in the distance to the west the clouds of dust of the chariots of Pharaoh and the word came that they were trapped. Trapped with the desert on each side and with the water in front and the army of Pharaoh behind. If they had had time, they could have gone around the water, but there was no time. They were caught. And here it would have been slaughter for them to stay where they were and it would have been slaughter, also, to try to find their way laboriously around the water and have Pharaoh attack them on the flank. The only way of safety was to go through. And this is what the Lord told them to do. And the Lord hindered the chariots of Pharaoh, put the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night between the host of Pharaoh and the Israelites. He opened up the sea as Moses stretched forth the rod of God in that great miracle that is celebrated again and again and again down through the history of the Old Testament, and the Israelites went through the water. Don’t think that the water was very shallow and it was only ankle deep and there was no miracle. It was a miracle. The fact that the water was deep is shown by the fact that it overwhelmed Pharaoh’s horses and his chariots when they tried to pursue. This was a good sized body of water, marked on our maps, and the Israelites went straight through by the miraculous power of God.

It was a deliverance that the Israelites have never forgotten. In chapter 15, we have a celebration of this in what is called the “Song of Miriam,” usually. Moses sang the song, too, but Miriam particularly is cited. “Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the LORD and spoke, saying, I will sing unto the LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation.” A verse that is picked up and reiterated, by the way, in [Exodus chapter 15, verses 3 and 4]. “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea.” The Sea of Reeds. And so the song goes on.

This has been studied from the poetic angle and from the linguistic angle by Dr. Albright who pronounces it a “piece of very early Hebrew poetry.” On the basis of the characteristics of its parallelism and its repetitive parallelism, his discussion is found in his book Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, one of his later books and full of very useful information. Though I can’t agree with him in all the details of the dating of his poems, he does find that this repetitive parallelism, such as we have here, “Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.” He finds numerous parallels of this construction where the first phrase of a line is repeated in the second line in climactic parallelism. You have this also in the Ugaritic poetry of 1400 BC.

So it is a poem that has very interesting overtones. If this is an early poem, it shows, of course, a high conception of God. Indeed, of monotheism. Whereas Wellhausen thought that monotheism was the invention of the eighth century prophets here the suggestion of Albright would be that Moses himself was a monotheist, because he would say that this song comes from Mosaic days. So Exodus 14 tells in narrative style about the passing through the Red Se;a Exodus 15 gives it in high poetry.

Then the Israelites turned south and went down along the western edge of the Sinai Peninsula. How they were able to do this is not too clear. There are various oases down on that route. The Egyptians worked the turquoise mines in the south central section of Sinai. The turquoise mines are at a place called Serabit el-Khadim, and so there were regular routes; the oases were doubtless well known. We would hope that this would have been a year of particularly good rains. Remember, also, it was the springtime and in the spring the grass inches out into the desert a little bit. We must remember that the Israelites went with their sheep and their goats and some cows. They were a pastoral people; they were nomad people. They moved slowly, of course. I understand that our western settlers taking their cows and horses and their covered wagons, when they went west, they would make perhaps ten miles a day. Well, the Israelites probably would have gone a little bit slower under their circumstances, but there is some bush in the desert and they did need, of course, these water holes to water the flocks. And then the Israelites like true Bedouin, like true nomads of the desert, lived off of their flocks.

They got down to Mount Sinai. The location of Sinai has been debated by some. The only logical, biblical spot for Mount Sinai would be the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. Some people argue that the Sinai tradition comes from a place farther down on the Arabian Peninsula. The reason for that is that they must find the place where there is a volcanic mountain because it says that Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke. The Bible pictures this as the supernatural presence of God and does not demand a volcano, but those who cannot believe in the supernatural must find a volcano for the location of Sinai. There being no volcano anywhere nearby, the whole Sinaitic story must be called a tradition, a legend.

Enough of that. The children of Israel went down to the Sinai area which is a massif of several peaks about nine thousand feet high, and there they camped at the foot of Mount Sinai for a year, a little over.

We will discuss the date of the Exodus after we discuss the rest of the journey of the Israelites. After they had camped at Sinai for this time, they went north to Kadesh Barnea and there was the debacle of the first effort to enter Canaan when they failed and were beaten badly and were condemned to forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Then they went on through Moab and Edom and up to the trans-Jordan territory opposite Jericho, and when we discuss that latter part of the journey, we shall take time to look into the date of the Exodus.

In the meantime, we discuss the situation in Sinai itself. There as they were camped at Mount Sinai was fulfilled the word of God to Moses when He spoke to him in the backside of the desert and said, “This is the sign that you will deliver my people from Egypt. When you have delivered them, you will worship God upon this mountain.” And God took the children of Israel down to Mount Sinai and there during this intervening year, under the control of God, Moses organized this group of slaves into a somewhat rebellious, but nonetheless organized nation with a government, with laws, with a institutionalized worship, a place of worship, the tabernacle, order of worship, the sacrifices, and the personnel of worship, the Levites and the priests. So there was much to do this year, and Moses was God’s man. I’ve pointed out already how Moses was well trained by God in His providence. Trained in legislation and administration. Trained, also, in the ways of the desert to take care of His people, and best of all, trained in his waiting upon God to receive the wisdom of God to give to us, as well as to the Israelites, these great laws that express the divine will.

There are some who have argued that the Semite slaves of Egypt who worked in the turquoise mines and who scratched their brief messages on the rocks there in the alphabetic inscriptions of Serabit el-Khadim, that these slaves invented the alphabet. Some of the Hebrews may have been among these slaves as a matter of fact. But if that be true, and we’re not quite sure if that be true, it is of interest that from this waste Sinai Peninsula, we have that great benefit to mankind, the alphabet, which has made writing so much simpler for so many languages, and we have also, of course, from God at this spot the Ten Commandments, which express in marvelous ways God’s will for man.

The Ten Commandments, where will we find better moral legislation than this? And given in such a compact package and one that we should not only memorize, but also revere as expressing God’s nature and also His directives for us in the position in which He has created us, because they express not only God’s nature, but also our activity to please God in our natures.

They stayed at Sinai and the report of the events at Sinai are found in the last part of Exodus, in all of Leviticus, and the first ten chapters of Numbers. So from Exodus 20 to Numbers 10, we have the time at Sinai. The journeying of the Israelites picks up again only in Numbers 10.

The Ten Commandments are divided usually into two halves. There is a difference between the usual Roman Catholic division, which the Lutherans, by the way, follow, and on the other hand the Protestant division. The Catholic division is old and divides into three commandments dealing with our duty to God and seven commandments, our duty to man. The first two commandments are united in the Catholic system, and the last commandment is divided in two in the Catholic system.

In the Protestant enumeration, you have four commandments, their duty to God. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me;” “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” and so on. “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain,” and “Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy.” The other six are the commandments expressing our duty to man. “Honor thy father and thy mother,” and so on.

There are ten commandments according to the statements in the book of Deuteronomy. We know that, but we do not know from God how the commandments are to be divided. We do know that some of the Ten Commandments, which Christ quotes from the Old Testament itself, He says that our duty to God is expressed in those memorable words of Deuteronomy 6, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, strength, and mind.” And then from Leviticus He gets the other commandment, “And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” From these He says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” These are the sum of the Ten Commandments according to an expression given in the Westminster Shorter Catechism that is widely used.

Now it is usually said that the legislation that God gave Moses can be classified in three heads. We have the moral law of the Ten Commandments of which we have spoken, and then there is the civil legislation dealing with the situations of thievery and of the manslaughter, adultery, rape, various kinds of crime, and then there is, also, the ceremonial legislation: ceremonial legislation dealing with sacrifices, feasts, fasts, the priesthood, and their work. This is a satisfactory classification. We must always remember that this is not a divine classification, but a convenient one and to help us remember and classify the various materials. And according to this, we have the moral law, the Ten Commandments, and the civil legislation, and the ceremonial legislation.

According to this, also, the moral law would be of permanent validity. The civil legislation would be appropriate for the nation of that day, and it would change when the government would change. If, for instance, they were in Babylon, they would not be under the civil legislation of the Lord. They would be under the civil legislation of Babylon. The ceremonial legislation, according to this view, also would be changed when the Old Testament types and shadows were fulfilled in the reality of Christ and the church. So this is a satisfactory classification.

I would like to offer a slightly different classification which divides the Ten Commandments, also, in two, to make four divisions. It is the same material, so perhaps the division is not so terribly significant, and yet this might be worth your consideration.

The Ten Commandments are said to be the moral law. It does not just say any place that the Ten Commandments are the moral law. There are other laws also which may well be classed as moral in the Pentateuch and in, of course, the New Testament as well. It seems to me that it is possible to divide the moral and other laws according to another division as the parts referring to our relation to God and the parts referring to our relation to man. In which case, we might say that the first four Ten Commandments are, as most would say, commandments dealing with our relation to God, and then the ceremonial legislation would be the application of those principles to the worship of God in the institutionalized religion of Israel. In short, the ceremonial legislation would be an exposition of and development of our duty to God as given in the first four commandments. And then the civil legislation would be an exposition of and development of our duty to one another as given in the last six commandments.

So you see, the ceremonial legislation would be attached to commandments one to four and the civil legislation attached to commandments six to ten, and we would have, in a sense, four divisions of the legislation instead of three. The commandments would still be of the permanent validity and the interpretations, applications in the sphere of ceremony and religion and in the sphere of civil life would be that which would be variable and could be done away as situations changed.

Just take, for instance, the civil law. It seems rather clear that the civil law in the book of Deuteronomy where it says, “If you build a house, you should build a battlement around the roof” in the King James Version. Well, a battlement around the roof hardly expresses the situation. It doubtless means a fence or railing, because it says you must not bring blood upon the house. In those days, the house roofs were flat, people went up on the roof in the cool of the evening in order to cool off, and to get a breeze and fresh air, but it was dangerous to go up on a flat roof unless there was a fence around it. When you build a house, you should make a fence around it. Well, this was a matter of civil legislation. The principle was of eternal validity. The principle is one of criminal negligence. The principle today applies if you have a swimming pool in your backyard, you have to build a fence around the swimming pool to keep the neighbor’s child from falling in. We don’t build a fence around our roofs. Our roofs aren’t like that. We don’t use them that way, and yet I know of a building in New York City, a school where they had a small fence around the roof, and according to city ordinance, the roof must not be used; people should not go up there on the roof, because there was not an adequate “battlement” around the roof.

So you see the civil legislation is based on eternal principles, but it applies to the situation of the people, and the same way we may say with the ceremonial legislation in the religion of types and shadows of the Old Testament time, the ceremonial legislation was adequate and good and proper, and it looked forward to a fulfillment in the coming of Christ.

Now the laws, I’m thinking particularly of the civil legislation now, may be classified in various ways. Albrecht Alt, the mentor by the way of Martin Noth whom I spoke of with regard to higher criticism, Albrecht Alt has divided the civil legislation of this part of Exodus and of Leviticus into two divisions, what he calls the Apodictic legislation and the Casuistic. The Apodictic would include the commandments for that matter, and it means the legislation that is couched in the form of “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not.” The Casuistic legislation might better be called “case law” and this would be the laws that begin with an “if.” “If a man is caught breaking into your house and if you kill him,” it goes on to say that this was killing in self-defense and is not punishable by death. This is a case law. If such and such happens, then so and so must be done. Whereas the “thou shalt not” legislation would be “Thou shalt not steal” or “Thou shalt not take a wife to her sister in her lifetime to vex her.” Things like this. This is the Apodictic legislation. It is very curious that the Casuistic or case law is what we have exclusively in the laws of Hammurabi. Hammurabi’s laws are all case laws, and there is no good parallel for the Apodictic legislation in the other laws of antiquity. We have laws of the Babylonians, the Hittites, the ancient Sumerians, and of course, the great laws of Hammurabi, the Amorite ruler of Babylon around 1700 BC. But the Apodictic laws are quite peculiar. It is said by some critics that this means that the Apodictic legislation was what Israel had when she was out in the wilderness and when she came into the land of Canaan, she adopted the case laws of the surrounding Canaanites. This, of course, is a very fine conclusion, and it is one that is hard to argue with because we have absolutely no evidence of what laws people would have when they lived out in the wilderness. And, therefore, it is a good theory and one of those theories that has no basis and cannot be answered because there is no evidence. No, there’s no need to suppose that the source of this Apodictic legislation was a wilderness experience. It was simply the laws of God given from Mount Sinai, and that depends upon the fact that God claimed an absolute supremacy over the lives and all of the Israelites. They were His people, and He had a right to tell them what they should do and what they should not do not only because they were His, but also because He knew what they were and what they needed and gave them good laws, the best laws that the world has ever seen.

We might say something about the relationship of these laws to the Code of Hammurabi. It is interesting and has been pointed out that the Code of Hammurabi is not a complete law code such as we would have. The attitude toward judgment was different in those days from what we have in our day. We have laws passed by Congress, passed by state legislators. If a person violates those laws, he is lawbreaker, he comes before the judge, the jury declares if he is guilty, and the judge gives the penalty. Much more freedom was given to the judge in ancient times and, indeed, also to the Arab courts today. These laws of Hammurabi were more specimens that should guide a judge. A judge was given credit for common sense, and if he reads that you should do so and so, if a man sets fire to his neighbor’s standing grain, then the judge is supposed to be able to enlarge this decision for similar cases. And so it was, doubtless, in the Old Testament laws. These Old Testament laws were not the only penalties that were given, nor the only judgments that were given. These are the main types of law and main types of punishment that a judge would use to decide his cases, and the judge was expected to have common sense and wisdom and wisdom, indeed, from God. He was to pray for wisdom from God, and so these different laws, which seem to us sometimes rather helter skelter, were case laws for judges to go by in administering justice in ancient times.

The Book of the Covenant, particularly, we should look into and see some of the principles that apply even to our own day and are used, actually, in modern legislation to good effect.