Exodus and the birth of a national narrative

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The Ramban, in his masterful fashion, manages to quickly give both a philosophical and a literary explanation for the repetition of the verse. Conceptually, he argues that the central problem in the Book of Exodus is not slavery, but exile. So it was the descent into Egypt in the earlier book that set the stage for the struggle the Children of Israel will be contending with in this book.

As a matter of reading strategy, then, he explains that the Torah uses the callback as a device to emphasize the interconnectedness of these two books. If the Torah wants us to remember the descent into Egypt, instead of a lengthy exposition, it can use six words from a scene in Genesis as a way of invoking that moment in the earlier narrative and importing its meaning into the text in front of us. Genesis and Exodus are thus connected not only through an ongoing storyline, but also through a set of interlocking word parallels.

See: CALLBACKS TO CREATION, Parashat Shemot, Rabbi David Kasher, Hadar

The beginning of Exodus is shot through with callbacks to Genesis to indicate that the formation of the people of Israel represents a new creation, an entirely new reality. But the stormy arc of Genesis also reminds us that for every creation there is the potential for destruction. Every new life is already haunted by the shadow of death. All of this is terribly fragile.

see Rabbi David Kasher ibid

When read its own terms, the protestation of inadequacy by a lowly shepherd makes perfect sense. But when read as part of the larger narrative, the question “Who am I?” comes as a surprise. The preceding chapter of Exodus describes how the pharaoh’s daughter discovered the baby Moses in the Nile and adopted him as her own. The reader knows that as a “Prince of Egypt” Moses is uniquely qualified to negotiate with the pharaoh. There is no one better for the job than he. Augmenting the narrative dissonance, Moses says “go” to the pharaoh; the reader expects him to say “return,” as he had already spent much of his life at the Egyptian court. These and other incongruities suggest that we have here an older story that depicts Yhwh commissioning a humble herdsman from a burning bush in direct anticipation of the later events at Sinai.1 Assuming that such is the case, what would have necessitated the composition of the preceding chapter in which this figure grows up at the Egyptian court?

The composition of chapter one not only introduces a more dramatic plot to the narrative but also cleverly connects that narrative to the Family Story in Genesis.

The Exodus-Conquest Account does not describe how Israel became a people; rather, it simply presupposes their existence as an oppressed population in Egypt. As foreign slaves laboring for the pharaoh, they long for liberation and a land of their own. Once they are freed, they migrate to it collectively, at one point in time. When they set out for the Promised Land, they know nothing about it, not even how to get there. Instead of returning to their homeland, where their ancestors had once roamed, they are charting new territory. That this account originated among Northern scribes is clear from its depiction of the nation circumventing Judah and entering the Promised Land from the eastern side of the Jordan, at the border town of Jericho.

The deep tension between these two political models – one ecumenical and conciliatory and other particularistic and militant – define the Pentateuch’s character. In the Family Story, Egypt extends generous hospitality to Jacob’s family when they migrate as refugees from famine-stricken Canaan. In glaring contrast, the Exodus-Conquest Account presents Egypt as a land of affliction from which a

nation of former slaves flees. As a whole, the general animus toward outsiders in this work could not be more at odds with the vision of peace promoted in the Family Story. These two works are deeply antithetical, but they share a basic, yet remarkable, feature: they imagine a national past in which their own monarchies play no role whatsoever.

This Northern notion of peoplehood was a bold thought experiment, one that departed dramatically from conventional thinking. It did not gain purchase in Judah until the years directly prior to its conquest in 586 bce and especially in the decades thereafter. At this time Southern scribes began not only to copy and embellish the Family Story and the Exodus-Conquest Account, but also to link these competing, parallel works in a single, linear, narrative history – what I call the “People’s History.”

The literary hinge on which the People’s History hangs is found in the first chapter of Exodus. The passage begins by recounting how Jacob’s family had gone down to Egypt during the days of Joseph and had grown into a large population in the land.

In creating the People’s History, our scribes did not opt for one or the other tradition; rather, they embraced both. Not only that, but they also fused them together to form a larger narrative. The Family Story of Genesis connects disparate clans to common ancestors, while the Exodus-Conquest Account tells how a group of freed slaves consolidated to form a nation and migrated to a new land, embracing

many “fellow travelers” along the way.

Wright, Jacob L.. Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins (p. 283). Cambridge University Press.

Why did no other ancient society produce something like the Bible? That a tiny, out of the way community could have created a literary corpus so determinative for peoples across the globe seems improbable.

The thread that ties together this body of writings is a question that was trailblazing at the time: What does it mean to be a people? Not a kingdom, city, clan, empire, or ethnicity, but a people. In other words, a national community that embraces many different cities, clans, ethnicities, and so on, and that may have kingdoms in their collective past, but that now – thanks to a new self-understanding, survival strategies, and institutions – does not depend on territorial sovereignty or statehood.

How is it, then, that the literary legacies of these leading civilizations were completely forgotten, while a body of writings from a conquered and colonized community survived?

book, I claim that the Hebrew Bible represents the first attempt in world history to construct what we may properly call a “national identity.” Many historians insist that the nation is a product of modernity, but I find their arguments to be (often severely) myopic.

A state may be defined as a polity with institutions of government and a territory that can be conquered and destroyed. Nation, by contrast, is a political community held together by shared memories and a will to act in solidarity. It is fundamentally a work of the collective imagination – a state of mind.

As readers, we follow the biblical story from the evolution of a family to the emergence of two kingdoms. But as historians, we begin with these two kingdoms and work backwards, examining how the biblical writers imagined a common past that long antedates these kingdoms. And what we discover is that at the beginning, there was not one family or one nation, as the Bible portrays it, but a wide array of unrelated clans that would later populate these two kingdoms.

Much of what became the biblical narrative originated in the Northern kingdom of Israel. After its downfall, scribes constructed a past of peoplehood that long preceded the palace. These are moving tales of a family becoming a nation, and of liberated slaves making their way as refugees to a new land. Although Northern scribes drafted early versions of these tales, much of their poignancy and power is due to the work of Southern scribes who created a larger “National Narrative” by connecting the competing histories of Israel and Judah. The Bible as we know it is therefore a work from Northern writers that has been filtered through, and decisively shaped by, the experience of Southern writers. If it had not been for the special relationship between these two defeated kingdoms, there would be no Bible. North and South had long been divided, and the states had repeatedly come to blows in bloody civil wars. What drove the Bible’s formation was a vision that the populations of these two vanquished kingdoms could be one people.

Wright, Jacob L.. Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins (p. 27). Cambridge University Press.

The pervasive presence of defeat is an important clue to the enigma of the Bible’s existence.

It suggests that the most formative time for biblical literature was the period following the destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 722 bce, the decades leading up to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 bce, and especially the centuries thereafter, during which new communities re-emerged in both the North and the South.

In the aftermath of defeat, the act of putting pen to paper – or stylus to papyrus – required courage. Indeed, without the courage to look defeat in the face, to lament, to protest, and to write, all would have been lost.

The Bible’s project of peoplehood grew out of the will to admit defeat, yet also the refusal to allow it to be the final word.

Wright, Jacob L.. Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins (p. 152). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

See also: Azure no. 42, Autumn 5771 / 2010, A Nation Conceived in Defeat, By Jacob L. Wright

See also: https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/it-was-not-the-security-of-biblical-2af