Unit 10 · The Pentateuch as Literature and History

The Bible opens with a short, careful passage. Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 tells of creation in six days, followed by a seventh day of rest. Each day follows a pattern. God speaks, something comes to be, God sees that it is good, and evening and morning close the day. The pattern repeats like a refrain in a song. Readers of Hebrew notice that the passage is built from repeated phrases.

The days pair up. On days one to three the text says God makes light, sky and sea, and dry land with plants. On days four to six the text fills those spaces: sun, moon and stars; birds and fish; land animals and people. On day six, the story says, God makes humans "in the image of God," both male and female. On day seven God rests, and the day is made holy.

Jewish tradition connects the seventh day to Shabbat, the weekly day of rest. Many Christians connect it to Sunday worship. Scholars who study the Bible as literature point to its shape: a refrain, a count of days, and a balance between the first three days and the last three. The first thing a reader can do is simply see that shape.

The Hebrew name for this book is Bereshit, its first word, meaning "in the beginning." The English name Genesis comes from a Greek word for origin. Both names point to the same thing. This is a book about how things started, as its writers told it.

Starting at Genesis 2:4, the story begins again. The style changes. There is no count of days. The text says the LORD God forms a man from the dust of the ground and breathes life into him. Then God plants a garden in Eden and puts the man there to tend it. Only after that does the text say God makes animals, and last of all a woman from the man’s side.

The order is different from Genesis 1. In chapter 1, plants and animals come before people. In chapter 2, the man comes first, then the garden, then the animals, then the woman. God is also drawn differently. In chapter 1 God speaks from a distance. In chapter 2 God forms, plants, walks and talks, more like a potter or a gardener.

Genesis 3 continues the garden story. A talking serpent, a forbidden tree, a choice, and a leaving of the garden. Christian tradition often reads this as "the Fall," the start of human sin. Jewish tradition reads it in many ways, and often does not use that term. The text itself never uses the word sin in chapter 3. Noticing what the text says, and what later readers added, is part of reading closely.

The two names matter too. Genesis 1 calls the creator "God" (Hebrew Elohim). Genesis 2 and 3 use "the LORD God," where LORD stands for the four-letter Hebrew name that many Jews do not pronounce. Many English Bibles print LORD in small capitals to mark it.

Put Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 side by side and the differences show. The order of creation is not the same. The name for God is not the same. The style is not the same. Ancient readers noticed this long before modern scholars did. The question is what to do with it.

One old answer says the two chapters are one story told twice. Chapter 1 gives the wide view. Chapter 2 zooms in on the sixth day. Many Jewish and Christian readers today still read it this way. Rabbis in the ancient Midrash and Christian writers like Augustine (354 to 430 CE) each offered ways to fit the chapters together.

Another answer, common among scholars since the 1800s, is that the Torah joins older written sources. In this view, Genesis 1 comes from one source, often called the Priestly source, and Genesis 2 from another. A later editor placed them side by side. The German scholar Julius Wellhausen made this view famous in 1878. It is called the documentary hypothesis. Many scholars accept a version of it. Others, including many religious readers, do not.

In a public school, the job is not to pick the true reading. It is to know the text, know the readings, and say who holds each one. That is what the study of the Bible as literature means.

Genesis 4 moves fast. Two brothers bring offerings. Cain, a farmer, brings crops. Abel, a shepherd, brings the best of his flock. The text says God accepts Abel’s offering but not Cain’s. It does not say why. Cain grows angry. God warns him that sin waits "at the door." Then Cain leads his brother into a field and kills him.

The narrator of Genesis rarely explains. That is a mark of the book’s style. When God asks, "Where is Abel thy brother?" Cain answers with a question of his own: "Am I my brother’s keeper?" The text does not answer him. Readers have filled that silence for thousands of years. Jewish Midrash imagined what the brothers argued about. Christian writers read Abel as the first innocent victim.

God punishes Cain with wandering, but also marks him so no one will kill him. Cain builds a city and starts a line of children. Readers notice that the story mixes judgment and protection. It also asks a question the rest of the Bible keeps asking: what do people owe one another?

The phrase "my brother’s keeper" has entered everyday English. Speakers use it in speeches about duty to neighbors. Knowing where it comes from helps you hear what a speaker is doing with it.

Genesis 6 says the earth has filled with violence. God decides to send a flood but tells Noah to build an ark, a huge boat. Noah loads his family and animals. Rain falls for forty days and nights. The waters cover the mountains. When they go down, the ark rests on the mountains of Ararat. Noah sends out a raven, then a dove, to test whether the land is dry.

After the flood, Noah builds an altar. God promises never again to destroy the earth by flood. The text calls this a covenant, a binding agreement. Its sign is the rainbow. God also gives rules to Noah and his sons: do not eat blood, and do not shed human blood. Jewish tradition later called these and other rules the seven laws of the children of Noah.

Careful readers notice that the flood story seems to say some things twice. Noah is told to bring two of each animal in one place, and seven pairs of clean animals in another. The rain lasts forty days in one verse and the waters rise for 150 days in another. Traditional readers explain these as different stages of one event. Many scholars see two sources woven together. Both readings start from the same text.

The flood story is read every year in synagogues in the Torah reading called Noach. It is retold in the Qur’an, where Noah is the prophet Nuh. It appears in children’s books, art and film. Each retelling chooses what to keep.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a long poem from ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Its hero, a king named Gilgamesh, goes looking for a way to live forever. He finds an old man, Utnapishtim, who survived a great flood. On the eleventh tablet of the poem, Utnapishtim tells his story.

The likenesses to Genesis are striking. A god warns one man. The man builds a boat and coats it with pitch. He brings his family and animals aboard. A storm floods the world. The boat lands on a mountain. The man sends out birds: a dove, a swallow and a raven. He offers a sacrifice, and the gods gather around it. Some flood stories from Mesopotamia are older than 1700 BCE, long before the earliest likely dates for Genesis.

The differences matter just as much. In Gilgamesh, the gods send the flood because people are too noisy and too many. In Genesis, the text says God acts because of violence. In Gilgamesh, one god secretly warns the hero against the wishes of the others. In Genesis, one God decides, warns and saves. In Gilgamesh, the survivor becomes immortal. In Genesis, Noah receives a covenant and grows a vineyard.

Scholars debate how the stories are connected. Most think the Genesis writers knew a Mesopotamian flood story and retold it with their own meaning. Some religious readers hold that both stories remember one real event. The public-school reader’s task is to see the likeness, name the difference, and report how readers explain them.

Genesis 11:1-9 is only nine verses long. It says all people once spoke one language. They settle on a plain in Shinar, which readers have long linked to Babylon. They bake bricks and plan a city with a tower reaching heaven, "to make us a name." God comes down, mixes their language, and scatters them. The city is called Babel, a play on the Hebrew word for confusion.

The story works like an etiology, a tale that explains how something came to be. Here it explains why people speak many languages and live in many lands. Ancient Mesopotamian cities did build stepped towers called ziggurats, some of them enormous. The writers of Genesis likely knew them. The story turns a proud building into a lesson about limits.

Readers have found different meanings in Babel. Some read it as a judgment on pride. Some read it as a story about the value of many peoples and tongues. Some read it beside Genesis 10, the table of nations, which already lists many languages. The narrator, as usual, does not say what the story means.

The story also uses wordplay. Babel sounds like the Hebrew verb for mixing up. Puns on names appear all through Genesis. Noticing them is one way to read the book as its first hearers might have.

In Genesis 12 the story narrows from all peoples to one family. The text says God tells Abram to leave his home in Mesopotamia and go to a land he will be shown. God promises him land, many descendants, and that through him all families of the earth will be blessed. Abram goes. Later God renames him Abraham and his wife Sarai becomes Sarah.

The promise runs into a problem. Sarah has no children. She gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar bears Ishmael. Sarah then treats Hagar harshly, and Hagar runs away. The text says God’s messenger finds her by a spring and promises that her son too will become a great nation. Hagar gives God a name of her own, the only person in Genesis to do so.

Sarah bears Isaac in old age. Ishmael and Hagar are sent away, and again the text says God hears them. Genesis 17 tells of circumcision as the sign of the covenant with Abraham. In Genesis 22, God tests Abraham by asking for Isaac; a ram is offered in his place. Jewish tradition calls this the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. Christian readers have often linked it to Jesus. Muslims recall a similar test, and many hold that the son was Ishmael.

Three traditions look back to Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For that reason people sometimes call them the Abrahamic faiths. Each reads his story in its own way. The text itself gives the promise to Isaac’s line and also blesses Ishmael’s.

Genesis 24 is the longest chapter in the book. A servant travels back to Abraham’s homeland to find a wife for Isaac. He meets Rebekah at a well, where she waters his camels. She agrees to go. Wells are meeting places all through Genesis. Readers learn to expect a marriage when a stranger stops at one.

Rebekah bears twins, Esau and Jacob. The text says God tells her the older will serve the younger. Esau is a hunter, his father’s favorite. Jacob is quiet, his mother’s favorite. Jacob buys Esau’s birthright for a bowl of stew. Then, with Rebekah’s plan, he tricks the blind Isaac into giving him Esau’s blessing. Jacob flees to his uncle Laban.

In Laban’s house, Jacob the trickster is tricked. He works seven years for Rachel and wakes married to her sister Leah. He works seven more. Between them, and their servants Bilhah and Zilpah, twelve sons and a daughter are born. Coming home, Jacob wrestles all night with a stranger at the river Jabbok. He is given a new name, Israel. Genesis 32 says the name means one who struggles with God.

Jacob is not a simple hero. The narrator shows his lies and his limps. Jewish tradition has both praised and questioned him. What the text makes clear is that the promise passes through people who are far from perfect.

Jacob loves Joseph more than his other sons and gives him a fine coat. Joseph tells his brothers about dreams in which they bow to him. They sell him to traders bound for Egypt. They dip the coat in goat’s blood and tell their father a wild animal killed him. Readers notice the goat and the coat: Jacob, who fooled his father with goatskins, is fooled by his sons.

In Egypt, Joseph rises, falls, and rises again. He is jailed on a false charge. In prison he interprets dreams. When Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows and seven thin ones, Joseph is called. He explains seven years of plenty and seven of famine, and Pharaoh puts him in charge. When famine comes, Joseph’s brothers arrive to buy grain. They do not know him.

Joseph tests his brothers before he reveals himself. The scene where he weeps and says "I am Joseph" is one of the most famous in the Bible. Jacob and the whole family move to Egypt. Near the end, Joseph tells his brothers that what they meant for harm, God meant for good. The book ends with Joseph’s death in Egypt and his wish to be buried in Canaan.

Unlike the Abraham stories, the Joseph story is one long, tightly built narrative. Scholars call it a novella. Its dreams come in pairs, its scenes echo one another, and God never speaks directly in it. Later readers made it into plays, paintings and a Broadway musical.

Genesis gives no dates for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Adding up the Bible’s own numbers, traditional readers place them around 2000 to 1700 BCE, in the Middle Bronze Age. Archaeology has found a great deal about that world: cities, trade routes, camel bones, tablets with names like those in Genesis, and laws about marriage and servants.

What archaeology has not found is the ancestors themselves. No inscription names Abraham or Jacob. That is not surprising. Herding families rarely left written records. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it is also not evidence. Historians say the ancestor stories cannot be checked the way a king’s reign can.

Scholars disagree about how to use the stories. Some point to details, like customs known from Mesopotamian tablets at Nuzi and Mari, as signs of old memory. Others note that camels, Philistines and Arameans in the stories fit better with the first millennium BCE, when they think the stories were written down. Religious readers may hold that the stories are true whatever the spade finds.

In a public-school class, the fair statement is this: archaeology can show what the world of Genesis looked like, and it cannot prove or disprove the family stories. Both religious and non-religious readers can agree on that much.

The book of Exodus begins where Genesis ended, in Egypt. Its Hebrew name is Shemot, "names," from its first verse, which lists the sons of Jacob. Generations pass. The family becomes a people. A new Pharaoh, the text says, does not remember Joseph. He fears the Israelites and forces them to build his store cities with brick and mortar.

Pharaoh then orders that Hebrew baby boys be killed. The story turns on women who refuse. Two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, disobey and are rewarded. A mother hides her baby in a basket among the reeds of the Nile. His sister watches. Pharaoh’s own daughter finds him, takes pity, and raises him as her son. She names him Moses.

Moses grows up in the palace but knows his people. When he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, he kills the Egyptian and flees to Midian. There he marries and tends sheep. The text says that years later God hears the groaning of the enslaved people and remembers the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Readers have long noticed that the story’s first heroes are women: midwives, a mother, a sister, a princess. Jewish tradition praises the midwives by name. The Exodus story has also spoken to enslaved and oppressed people far from Egypt, including African Americans who sang of Moses and the river in spirituals.

Exodus 3 finds Moses tending his father-in-law’s sheep near a mountain called Horeb, which the text also calls the mountain of God. He sees a bush on fire that does not burn up. He turns aside to look. A voice tells him to take off his shoes, because the ground is holy. The voice names itself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Moses is given a job: go to Pharaoh and bring the people out. He objects five times. Who am I? What is your name? What if they do not believe me? I am slow of speech. Send someone else. The text gives an answer to each, including a helper, his brother Aaron, who will speak for him.

The most discussed answer is to the question about the name. In Hebrew the reply is Ehyeh asher ehyeh. The King James Version renders it "I AM THAT I AM." The 1917 Jewish Publication Society Tanakh leaves the Hebrew untranslated in capitals. Scholars connect it with the four-letter name, often written YHWH, which many Jews do not pronounce and which English Bibles print as LORD.

The burning bush has become a symbol far beyond the text. It appears on seals of universities and churches. Presbyterian churches in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere use it as an emblem. Reading the passage lets you see where the symbol comes from.

Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh with a demand: let the people go. Pharaoh refuses. The text then tells of ten plagues: the Nile turns to blood, then frogs, gnats, flies, disease on cattle, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and last the death of the firstborn. After each, Pharaoh’s heart is "hardened," sometimes by Pharaoh and sometimes, the text says, by God. Readers have long puzzled over that phrase.

Before the last plague, Exodus 12 gives instructions. Each family is to take a lamb, roast it, and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, bread made without yeast, in haste. They mark their doorposts with the lamb’s blood. The text says death passes over those houses. The Hebrew word Pesach, "pass over," gives the holiday its name.

Exodus 12 also says the night is to be kept every year. Jews have done so for many centuries. The Seder meal retells the story with symbolic foods, four cups of wine and four questions asked by the youngest. Many Christians connect the Passover lamb to Jesus, and the Gospels place his last supper at Passover time. The text of Exodus is the root of both.

Chicago has one of the largest Jewish communities in the United States, and Seders are held in homes and synagogues across the city and suburbs each spring. Many Illinois churches hold Passover-themed meals as well. The same chapter of Exodus is read at both.

Pharaoh lets the people go, then changes his mind and chases them with chariots. The Israelites are trapped between the army and the water. Exodus 14 says Moses stretches out his hand, the sea parts, and the people cross on dry ground. The Egyptians follow and the waters return. The Hebrew calls it Yam Suf, which the King James Version translates "Red Sea" and many scholars render "Sea of Reeds."

Exodus 15 tells it again, as a poem. Moses and the people sing of horse and rider thrown into the sea. Then Miriam, called a prophet, leads the women with drums and dancing. Scholars think the Song of the Sea is one of the oldest passages in the Bible, because its Hebrew is old and its style is different from the story around it.

Prose, then poetry: the Bible does this often. Judges 4 tells a battle in prose and Judges 5 sings it. Reading both versions of the sea shows how the poem shortens, heightens and repeats. It does not mention the dry ground or the wind. It praises. The story explains; the song celebrates.

Readers have handled the sea in many ways. Some take the account as history. Some see a natural event told in a grand way. Many scholars see the poem as older memory shaped into the later story. The text itself does not argue. It tells and then sings.

Exodus 19 to 24 is the hinge of the Torah. Before it, the books tell stories. After it, they mix stories with laws. At Sinai, the text says, God makes a covenant with the whole people. The pattern is like ancient treaties between a great king and a smaller one: the king recalls what he has done, sets terms, and the people agree. Scholars have compared Exodus and Deuteronomy with Hittite treaties from the 1300s BCE.

The Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 begin not with an order but with a statement: "I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt." The laws that follow rest on that story. Four concern God: no other gods, no idols, no misuse of the name, and the Sabbath. Six concern people: honor parents, and do not murder, commit adultery, steal, lie in court, or covet.

In Exodus 24 the people say again that they will obey. Moses reads the "book of the covenant" aloud and sprinkles blood on the altar and the people. The scene is short but has been read closely. Jewish tradition sees Sinai as the giving of the Torah, celebrated at the festival of Shavuot. Christian readers often read the Sinai covenant beside what the New Testament calls a new covenant.

The commandments appear twice in the Bible, in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5, with small differences. The reason given for the Sabbath, for example, is creation in Exodus and the escape from slavery in Deuteronomy. Reading both versions is a good way to see how the Torah repeats and reshapes.

Exodus 20:2-17 has no numbers in it. The text calls them ten "words" in Exodus 34:28, but does not say where each one starts. So readers had to divide them. They did so differently, and the differences are still visible on classroom walls, church windows and courthouse monuments.

In the Jewish count, the first word is the statement "I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt." The second joins "no other gods" and "no graven image." The tenth is "thou shalt not covet." Catholics and Lutherans, following Augustine, join "no other gods" and "no image" as the first, and split coveting into two, a neighbor’s wife and a neighbor’s goods, as the ninth and tenth.

Most other Protestants, following the Reformed tradition, and the Orthodox churches count "no other gods" as the first and "no graven image" as the second, with coveting as one tenth commandment. All three counts contain the same words. Ask someone which one is "the second commandment," and you learn which tradition they come from.

Comparing the King James Version (1611) with the Jewish Publication Society translation (1917) shows this well. Both translate the same Hebrew. The 1917 JPS was made by Jewish scholars in the United States and follows the Jewish division. The KJV, an English Protestant translation, follows the Protestant division. The numbering is a tradition laid over the text.

Right after the Ten Commandments come three chapters of detailed laws, Exodus 21 to 23. Scholars call them the Covenant Code. Most are case laws: "if this happens, then this follows." If an ox gores a person. If a fire spreads to a neighbor’s field. If a thief is caught at night. They deal with servants, injuries, animals, property, courts and festivals.

In 1901 French archaeologists found a tall black stone at Susa, in Iran. On it were about 282 laws of Hammurabi, king of Babylon around 1750 BCE. Many are case laws too, and some are strikingly close to Exodus. Both have a law about a goring ox. Both say "an eye for an eye." Hammurabi’s stone is now in the Louvre in Paris. It is centuries older than any part of the Bible.

The differences are as interesting as the likenesses. Hammurabi’s laws often set penalties by rank: a noble, a commoner and a servant pay differently. The Covenant Code makes distinctions of its own, especially between free people and servants, but it does not rank by class in the same way. Hammurabi’s laws come from a king; the Torah presents its laws as spoken by God. Exodus also repeats a reason no ancient code gives: you were strangers in Egypt.

"Eye for eye" has often been read as harsh. Ancient readers may have heard it as a limit: no more than an eye. Jewish tradition, in the Mishnah and Talmud, read it as money paid for the injury. Jesus in Matthew 5 quotes it and teaches not to strike back. The same five words have carried very different meanings.

Exodus 25 to 31 give instructions for a tabernacle, a tent-shrine that can be carried through the desert. Exodus 35 to 40 tell of building it, often repeating the instructions word for word. Readers who skim these chapters miss how much space they take: thirteen chapters, a third of the book. For the text, the building matters as much as the escape.

Inside the fenced courtyard stood an altar and a basin. Inside the tent stood a table for bread, a seven-branched lamp called the menorah, and an altar for incense. Behind a curtain lay the ark of the covenant, a gold-covered wooden box holding the stone tablets, topped with two winged figures. Only the high priest entered that room, and only once a year.

Exodus ends with the tent finished and a cloud covering it. The text says the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle, and the people moved only when the cloud lifted. Jewish tradition later saw the Jerusalem Temple as the tabernacle’s permanent form. Some Christians read the tabernacle as a pattern for Jesus, following the New Testament letter to the Hebrews.

Many scholars think these chapters come from the Priestly source, written by priests who cared about worship and its order. Traditional readers see them as instructions given to Moses. Either way, the chapters show what the writers valued: exact measures, fine materials, and the idea that a holy presence could travel with a people.

Leviticus is the middle book of the Torah. Its Hebrew name, Vayikra, means "and he called." Much of it is about the priests, the sons of Aaron, and the offerings they made. It describes which animals may be eaten and which may not, the laws often called kosher. It sets the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, in chapter 16, the one day the high priest entered the innermost room.

Chapters 17 to 26 have a theme repeated so often that scholars call them the Holiness Code: "Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy." Holy means set apart. In these chapters holiness covers worship, food, the body, farming, courts and neighbors. Chapter 19 mixes them freely: leave the corners of your field for the poor, do not lie, pay wages the same day, do not hate your brother, love your neighbor as yourself.

Leviticus 19:18, "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," has traveled far. Rabbi Akiva, in the second century CE, is recorded as calling it a great principle of the Torah. Jesus, in Mark 12, pairs it with Deuteronomy 6:5 as the two greatest commandments. Leviticus 19:34 extends it: love the stranger as yourself, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Some laws in Leviticus have been hard for later readers, including laws about slavery, illness and sexual conduct. Jewish and Christian communities have read them in many ways, from strict to symbolic to set aside. A public-school reader reports what the text says and how its communities have handled it.

Deuteronomy is set on the plains of Moab, across the Jordan River from Canaan. The Hebrew name is Devarim, "words." The Greek name means "second law," because Moses repeats and reshapes laws already given. The book is a set of speeches. Moses looks back on forty years in the desert, restates the covenant, and blesses the tribes. Chapter 34 tells of his death on Mount Nebo, in sight of the land he will not enter.

Deuteronomy 6:4 begins with one Hebrew word, Shema, "hear." The verses that follow say: hear, O Israel; the LORD is one. Love the LORD with all your heart, soul and might. Teach these words to your children. Bind them on your hand and forehead. Write them on your doorposts. Jews recite the Shema morning and evening. The mezuzah on Jewish doorposts and the tefillin worn in prayer come from these verses.

The KJV renders 6:4 "The LORD our God is one LORD." The 1917 JPS has "the LORD our God, the LORD is one." The Hebrew has no verb "is," so translators must supply it, and where they put it changes the sense. Comparing translations is one of the clearest ways to see that every translation is a reading.

Second Kings 22 says that in the reign of King Josiah, about 622 BCE, a "book of the law" was found in the Temple. Many scholars think it was some form of Deuteronomy, and that the book took shape around that time. Jewish and Christian tradition names Moses as its author. Both views are part of the book’s story.

The Exodus story is set in Egypt, but Egypt’s own records never mention it. That is the starting point for historians. Egypt in the Late Bronze Age, about 1550 to 1200 BCE, was a great power. It ruled Canaan through local kings, as letters found at Amarna from about 1350 BCE show. Pharaoh Ramesses II built a capital called Pi-Ramesses in the Nile delta, and Exodus 1:11 names a store city Raamses.

The oldest thing outside the Bible to name Israel is a stone slab, the Merneptah Stele, from about 1208 BCE. It lists peoples Pharaoh Merneptah claims to have beaten in Canaan, and Israel is among them. So by then a people called Israel lived in Canaan. The stone says nothing about Egypt or an escape.

Historians hold a range of views. Some think a smaller group did leave Egypt and that their memory grew into the story of a whole nation. Some think the story was shaped much later, in the time of the kings or after, out of older traditions. Some point to Exodus 12:37, which counts 600,000 men, and note that such a number would leave clear traces, which have not been found. Religious readers may accept the account as told, and many do.

Nothing about the Exodus is settled by a single find. Fair reporting means saying what the Egyptian records show, what the Merneptah Stele says, and where scholars disagree. The story’s meaning to Jews at Passover, to Christians, and to people who have read it as their own story of freedom does not depend on how the debate ends.