Unit 9 · Torah: Genesis and Exodus

The Tanakh begins with the word Bereshit, "in the beginning." That word is also the Hebrew name of the whole first book. In English the book is called Genesis, from a Greek word for origin. The first chapter counts off seven days. Light comes first, then sky and sea, land and plants, sun and moon, fish and birds, land animals, and last of all human beings. On the seventh day God rests. Jewish tradition connects that rest to Shabbat, the weekly day of rest.

Then, at Genesis 2:4, the story seems to begin again. This second account is told in a different style. It names God differently, using the four-letter name that JPS 1917 prints as "the LORD." It is not built on days. Here a man is formed from dust before any plants grow, then a garden is planted, then animals are made, and then a woman is formed from the man’s side. The order is not the same as chapter 1.

Readers have handled the two accounts in different ways. Rashi, the great medieval commentator, reads the second story as filling in the details of the first. Many modern scholars read them as two separate traditions placed side by side by an editor. Jewish tradition holds both chapters as Torah. In this course we describe the readings; we do not rule on which is right.

One thing both accounts share is parallelism of a kind. Ideas are repeated in patterns: "and God saw that it was good" returns like a refrain, and the days pair up, with light on day one and the lights of the sky on day four. Noticing these patterns is the first step of reading Genesis as literature, and Jewish readers have done it for centuries.

Genesis 2 places the first humans in a garden called Eden. The text says they may eat from every tree but one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A talking serpent tells the woman that eating it will open their eyes. She eats, and gives some to the man. When God asks what happened, the man blames the woman and the woman blames the serpent. They are sent out of the garden.

Jewish tradition does not usually read this scene as a story of "original sin" in the way many Christian readers do. The rabbis of the midrash and later commentators tend to read it as a story about choice and its results. The characters are given the power to decide, and they must live with what they chose. Christian tradition, especially after Augustine, reads it as the moment sin entered all human nature. Both readings begin from the same Hebrew words.

In Genesis 4 the first two brothers, Cain and Abel, bring offerings. The text says God accepts Abel’s and not Cain’s, without saying why. Cain, angry, kills his brother in a field. When God asks where Abel is, Cain answers with a question that has become famous: "Am I my brother’s keeper?" The text then says the voice of Abel’s blood cries out from the ground.

The Mishnah, the early rabbinic law code, draws on the word "blood" in that verse. It notes that the Hebrew word is plural, "bloods," and reads it to mean Abel’s blood and the blood of all the descendants he would never have. From this the Mishnah teaches that whoever destroys one life is as if he destroyed a whole world. That is a midrash: a reading that fills a gap in the text with meaning.

Genesis 6 through 9 tells of a flood that covers the earth. The text says the world had filled with violence, and God decides to wash it away. One man, Noah, is told to build an ark, a huge wooden boat, and to bring his family and pairs of every animal aboard. Rain falls for forty days. When the water goes down, Noah sends out a raven and then a dove. The dove comes back with an olive leaf. God then makes a covenant with Noah and sets a rainbow in the sky as its sign.

In 1872 a scholar named George Smith, working at the British Museum in London, read a broken clay tablet from ancient Nineveh and found a flood story on it. It is part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a long poem from Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Its hero, Utnapishtim, is warned by a god, builds a boat, saves animals, and sends out birds when the water goes down. The tablet is far older than any copy of Genesis we have.

The two stories share a shape: a warning, a boat, animals, birds, a mountain, an offering. They also differ. In Gilgamesh, many gods argue, and the flood comes because humans are too noisy. In Genesis, one God acts, and the reason is human violence. Genesis ends with a promise never to flood the earth again. Scholars use the older story to understand the world Genesis grew up in. Jewish tradition reads Genesis as Torah regardless of what its neighbors told.

For this course, the point is not to decide which story is "true." It is to see that Genesis was written in a world that already told flood stories, and to notice how the Torah’s telling stresses justice, one God, and a covenant. Those are the threads that run through the rest of the book.

Genesis 11 tells of a city where all people speak one language. They decide to build a tower with its top in the heavens, to make a name for themselves. The text says God comes down, mixes their language so they cannot understand each other, and scatters them. The city is called Babel. The Hebrew plays on the word for "mixed up." The name also points to Babylon, the great city of Mesopotamia whose tall stepped temples, called ziggurats, were famous.

With Babel, the first eleven chapters of Genesis come to a close. Scholars often call these chapters the primeval history, meaning the story of the earliest world. They move fast and cover the whole human race. Then, at the end of chapter 11, the camera narrows. A family in the city of Ur is named. One of its sons is Abram. From chapter 12 to chapter 50, Genesis follows that one family and no other.

Jewish tradition divides Genesis into twelve weekly readings, each called a parashah. Each takes its name from one of its first words. The first, Bereshit, covers creation to Noah. Lech Lecha, "go forth," begins Abraham’s story. The last, Vayechi, "and he lived," ends with Joseph’s death in Egypt. Synagogues around the world read these portions in the same weeks each year, finishing the whole Torah in a year.

A useful way to hold the book in your head is by its own repeated phrase. Ten times Genesis says "these are the generations of" someone: the heavens and the earth, Adam, Noah, the sons of Noah, Shem, Terah, Ishmael, Isaac, Esau and Jacob. The Hebrew word is toledot. Many readers use these headings as the book’s table of contents.

Genesis 12 opens with a command and a promise. The text says God tells Abram to leave his country, his family and his father’s house, and to go to a land that God will show him. In return, God promises to make him a great nation, to bless him, and to make him a blessing. Abram goes. He takes his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and their household, and they travel to Canaan, the land that later becomes Israel.

The promise is repeated and made more exact in later chapters. In Genesis 15, the text says God shows Abram the stars and promises descendants as many as the stars. In Genesis 17, God changes his name to Abraham and Sarai’s to Sarah, and gives the sign of the covenant: circumcision, the brit milah that Jewish families still keep for baby boys on the eighth day. The word for this bond is covenant, and it comes up again and again.

Abraham and Sarah are old and have no children. Sarah laughs when she hears she will have a son. The son is born and named Isaac, which plays on the Hebrew word for laughter. Jewish tradition calls Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the patriarchs, the fathers, and Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah the matriarchs, the mothers. Many Jewish prayers begin by naming them.

Midrash adds stories the text does not tell. The most famous says that young Abram smashed the idols in his father’s shop and blamed the largest one, to show his father that idols cannot act. This story is not in Genesis. It is in a collection called Genesis Rabbah, from the early centuries of the Common Era. Knowing which parts are text and which are midrash is a basic skill in reading the Tanakh.

Before Isaac is born, Sarah gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham so that a child can be born through her. That was a practice known in the ancient Near East. Hagar becomes pregnant and, the text says, looks down on Sarah. Sarah treats her harshly, and Hagar runs away into the wilderness. Genesis 16 says a messenger of God finds her by a spring. The messenger tells her to go back, and promises that her son will father a great people.

Hagar names God with a name of her own, one that JPS 1917 renders as "Thou art a God of seeing." Readers often note that she is the only person in the Tanakh who gives God a name of her own. Her son is called Ishmael, "God hears." Years later, after Isaac is born, Sarah asks Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Abraham is troubled. The text says God tells him to listen to Sarah, and promises that Ishmael too will become a nation.

In Genesis 21, Hagar and the boy run out of water in the wilderness. Hagar sets the child under a bush. She sits at a distance so she will not see him die. The text says God hears the boy’s voice, and Hagar sees a well. This chapter is read in synagogues on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, before the Akedah is read on the second. The two readings are paired: two sons of Abraham, each nearly lost, each spared.

Islamic tradition honors Hagar and Ishmael as ancestors of the Arab peoples and of the Prophet Muhammad. The Quran tells of them in its own way. Jewish and Christian readers have often noticed how much sympathy the Genesis text shows for a servant woman treated unfairly. Describing all these readings, without ranking them, is how this course handles a shared story.

Genesis 22 begins by saying God tested Abraham. God tells him to take his son Isaac to the land of Moriah and offer him there. Abraham rises early and goes. On the mountain he builds an altar, binds Isaac, and lifts the knife. A messenger of God calls out and stops him. Abraham sees a ram caught in a thicket and offers it instead. The promise of blessing is repeated. Then Abraham returns to his servants. The text does not say that Isaac returned with him.

The Hebrew word for "binding" gives the story its name, the Akedah. Nineteen verses carry an enormous weight. Almost nothing about feelings is stated. The rabbis of the midrash noticed this and filled the gaps. One midrash has Abraham arguing with God about the contradiction between this command and the promise. Another has Isaac asking to be bound tightly so that he will not flinch. These are not in the text; they are readings of it.

Rashi reads the command "take thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac" as a slow conversation. Abraham says he has two sons; God says the only one; Abraham says each is the only son of his mother; God says the one you love; Abraham says he loves both; and only then does God say Isaac. Rashi’s point is that the text piles up words to show the command being given gently, one step at a time.

The Akedah is read on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and the shofar, a ram’s horn, is blown on that holiday. Tradition connects the horn to the ram in the thicket. Jewish thinkers of the modern era have read the story in opposite ways: as the highest picture of trust, or as a warning that a voice commanding harm to a child must be questioned. Christian tradition often reads Isaac carrying the wood as a picture of Jesus carrying the cross. Each reading begins from the same nineteen verses.

Isaac marries Rebekah, whom Abraham’s servant finds at a well in Genesis 24. Rebekah is barren for years, then carries twins who struggle inside her. The text says God tells her that two nations are in her womb and that the elder will serve the younger. The first twin is born red and hairy and named Esau. The second comes out holding his brother’s heel and is named Jacob, a name that plays on the word for heel.

Esau grows up a hunter; Jacob stays near the tents. One day Esau comes in from the field starving and sells his birthright, the older son’s share, to Jacob for a bowl of red lentil stew. Later, when Isaac is old and blind, Rebekah helps Jacob dress in Esau’s clothes and goatskins, and Jacob receives the blessing meant for Esau. Esau’s cry when he learns the truth is one of the most painful lines in Genesis. Jacob flees to his uncle Laban.

Readers have judged Jacob very differently. Some midrashim make Esau a villain so that Jacob’s actions look justified. Other readers, ancient and modern, note that the text itself never praises the trick. Jacob will later be deceived by Laban, who swaps a bride in the dark, just as Jacob deceived his father in the dark. Many readers see the text quietly balancing the scales.

On the road to Laban, Jacob sleeps with a stone for a pillow and dreams of a ladder set on the earth with its top in heaven and messengers of God going up and down. The text says God repeats the promise given to Abraham. Jacob names the place Beth-El, "house of God." This scene is read in synagogues in the parashah called Vayetze, "and he went out."

In Laban’s house Jacob works seven years for Rachel, is given Leah instead, and then works seven more for Rachel. Genesis 29 and 30 tell of the two sisters and their servants Bilhah and Zilpah, and of the children born to each. Leah, the text says, was unloved, and names her sons for her hope that her husband will love her. Rachel is barren for years before Joseph is born. Between them, twelve sons and a daughter, Dinah, are born.

Those twelve sons become the twelve tribes of Israel in the rest of the Tanakh: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph and Benjamin. Later, Joseph’s two sons Ephraim and Manasseh count as tribes in his place. Jewish parents bless their sons on Friday nights with the words Jacob speaks over those two grandsons in Genesis 48.

After twenty years, Jacob leaves Laban and heads home, afraid of Esau. The night before they meet, Genesis 32 says he is left alone by the Jabbok stream and a man wrestles with him until dawn. The stranger cannot beat him, touches his hip and leaves him limping, and then gives him a new name: Israel. The text explains it as "he strives with God." Jacob names the place Peniel, "face of God," and says he has seen God face to face.

Who was the stranger? The text calls him a man. Hosea 12 calls him an angel. Some midrashim say he was Esau’s guardian angel. Some modern readers see Jacob wrestling with his own past. The name Israel is then given to Jacob’s descendants, and the Tanakh calls them "the children of Israel." The name itself, tradition notes, means struggle. The next morning Esau runs to meet Jacob, embraces him, and weeps.

Genesis 37 begins the longest single story in the book. Jacob loves Joseph best and gives him a special coat. Joseph tells his brothers two dreams in which they bow to him. They hate him, throw him into a pit, and sell him to traders headed for Egypt. They dip the coat in goat’s blood and let their father believe Joseph is dead. Many readers note the goat: Jacob once used goatskins to deceive his own father.

In Egypt, Joseph rises in the house of an official, is falsely accused by the official’s wife, and lands in prison. There he interprets the dreams of two of Pharaoh’s servants. When Pharaoh has dreams of seven fat cows and seven thin ones, Joseph is called from prison to explain them. He predicts seven years of plenty and seven of famine, and Pharaoh puts him in charge of storing grain. Joseph, sold as a slave, becomes the second most powerful man in Egypt.

Scholars often call these chapters a novella, a short novel, because the story is long, has one plot, and moves toward a single climax. The climax comes when famine drives the brothers to Egypt to buy grain. They bow before Joseph, as in the dreams, and do not know him. He tests them, hides a silver cup in Benjamin’s sack, and waits to see whether they will abandon this brother too. Judah steps forward and offers himself in Benjamin’s place.

Then Joseph can hold back no longer. Genesis 45 says he sends everyone out, weeps so loudly the Egyptians hear, and says, "I am Joseph; doth my father yet live?" The brothers cannot answer. This recognition scene is the payoff of the whole story. Jacob’s family moves to Egypt, which sets up the book of Exodus. Genesis ends with Joseph’s death and his request that his bones one day be carried back to the land.

Genesis is set in a real region: Mesopotamia, Canaan and Egypt. Archaeologists have dug up cities the book names, such as Ur and Haran, and thousands of clay tablets from the second millennium BCE. Those tablets show customs like the ones in Genesis, such as a childless wife giving a servant to her husband so that an heir can be born. The Code of Hammurabi, a Babylonian law collection from c. 1750 BCE, sets out laws about slaves, marriage and injury that later readers compare with the Torah’s laws.

What archaeology cannot do is find Abraham. No inscription names him, Isaac or Jacob. Nomadic families leave few traces, and the events are placed long before any writing about Israel survives. The oldest object outside the Bible that names "Israel" at all is an Egyptian stone called the Merneptah Stele, from c. 1208 BCE, and it says nothing about the ancestors. Historians therefore describe the stories as set in a real world, without being able to test them as events.

Scholars also study when Genesis was written down. Most date the written book, in the form we have, to sometime between c. 1000 and c. 500 BCE, with older stories and poems inside it. The oldest surviving copies of Genesis are fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, from c. 200 BCE onward. The full Hebrew text used today is preserved in the Masoretic manuscripts of c. 900 to 1000 CE. Jewish tradition holds that the Torah was given to Moses; historians describe the text’s growth. This course reports both.

So a careful answer to "Did it happen?" sounds like this. The world of Genesis is real and well known. Its customs and laws fit the second and first millennia BCE. Its people cannot be found or ruled out by digging. What a reader makes of that depends on the reader, and Jewish tradition has never made the value of the Torah depend on a spade.

The second book of the Torah begins with a list of names, and its Hebrew title, Shemot, means "names." The English title, Exodus, is Greek for "going out." The book picks up where Genesis left off. Jacob’s family has grown into a people in Egypt. A new Pharaoh, the text says, did not know Joseph. He fears the Israelites, forces them to build store cities, and makes their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar.

When the people keep growing, Pharaoh orders two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill newborn Hebrew boys. The text says they fear God and refuse. Then Pharaoh orders every boy thrown into the Nile. A woman from the tribe of Levi hides her baby three months. Then she puts him in a basket of reeds sealed with pitch. She sets it among the rushes at the river’s edge. His sister watches from a distance.

Pharaoh’s daughter comes to bathe, sees the basket, and takes pity on the crying child. The sister steps forward and offers to find a Hebrew nurse, and brings the baby’s own mother. Pharaoh’s daughter names the boy Moses. Exodus 2 connects the name to a Hebrew verb meaning "to draw out," because she drew him from the water. Scholars also note that the name looks Egyptian, like the ending of the names Thutmose and Ramesses.

Readers have long pointed out that in these first chapters every rescuer is a woman: two midwives, a mother, a sister, and a princess. Jewish tradition names the mother Yocheved and the sister Miriam, and a midrash credits the women of that generation with keeping hope alive. Moses grows up in Pharaoh’s house. He kills an Egyptian he sees beating a Hebrew and flees to Midian. There he marries and tends sheep.

Exodus 3 finds Moses in the wilderness with his father-in-law’s sheep, near a mountain the text calls Horeb. He sees a bush on fire that does not burn up. When he turns aside to look, a voice calls his name from the bush. It tells him to take off his sandals, because the ground is holy. The voice says it is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and that it has seen the suffering of the people in Egypt. Moses is to go to Pharaoh.

Moses objects five times over two chapters. Who am I? What is your name? What if they do not believe me? I am slow of speech. Send someone else. The text answers each objection, and finally sends his brother Aaron to speak with him. Many readers notice that the Torah’s greatest prophet begins by trying to refuse the job.

When Moses asks for a name, the answer in Hebrew is Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. JPS 1917 renders it "I AM THAT I AM." Other translations say "I will be what I will be." The text then gives the four-letter name of God. Jewish tradition does not pronounce it. When reading Torah aloud, Jews say Adonai, "my Lord," in its place, and in everyday speech many say HaShem, "the Name." JPS 1917 prints it as "the LORD" in capital letters, and this course follows that practice.

Rashi reads the name as a promise: I will be with them in this trouble as I will be with them in troubles to come. Some modern scholars read it as a refusal to be pinned down, a name that is really a verb. Christian readers have connected the phrase to lines in the Gospel of John. For a student, the key skill is to see the difference between a name, a title, and a translation of either.

Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh with a demand: let my people go. Pharaoh refuses, and Exodus tells of ten plagues that strike Egypt. The Nile turns to blood. Frogs, lice and swarms follow. The cattle sicken and boils break out. Hail, locusts and three days of darkness come. Last, at midnight, the firstborn of Egypt die. Between plagues the text says Pharaoh’s heart is hardened, sometimes by Pharaoh and sometimes by God, a detail commentators have discussed for centuries.

Before the last plague, the text gives instructions. Each family is to take a lamb and roast it. They eat it in haste with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. They mark their doorposts with its blood. The text says the plague will pass over those houses. The Hebrew name of the holiday, Pesach, comes from that passing over. The people leave so fast their dough has no time to rise. That is why matzah, flat unleavened bread, is eaten for the festival. The Torah sets its length at seven days.

Exodus 12 and 13 say the story must be told to children each year. Jewish families do this at the Seder, a meal with a set order. It is held on the first night of Passover, and outside Israel on the second night too. The book used is the Haggadah, "the telling." It includes four cups of wine and four questions asked by the youngest. There is a plate with matzah, bitter herbs and other symbols. There are songs. When the plagues are named, a drop of wine is spilled for each one.

Readers have handled the plagues in different ways. The Haggadah’s spilled wine is often explained as lessening joy because Egyptians suffered. A midrash has God silence the angels who wanted to sing when the Egyptians drowned. Some scholars compare the plagues to natural disasters of the Nile valley. Others read them as a contest between the God of Israel and the gods of Egypt, each plague striking something Egypt honored. The text itself says the point is that Egypt and Israel will know who the LORD is.

After the people leave, Pharaoh changes his mind and sends chariots after them. Exodus 14 says they are caught between the army and the sea. Moses stretches out his hand. A strong east wind blows all night. The people cross on dry ground with water on either side. The Egyptians follow, and the sea returns over them. The Hebrew calls it Yam Suf, which JPS 1917 translates as the Red Sea; many scholars think it means "Sea of Reeds."

Then comes the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15. It is a poem, and many scholars believe its Hebrew is among the oldest in the Bible. It repeats ideas in pairs, the parallelism found across Hebrew poetry. The horse and rider are thrown into the sea; the deeps cover them. The enemy says "I will pursue, I will overtake." It ends with the LORD reigning forever. At verse 20 Miriam is called a prophetess, and she leads the women with drums.

The song did not stay in the book. Two of its lines, beginning "Who is like unto Thee," are sung in the daily morning and evening prayers. The whole song is read in the morning service. The Shabbat on which Exodus 15 is read each year is called Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Song. In a Torah scroll the song is laid out in a brick pattern, one of the few passages in the Torah given a special layout.

There is also a tradition about how the song is read. The Talmud, in tractate Sotah, records a debate about how Moses and the people sang. Did he sing a line and they repeat it? Or did they sing together? A midrash says the angels wished to sing as the Egyptians drowned. God stopped them, saying the work of my hands is drowning in the sea. Jewish readers have used that midrash to balance the joy of the song with the cost of the victory.

In the third month after leaving Egypt, Exodus 19 says the people camp at the foot of Mount Sinai. God tells Moses that if the people keep the covenant they will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The people answer that they will do all that the LORD has spoken. Three days later, the text says, there is thunder, lightning and a thick cloud. A loud horn sounds, and the mountain smokes. Then the words of Exodus 20 are spoken.

Jewish tradition calls these words Aseret HaDibrot, the Ten Sayings or Ten Words, rather than ten commandments. It counts them starting from "I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt." That first saying is a statement, not an order. The second in the Jewish count joins "no other gods" with the ban on images. Catholic and Lutheran tradition treat the opening statement as an introduction. They join the first two and split the last saying about coveting into two. Most Protestant traditions keep "no other gods" and "no images" as separate commands one and two.

So the same verses give three lists. This is a good example of how a text and its readers work together. The Hebrew text has no numbers in it; each tradition supplies its own. The Sayings appear twice in the Torah, in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5, with small differences. The Exodus version says to remember the Sabbath because God rested at creation; the Deuteronomy version says to keep it because you were slaves in Egypt.

Jewish tradition links the giving of the Torah to the holiday of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. Exodus 19 and 20 are read in the synagogue, and many people stay up all night studying. In many synagogues the congregation stands when the Ten Sayings are read. The Talmud also records a caution. The rabbis removed the Sayings from the daily prayers. They did not want anyone to think these ten mattered and the rest of the Torah did not.

After the Ten Sayings, the Torah does not go straight back to story. Exodus 21 to 23 is a block of laws that scholars call the Covenant Code, because Exodus 24 calls it the book of the covenant. The laws are mostly case laws: if this happens, then do that. If an ox gores a person, if a fire spreads to a neighbor’s field, if someone borrows an animal and it dies. Many of the cases are like ones in the Code of Hammurabi, which is centuries older, and scholars compare them line by line.

The Covenant Code includes laws about slavery, which the text takes for granted as a practice of its world. A Hebrew slave must be freed in the seventh year. Killing a slave is punished. A slave injured by a master goes free. These laws limit a practice rather than end it, and readers from the rabbis to modern historians have noted both the limits and what the text does not do. Describing that honestly is part of reading the book.

One line in Exodus 21 has become famous: eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Rabbinic tradition, in the Talmud’s tractate Bava Kamma, reads this as payment for injury, not as injury in return, and Jewish law has followed that reading for two thousand years. Some readers point out that even the plain sense sets a limit: one eye, not a life. The words are the same; the readings differ, and the Talmud’s is the one Jewish practice adopted.

The code also returns again and again to the weak. Do not wrong a stranger, it says, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Do not afflict the widow or the orphan. If you take a poor man’s cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset, because it is his only covering. Jewish tradition counts the command to love or not wrong the stranger as the most repeated command in the Torah. The reason given each time is memory: you know what it felt like.

Moses goes up the mountain for forty days to receive the tablets. Exodus 32 says the people grow afraid that he is not coming back. They press Aaron, who collects their gold earrings and makes a calf. They call it the god that brought them out of Egypt and hold a feast. On the mountain God tells Moses what is happening and offers to destroy the people and start over with him. Moses argues back: what will the Egyptians say, and what about the promise to Abraham?

Moses comes down, sees the dancing, and smashes the tablets at the foot of the mountain. He burns the calf, grinds it to powder, scatters it on water and makes the people drink it. The Levites carry out a punishment, and a plague follows. Then Moses goes back up to plead for the people, and asks to see God’s glory. The text says no one can see God’s face and live, but God will pass by and proclaim the name.

Exodus 34:6–7 gives that proclamation. Jewish tradition counts thirteen attributes of mercy in it. Among them: merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and truth, keeping kindness for thousands, forgiving sin. The rabbis of the Talmud, in tractate Rosh Hashanah, say that God taught Moses these words as a prayer for forgiveness. They are recited on fast days, on Yom Kippur, and when the ark is opened on festivals.

The tradition also pairs the calf with the calendar. According to the rabbis, Moses came down with the second set of tablets on the tenth of Tishrei. That day is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. So the day of forgiveness in the Jewish year is tied to the story of the worst failure at the mountain. Commentators differ on how guilty the people were and how guilty Aaron was; Rashi, for instance, reads Aaron as stalling for time. The text itself lets Aaron’s weak excuse stand without comment.

A student reading Exodus straight through often gets a surprise around chapter 25. The action stops. For seven chapters, God gives Moses instructions for a tent sanctuary, the Mishkan, meaning "dwelling place." The instructions cover everything in it. There is an ark of acacia wood covered in gold, a table, a lampstand with seven branches, and an altar. There are curtains, poles, and the clothing of the priests. Then, after the calf story, six more chapters describe the people building it, almost word for word the same.

Why so much detail? Readers give several answers. The text’s own answer is in Exodus 25:8: make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. The point of leaving Egypt was not just freedom but a people with God’s presence in their midst. Some commentators note that the Mishkan story mirrors the creation story. Both are done in stages. Both end with blessing and rest. The Torah uses similar words for finishing each. A people that could not make a calf could make a home.

The workers are named. Bezalel of the tribe of Judah and Oholiab of Dan are called wise-hearted. The text says Bezalel was filled with the spirit of God in skill and craft. Every person is asked to bring gifts, and Exodus 36 says they brought so much that Moses had to tell them to stop. Many readers see a deliberate contrast with the gold earrings collected for the calf.

The Mishkan is the ancestor of the later Temple in Jerusalem and, in a looser way, of the synagogue. The ark that held the tablets gives its name to the aron, the cabinet where Torah scrolls are kept today. The seven-branched menorah is still a symbol of the Jewish people. When the book ends, the cloud of God’s presence fills the tent, and the people know it is time to move when the cloud lifts. Exodus closes not with a battle but with a building.

The Torah commands that the story of leaving Egypt be told to the next generation, and Jewish tradition built a whole evening around that command. The Seder follows the Haggadah. Its oldest parts come from the Mishnah, edited c. 200 CE. Its full form took shape in the early Middle Ages. The Mishnah, in tractate Pesachim, already lists the four cups, the questions, and the rule that one begins with shame and ends with praise.

The center of the Haggadah is not a reading of Exodus. It is a rabbinic commentary on four verses from Deuteronomy 26 that sum up the story, with verses from Exodus brought in as proof. The Haggadah quotes Deuteronomy’s line that "a wandering Aramean was my father." Then it walks through the going down to Egypt, the oppression, the cry, and the rescue. Moses is barely mentioned at all. Many commentators say this is on purpose, so that the credit goes to God and not to a human leader.

The line from the Mishnah that shapes the whole night is this: in every generation a person must see himself as if he personally went out of Egypt. That is why the Seder is done with the body. People lean to one side like free people at a banquet. They taste salt water for tears. They eat bitter herbs, and a sweet paste that stands for mortar. They open the door. Children ask questions because the Torah says the telling begins with a child’s question.

The Haggadah is one of the most printed Jewish books. There are thousands of editions with art, commentary and translation. They run from illuminated medieval manuscripts to modern versions that add readings about freedom today. Because the Seder is held at home, not in a synagogue, families often make their own. In the Chicago area, as across the United States, Jewish communities hold public Seders as well. Many invite neighbors of other faiths as guests.

Enslaved Africans in the American South heard the Bible mostly by ear, in sermons and songs. Of all its stories, the one they made most their own was Exodus. Slaveholders often preferred verses telling servants to obey. The enslaved sang about a God who heard the cry of slaves and brought them out. In their songs, Egypt was the South and Pharaoh was the master. The Jordan was the Ohio River or death. Canaan was the North or heaven.

The best known of these spirituals is "Go Down, Moses." Its verses retell Exodus: Israel in Egypt’s land, oppressed so hard they could not stand. The refrain is let my people go. That is Moses’s demand to Pharaoh in Exodus 5 and after. The song was first printed in 1861. A chaplain had heard it sung by Black people who had escaped slavery and reached Fort Monroe, a Union army post in Virginia. The Fisk Jubilee Singers carried it across the United States and Europe in the 1870s.

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849 and returned many times to lead others north. The people she guided, and the press, called her Moses. Frederick Douglass and later Martin Luther King Jr. drew on Exodus in their speeches. In his final speech in 1968, King said he had been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. That picture comes from the end of Deuteronomy, where Moses sees the land he will not enter.

Historians describe this as the Exodus story crossing from one people to another. Jewish readers have noticed and honored it; some Haggadot include "Go Down, Moses" or readings from the civil rights movement. The story that Exodus tells about one nation became, in America, a way for another people to name their own bondage and their own hope. The words belong to the Torah; the song belongs to those who sang it.

What does the evidence outside the Bible say? Egypt kept many records, and none of them mentions Israelites in slavery, ten plagues, or an army lost in the sea. Historians point out that ancient kings did not record their defeats, and that a group of workers leaving would not have made the royal lists. Still, silence is silence, and it must be reported. The Torah gives no Pharaoh’s name, which makes the story hard to pin to a date.

There are hints. Exodus 1:11 says the Israelites built the store city of Raamses. A city by that name was built by Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt c. 1279 to 1213 BCE. The Merneptah Stele, from c. 1208 BCE, names "Israel" as a people in Canaan by then. Many scholars who think some real memory lies behind the story place it in the thirteenth century BCE. Others think the story took shape much later, in the time of the kings or the exile, and grew from smaller memories of people escaping Egypt.

Jewish tradition itself does not depend on the digging. The Torah is read as Torah; the story is retold at every Seder; and the rabbis teach that the point is what the story asks of a people. Some modern Jewish thinkers say that even if the details cannot be recovered, the story is true in the sense that it has shaped a people’s life and law for millennia. Others hold firmly that the events happened as written. This course reports the range of views and takes no side.

For a student, the best answer is careful. The world of the story, with brick-making, store cities, a great river, and a powerful king, is Egypt as it was. The exodus itself has no outside witness, for or against. The book’s own claim is a religious one: that a God who freed slaves asks that people to remember what slavery felt like. That claim can be described, quoted and studied, whatever a reader decides about the sea.