An Atheist Explores the Bible Part Fourteen: How to survive in the Wilderness when your leader hides up a mountain (Exodus 16-20)
Exodus 16-20
Exodus 16
How to survive in the Wilderness when your leader hides up a mountain.
Welcome to
another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).
In this series I
work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it
from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.
For more detail,
see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT
And now:
“And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God
we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the
flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth
into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
No sooner have the Israelites escaped from Egypt than
they begin complaining to Moses and Aaron, seeming to prefer the stability of
slave life to eking a living in the desert. They also seem to have forgotten
all the livestock and provisions that they’ve bought with them, but nevermind.
So God causes the appearance of quails and “manna”, which
here sounds something not unlike candy floss that appears with the dew in the
morning and decays if not gathered. Gathered by the omer, which seems to be a
unit of measurement, and the last verse helpfully tells us that an omer is a
tenth of an ephah, so that’s cleared up. There’s also establishment of the
rules for the Sabbath which, although the reasons were laid down back at the beginning
of Genesis, hasn’t been given a formal
rule as yet. That’s about it, but there are a couple of points of
interest in the last few verses. One is that Aaron places the gathered manna
before the Testimony (capitalised), which is not something that we’ve come
across before. Is this the Ten Commandments out of synchronology? The next is
that it is suggested that the Israelites eat just manna for forty years.
Really?
Exodus 17
“And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying, What shall I do
unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me.”
Having sorted out food, Moses now sorts out water, with
his magic staff again, creating a spring from the rock of Horeb. There’s a
quaint little bit of onomastic myth where the place is effectively named “bunch
of whingers” in memory of this experience.
And then suddenly there’s a war, where Joshua, general of
the Israelites, makes his appearance, against someone called Amalek. And
there’s another slightly farcical episode where Moses stands above the fight
and raises his staff – when his hand is in the air the Israelites are winning
and when he drops it the Amaleks (?) prevail, but his arm gets tired, so Aaron
and Hur (who also crops up suddenly in this episode) stand next to him and hold
his arms up for him. Which, really, makes the whole little story more silly
than epic.
Exodus 18
“And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made
them heads over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of
fifties, and rulers of tens.”
Moses’ father in law, Jethro, turns up, and sees that
every day Moses judges matters for his people. Jethro warns him that he will
wear himself out if he does it alone, and suggest that he set up a system of
judges from men that he trusts. And that’s really it for this chapter, which is
pretty sensible and straightforward.
Exodus 19
“For they were departed from Rephidim, and were come to the desert of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness; and there
Israel camped before the mount”
This is another transitionary chapter. The Israelites,
three months into their sojourn, arrive at Mount Sinai, where God appears as a
plume of smoke and thunder, and calls Moses alone on to the mountain. And...
that’s it really. There’s a confusing but at the end, because God has warned
everyone to purify and not set foot on the mountain, then later tells Moses to
call the people up. Moses reminds God about the whole “set foot on the mountain
and die” thing and then God tells Moses to tell the people to stay away again.
Probably some kind of transcription artefact.
Exodus 20
“Thou shalt not kill.”
This is the chapter where God gives Moses the Ten
Commandment. Not that they are given that name here, nor enumerated as such (in
fact they take up 15 verses). Not a lot to say about these, really. I wonder
about the first one, having no other gods, if this implies that at the time of
writing originally the Israelite god was one amongst many – it doesn’t specify false gods here, which it surely would
if this was meant to be the one and only God; more than one god, this I AM,
will suffice for the Israelites.
The chapter finishes with a few more regulations
concerning the manufacture of altars (unworked stone, no gold and silver) and
the proper kind of sacrifice. Strange little verse at the end –V26 “Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine
altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon”, in other words don’t let
anyone see up your tunic when you go to pray!
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