Abstract
The beginning of the Book of Exodus describes the start of a new era in Israelite history. No longer an extended family living under the personal rule of a patriarch, soon to cease being a confused multitude oppressed by a foreign despot, the Israelites are about to assume the status of an independent people living under a code of laws. The event, accompanied by signs and wonders, can aptly be described as millennial.
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Notes
See Jules Gleicher, “On Plutarch’s Life of Caesar,” Interpretation 29, no. 3 (Spring 2002).
Cf. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Random House, 1939).
The “Merneptah Stele,” which celebrates this ruler’s military triumphs, declares: “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” This is apparently the earliest reference to the Israelite People in an extra-biblical source, and the only one of Egyptian vintage. Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), pp. 11–12.
Winston Churchill, “Moses: The Leader of a People,” in Thoughts and Adventures (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991 [orig. 1932]), p. 209.
George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1954), p. 159.
Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Passover Haggadah (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 45.
I owe this interpretation to Professor Carmichael. See also, regarding this fable and the later one from the Book of Judges (infra, chap. 4, III), David Daube, “Ancestors in the Mist,” in Studies in Comparative Legal History: Collected Works of David Daube (Berkeley, CA: Robbins Collection), v. 3: Biblical Law and Literature (2003), pp. 741–47.
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© 2010 Jules Gleicher
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Gleicher, J. (2010). Mosaic Episodes. In: Political Themes in the Hebrew Scriptures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105980_2
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