The Exodus Revealed: Israel's Journey From Slavery to the Promised Land by Nicholas Perrin

Author:Nicholas Perrin [Perrin, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Religion, Biblical Studies, History & Culture, Old Testament, Judaism, History
ISBN: 9781455560660
Google: L2GOBAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1455560650
Barnesnoble: 1455560650
Publisher: FaithWords
Published: 2014-10-06T22:00:00+00:00

God’s Covenant

The concept of “covenant” is another important piece of this interchange between Yahweh and Moses. The word itself is in fact used twice here: “I have also established my covenant with them, in order to give them the land of Canaan, the very land in which they lived as aliens. I have also heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians are keeping as slaves and I have remembered my covenant” (Exodus 6:4–5).

The repetition is theologically significant. Although the suffering of the Israelites under Pharaoh’s rod presumably would have been motivation enough for Yahweh to initiate the Exodus, divine compassion over Israel’s wretched state was not the only precipitating cause of the Exodus. Nor, indeed, does this seem to have been the primary cause. Instead, the overriding motivation for Yahweh was his promise made to Abraham through a solemnly established covenant.

This requires its own explanation. Way back in Genesis 12 (as well as in Genesis 15 and 17), Yahweh initiated a covenant with Abraham which included a promise of land and seed (progeny). (By the term “covenant” I mean a solemn life-blood bond that binds two parties into a formal relationship of specified expectations.) According to the terms of the Abrahamic Covenant, God intended that the same seed that secured the land would also be a blessing for the nations. So when the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob made their way down to Egypt in order to survive the years of famine in Canaan (thank you, Joseph), this move was to be finally understood not merely as a pragmatic strategy for survival but as God’s appointed means for preserving the seed-line initiated under the Abrahamic Covenant. Having inaugurated the Abrahamic Covenant as a way of reversing the curse of the fall (Genesis 3—11), Yahweh was then—as the remainder of Genesis reveals—superintending the course of history behind the scenes to ensure the successful implementation of the covenant. In order to understand Genesis properly, we must see it not as the story of one debased human action after another (though on the surface it can read that way), but of God’s advancing the goal of the Abrahamic promise despite and even through those debased human actions.

Now when we come to Exodus 1 with the story of the Israelites’ oppression, we have every human reason to believe that the freight train of God’s redemptive purposes has come to a grinding halt. As the story unfolds, however, we begin to see that this is only the appearance of things: God is moving forward after all, even through the suffering of his people. By linking the imminent Exodus with the Abrahamic Covenant, Yahweh’s words in Exodus 6 frame this miraculous historical moment within a context that was larger than the immediate plight of the Israelites. Accordingly, Moses is being invited to rely on God’s faithfulness not simply to the Israelites (as if God’s people were an end unto themselves), but to the overarching missiological promise made to Abraham.

On this reading, we are

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