Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel by Nahum Sarna

Author:Nahum Sarna [Sarna, Nahum]
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76069-2
Publisher: Schocken Books
Published: 2011-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII

The Ten Commandments; Moses and Monotheism

EXODUS 19–20

Preparations for the theophany

It was in the third month following the Exodus that the Israelites arrived at the wilderness of Sinai, and encamped before the mountain where Moses had first experienced the call to leadership.1 Thus far the relationship between God and Israel had been wholly one-sided, with Israel being the passive beneficiary of God’s active role in history. It was God who took the initiative in sending Moses to the pharaoh, who coerced the tyrant by way of the plagues to liberate Israel, who performed the wonders at the sea, and who supplied the Israelites’ physical needs in the wilderness. Now a new phase in Israel’s history is about to commence. God’s redemptive acts on Israel’s behalf require a reciprocal response on the part of Israel. The liberated multitude of erstwhile slaves must be united not only by a vital sense of a shared tragedy and a common experience of emancipation, but even more by bonds of perceived ideals—a vision of a new order of life, namely, the establishment of an essentially different kind of society from what had hitherto existed.

The precondition for the fulfillment of this goal, indeed its instrumentality, is to be the forging of a special relationship between God and Israel. This relationship is to be sealed by a covenant, which would establish Israel as God’s “treasured possession,” as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”2

The full range of meaning of the first designation, “a treasured possession” (in Hebrew, segullah),3 has been illuminated by epigraphic finds from the ancient Near East. From the city of Alalakh on the River Orontes in Turkey comes a royal seal of King Abban that cannot be later than the fifteenth century B.C.E. The term sikiltum,4 the Akkadian equivalent of segullah, is used in the titles of the monarch in parallel with “servant” and “beloved” of a god.5 Another text derives from the city of Ugarit. At the moment when the royal palace was being destroyed soon after the year 1200 B.C.E.,6 scribes were baking some inscribed clay tablets in the kiln. The fate of the royal officials is unknown, but the abandoned tablets remained in place for the next three thousand years until discovered by modern excavators. One of the documents in question is a translation into Ugaritic of an Akkadian letter sent by the Hittite suzerain to his vassal Ammurapi, the last known king of Ugarit. Here the Hittite overlord characterizes the latter as “his servant” and “his special possession” (sglth).7 Clearly, the biblical designation of Israel as God’s “treasured possession” is used in a special sense that has political and legal implications.

The second description of Israel as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”8 alludes to the consequences that flow or should flow from that special relationship with God. The priests are set apart from the rest of the people by dedication to the service of God, by their consecration to a distinctive way of life that gives expression

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