Exodus 1 and 2

[Josh]

3/5/06:

Pharaoh?

Many have noticed the strange fact that the Pharaoh is never named. This has created a bit of a headache for historians (I personally think it was Ramses II), but perhaps it has to do with the fact that God is much more focused on the small things, the weak things (Israel) than the strong and powerful.

How Many Israelites?

Numbers seems to indicate that there were about 600,000 Israelite men twenty years and older that came up out of Eygpt (a massive amount of people: including women and children, they would have numbered about 2 million), yet other passages seem to indicate that there number was much smaller.

For instance, why would the Israelites be afraid of the Eygptian army if they had 600,000 armed soldiers?

Why would they have struggled to defeat the small Amalakite tribe later on?

Why does Exodus 1 seem to indicate that there were only 2 Hebrew midwives?

Several passage emphasize the smallness of Israel (Deut. 7:7 and Exodus 23:30).

Also, Numbers 3:42-48 gives us a much smaller (proportionally) count of first-born males than would be required for 2 million people. We are told that all of Israel had only 22,273 first born males, whereas we might expect somewhere around 250,000. We are also told that the total number of Levite men was 22,000. Even if family had an average of 2, 3, or 4 boys, there's no way that the Levites would nearly have as many men as the firstborn men of all the other 12 tribes.

Also, of course, the logistics of traveling with 2 million people across the Sinai peninusla staggers the imagination. Imagine how much quail God would have had to send to feed 2 million people on an ongoing basis. That's like 600,000 quail a meal.

For these reasons, some scholars translate the word 'eleph (thousand) as "group, tribe, or clan" instead, which is another viable option. This would mean that Israel was subdivided into 600 military 'groups' or bands.

According to this line of reasoning, the number of Israelites in the Exodus would have been something like 20,000. This is the interpretation I am inclined to take for several reasons.

For more information on this subject, I'd recommend the book "The Miracles of Exodus" chapter 8 by Colin J. Humphreys.

[Josh]

3/8/06:

After the discussion last night (and further investigation with Douglas), I added some thoughts to the previous posting.

The 20,000 people view above does imply that later copyists of the Pentateuch misunderstood the numbers and inadvertantly created some of the numerical difficulties we find.

If we are quick to say that we're just going to take our English versions at face value, we will quickly have to realize that our English version contains contradictory statements about how many Israelites there were. So, whether you hold that there were 2 million, 250,000 (as some do) or 20,000, you will have to deal with several verses which appear to be in contradiction of your stance.

First off, does this even matter? Not ultimately, I don't think. Obviously your what you believe about this isn't a litmus test for authentic Christianity. And the fact that there is some discrepency here doesn't (in my opinion) negate the very historical and reliable nature of the Exodus account on the whole.

But I would warn against thinking that details like this don't affect our understanding of Scripture in important ways. I tried to give some examples of this last night, but here's another:

Since the Bible is Story, it invites us to Envision it as we're reading. Envisioning a story is the best way to remember it-- to take it in. And if that's true, we want to try to have the most accurate pictures that are available to us.

And let me tell you, if you envision 2 million people as we read along that will be a very different picture than 250,000 or 20,000. It's going to affect how you see all the different little events in the story. Like, when 2 million people complain that's a little different than 20,000. When God says He chose His people began they were the smallest tribe, that means something quite different if it's 2 million or 20,000. So, I think it's important.

That's not to say this is all concisively resolved. Maybe you might want to keep imagining it both ways, I don't know, but I just want to reiterate the practical need to ask these questions.

[Josh]

3/8/06:

Hey Douglas,
I checked further into the whole Levite male/ firstborn of Israel stuff and found out that indeed, even in my Bible concordance, the Numbers 3 passage is taken by many commentators to be a strong tally on the smaller population side, although my concordance uses these numbers to project a total population of about 250,000. I'm not sure how that camp would deal with the 603,550 number tho.

[Josh]

3/31/06:

Interestingly, I found a reputable source quoting 3 other sources that set the total Egyptian population at the time of Ramses to only 1.5-3 million! Just another figure that seems to indicate a smaller number of Israelites.

www.christian-thinktank.com/killheir.html

[Josh]

4/8/06:

Exodus 12:50 All the Israelites did just what the LORD had commanded Moses and Aaron. 51 And on that very day the LORD brought the Israelites out of Egypt by their divisions.

The word divisions here is the same word for thousands: elephs. Why is it translated as division here, but not elsewhere?

[Josh]

3/5/06:

A question to ponder:

If all the Hebrew boys were being thrown in the Nile, how is it that Moses ends up having a younger brother Aaron?

[nathaniel]

3/9/06:

aaron was probably born during the period when the hebrew midwives were supposed to be killing any newborn hebrew boys, but the midwives disobeyed. the pharoah probably saw that that wasn't working so he put out a new order to his people to throw the israelites baby boys into the nile.

on another note; exodus says that the two midwives "feared God, and did not do what the Pharoah had told them to do; they let the boys live." now, i'm not sure how much we can say that these two midwives new about God; either through written word, oral tradition, etc. but assuming that they didn't have much, could this be a good example of two people "responding to the light they've been given," i.e. conscience, the heavens, etc.?

[Josh]

3/9/06:

I hadn't thought of that, but for some reason I was assuming Aaron was younger. Do we know who was older? I can't remember without researching it.

That's a great observation about the midwive's knowledge of God, too. One is kinda left to wonder about the status of the Israelites knowledge of/ and relationship to God at this time, but judging from the life of Moses, it doesn't seem to have been much. Even the stories of Genesis could not have prepared them for what was coming.

We'll be seeing a fair amount of what you're describing- we especially see it with Moses's father-in-law Jethro/ Reuel.

[Josh]

3/24/06:

Aaron's older: see Genesis 7:7.

[Josh]

3/11/06:

In reading thru the passage again, I noticed how God first calls himself the God of "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" to Moses. This clearly indicates, as you said, some major oral tradition that Moses is familiar with. Still, if all you had to go on was the material in Genesis, that's not much

[Josh]

3/11/06:

Note the crucial role of women in this text (which is a theme throughout Scripture): the Hebrew midwives, Moses's sister and mother, a Midianite shepherdess, even a pagan princess, all are crucial elements of God's plan.