Exodus as Religious Transition (A Fragment)

 In Exodus 1:9, Pharaoh worries that the Israelites as one ever-growing people would challenge Egypt’s authority. This reminds me of God’s reasoning for confounding the languages in Genesis 11:6. The structure is the same between these verses and the verses surrounding them as well. There’s a comment on the progress of the people, followed by an observation of their increasing strength and an expression of fear about what they might accomplish, and then action to decrease the risk of those accomplishments from taking place. The story of Babel in Genesis 11 is just one example of this kind of logic in Genesis though. There are lots of times when God works to prevent humans from reaching his status. 

But then God, the LORD, a specific god with a specific name, makes covenants with Abraham and his children. We know there is an underlying assumption and acceptance of other gods in the Pentateuch, and one possible description of what’s going on in the saga is that the ancient authors are describing a turning away from the gods of mesopotamia and other areas in the Near-East and toward their own, new conception of God. Some scholars have called this the formation of monotheism as directly opposed to other polytheistic religions, but that’s not quite right. Recent scholarship has found that it’s not so much that ancient Israel denied the existence of other gods, but simply proclaimed the preeminence of the YHWH (translated as “LORD” in most English Bibles) over all other Gods. 

Perhaps Egypt is to be read not just as a political authority, but a religious one, one akin to other polytheistic religious authorities in the region. 

But the comparison between Exodus 1 and Genesis 11 doesn’t quite show a transition from another God to the LORD. It’s pretty clear that we are meant to read Genesis 11 as portraying the same God as the one who covenants with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But this could simply mean something more subtle about theological transition: That it is not always about moving from one starkly contrasted God to another, but the evolution of one’s concept of God over time, which sometimes happens gradually, and sometimes is a more dramatic exit. 

Another illustration of the Exodus as religious transition comes from comparing the story of Moses to the story of Noah. This comparison starts with Noah’s escape as a baby in the waters of the Nile in a “basket,” the word for which is used to refer to Noah’s ark in other places in scripture. His escape from death is through water on multiple levels (as a baby, as the voice of the plagues on water as an adult, and as the leader of a people through the Red Sea on dry ground. 

Why does comparing Moses to Noah make me think the Exodus is a story of religious transition? Because the flood described in Genesis is a clear transition between two conceptions of God–one who would flood the earth and one who will never flood the earth, as symbolized by a rainbow. 

As the pentateuch progresses, we see additional signs of religious transition, or maybe more appropriately termed religious development. We see the establishment of religious laws and ordinances. We see the building of religious shrines and the elevating of certain religious symbols. The more I develop in my own relationship to religion, the more I’m coming to think of religion not as just a set of beliefs, but a set of actions that bind together a religious community. Its the actions that establish my religious community that I think holds me here–at least for now. I like going to church. I like participating in laws and ordinances. I even like the weird ones like the Word of Wisdom. 

And my theology is developing, transitioning, while still being anchored in a tradition I find valuable, even as my faith in individual principles wax and wane and change–not unlike the children of israel.