400 Years Later

Exodus Chapters 1-18

Here is a story we are all familiar with. Everyone has some idea of the story of Moses and the escape of the Israelites from Egypt. Biblical tradition would put the incident at around 1440 B.C., but there is no real archelogical evidence of the events recorded in the Exodus. The events are refrenced in the later books in Hebrew scriptures that are attributed to the prophets. Some of them were included in the Old Testament. They were written centuries after the Torah, during the years when Israel was a split nation. The prophets always begin at the begining and remind the Israelites all the miracles that Yahweh performed over the years. They include Moses and the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai, but to this day there is still discrepencies about just what mountain and what areas the events could have been based around.

There is very little evidence to show that the events that happened in Exodus did indeed happen. Although, there is archelogical proof that there was hostility between the Hebrews and the Egyptians. The Israelites had a negative relationship dating back to 1200 B.C. when a sribe for Pharoh Merneptah claimed in writing, "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.' This was a common boast made after all military campaigns regardless of the outcome, but this establishes the Israelis as an already established foe of Egypt at this point in history. There is evidence that the early ancestors of the Israelites in Caanan could have come from enslaved peoples of Egypt, but there is no evidence of the kind of pilgrimage described in this book.

This is the story of how a certain group of people, that were supposedly linked by a common ancestor, came together from out of the Egyptian culture and declared themselves followers of the God Yahweh. This is the story of how the people came to the land that was promised to their ancestor Abraham. Exodus is the first book that mentions the name of God, Yahweh. Up until now the Hebrew words have been El Shaddai and Elohim and other substitutions. They basically can be translated to 'The God that is God' or 'The Most Highest God'. Yahweh can be translated as 'I am that I am'. A new covenant will be established through this character Moses and the story is interesting in that we get to see a new relationship develop between Yahweh and mankind. I'm interested to look up more information about the authenticity or origin of this story. If anyone finds anything interesting please pass it our way.