Unveiling Exodus: Timeless Story and the Wonder of the Bible
This week I spent very little time listening to podcasts during the work week as I spent most of it in the office while my boss was on vacation. As I first sat down on Saturday to write this week’s post, I realized I didn’t have anything coming to mind about what I wanted to write. And so rather than write, I fired up my PC and did some gaming. As I sat there playing, I decided to finally start a lecture series on Exodus done by Dr. Jordan B Peterson and a panel of scholars. This is a series I have long wanted to begin, but I had never made the time to do so. And so, before I knew it, I was wrapped up and swept away by insights I had never before heard. Today, I will share some of those insights which most struck me and fascinated me as I listened. Anyone interested in checking out this Lecture series for yourselves can find it on YouTube with limited availability and in full length on The Daily Wire + platform.
What I learned
As I am unable to review each of the episodes in detail fully, I want to take highlights simply. Episode 1 of the series focuses on the first three chapters of Exodus.
The Holidays of Israel: The children of Israel were in many ways a unique people who held to customs that were foreign and strange to many of the Neareastern people. One of these was that the festivals and holidays that they celebrated were all events not based on the worship of nature as pagans’ holidays were, but instead, their holidays were markers of historical events and reminders of their rescue by the hand of God.
The Abortion of the Men: Within chapter one, we learn of the fear Pharaoh had for the children of Israel. He feared them, and so in order to control them, Pharaoh had two solutions, the first was to work the children of Israel mercilessly, and the second was to order the Hebrew Mid-Wives to murder any Hebrew males that were born to them and to allow only the girls to live. I had never really spent much time on the fact that only the boys were to be killed. Having first read this story when I was a child, I took the many details of it as simply facts of the story, but listening to Dr. Peterson and his panel of guests, they introduced a phycological side to the story.
I feel incredibly blessed to have grown up learning of the biblical stories, but sometimes I do feel like I have gotten so used to the story I often forget how incredible they are, or often I miss the nuanced details of these stories. I read the stories as simply stories rather than events in history. I still read them as a child in many ways, and I forget these stories are, again, stories pulled from the pages of history, so as I spent time thinking about this story once again while listening to this panel of historians, scholars, and psychologists. Pharaoh became someone real to me, a real person of history who wanted to destroy a people, and he wanted to destroy their culture and tradition. He wanted to destroy everyone who would stand up and oppose his tyranny, so he eliminated the men.
So then, who will save them? Who will oppose this tyrant when the male population has been eliminated and beaten into submission? In comes the story of a courageous mother, a mother who chose to hide her child despite the consequences that could be incurred. We never hear about Moses's father. We only learn of his mother, and how she hid her child, and then when she could no longer hide him, she sends him away in a boat prepared to the best of her ability. A choice a good mother makes still today. She nurtures and prepares her child as long as she is able to, but eventually, she must release him to the world and allow him to face the world and its many dangers.
I’ve talked with my own mother about many of these things, and one thing she has often told me is one of the hardest things she did as we were growing up is letting us go out from her care. Allowing us to face the world unshielded but hopefully prepared. She has often told me she knew she had to do it. She knew she couldn’t keep us under her wing of protection forever. As I learn and hopefully continue to grow, my gratitude for this choice grows too. It is and was necessary for me to be allowed to face the challenges of the world and to learn to walk on my own, and my mother’s natural instinct told her that she needed to do this. She needed to let her children out from her care so that they could grow and become capable of withstanding hardships and learn how to deal with the world. I have seen children who never had to face hardships because everything was done for them or on their behalf, and often times it seems that they are much worse off in the long run because they never have to learn to become self-sufficient.
Going back to the story of Moses and learning to see the thousands of tiny details I missed as a child and even as an adult reminds me how incredible the Bible is and how we have studied and read these stories for literally thousands of years and yet it still has something new for us to learn, it is still today the most studied and talked about book in human history. As I hope to continue to go through this Exodus series and learn details I may have missed, I hope I also can learn to have a deeper appreciation for this incredible book that has not perished though many thousands have tried to destroy it. The word of God has endured, and today have the great privilege to study and learn its stories. It is the only book that has endlessly fascinated Scholars, historians, and psychologists alike. It is the book that has inspired the world of science and so much more.
My prayer is that I can learn to read this book and see its stories with fresh eyes, to have a deeper gratitude for it.
2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.
The truth of this verse really stuck out to me as I was writing this post. I have often read this book, and often I forget how lucky I am to be holding it. Often I have read it, and yet I forget or don’t treat it as though it is actually “God-breathed.” Something I hope to grow in and do better in. I want to read this book again with childlike wonder.
