A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible. Colleen M. Conway

complex mix. Not only does the Bible describe God’s promises to and covenants with Israel’s great patriarchs (e.g. Genesis 15 and 17), but it includes adaptations of these stories of ancestral trickery and self-reliance.

      Finally, it should be stressed that these earlier oral traditions are adaptations themselves of centuries of earlier oral traditions. As stories about Abraham and Jacob, Rebekah and Rachel were told and retold in the vulnerable unwalled villages of Israel, they were selected and reshaped to encourage early Israelites. Those Israelites faced challenges in securing their livelihood and defending themselves against the kings of surrounding city-states. Generations of Israelite storytellers selected certain stories and reshaped them for their hearers. Some tales fell by the wayside while others gained new elements. And this complex oral storytelling process produced uncanny elements in Israel’s ancestral narratives that readers often overlook.

      The Exodus from Egypt

       READING

       Exodus 2, 5–10, and the potential early song of Miriam in Exod 15:20–1.

The book of Exodus, like Genesis, is a complex mix. In Chapter 6 of this Introduction, we will discuss how major parts of Exodus – such as the stories of God’s delay of the exodus to inflict plagues on Egypt – were shaped in relation to later Israel’s experiences of imperial trauma. That does not mean, however, that later storytellers completely made up the figure of Moses and the exodus event. Rather, key parts of the exodus story would never have been invented by later writers, such as Moses having an Egyptian name (consider, for example, the famous Pharaoh Thutmose) or Moses having foreign wives from Midian (Exodus 2) and Cush (Numbers 12). And these are just two initial indicators that some kind of story of the exodus circulated in ancient Israel from a very early period. At the start, such a story may well have been the property of a subgroup in Israel, perhaps an “exodus group” of prisoners who had escaped from Egypt who then joined others living in hill-country villages and told their story of liberation from Pharaoh under the leadership of Moses.

      Yet, even assuming that some sort of exodus from Egypt occurred historically, the story about it would not have survived if it had not also spoken an important new word to the people living in the hill-country villages. And there are good reasons to think it did. For these village-culture Israelites had “pharaohs” of their own day, the rulers of the city-states surrounding them, whom they needed to resist. The Song of Deborah in Judges 5 (and the later accompanying story in Judges 4) vividly describes the kind of threat posed by such cities, with their professional armies and chariots. Furthermore, it is likely that some such formerly Egyptian-dominated cities, such as Jerusalem or Shechem, preserved remnants of the Egyptian culture. At the least, these former outposts of Egyptian domination of Canaan would have been perceived by villagers as the closest oppressive counterpart to the Egypt that had once dominated the area.

      The story of Yahweh’s deliverance of slaves from Egypt would have served as a powerful rallying cry for villagers now fighting for survival against such city-states. The story became the property of all “Israel,” not just former slaves and their descendants. We see this sort of community claiming of an older story today, for example, in the way later African Americans have claimed the stories of the Bible for themselves. In his March 2008 speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” Barack Obama drew on his autobiography to describe how he found hope in the merging of biblical stories and contemporary lives in the black church:

      People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters … And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about … memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.

This claiming of older stories by new groups is hardly limited to the black church. Much as many Americans now claim for themselves the story of the Mayflower and the Puritan holiday of thanksgiving, despite the fact that many descend from immigrants of the twentieth century, so also Israelite villagers of varied origins claimed the exodus story as their own. That story celebrated the god, Yahweh, who had liberated “them” from Egypt, and it expressed their confidence that this exodus God would also fight on their behalf against their contemporary “pharaohs,” the local city-states.

      MORE ON METHOD: AFRICAN AMERICAN BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION

      The above-quoted speech by President Obama connects with a complicated history of African Americans and the Bible. On the one hand, African Americans have seen the Bible used against them. In particular, slaveholders reinterpreted the story of Noah’s curse of Ham (Gen 9:20–7) as an eternal curse of Africans to slavery, and they noted that slavery is assumed as an ongoing reality in a number of biblical writings (e.g. Lev 25:44–6). On the other hand, African Americans have also found encouragement in the Bible’s story of God’s liberation of slaves from Egypt, calls for justice in prophets like Amos, and the Bible’s picture of Jesus.

      African American scholars have engaged in multiple ways with this complicated history. To start, a number of scholars highlighted the presence of African characters in the Bible and countered racist interpretations of stories like the curse of Ham. More recently, a number of studies have analyzed the diverse ways that the Bible, especially elements like the story of exodus from Egyptian slavery, have functioned in African American religion and culture. For one survey of the broader field of critical African American interpretation, see Mitzi J. Smith, Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017). We will return to themes of African American interpretation in later chapters, starting with the next chapter’s discussion of Afrocentric and womanist interpretation and the biblical Song of Songs.

      Yet again we must remember that the exodus story (or stories) that ancient Israelites claimed was not identical with the story found in the Bible in Exodus 1–15. No one would have been writing such texts in the villages of early Israel. Moreover, there are numerous signs – to be discussed elsewhere in this book – that these stories in the book of Exodus were shaped into their present form by much later Israelites rereading the story of exodus in relation to ever new “pharaohs”: the “pharaoh” of Solomon and his kingdom, the “pharaoh” of Assyrian and Babylonian superpowers, etc. This process of merging of stories described by Barack Obama has been going on a very long time.

That said, there are some trickster elements in the biblical exodus story that may point to a few early oral elements lying in some form behind the text in Exodus 1–15. Take, for example, the tale of the tricky midwives, Shiphrah and Puah (Exod 1:15–22), who disobey Pharaoh’s command to kill all male Israelite babies, claiming “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are so strong that they give birth before the midwife has a chance to get to them.” Later on, fully intending to depart for good, Moses nevertheless tries to get the Israelites free by asking Pharaoh for a three-day vacation in the wilderness so they can fulfill God’s command to worship there (Exod 5:1–5). Later, when Pharaoh agrees to let the Israelites have a three-day festival in Egypt rather than going away, Moses claims that they cannot do so because the Israelite sacrifices would be too distasteful to the Egyptians (8:21–3). When the plagues finally persuade Pharaoh to let the male Israelites go on their supposed worship pilgrimage, Moses slyly insists that the men cannot