“I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth” [Gen. 13:16]. As the dust of the earth is from one end to the other, so your children will be dispersed from one end of the world to the other. As dust is trodden by all, so your children will be trod upon by the peoples of the world. As dust outlives all vessels of metal and endures forever, so other nations of the world will cease to be, while Israel endures forever. (Genesis Raba 41:9)
Travel to Egypt today and you can still see the great temples built by Ramses II, assumed by most scholars to be the pharaoh of the Exodus. Luxor, Karnak, Abu Simbel: they still stand, three thousand years later, in little less than their former glory, astonishing achievements that seem to defy time. Yet the civilization that produced them is no more. The Egypt of the pharaohs was one of the greatest and most long-lived empires of the ancient world, but already by the time of Ramses II it had reached its peak, and shortly thereafter began its long decline. By the time of Alexander the Great it was a shadow of its former glory, and it fell to the Greeks. Like other imperial powers, in its day it “bestrode the narrow world like a colossus” and then faded into oblivion. The monuments remain, but the culture that brought them forth was all too mortal.
Among the builders of those monuments were a small migrant people known to the Egyptians as Hebrews, Ivrim, meaning nomads, people who wander from place to place without a fixed home. In the late nineteenth century great interest was aroused by the discovery, in an Egyptian village known as El-Amarna, of a cache of some 350 clay tablets dating back to the fifteenth century bce. Written in Akkadian, they contained reference to a group known as Habiru, who seemed to bear some similarity to the Israelites of that time. They too were a nomadic group who appeared from time to time, arousing fears on the part of other residents in the land of Canaan. There is even a record, in the form of two papyri from the reign of Ramses II, of Habiru workers being employed to transport materials for the pharaoh’s construction projects.
Scholars today are less likely to identify the Habiru of the Amarna letters with the Hebrews of the Bible. The word appears to be not the name of a specific people but a generic description of roaming groups of marauders. But the existence of such groups may help to explain why a powerful empire like Egypt regarded the Israelites as a threat. Some centuries before, it had suffered an invasion from the east, by a group known as the Hyksos, who seized hold of the country for 160 years, and the memory remained. Egypt was on its guard against outsiders.
The fact that Abraham and his descendants were known to others as Ivrim suggests that they too were seen as Habiru, a potential danger to the more settled peoples of the region. Abraham himself, despite his long residence in Canaan, was forced to describe himself as “an alien and a temporary resident” when he came to buy land from the local Hittites as a burial place for his wife, Sarah (Gen. 23:4). Nor did the Egyptians take readily to outsiders. A text of the time complained that “strangers from outside have come into Egypt…. Foreigners have become people everywhere” (Admonitions of Ipuwer Papyrus). So it is altogether likely that, faced with a growing population of Semitic herdsmen from Canaan, the Egyptians would have sensed a potential threat.
We do not have independent confirmation of the events of the Exodus. But we have enough background information to understand the context in which a pharaoh would say, “Look, the Israelites have become much too numerous for us. We must act wisely against them, in case they grow great, and when we are called to war they may join with our enemies, fight against us, and rise up to leave the land” (Ex. 1:9–10). This makes eminent sense, given the conditions of the time. With them a great drama began that was to leave its mark ever afterward on the life of the group whose descendants are the Jews of today.
The contrast between the two peoples could not have been greater. Egypt at that time was an indomitable power. It held sway over the whole ancient Near East. Ramses II conducted successful campaigns against the Hittites and the Libyans and launched punitive raids against Edom and Moab. He used the technical prowess and prosperity of Egypt to undertake a series of monumental building projects that have few rivals in the ancient world. He had colossal statues of himself erected throughout the country. The prefix Ra in his name tells us that he was seen as the sun god, a divine being whose rule was written in the heavens and whose word carried absolute command.
The Israelites, for their part, were a landless people, entirely at the mercy of the Egyptians. They had no power and, at first, no effective leadership. They were easily conscripted into forced labor. The Torah tells us that they were employed to build two of Ramses II’s great projects, the cities of Pithom (Per-Atum) and Ramses (probably Per-Ramesses-Meri-Imen). No group seemed less likely to become the people of eternity.
Had anyone suggested at the time that it would not be the Egypt of the pharaohs that would survive and change the moral landscape of the world, but instead a group of Hebrew slaves, it would have seemed an ultimate absurdity. The Egyptians believed that the Israelites were already on the verge of extinction. The earliest known reference to Israel outside the Bible is an inscription produced by Ramses’ successor, Merneptah, in the thirteenth century bce. The Merneptah Stele, a giant slab of black granite that stands today in the Cairo Museum, contains these words: “Israel is laid waste. His seed is no more.”
The clash between Moses and Ramses was no ordinary encounter. It deserves to be seen, in retrospect, as one of the defining confrontations of history. Between the most powerful empire of the ancient world and a powerless group of slave laborers, an immense question was being framed. What endures and what wanes? What survives and what is eclipsed? Ancient Egypt and ancient Israel were two nations that posed the great question of time: how, in a world of flux and change, do we create something that defeats mortality? The Egyptians gave one answer, a response that has long appealed to emperors and kings. We defeat time by building monuments that will outlive the winds and sands of time. Ancient Israel gave a different and altogether counterintuitive reply. We can identify exactly the moment when it occurred. It is set out in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the Book of Exodus.
The Israelites were about to go free. Nine of the ten plagues had already taken place. The tenth, they knew, would be the last. According to the biblical account, Moses gathered the people and instructed them on the preparations they were to make. By any standard it was an epic moment. For 210 years the Israelites had been in exile. They had experienced suffering, slavery, and attempted genocide. Now they were about to begin the journey known to history as the Exodus. What would Moses say? He might have spoken about freedom, or the promised destination, the “land flowing with milk and honey.” He might have chosen to speak about the arduous journey that lay ahead, what Nelson Mandela called “the long road to freedom.” Any of these would have been the great speech of a great leader.
Moses did none of these things. Instead he spoke about children, and the distant future, and the duty to pass on memory to generations yet unborn. Three times he turned to the theme:
And if your children should ask you, “What is this rite you perform?” you shall say…. (Ex. 12:26–27)
And you shall tell your child on that day, “It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt.” (ibid. 13:8)
And if in that time your child should ask you, “What is this?” you shall say to him…. (ibid. 13:14)
About to gain their freedom, the Israelites were told that they were to become a nation of educators. That is what made Moses not just a great leader but a unique one. Freedom – he was suggesting – is won not on the battlefield nor in the political arena but in the human imagination and will. As the American justice, Judge Learned Hand, put it: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.” To defend a land you need an army, but to defend freedom you need education. You need parents, families, and homes and a constant conversation between the generations. Above all you need memory – the kind of memory that never forgets the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.
Freedom is more than revolution. The pages of history are littered with peoples who won their freedom only to lose it again. The “constitution of liberty” is one of the most vulnerable of all human achievements. Individual freedom is simple. Collective freedom – a society that honors the equal dignity of all – depends on constant vigilance, a sustained effort of education. If we forget where we came from, the battles our ancestors fought and the long journey they had to take, then in the end we lose it again.
So Moses led his people along the least likely path to eternity. The Israelites became builders, but what they constructed was not monuments of stone. Instead it was a way of life inspired by the twin ideals of justice and compassion. Its bricks were holy deeds; its mortar, study and the life of the mind. What Moses taught, and what the Jewish people came to discover, is that you achieve immortality not by building pyramids or statues – but by engraving your values on the hearts of your children, and they on theirs, so that our ancestors live on in us, and we in our children, and so on until the end of time.
It was an astonishing insight, so unlike anything else in the ancient world that, contemplating it, it is hard not to feel oneself in the presence of transcendence, a totally unpredictable moment when one of the great truths of the human situation emerged for the first time. The people who survived and eventually became a nation of visionaries and prophets, scholars and sages, had little in their immediate past to suggest future greatness, except one thing: a voice heard intermittently since the days of the patriarchs, summoning them to a way of life quite different from their neighbors’. It said that God is not the power that enslaves but the power that sets free. Instead of worshipping mighty rulers, it taught that God is to be served by protecting the dignity of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the weak, the vulnerable, and the neglected. Holiness is found not in monumental architecture but in words and teachings, above all in the instruction that takes place at home. “Read not banayikh, ‘your children,’ but bonayikh, ‘your builders,’” said the sages (Berakhot 64a), and it was an insight Jews did not forget. No civilization, no faith has been as child-centered as Judaism. As a result, none has stayed so perennially young, so self-renewing through time. On Pesaḥ, telling our story to our children, we relive the secret of Jewish renewal.
The men and women who built Ramses’ temples lived through one of the great revelations of history. Because of it the Jewish people became a nation, a nation dedicated to bringing new generations into being and handing on to them the heritage of the past. The result was that Jewish identity, and with it the Jewish dream, never died. By telling the Israelites in Egypt to become a nation of educators, Moses turned a group of slaves into a people of eternity.