Robert Alter - Essay "Introduction to the Book of Exodus" Learning by Parshat HaShavua vs Reading Exodus by Themes and as a Whole

Q. In all of Biblical literature, what is the climax and its central point of reference?

A. Exodus has “a grand narrative sweep that culminates in ... the great climax and point of reference of all biblical literature—the revelation through Moses to Israel of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.”

Robert Alter - Introduction to Exodus, p.588-89

[MS: Alter has many essays in the form of "Introductions":

The Introduction for Genesis is described in the MS Sefaria Sheets Robert Alter Collection.

Alter also has essay-length introductions to The Prophets and to Ketuvim (The Writings) and an essay on each Prophet and each work in Ketuvim.]

[MS: copyrighted material - excerpts, formatting and emphasis added]

pp. 120-25 (Kindle page references)

Genesis ends with the death of Joseph, and Exodus begins with an Egyptian king who “knew not Joseph” and with a flurry of allusions to early Genesis, so the two are clearly meant to be read in succession as a continuous narrative.

The focus of the narrative, however, shifts from the emotionally fraught lives of the founding fathers and mothers to the story of the origins of the nation. The account of the enslavement in Egypt, ... and the march of the people led by Moses to the foot of Mount Sinai, is a kind of national epic, narrated in a cadenced prose, punctuated with refrainlike rhetorical flourishes, deploying a grand sweeping style only occasionally evidenced in Genesis.

[MS: See Robert Alter - Sefaria Sheets Collection. For comparison of Genesis and Exodus, see Alter's "Introduction to Genesis" in the Collection, with other sources.]

This imposing narrative has been shaped to show forth God’s overwhelming power in history, ... After the Sinai epiphany, Exodus takes a turn that may seem perplexing to modern readers. Narrative is dropped—to return briefly with the arresting episode of the Golden Calf ... and is replaced first by the articulation of a code of civil and criminal law and then by elaborate instructions for the erection of that Tabernacle that will be implemented in the closing chapters of the book with word-for-word repetition. Narrative continues to be set aside for almost all of the next book, Leviticus, which is devoted to a complex body of legal injunctions, mainly but not exclusively cultic....

It should be said, however, that if these Five Books are chiefly an account of the origins and definition of the nation from its first forebears who accepted a covenant with God to the moment when the people stands on the brink of entering the Promised Land, the ancient writers conceived three major constituents of national identity and cohesion. The first, and the one that we can most readily understand, is the trajectory of the collective and of its principal

figures through the medium of history. [MS: See note below listing these three elements.] In the tracing of this trajectory, the narrative shows us how historical events shape the people, how the people achieves a sense of its identity and purpose through the pressure of events. This, in essence, is the grand narrative arc from Genesis 12 to Exodus 20.

But the biblical writers assumed that Israel’s covenant with God had to be realized through institutional arrangements as well as through historical acts; and so the account of national origins and destiny required a body of cultic regulations, in which the people’s relationship with God would be enacted regularly, repeatedly, through ritual, and a body of general law governing persons, property, acts of violence of man against man, social obligations, and ethical behavior. ... the effect of the lengthy legal passages, both cultic and civil or criminal, is to bridge the distance of ... the time-back-when, of the narrative and bring the text into the institutional present of its audience. [MS: If I am reading correctly, the three major constituents of national identity and cohesion are: a shared collective national history, cultic regulations enacted regularly to connect to God and a body of civil and criminal laws. These bridge the distance from ancient times to current Jewish experience.]

... The Torah is manifestly a composite construction, but there is abundant evidence throughout the Hebrew Bible that composite work was fundamental to the very conception of what literature was, that a process akin to collage was assumed to be one of the chief ways in which literary texts were put together.

What we have, then, in the Five Books is a work assembled by many hands, reflecting several different viewpoints, and representing literary activity that spanned several centuries. The redacted whole nevertheless creates some sense of continuity and development, and it allows itself to be read as a forward-moving process through time and theme from book to book, yielding an overarching literary structure we can call, in the singular version of the title, the Torah.

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** Exodus - Introduction To Exodus**

pp 583-89 Kindle edition

As the long historical narrative of the Five Books of Moses moves from the patriarchs to the Hebrew nation in Egypt, it switches gears. ....The narrative conventions deployed, from type-scenes and thematic keywords to the treatment of dialogue, remain the same but

the angle from which events are seen and the handling of characters

are notably different. Genesis ended with the death, and the distinctly Egyptian mummification, of Joseph.

[MS: See MS Sefaria Sheet Hanukah and Parshat VaYechi. Alter notes a transition from the grim image of mummification, a coffin at the end of Genesis, to the hopeful Teva, the Ark of Noah and Moses, in Exodus.]

Exodus begins with a listing of the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt, thus establishing a formal link with the concluding chapters of Genesis...and this is followed by a restatement of the

death of Joseph - a device that biblical scholars call "resumptive

repetition," whereby, after an interruption of narrative continuity, a

phrase is repeated from the point at which the narrative broke off (the

phrase here is "And Joseph died") in order to mark the resumption of

the story.

In this second report of Joseph's death, however, the focus is not on the mummy in the coffin but on the dying out of a whole generation, which thus propels us forward in historical time .... We now have ... the perspective of the whole wide world of creation announced at the beginning of Genesis .... (Exodus 17).

In keeping with this new wide-angle lens through which the characters and the events are seen, the narrative moves from the ... psychological realism of the Patriarchal Tales to a more stylized, sometimes deliberately schematic, mode of storytelling that ... has the feel of a folktale. At the beginning of the story; Pharaoh is referred to several times as "the king of Egypt" rather than by his

Egyptian title, which was used in Genesis and will become his set designation as the story goes on. This has the effect of casting him as the archetypal evil king (one who kills babies) in a folktale confrontation between the forces of good and of evil. Other folktale elements are evident: the many thousands of childbearing Hebrew women are attended to, ... in a folkloric motif that has been profusely documented in many traditions of the ancient Near East and elsewhere, the future hero is threatened with death by the evil king and is saved by being hidden and then rescued.

The betrothal type-scene of the young woman....here has undergone a certain stylization. ... Indeed, it is only here that the young woman at the well is multiplied into seven young women, Zipporal and her six sisters, a move that diminishes her individuality ....

The general rule in Exodus .... is that what is of interest about the character of Moses is what bears on his qualities as a leader - his impassioned sense of justice, his easily ignited temper, his selfless compassion, his feelings of personal inadequacy. Alone among biblical character, he is assigned an oddly …generic epithet, "the man Moses," .... it also suggests more concretely that Moses as forger of the nation and prince of prophets is, after all, not an absolutely unique figure but a man like other men, bringing to the … tasks of leadership both the moral and temperamental resources and the all-too-human weaknesses that many men may possess. …In regard to

our experience of character and the story, all this means that “the man Moses” remains somewhat distanced from us, that we never get the sense of intimate acquaintance with his inner life and his distinctive traits of personality that we are so memorably afforded in the stories of Jacob and Joseph.

There is a certain correlation between the distancing of the central

character and the distancing of the figure of God in Exodus ... God in Genesis, ... walks about the earth looking very much like a man -indeed, being easily mistaken for a man until He chooses to reveal His identity ... Engaging a human being in what is clearly represented as face-to-face conversation, in Exodus has become essentially unseeable, over-powering, and awesomely refulgent [MS: shining brightly]. Barriers to access accompany Him everywhere, just as they will be instituted architecturally in the tripartite structure of the sanctuary that He orders the Israelites to build.

The first manifestation of God's presence to Moses is in the anomaly

of the fire burning in a bush without consuming it, and then the divine

voice enjoins Moses, "Come no closer here," and proceeds to speak to

Him without being in any way visible to him. Fire, which betokens

potent energy and which is something one cannot touch without being

bunt or destroyed, is the protective perimeter out of which God

addresses Moses and the Israelites throughout the story.... God in Exodus has become more of an ungraspable mystery than He seems in Genesis; and as He moves here from the sphere of

the clan that is the context of the Patriarchal Tales to the arena of history His sheer power as supreme deity and His implacability against those who would thwart His purposes emerge as the most salient aspects of the divine character.

*Chapters 1-20: The first unit, running from chapter 1 through chapter 20, is "a grand narrative sweep that culminates in what is, at least in national-historical and theological terms, the great climax and point of reference of all biblical literature—the revelation through Moses to Israel of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai." The narrative plays out in three "defined locations" with different themes, Egypt; the Wilderness; and the "promised destination" of the Exodus," the land of milk and honey, but a place beyond the scope of Exodus. p.589

*Chapters 21- 40:36 - seventeen chapters of laws, rituals and instructions on building the Tabernacle. p.591

p.589

The narrative is organized around three thematically defined spaces:

*Egypt the place of bondage;

*the wilderness, a liminal space where freedom will be realized and new obligations incurred, where a tense struggle between leader and people will play out as part of the initiatory

experience of nationhood;

*and the promised destination of the Exodus from Egypt, the land that remains beyond the horizon of this book....

Egypt- almost everything there being linked with its central waterway, the Nile, …where baby Moses is saved from

drowning and where the Ten Plagues begin; and a barrier of water must

be crossed to effect the escape….

Wilderness - The wilderness is, antithetically, a zone of parched dryness - arid sand and rugged rock formations, where the people more than once desperately thirst for water and are dependent on its miraculous discovery: The shepherd Moses first encounters God in a the wilderness on a mountain later called Sinai ... but in this episode

referred to as Horeb, which as the twelfth-century Hebrew exegete

Abraham in Ezra shrewdly saw, means "dryness" or "parched place. (p.590) ... The culmination of this narrative in the Sinai epiphany ... will make the mountain itself incandescent... with divine fire.

The climax of this whole story is a set of lapidary legal injunctions, but they are in no way anticlimactic for being that. Framed as a series of imperatives in the second-person singular and thus addressing every man and woman of the Israelite nation, they express the keenest sense of urgency ... Later, in the episode of the Golden Calf, we learn that God has incised the ten imperative utterances on two tablets of stone (32:15-16), but here no mention is made of writing. The omission is dictated, I think, by a desire to convey the potent immediacy of God's speech to Israel through Moses: "And God spoke these words, saying" is the formula pointedly used to introduce the Decalogue.

Finally, beyond well-watered Egypt and the burning desert where uncanny fires flare, the new Israelite nation is repeatedly told of a third place, a land flowing not with water but, hyperbolically, with milk and honey. This utopian space will be beyond reach for forty years, and in sense it can never be fully attained. When the twelve spies enter it ... they confirm its fabulous fecundity, but ten of the twelve also deem it unconquerable, calling it "a land that consumes its inhabitants." As the biblical story continues ... the land flowing with milk and honey will begin to seem something like the Land of Cockaigne of medieval European folklore [MS Famously portrayed in a Brugel painting, "the Lazy-Tasty Land"], a dream of unimpeded fulfilment beyond the grating actualities of real historical time. Treated with poetic hyperbole by the Prophets, it will eventually generate eschatological visions not within the purview of these early books of the Bible.



p.594

It is the second large panel of Exodus that is likely to cause perplexity

for a good many modern renders. After the riveting narrative... the second half of the book, with the exception of

the Golden Calf story (chapters 32-34), is devoted to legal material.... which is often referred to by scholars as the Book of the Covenant, and then the elaborate instructions for the building of

the Tabernacle (chapters 25-31), instructions that will be carried out,

more or less word for word, just as one would expect, after the resolution of the confrontation over the Golden Calf (chapters 35-40)....

Readers attached to the notion of story are bound to find these seventeen chapters of laws and architectural instructions something of a letdown, but one must assume that the ancient writers and their audience had different ideas about literary unity and about how story related to law.

The Book of the Covenant could be understood as a detailed extension of the Decalogue, but the Tabernacle passages pose more of a problem.... An analogy between the two-panel structure of Exodus and the complementary interaction between the two versions of the Creation story in Genesis may be helpful.

....

The first half of Exodus is a compelling story, punctuated, as some scholars have proposed, by certain epic gestures that moves from enslavement to liberation to epiphany. It is also a story marked by danger, doubt, and what looks like a national destiny of endless trouble. ...

The Tabernacle ...was imagined by these writers as a

vision of perfectly orchestrated harmony, enacted through the meticulous crafts of architecture, weaving, dying, woodcarving, and metalwork - an implementation by human artisans, following divine

directives …. After the tense story of rupture and recrimination

of national experience in history, the …[narratives] provide an elaborately imagined representation of the beautiful ordering of sacred space of choreographed repetition set off against the unsettled peregrinations of the Wilderness generation. The satisfaction this material gives its audience is not story but pageantry: the splendor of the many-colored textiles displayed along the walls of the Tabernacle ...., the bronze loops on which they are hung, the wrought precious metals and inlaid gems of the various ritual implements. ... p.594

p. 595

When at the end of all the building, we are told, "And Moses completed the task" (40:33), we hear a significant echo of "And God completed on the seventh day the task He had done (Genesis 2:2).

But the concluding image of the book is the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night that leads the Israelites on their march …. On that long way, more trouble awaits them, as readers will

discover when the narrative resumes in Numbers.

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