The Bible's Greatest Meme?

Abstract

The Bible's Greatest Meme? Peter Heinegg The Book of Exodus: A Biography. By Joel S. Baden, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xv + 215 pp. $26.95. No serious reader, student, or teacher of the Bible can fail to see that the Book of Exodus is the key to the Hebrew Bible‐Old Testament and perhaps to all of Sacred Scripture. Genesis has many more appealing folkloric tales and mythic moments, but Exodus is absolutely indispensable. Here, we meet God as the Lord of history, the force that created and saved his own people, the Israelites, and bound himself to them forever in a solemn, all‐encompassing Covenant. Baden is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School, and his work is part of the Princeton Press's “Lives of Great Religious Books”; but he focuses less on the text of Exodus (or Shemot) than on the astonishing power of the Exodus story to shape and enrich religious traditions not just in Judaism, but in a bewildering variety of Christian churches. At the heart of the narrative is something like a complete historical blank. Exodus 12.37 claims that the Israelites had 600,000 foot soldiers, which translates into a minimum total population or two million; and scholars are agreed that there is no archeological or written evidence of such a mighty horde having lived in Egypt or survived for forty years in the Sinai desert. And was Moses himself an actual personage or a fictional hero? What to make of his Egyptian name and his supposed royal upbringing? Why did Yahweh want to kill Moses (in Ex. 4.24) shortly after the sublime theophany on Mt. Sinai/Horeb? How is it that God's grandest spokesman had a speech defect and was told to let his highly flawed brother Aaron occasionally take his place? Was Moses really barred from entering the Promised Land, after all his years of toil and travail, simply because he struck a rock to make it gush water (Num. 20.11‐12) instead of just bidding it to do so? As for the mass departure from Egypt, the most one can say is that a group of runaway Hebrew slaves may have escaped from Egypt (at some time in the thirteenth‐century BCE?) and made their way into Canaan, where they joined up with some distant tribal kin. And the confusion thickens when we consider the incompatible or contradictory elements in Exodus supplied by the J, P, and E strands of tradition that have been woven together. (E.g., were there seven plagues or ten?) The eating of matzah is an essential feature of Passover, but it turns to have nothing to do with the Exodus, only connected to it by the invented detail that the fleeing Israelites had no time to bake normal leavened bread. And the problems go on, but no matter, because in the Exodus God both makes his tremendous intervention in the life of Israel and establishes the core of Judaism forever. Once again, historical realism has to admit that Moses himself could no more have delivered the vast body of specific legal material in the Torah (much of which refers to conditions in a future settled country, rather than the wasteland of Sinai) than he could have described his own mysterious death and burial in Deuteronomy 34). And finally, there are the painful issues of the death of the Egyptian first‐born and the army of Pharaoh, which we'll get to later (Baden doesn't deal with them). The point is that, historical disputes aside, Pesach joins all Jews celebrating it into an organic symbiosis with a primordial liberation (whatever it may have exactly been) and all past generations who have ever liturgically participated in it. Unlike formal, clerically led synagogue services, Passover is a home‐based, democratic affair, with a unique focus on children. The Seder replaces the obsolete (since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE) Passover sacrifice. Baden calls the Passover Seder “an act of commiseration and of communal redemption,” whose relevance never fades. And, of course, it flowed into the life blood of Christianity. Jesus is at once the new Moses (especially...