The Road to Monotheism Peter Heinegg The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters By Richard Elliott Friedman New York, NY: Harper One, 2017. xiv + 282 pp. $27.99. Professor Richard Elliott Friedman (Jewish Studies, U. of Georgia, after 22 years at U.C., San Diego) has made a successful career out of combining solid biblical scholarship (much of it centered around the Documentary Hypothesis) with bold speculation. His lively, accessible style has won him many readers; and it's hard to come away from his books without being intellectually stimulated, though not necessarily convinced. What is one to make of his comparing the “Big Bang” to the cabalistic “shattering of God's unity,” as presented in The Disappearance of God (1995)? Newcomers to Friedman may be at least initially disappointed because he doesn't actually explain “how the Exodus happened.” The whole account is so saturated with myth (e.g., the plagues and the claim the Israelites had an army of 600,000 men, cf. Ex. 12.37‐38, Num. 1.46) that he quickly dismisses the great bulk of what is the Hebrew Bible's most important and dramatic event. This makes sense, since only fundamentalists could believe that, apart from all the preceding miracles, a horde of over two million people could survive for forty years in the wilderness of Sinai—without leaving a single archaeological trace behind. But, as well as skipping over all that narrative color, Friedman leaves some painful questions unasked. Why punish all of Egypt for the Pharaoh's divinely inflicted hardness of heart? Why did all the first‐born, “from the first‐born of Pharaoh, who sits upon his throne, even to the first‐born of the maid‐servant who is behind the mill” (Ex. 11:5) have to die? Was it the fault of all the conscripted grunts in the Egyptian cavalry (Ex. 14:26) that they were ordered to pursue the Israelites? And is it a problem that at Passover Jews to this day celebrate the death of the first‐born Egyptians in the Dayenu song? Friedman's thesis doesn't deal with any of this. He asserts that there was no massive Exodus. Only the Levites made the great crossing (the rest of Israel was composed of indigenous tribes in Canaan); and the Levites brought with them the worship of Yahweh, which fused with the Israelite cult of El and became the monotheistic faith of the Jews. Friedman presents many links in his argumentative chain, most of which are quite interesting and none of which is conclusive. (When all is said and done, the historical possibility remains that the entire tale of the Exodus, including the person of Moses, is fiction.) Friedman does have a lot of suggestive bits to work with: (1) Of the eight Israelites with Egyptian names, all of them are Levites; (2) Both passages (Ex. 3:25, 6:2–3) revealing the name Yahweh cite Moses the Levite as the recipient, and both occur in Levite sources; (3) The long (and, for most readers, utterly tedious) chapters on the Tabernacle (Ex. 25‐30, 35‐40) can be linked to the Egyptian tent of Ramses II; (4) The ark of the covenant is similar to Egyptian ritual boats; (5) All seven items of “Egyptian” lore in the Exodus story come from Levite sources; (6) All eleven references to circumcision in a legal context occur in Levitical sources, as do; (7) all texts about slavery during and after the time in Egypt. (The root of the word Levite means “attached,” which Friedman sees as indicating the outsider status of the Levites, first as slaves in Egypt, then as a landless tribe in Israel.); (8) All fifty‐two references to aliens are found in Levite sources; (9) All fifty‐two references to the “sanctuary” (miqdash), which in the triumphal Song of the Sea chanted by Miriam in Ex. 15:1 b‐18 is where “the people” enter, identify it as the Temple or Tabernacle, into which only the Levites are allowed. Friedman says all this is too much to be merely coincidental; and besides, why would any people trace their origins to the debased condition of slaves...
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Jan 13, 2024
Azhar Nurachman + 4
Open Access
