Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Robin Holland - Exodus And The African American Experience

For about the past two weeks I've been going into the book of Exodus, reading a number of translations and versions, reading different commentary on it, concentrating especially on those of Everett Fox and those that I'm finding at the Jewish Theological Seminary site as well as in various Bibles, the Christian Community Bible commentary has some especially interesting things to say.

Another thing I found really interesting is this interview with Richard Elliott Friedman - from a Reformed Jewish website - on the historicity of the Exodus from Egypt that points out that though the archeological community has not found evidence of an exodus, that the Sinai desert is especially effective in burying even evidence of forty-year old events known to have happened:


If that's the case then it's no wonder that even a large Exodus event happened that no sign of it might be found.  Though I don't see any need for the numbers in the book to be accurate, they tend to exaggerate things over time.   As Marilynne Robinson pointed out you'd think the entire population of France participated in the resistance only a few years after the war, by the claims people made.  His arguments for an Exodus that primarily or exclusively involved a Levite community, in which a large number of peculiarly Egyptian names and cultural artifacts survive in the text as well as a theory of how the Levites - who he attributes extreme and stubborn, even violent coercivity  to - got the El tradition to meld with the YHWH tradition of the Levites.  Which is interesting even if you don't find it entirely convincing.

I don't think any of it needed to happen for the meaning of the what was said to have been both true and useful and entirely relevant to the experience of beleaguered human beings, today.  The whole thing could be one long parable, though one with distinct parts put together by generations of scholar-priests.  I did find the claim that the Song of Miriam and the Song of Deborah being the two oldest texts in that line of narrative to be interesting and how it may have grown from them.  Everett Fox points out that in the story of Moses, his entire existence, and so the entire story, depends on women saving his life, his mother, his sister, the two Egyptian-named midwives - unlike Pharaoh and his daughter, the two mid-wives have names - and I'll add Moses' wife,  Tzippora, who saves Moses when the text says that YHWH tried to kill him while they were going to Egypt by doing some magic with the foreskin of their son.  The commentaries speculate that it means Moses got really sick on the way, not that God was literally trying to kill Moses.   It's a really fascinating text, it's too bad more people don't read it and that those who do often don't take advantage of commentaries written by people who have studied it in the context of the Scriptures and other relevant scholarship.


Walter Brueggemann in Chapter 8 of The Bible Makes Sense talks a lot about how, growing directly out of the Exodus narrative and the moral consequences and obligations that the Jewish priests and scholars taught came from that experience, especially as interpreted by Paul the Pharisee and the other Jews who wrote the New Testament, are relevant to modern life.

 Slaves Become Sons and Daughter

This good news exposes our previous status as one that can and must be given up.  We are empowered to quit being who we were.  We are permitted to regard ourselves differently.  Two images suggest themselves by which we may appreciate what it means to be adopted children  First, before people in the biblical world become adopted and treasured children, they are often slaves or servants.  They are already present in the household, but they have no value of their own.  They are kept only for the work they can perform.  They have no rights and no reason to hope for any long term security.  They do not belong.  Indeed their well-being depends completely on their good performance 

The slave motif is at the root of biblical imagery.  In the Exodus event, the LORD frees the slaves because he has adopted them as his treasured children: 

Thus says the LORD:  Israel is my first-born son, and I say to you,  “Let my so go that he may serve me” (Exodus 4:22-23).

In that powerful act of liberating, their status in life is redefined and they are given a new identity.  They cannot refuse it and Pharaoh cannot resist it.  God has power to make people into his precious children (Matthew 3:9).


Now their life consists, not in the capricious pleasures of the brick-yard Pharaoh, but in the affirming fidelity of this God who takes children into his household. 

Our society is filled with the same kind of slaves,  people who must daily establish their worth by performing someone's assigned tasks.   These are people who must daily live with anxiety concerning the day when they will be unable to perform.  Slaves live by obedient performance, effectively accomplishing what is expected.  They are nameless agents without intrinsic worth. 

The LORD characteristically transforms slaves into children  This is evident in the story of the prodigal son, Luke 15:11.  The son came home to be a servant:

Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.  I am no longer worthy to be called your son;  treat me as one of your hired servants (15:18-19).

But the father will not consider it and makes his own insistence:

again;  he was lost, and is found (15:22-24).

The son was welcomed to the gather's table of joy, for a son does not gain his worth by his performance but by the will of the father.  

Orphans Become Adopted Children 

A second biblical image is that people are orphans – people who belong nowhere, who have no identity or rootage and no claim on anyone or anything.   The term orphan sociologically refers to those who have no voice in government, no advocate in court, no representation in any decision.  They are helpless victims without power to make any decisions about their own lives.  It is the staggering news of the Bible that the LORD takes orphans and brings them into his family, declares them his children, gives a new identity and redefines their status:

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing (Deuteronomy 10:18).

In thee the orphan finds mercy (Hosea 14:3).

Our society is filled with such rootless people.  It includes the economically disadvantaged who have no advocate among the powerful.   It also includes some powerful who are rootless and in fact belong nowhere.  It is a striking reality that lostness and displacedness characterize goth the conventional poor who owe their souls to the company store and the beholden class of middle income who also are enmeshed in corporate structures which displace.  Vance Packard has shown how we are A Nation of Strangers.  He describes the disintegration of personality and community with such displacement.  The gospel is not only an assurance of belonging but a harsh protest against such an ordering of society. 

The good news of adoption is addressed to no special class.  Rather it addresses persons of every age and class whose humanity is diminished by displacement.  It may be that a perception of reality free of ideology will enable us to see that this is a malady effectively destroying our notion of humanness.  Humanness mean to belong and to have dignity!  But among us are the demonic powers of alienation which address us all. 

Which you should remember when you hear Paul Ryan or other white washed tombs and the Trumpian-Mammonist Halleluliah peddlers.  Not to mention the atheists and anti-religious distorters.


  1. "Another thing I found really interesting is this interview with Richard Elliott Friedman - from a Reformed Jewish website"

    BTW, Sparkles -- you do realize that actual Jews consider Reform Jews to be essentially Unitarians, right?

    1. I doubt you know what "actual Jews" think anymore than actual Uzbekistanis think. Reform is the largest grouping of Jews in the United States, from what I've seen the estimates are 35% of Jews in the United States are Reform, about 18% Masorti and about 10% Orthodox, I'm not sure about other denominations but it would seem that most religious Jews in the United States are Reform.

      Fredman is a very well respected scholar, I'm not aware of what his religious affiliation, if any, is. He's a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary which is a Masorti institution.

      If you weren't too lazy to look stuff up online you'd avoid looking quite as stupid as you inevitably do. Not that it matters, my experience is that blog atheists tend to be pretty stupid and lazy.

  2. So you know more about Jews, culturally, than I do.

    Got it.

    Get back to me when you can quote whole sections of bits from THE 2000 YEAR OLD MAN from memory.

    1. Like I said to you earlier today, you're like those a-hole 12-year-olds who memorize comedy albums and parrot them into the ground.

      I don't steal other peoples' material. You're neither a Mel Brooks nor a Carl Reiner. You're not even a Louise Brooks. You've got a lot in common with Jackie Mason, I'd say apart from being an asshole but that's pretty much all there is to you both.

  3. "my experience is that blog atheists tend to be pretty stupid and lazy. "

    As you well know, you lying piece of shit, I'm not an atheist. I'm a lapsed agnostic -- who used to not know but now doesn't give a shit.

    1. Since just about everything I know about you is sourced to you, the only thing I know for certain is that you're an habitual liar.

      I wouldn't be surprised if you're a prolapsed liar.

  4. Right. Jackie Mason = Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner.

    Obviously, you know more about Jews culturally than I do.

    1. Well, Stupy, I said you were no Mel Brooks or Carl Reiner but that you were the equivalent of Jackie Mason. So you don't understand how equals signs work either, obviously.

      If a=b and b=c then a does = c. But let a = asshole, you, in other words, let b = Brooks and c = Carl, If a does not equal b, as I stated it didn't and a does not equal c as I stated it didn't then, you asshole do not equal either of them. Since m (Mason) = a (you) then that is what an equal sign is used to express. And in that case m (Mason) does not equal b (Brooks) or c(Carl).

  5. Still claiming you know more about Jews culturally than I do, McCarthy?

    That'll work.

    1. I didn't claim it, it was proved when you claimed to know what "most Jews" thought of Reform Jews when they're the biggest denomination of Jews in North America. And you proved it by being so stupid so obviously.

    2. And Jackie Mason was never funny for a second in his pathetic career as a stand up asshole, racist and bigot. He was about as funny as Andrew Dice Clay and Dennis Miller.

  6. "I didn't claim it, it was proved when you claimed to know what "most Jews" thought of Reform Jews"

    And again, you can't tell the difference between a claim and a joke. Which of course fucking proves you know fucking nothing about Jews.

    Good grief, it's amazing you haven't died of shame from some of the crap you've posted here over the years.

    1. " The president was obviously joking with his comments (that the Democrats who didn't applaud his State of the Union were traitors)."

      We can add ss to that equation as in if a(asshole, you)=m (also asshole, Mason) and m=ss(asshole,Sarah Huckabee Sanders) then a=ss. It works with "liar" as well as "asshole".

      All assholes are equal to any other asshole anywhere, if you've known one you've known them all. And don't we all know at least one.

    2. No, he's one of your people, a lying asshole who can't read and can't tell the truth.

  7. I'm sorry -- when did I suggest that Jackie Mason was funny? Find a citation for that and have it on my desk in triplicate by tomorrow.

    Thank you.

    1. You didn't, I did. I said it to point out that you and Jackie Mason have a lot in common, mostly you're both bigoted assholes who aren't funny.

  8. Get back to me when you don't have the same attitude toward the centrality of the Jews to the Holocaust that the Trump administration has.

    1. As I've said, you are the equivalent of Sarah Huckabee Sanders as well as Jackie Mason. Lying assholes.

      You're the one who didn't want more Jews here and screamed your lying head off when I said I did.