Esther Keller-Stocker

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 8th page of 10 pages

3.2. The Salvation of the People

In our text Exodus 3,6-11 the people of Israel is described as a suffering, salvation needy people.

• The misery of my people (v. 7)
• To rescue if from the hand of the Egyptians (v. 8)
• Now the cries of Israel's sons have reached me (v. 9.10.11)

3.2.1.Israel

The people of Israel in Egypt was the descentant of Jacob according to the Bible text. The experts believe that the Israelites in Egypt were only a small group of the entire population, which lived in Palestine under the name Israel. (25). G. Gerlemann accents that Israel originally was a sacred tribal confederation and secondarily connected with Jacob (26).

The patriarch Jacob should have received his name Israel from God, as already mentioned. The prophets saw the name Israel differently. They often  threat Israel as a women, as Yahweh's daughter or/and wife. To the relationship between Yahweh and Israel Julius Wellhausen wrote in "The Israelite and the Jewish history":

Yahweh, the God of Israel, Israel, the Lord's people: This is the beginning and the abiding principle of the followoing political and religious history. Before Israel existed, Yahweh did not exist, on the other hand the prophets had the right to say that it was Jehova who begot and bore Israel. Inseparably both were connected each other as soul and body. Israel's life was the Lord's life (27).

This intimate relationship between Yahweh, as father and mother, and Israel, once as the son, once as the daughter and wife, the Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic school tried to dissociate and used instead of the name "Israel" "sons of Israel". But I wonder, why the sons are named after Israel, as if Israel were the mother and not after God, the father? Why the people are not called "people of Yahweh"? Does the expression "sons of Israel" belong to the past matrilocal structure?

But there are also texts in the Old Testament, where Israel does not connected closely to Yahweh but to Jacob. Some examples:

There Israel encamped before the mountain, while Moses went up to God. Yahweh called to him out of the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel (Ex. 19,3).

Or in Balaam's First Oracle:

From Aram Balak has brought me, the king of Moab from the eastern mountains: 'Come, curse Jacob for me, and come, denounce Israel!' 
(Num. 23,7)

Instructive is the blessing of Jacob:

Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce,
and their wrath, for it is cruel!
I will divide them in Jacob
and scatter them in Israel.

Judah, your brothers shall praise you;
your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies;
your father’s sons shall bow down before you.
Judah is a lion’s cub;
from the prey, my son, you have gone up.
He stooped down; he crouched as a lion
and as a lioness; who dares rouse him?
The scepter shall not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until tribute comes to him;
and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples
(Gen. 49,7-10).

Judas is the young lion and "crouched as a lion and as a lioness" (v. 9). I think there is refered to the parents of the cub. Above, Jacob and Israel were named. They seem to be the parents, as lion and lioness. In v. 2 the sentence is striking: "Assemble and listen, O sons of Jacob, listen to Israel your father". Otherwise, in the Old Testament is normally mentioned "sons of Israel" and Jacob is considered as "father of his sons". In v. 2 the two names were therefore inverted. But from v. 2 we have now the key word "father", the thought is continued in v. 9: A young lion and who are his parents? A lion and a lioness. Because in v. 2 a converse took place to the attributes of the Jacob and Israel, we can here also suppose a shift from the origin information: Jacob crouches as a lion, Israel as a lioness.

But we read:

yet his bow remained unmoved;
his arms were made agile
by the hands of the Strong of Jacob,
from there is the Shepherd, the Stone of Israel,
by the God of your father who will help you,
by Shaddaj who will bless you
with blessings of heaven above,
blessings of the deep that crouches beneath,
blessings of the breasts and of the womb.
(Gen. 49,24-25)

What can I do with this very complex text? Anyway I have read again the essay by Albrecht Alt "The God of the Fathers" (28). He pointed out, there was a nomatic tradition in Syria-Palestine, in which the name of the god was attached to the name of an individual man. But A. Alt had only original documents, which did not appear before the Hellenistic period and continuied until the 4th century AD, when the Christianity put an end to this "God of your/yours father".

In the saying of Joseph he noticed that the name Yahweh is deliberately avoided. The saying is written in a deliberately archaic row. Thereby the "Strong (God) of Jacob" is in parallel to "the Name of the Shepherd". And "the Stone of Israel" is added then. To the stone, to which I can not explain more in this essay, it is said in Jeremiah:

who say to a tree, 'You are my father,'
and to a stone, 'You gave me birth.'
(Jeremia 2,27)

In Jacob's blessing there is not mentioned "the Strong"/"Shepherd" instead of the wood. The "Strong/Shephard" and the "Stone of Israel" are the divine parents of Joseph. In Verse 25 it is reiterated: "God of your father who will help you" and "Shaddaj who will bless you".

Albrecht Alt pointed out that the priests introduced (El) Schaddaj as a collective term of various Gods of the Father. Albrecht Alt lived in the first half of the 20th century and could not imagine in his patriarchal world that the priests, who wrote the Priest's Codes in the distant Babylon, did not summarise the gods of the father but possibly found a collective term for the different forms of goddesses.

In Genesis 49,25 Joseph will be assured of the help of his father's god, but also the divine Mother Shaddaj will assist him. At last, it is the concentrated power of his ancestor parents, the floods from above und below, who help Joseph. Not enough, Joseph as a descendant of the Great Mother is certain to her particular abundance too.

3.2.3. Yahwe's Mercy

Then Yahweh said, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them (Ex. 3,7-9)

Yahweh has mercy on his people and wants to help him without any conditions on the part of Israel. Assuming the Yahwist is a successor to the Deuteronomist, here we recognize a very important improvement. In Deuteronomy we find the federal formula telling: The unfathomable love of Yahweh to Israel should be respond in obeying the commandments and rights of God. Keeping the commandments and rights of God is the declaration of Israel's love to her god (Dt. 26,16-19) (29).

Hosea in the northern kingdom was the first prophet, who made the "God who lead Israel out of Egypt" a subject of discussion. The former prophet Amos had no idea of the Exodus story. In the book of Hosea is solemnly written twice:

 I am Yahweh your God from the land of Egypt twice solemnly (Hosea 12,9; 13,4).

Wether this sentence is really written by Hosea, is doubtful. It may have been written by a descendant of his school. But in other texts Hosea too understands the covenant of Yahweh with Israel as a marriage that begins with the Exodus:

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
(Hosea 2,14-15; see Hosea 8,13; 9,3; 11,1: here not as a wife but a son; 12,10.14; 13,4)

Hosea accuses Israel after entered the Promised Land has felt away from her God Yahweh and served other gods and has prostituted herself. Now, her sins must be punished by the divine judgement (30).

Among all these texts it is always raised the question, how much is written by Hosea directly and how much by subsequent students.

In his prophetic polemic, we wonder, to what historical event Hosea or rather his followers thought about? Hosea acted between 750 to 725 BC unter King Jeroboam II, the last famous king of the northern kingdom, Israel (781 to 742 BC). This king had the same name as the founder of the northern kingdom, Jeroboam I. The former Jeroboam I. reigned from 926 to 907 BC. His story began as a youngster, who was noticed by King Solomon. Salomon gave him charge over all the forced labor of the house of Joseph (I. King 11,28). But Jeroboam revolted aigainst Solomon, and had to flee to Egypt. However, before Jeroboam Jeroboam fled to Egypt, the prophet Abijah of Shiloh said to him, Yahweh will give him 10 parts of the Davidic kingdom (I. King 11,31). After the death of Solomon, his son Rehoboam came to the throne. In Shechem Rehoboam took counsel with the elders to know how to govern the people. The old men, who "had stood before Solomon", advised him to speak good words with the people. Then, Rehoboam asked the young men, who had grown up with him. They answered him to treat the people harder than Salomon (I. King 12,6-11).

King Rehoboam chose the advise of the young men. The Israelites rebelled against the king, and he fled to Jerusalem. Jeroboam had returned from Egypt and was proclaimed King of Israel, as the prophet Abijah of Shiloh had predicted to him. The son of Solomon ruled only on the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. But Israel separated from the Davidic kingdom had now a big problem, because the sanctuary of the ancient tribes of the covenant, the Ark of the Covenant (aaron b^erith), was standing in the Temple of Jerusalem. In order to have their own sacred center, Jeroboam commanded after his coronation to set a Golden Calf in Bethel and in Dan (I. King 12,29). The two golden calves were to be the gods "which Israel brought up out of Egypt":

Then Jeroboam built Shechem in the hill country of Ephraim and lived there. And he went out from there and built Penuel. And Jeroboam said in his heart, "Now the kingdom will turn back to the house of David. If this people go up to offer sacrifices in the temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, then the heart of this people will turn again to their lord, to Rehoboam king of Judah, and they will kill me and return to Rehoboam king of Judah." So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. And he said to the people, "You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." And he set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan. Then this thing became a sin, for the people went as far as Dan to be before one. He also made temples on high places and appointed priests from among all the people, who were not of the Levites. And Jeroboam appointed a feast on the fifteenth day of the eighth month like the feast that was in Judah, and he offered sacrifices on the altar. So he did in Bethel, sacrificing to the calves that he made. And he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places that he had made. He went up to the altar that he had made in Bethel on the fifteenth day in the eighth month, in the month that he had devised from his own heart. And he instituted a feast for the people of Israel and went up to the altar to make offerings (I. King 12,25-33).

Why calves? In I. Samuel 6 two milk cows dragged the Ark (hebr: Aaron). Because two cows dragged the Ark and not two bulls, Jeroboam I. more likely put two golden cows in the sanctuary of Dan and Bethel. Later, according to the patriarchal dominance the authors wrote about calves instead of cows. Also the statement that two calves brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, is secondar and a polemic against Jeroboam I.

After about 180 years later Jeroboam II. came to the throne. Normally, a reigning king takes up his name to a great predeccessor. So Jeroboam II. should have done, too, to establish consciously his power and his self-conception to the first king of Israel. In the time of Jeroboam II, the story of suppression by Solomon renewed againl, of the escape of Jeroboam I. to Egypt and his return to Israel. Prophet Hosea and his followers picked up this story to connect their criticism of Israel's cult with the Exodus out of Egypt. Now, there are no longer individuals but the entire people, who leaves Egypt.

Text and Design: Esther Keller-Stocker, Horgen, Zürich (Switzerland)
Last correction on 09.02.2010.

I'm looking forward to your comments and your suggestion!
Contact me at  esther@estherkeller.ch