Day 5, Genesis 48-50, Exodus 1-9

I will preface this entry with a request: comment, comment, COMMENT! If you are reading this right now, leave a comment! A few people have told me that they've tried to comment and had difficulty, so I just made some modifications to the settings that should make things easier. Obviously comments aren't necessary, because my prime motivation for doing this blog is self-fulfillment and obsessive compulsion, but it does take awhile to write every day and it's nice to hear what people think of it.

Secondly, I want to establish something about the terminology I have chosen to use in this blog. Although the idea of Judaism in a modern sense did not come into existence until much, much later than these stories, and the characters within were correspondingly not really Jews, it is tedious to reuse "Hebrewite" and "Israelite" all the time, my spell checker doesn't like them, and overall it makes me feel more comfortable to have a third noun at my disposal. So I will often use the word "Jew" to describe these people, and I ask you pardon me for it.

Thirdly, I would like to share my jubilation on having completed Genesis. One book down! Sixty-five to go! So what am I doing wasting my time with all these silly side notes? Let's get started on today's analysis.

The last three chapters of Genesis center around Jacob's death, and the blessings he bestows on his sons and grandchildren. In chapter 48, Joseph introduces his father to his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Incidentally, their names literally translate to "forgetfulness" and "fruit" because they were born during Joseph's time in Egypt, when he had forgotten his family in Canaan, and was enjoying the fruits God provided him. By this logic, were I to have children today I might name them Watermelon, because I just bought a great watermelon, and Useless Activities,  because that's what I've spent my morning doing. Maybe I would name one Crossword Puzzle too, after my favorite past time.

Jacob bestows a rather sweet blessing on the two boys and adopts them as his own sons, which is a little weird but we'll go with it since Jacob is being nice instead of an asshole at this particular stage in his human development. Chapter 49 follows with a much bigger blessing of all his real sons, who will go on to found the tribes of Israel. The blessings themselves reflect the state of the tribes at the time the book was written; for instance, Reuben is described by his father as someone "uncontrollable as a flood, [who] will excel no more, because [he] climbed into [his] father's bed and defiled his concubine's couch" (Gen 49:4). The footnotes expand on this, explaining that the tribe of Reuben is prosperous at first but eventually dwindled in numbers. Some of the boys receive favorable blessings, like Judah, who "crouch[es] and stretch[es] like a lion, like a lion no one dares rouse" (Gen 49:9), while Issachar is conversely "a gelded donkey lying down in the cattle pens" (Gen 49:14). In chapter 50, Jacob finally dies (he also died at the end of chapter 47 but the authors are backtracking! Okay?!!), and the family goes to Canaan to bury him in the Cave of Machpelah, where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, and Leah are buried as well. At the very end of chapter 50, Joseph dies, leaving behind hordes of prosperous Israelites in Goshen, an area of Egypt.

So now, let us begin Exodus! As you probably know, Exodus tells the story of the Israelite enslavement in Egypt, and their eventual deliverance to the "promised land." I should forewarn my readership that so far, the first nine chapters of Exodus have proven nowhere near as funny as Genesis. Where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph were rather laughably self-interested, cruel, and corrupt by modern standards, Moses is actually... kind of cool! Of course, I have only read nine chapters of this imposing tome, so my opinion may easily change as we delve further in.

Exodus begins a fair time after the end of Genesis, and all of Joseph's brothers have died. The Israelites continue to flourish in Egypt, but after awhile a new Pharaoh takes possession of the throne, and he is unfamiliar with Joseph's contributions to the country long ago. He resents seeing the Jews, who breed like bunny rabbits, sprawled throughout his fine nation, so he enslaves them. This Pharaoh is a huge jerk and also commands that all the sons born to Israelite families be thrown in the Nile. One Levite woman, who is unnamed, comes up with a clever scheme to save her son; she builds a basket of reeds and floats him down the Nile, hoping that someone will find him and he will be spared. She has crazy good luck, because the Pharaoh's daughter finds him and decides to raise him herself! She calls him Moses, which folklore tells us is a name that means "from the bulrushes" but actually is an Egyptian name meaning "has begotten a child." Oh well. I like the folklore version better.

The Levite family's luck continues, because Moses's older sister has watched the progress of her brother in the river, and immediately presents herself to the Pharaoh's daughter, suggesting that her own mother serve as nurse for the baby. The Pharaoh's daughter, who has a lot of important Egyptian things to attend to like putting on eyeliner and mummifying people, agrees. So Moses's real mother gets to raise him! Awesome!

A lot of modern interpretations of Exodus will play up Moses's adoption into the Egyptian household, mostly to heighten the drama of the story and explain his hesitation to assume the role as "deliverer" of the Hebrew people. But the bible barely mentions his childhood, jumping ahead to much later in his life, when he is walking around Egypt watching the Hebrews at work as slaves. He seems to be completely aware that he is a Jew, and upon seeing an Egyptian striking one of the workers, he kills the man and is sentenced to execution by the Pharaoh. Moses escapes into the wilderness of Midian, where he marries a nice young Jewish girl named Zipporah and has a son named Gershom. All is well for Moses, who doesn't really give a crap about the Jews enslaved -- but unlike his forefathers, who were straight up assholes, I have a little more sympathy for Moses. He doesn't really seem connected to his heritage, and doesn't recognize how the plight of the slaves in Egypt involves him. God, as we will see, eventually has to spell it out.

One day Moses is chilling with his sheep, when he sees a bush on fire -- but remarkably, not burning up. He approaches the spectacle and a voice speaks to him, claiming to be the voice of the Hebrew god. The voice instructs Moses to lead the Jews out of Egypt. Moses, who is evidently wary of anonymous sources, asks God what his name is. "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14) says God, doing his best Popeye impression. Moses asks him to do Betty Boop too, but God emphasizes the seriousness of the issue at hand. He provides Moses with a sign, by turning his staff into a snake, and tells Moses he may perform this trick to convince any nonbelievers. Moses remains hesitant: "Lord, send anyone else you like" (Exodus 4:13) he begs, but this just pisses God off. He tells Moses to go meet his brother, Aaron, who will do all the talking. Moses must have a lisp or something, because he alludes constantly to the fact that he is not "a man of ready speech" (Exodus 4:10). As someone with a lisp, I am inclined to be sympathetic, but on the other hand the phrase "Let my people go" doesn't have the 's' sound anywhere, so Moses is really just being a little bitch about this. But not too much of a bitch. To me, he feels a little bit like an anti-hero, a man who has great potential but is unable to see it in himself, and is afraid to fulfill it. I like that!

After Moses consents, God explains the plan a bit more fully, saying that Moses will display his signs before the Pharaoh but that "I shall make him obstinate and he will not let the people go" (Exodus 4:21). Hooooooooold up. God is going to make the Pharaoh obstinate? Isn't the whole point of this that people have free will and can choose to be "righteous" and follow God or whatever? Now we're finding out that this whole mess is God's fault!

If you were missing the weird sex moments from Genesis, don't you worry. Moses leaves on his journey that day, and when he sets up camp for the night God realizes that his son is not circumcised and freaks out. He's about to kill Moses even though he just made a big deal about how Moses is the only one who can free the Jews, but luckily Zipporah "pick[s] up a sharp flint, cut[s] off her son's foreskin, and touch[es] Moses' genitals with it, saying 'You are my blood bridegroom'" (Exodus 4:25). Whew! I was worried there for a minute, but now everything is resolved. I am sure glad she did that, because it makes perfect sense and isn't weird at all.

Moses goes with Aaron to the Pharaoh and makes his speech, but the Pharaoh is -- as previously mentioned -- a big jerk, and just increases the Jews' workload. There is a fair amount of repetition in the account, with chapters 6 and 7 basically telling the same story as chapter 5, but further emphasizing the role of Aaron; this is because the accounts were written when the Aaronite priesthood ruled Israel. Handy!

I feel that I am making very slow progress through this entry, so I will not go into extensive detail about the plagues, because they are not really all that exciting. Everyone knows about how Moses, via God, inflicts ten disasters on Egypt, and by the end of chapter nine we get through seven of them: water turning to blood, frogs, maggots, flies, disease on livestock, boils, and a big thunderstorm. One amusing note is that for the first few plagues, the Pharaoh's magicians attempt to discredit Moses by reproducing the plagues themselves -- and they are successful! "You can make frogs and blood appear?" they say, "Whatever! We can do it too!" Evidently, no one thinks maybe they should put their magicianship to better use by cleaning up the plagues as opposed to making a bigger mess. Unfortunately for everyone, the magicians are not able to make maggots appear, only frogs and blood. This proves the superiority of the Hebrew God; he can make as many gross things as he wants.

After a handful of these plagues, Pharaoh consents to let the Hebrew people go free, but every time that Moses has God clean up the mess, Pharaoh retracts his concession. He is described over and over as being "obdurate" which means "unmoved by persuasion, pity, or tender feelings; stubborn; unyielding." Write that one down for when you take the SAT.


Chapter 9 ends, as previously mentioned, with thunderstorms. Tomorrow's reading brings us to chapter 21, where we will encounter the rest of the plagues, and quite possibly the exodus out of Egypt as well!


I will conclude today's analysis with an interesting sidenote: although the story of Exodus has been embraced in modern times as containing a strong anti-slavery message, and was even considered inspirational by a number of slaves and abolitionists in the Antebellum era United States, it should be noted that the Torah does not actually condemn slavery at all. As you may have remembered, Moses's descendants in Genesis all had slaves, and in fact around half of Jacob's sons are born from his slave concubines. The issue at hand here is that the Israelites do not deserve to be slaves, because they were not conquered or captured, but rather permitted to live in Egypt because of the valuable service that Joseph provided the nation. It is certainly something to ponder.


That being said, this has grown lengthy enough! See you tomorrow!