Читать книгу A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible - Colleen M. Conway - Страница 56

READING

Exodus 2, 5–10, and the potential early song of Miriam in Exod 15:20–1.

The book of Exodus, like Genesis, is a complex mix. In Chapter 6 of this Introduction, we will discuss how major parts of Exodus – such as the stories of God’s delay of the exodus to inflict plagues on Egypt – were shaped in relation to later Israel’s experiences of imperial trauma. That does not mean, however, that later storytellers completely made up the figure of Moses and the exodus event. Rather, key parts of the exodus story would never have been invented by later writers, such as Moses having an Egyptian name (consider, for example, the famous Pharaoh Thutmose) or Moses having foreign wives from Midian (Exodus 2) and Cush (Numbers 12). And these are just two initial indicators that some kind of story of the exodus circulated in ancient Israel from a very early period. At the start, such a story may well have been the property of a subgroup in Israel, perhaps an “exodus group” of prisoners who had escaped from Egypt who then joined others living in hill-country villages and told their story of liberation from Pharaoh under the leadership of Moses.

Yet, even assuming that some sort of exodus from Egypt occurred historically, the story about it would not have survived if it had not also spoken an important new word to the people living in the hill-country villages. And there are good reasons to think it did. For these village-culture Israelites had “pharaohs” of their own day, the rulers of the city-states surrounding them, whom they needed to resist. The Song of Deborah in Judges 5 (and the later accompanying story in Judges 4) vividly describes the kind of threat posed by such cities, with their professional armies and chariots. Furthermore, it is likely that some such formerly Egyptian-dominated cities, such as Jerusalem or Shechem, preserved remnants of the Egyptian culture. At the least, these former outposts of Egyptian domination of Canaan would have been perceived by villagers as the closest oppressive counterpart to the Egypt that had once dominated the area.

The story of Yahweh’s deliverance of slaves from Egypt would have served as a powerful rallying cry for villagers now fighting for survival against such city-states. The story became the property of all “Israel,” not just former slaves and their descendants. We see this sort of community claiming of an older story today, for example, in the way later African Americans have claimed the stories of the Bible for themselves. In his March 2008 speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” Barack Obama drew on his autobiography to describe how he found hope in the merging of biblical stories and contemporary lives in the black church:

People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters … And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about … memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.

This claiming of older stories by new groups is hardly limited to the black church. Much as many Americans now claim for themselves the story of the Mayflower and the Puritan holiday of thanksgiving, despite the fact that many descend from immigrants of the twentieth century, so also Israelite villagers of varied origins claimed the exodus story as their own. That story celebrated the god, Yahweh, who had liberated “them” from Egypt, and it expressed their confidence that this exodus God would also fight on their behalf against their contemporary “pharaohs,” the local city-states.