Exodus as a Whole

3. Exodus as a Whole

The deliverance and covenant traditions have been combined in the book of Exodus to tell a profound story. The final form of Exodus, in particular the way the story of the exodus was placed before the Sinai traditions, conveys a deep truth about the relationship between God's care and Israel's life. The flow of the story communicates that God gave special treatment to the Israelites because of his love for them and out of his faithfulness to the ancestral promises. Only after delivering them from slavery did God formalize their relationship with a national covenant. In other words, obedience to Torah, as defined by the Sinai covenant, was expected, but only as a response to the deliverance of the exodus. It was not a precondition of experiencing God's care and salvation. In fact, going all the way back to the ancestral story, God had made the first move by choosing them as his special people through Abraham.

Exodus Traditions. As with Genesis, the book of Exodus contains material from the Yahwist, Elohist, and Priestly sources. However, in contrast to Genesis where the Elohist had a small role, in Exodus the Elohist makes a substantial contribution. In addition, the final form of Exodus included independent traditions such as the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 and the Book of the Covenant.

For an outline of the book of Exodus see Table 3.X. For a complete source analysis of the book of Exodus see Table 3.Y, the literary sources of the book of Exodus.

    Furthermore, the book of Exodus places the phenomenon of biblical law in perspective. When we examine Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy we see that these books contain many collections of legislation, including

• the Ethical Decalogue (in two versions, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5)
• the Book of the Covenant (Exodus 20:22-23:33)
• the Ritual Decalogue (Exodus 34)
• Ritual Laws (Leviticus 1-16 and Numbers 1-10)
• the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17-26)
• and the Deuteronomic Code (Deuteronomy 12-26).

    Viewed with an eye to each collection's source and historical context, we see that they come from different settings, many of them no doubt later than the lifetime of Moses. Yet all of them are attached to Israel's historical experience at Mount Sinai and are associated in the present books with the figure of Moses. This association was deliberate, as Moses was regarded as the prime lawgiver of Israel; for any legal tradition to have full legitimacy it would have to be associated with him.
    Rather than being presented in catalog fashion (such as the Code of Hammurabi), all this technical legal and ritual material is embedded within historical narrative. Biblical law does not stand in isolation but is associated with the life story of Israel. This provides law and covenant with a grounding in Israel's experience with Yahweh, especially his acts of deliverance. Torah comes with divine authority; though Moses transmitted the laws, they originated with Yahweh.
    This helps us understand the overall purpose of Torah in its setting within the Hebrew Bible. Law was not given as a set of conditions to be met in order to establish a relationship with God; the narrative demonstrates that the relationship, by the time of the exodus, was already a long standing one. The purpose of covenant law was to preserve and perpetuate an already functioning bond between God and his people. In this perspective, law defined the shape that Israel's obedience would need to take in order to sustain that already initiated relationship.