A more formidable story than that of Moses and the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is hard to find. Let us refresh our memory. For 430 years since Joseph brought them there, the Israelites have toiled as slaves at the Pharaoh’s great building sites; in the process they have become transformed into a great people. When the Pharaoh orders every newborn Hebrew male put to death, little Moses is cast adrift on the Nile in an basket of bulrushes. Of all people, the Pharaoh’s daughter fishes him out of the water. Once an adult, Moses is ordered by Yahweh, who appears in a burning bush, to lead his people out of Egypt, but Pharaoh refuses to let them go until after ten plagues have visited the land. God enables Moses to part the Red Sea so that his people can cross and later presents Moses with the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. But because the Israelites lack the necessary discipline, they must wander about the desert for forty years before finally reaching the borders of the Promised Land.
With the 1956 film The Ten Commandments, Hollywood dedicated one of the all-time greatest monumental films to the story of exodus, with 14,000 extras, 15,000 animals, and Charlton Heston in the lead role. Movie audiences were overwhelmed with emotion when Moses defied the Pharaoh and told him, “Let my people go!” or smashed the tablets of the Ten Commandments on discovering his people dancing around the golden calf. Since then the story has been filmed again and again.
Moses is, after all, “the most prominent character of the most important part of the canon of the Hebrew Bible.”1 He is considered the founder of monotheism, and his story occupies four of the five books that bear his name: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Even the modern knowledge that he did not author the five books of the Torah (also known by their Greek name, the Pentateuch) has done little to harm his reputation. Moses stood directly before Yahweh and was in constant dialogue with him; no one else in the Old Testament achieved such closeness to God.2
Exodus, that great, epic story of freedom, influences Judaism’s self-image to this day.3 Retold each year at Passover, it has tied families to their traditions for thousands of years. Exodus is deeply rooted in Christian tradition as well: peoples as diverse as the Americans, the Armenians, the English, the Dutch, and the Boers, social and religious movements such as Protestantism, Pietism, Puritanism, and the civil rights movement, and even Latin American liberation theology all identify with the tale. But even if this led Egyptologist Jan Assmann to conclude that “the book of Exodus contains what is probably the greatest and most consequential story that humanity has ever told,”4 we believe that the epic itself is not the most spectacular part of Exodus. In fact, in our view, it is just a vehicle for the actual masterpiece: the law.
Genesis offered an impressive demonstration of the challenges people faced in the millennia following the Neolithic Revolution. The other four books of the Torah lay out the strategies developed to come to terms with all of the diseases, wars, and other catastrophes that accompanied these great changes. Part II of this book argues that the Torah represents a highly refined cultural-protection system in the form of 613 proscriptions and prescriptions. We examine this system from an anthropological perspective and show what a remarkable milestone of cultural evolution it truly is. The Torah pointed the way ahead for the development not only of religion but also, and more remarkably, of science.
The exodus epic has three main protagonists: Moses, Yahweh, and the stubborn Israelites who aren’t all that willing to follow the other two and for this reason are constantly “murmuring” throughout the Torah’s pages. Each of the three parties merits a chapter of its own. We begin by scrutinizing the great prophet Moses and carefully examine the tremendous corpus of laws that he delivered in God’s name. We then turn to Yahweh himself and investigate how he became so uniquely monotheistic. Just think about it: Why did the god of the “fewest of all people” (the Torah’s own words) make a career that would change the face of the world? Finally, we consider the murmuring people themselves. Why did they keep resisting the religion revealed to them at Mount Sinai? And what did women have to do with it? In pursuing these questions, we discover a great deal about people’s true religiosity. Toward the end of this part we inquire about the portentous consequences of this cultural-protection system set forth in the name of Yahweh. But let us first begin with God’s greatest prophet.