Thoughts on Exodus 12

Today's reading: Exodus 12; 2 Corinthians 2-3

One of the most difficult things about studying the Bible seriously, in my opinion, is letting the Bible be what it is, and understanding it in light of that, and Exodus 12 can be a great example of that.

Too many Christians today have a very supernatural view of inspiration, as though God just put each biblical author into a trance, gave them the exact words to write down, and when they came out of the trance they were just as surprised as everyone else to see what they had written. Then add to that the (often unexamined) view that the biblical authors must have been writing with our same understanding and standards for history… That’s just not how it works.

The books of the Bible were written by real people, who were writing in the midst of real events, who had specific literary styles and examples to pull from, who were working within known means of composition for their culture and time. And if/when we ignore those things and try to read it as though it were written yesterday to a modern Western audience, we are setting ourselves (and our listeners if we are teachers or otherwise have a platform) up for failure.

A great example of this, if you are a Marvel fan at all, is Drax the Destroyer from Guardians of the Galaxy. Drax doesn’t have an understanding of sarcasm or idioms, so he takes everything anybody says 100% literally. It sets up some really fun interactions, but it is really just over the top ridiculousness.

The problem is though that so many people approach the Bible like Drax approaches life. We have our understanding of literary forms and expressions, and the Bible must conform to those forms. But then when it doesn’t we end up left with “problem passages” or “clear textual errors” or, at times, things that just seem a little nonsensical.

In Exodus 12, the number of people leaving Egypt is a great example of this. If you’re interested, Michael Heiser has a great breakdown of all of the practical and textual problems you run into if you take the 600,000 men (aside from women and children) as the literal number of people leaving Egypt in the Exodus in episode 127 of The Naked Bible podcast.

One of the things Dr. Heiser points to in that podcast episode is research done on other contemporary texts that show that hyperbolic numbers, especially in terms of a marching army, was a standard literary practice at the time to show the strength of the king or commander of that army. So we have other records from other sources which will name an obviously exaggerated size of an army or force. But what’s important to realize for us today is that this wasn’t done to trick anybody, it wasn’t deceptive, it was just writing convention for the time.

So when the number of men of fighting age is given in Exodus 12 as 600,000, the ancient person reading that would not have said, “Oh my, but you say they stopped in that plain over there after they left Egypt, but that plain could never hold 2 million people, even if they were all standing and packed in as tight as they could be.” That person would read that number and say, “What?? Is Yahweh really so great as that??” And as they read, the answer is yes. This is the Yahweh that is greater than all the gods of Egypt, and is the Yahweh who is about to show Himself to be greater than all the gods of Canaan, so yes, He really is that great!

To me, this is the hardest part of being a student of the Bible. I intrinsically want the books of the Bible to conform to my literary genres and understandings, and it takes active work and effort to try to understand them under a foreign (to me) paradigm. But if we want to understand what the Bible actually has to say, more than we want to understand what we want the Bible to say, this is absolutely necessary effort to put in.