Agnolo Bronzino, The Crossing of the Red Sea, 1541 to 1545. Public domain.
Exodus 1 to 15 · Doctrine · Featured Study
The Exodus, Redemption's Master-Type
Exodus 1 to 15 tells how God sent Moses to Pharaoh to demand that he let Israel go.
A people who cannot free themselves are spared under blood, brought through a sea they could not cross, and led to the place where God lives among them.
Therefore tell the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.
- First taught
- Exodus 6:6 “Therefore tell the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD,…”
- Fullest statement
- 1 Corinthians 5:7 “Get rid of the old leaven, that you…”
A people who cannot free themselves are spared under blood, brought through a sea they could not cross, and led to the place where God lives among them.
Summary
The exodus is the rescue that Scripture uses to describe being saved.
- God promises Moses to bring Israel out, deliver them and redeem them (Exodus 6:6).
- The rescue keeps one order the New Testament reuses: God begins it, blood pays for it, and the rescued change masters.
- Paul calls Christ our Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7).
- Isaiah promises a new exodus, and Revelation 15 sets the song of Moses beside the song of the Lamb.
- Readers date the exodus about 1446 BC, from the 480 years of 1 Kings 6:1, or about 1260 BC, from the city of Rameses in Exodus 1:11.
The First Text and the Fullest
Exodus 6:6 and 1 Corinthians 5:7
God speaks the first text to Moses in Egypt before the first plague, in answer to Moses' complaint that the LORD has brought trouble on His people (Exodus 5:22 to 23).
Paul gives the fullest reading in his first letter to Corinth, to a church that boasted while it tolerated a man's open sin (1 Corinthians 5:1 to 6).
Therefore tell the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.Every later stage of the rescue keeps one of these promises.
Get rid of the old leaven, that you may be a new unleavened batch, as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.Other texts borrow one detail of the exodus; this one names its centre, the Passover lamb, as sacrificed in Christ.
Get rid of the old leaven, that you may be a new unleavened batch, as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.Other texts borrow one detail of the exodus; this one names its centre, the Passover lamb, as sacrificed in Christ.
The New Exodus
the echo running forward, prophets, Gospels, apostles, and the last sea
Eight numbered cards joined by arrows: the event, then seven texts that return to it.
- Where it stands
- The event
- What it carries
- That day the LORD saves Israel from the hand of the Egyptians, the rescue every later text returns to.
- Where it stands
- The prophets
- What it carries
- Isaiah's book of comfort opens by staging the return from Babylon as a second exodus, God leading His people home again.
- Where it stands
- The prophets
- What it carries
- Having recalled the God who made a path through the sea, Isaiah says to stop remembering it, because the next deliverance will make the first look small.
- Where it stands
- The prophets
- What it carries
- A prayer that argues with God from His own record at the sea. The exodus becomes Israel's permanent ground of appeal.
- Where it stands
- The prophets
- What it carries
- Israel ate the first Passover in haste, fully dressed for travel (Exodus 12:11), and Isaiah sets the return from exile against that night.
- Where it stands
- The Gospels
- What it carries
- On the mount of Transfiguration, with Moses himself standing there, the word Luke chooses for Jesus' death is exodos. The cross is named as the exodus the first one was rehearsing.
- Where it stands
- The apostles
- What it carries
- Paul reads the crossing as the church's own baptism prefigured, the manna and the water as spiritual food and drink, and the rock as Christ. He then warns that a redeemed people can still fall in the wilderness.
- Where it stands
- The consummation
- What it carries
- The redeemed stand beside a sea of glass mixed with fire, victorious over the beast, as Israel once stood beside the sea.
A type is a pattern the Bible itself reuses. The chain runs one rescue, told again at rising magnitude: out of Egypt, out of Babylon, out of death, out of the world.
1 Corinthians 10:1 to 12, Revelation 15:3
The prophetsIsaiah 40:3, Isaiah 43:19, Isaiah 51:10 and Isaiah 52:12
A voice of one calling: “Prepare the way for the LORD in the wilderness; make a straight highway for our God in the desert.Behold, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert.Was it not You who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made a road in the depths of the sea for the redeemed to cross over?For you will not leave in a hurry nor flee in haste, for the LORD goes before you, and the God of Israel is your rear guard.The Gospels, the apostles and the last songLuke 9:31, 1 Corinthians 10:2 and Revelation 15:3
They appeared in glory and spoke about His departure, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.and they sang the song of God’s servant Moses and of the Lamb: “Great and wonderful are Your works, O Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, O King of the nations!The Passage
six stages from the groan to the song
1. The GroanExodus 1 to 2
A new king of Egypt makes Israel's lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar (Exodus 1:14). After a long time the Israelites groan and cry out under their burden of slavery, and their cry ascends to God (Exodus 2:23).
So God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.2. The NameExodus 3 to 6
A bush burns without burning up, and a fugitive shepherd is sent back to the empire he fled. Moses asks for credentials and is given a Name. With it comes a promise in seven verbs. After the three of Exodus 6:6, God will take Israel as His people, be their God, bring them in and give them the land (Exodus 6:7 to 8).
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”The rescue rests on who He is.
3. The PlaguesExodus 7 to 11
Nine blows in three triads, escalating, strike the river, the herds and the crops. The plagues are a courtroom, and every plague is an exhibit. The ninth puts out the sun: total darkness covers all the land of Egypt for three days, yet all the Israelites have light in their dwellings (Exodus 10:21 to 23).
And the Egyptians will know that I am the LORD, when I stretch out My hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out from among them.”God states the purpose of all ten blows before the first one falls.
4. The LambExodus 12 to 13
At midnight the tenth blow falls on every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner in the dungeon (Exodus 12:29).
The blood on the houses where you are staying will distinguish them; when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No plague will fall on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.5. The PursuitExodus 14
Pharaoh and his officials change their minds about releasing Israel, and he takes 600 of the best chariots after them (Exodus 14:5 to 7).
When Israel saw the great power that the LORD had exercised over the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD and believed in Him and in His servant Moses.The pursuit ends in faith: the people who feared Pharaoh now fear the LORD.
6. The SongExodus 15
Moses and the Israelites sing to the LORD, who has thrown the horse and rider into the sea (Exodus 15:1). The song is the hinge of the whole book: after it, the story stops being about getting out of Egypt and starts being about getting to the mountain.
With loving devotion You will lead the people You have redeemed; with Your strength You will guide them to Your holy dwelling.The song calls Israel redeemed before the LORD gives the law at Sinai.
The Sea
Exodus 14, the crossing of the sea in three moments
THE TRAP IS DELIBERATE
God tells Moses where Israel is to camp so that Pharaoh will say they are wandering the land in confusion (Exodus 14:2 to 4). Freed slaves are trapped between water and chariots.
STILL, THEN FORWARD
Moses tells the people that the LORD will fight for them and they need only be still (Exodus 14:14). Then God tells him to have the Israelites go forward. They add nothing to their own deliverance but the walking, into a corridor they did not open.
THE OLD MASTER IS DROWNED
Israel walks out on dry ground between walls of water, and not one of the army that owned them survives. Deliverance in this book ends the old master; God makes no terms with him.
Two Honest Questions
two questions readers ask of the history, with the scholars who answer them
Which sea, and by what route?3 paragraphs
The Hebrew yam suph is literally “sea of reeds”; “Red Sea” reaches English through the Greek Old Testament. The word for reeds settles nothing about the depth of the water.
The historic Christian reading places the crossing at the head of the Gulf of Suez and Mount Sinai at Jebel Musa in the south of the peninsula. The pilgrim Egeria records that route in her Travels, written about AD 383.
James Hoffmeier, in Ancient Israel in Sinai (2005), places the crossing at the lakes on Egypt's eastern frontier, near Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes. Colin Humphreys, in The Miracles of Exodus (2003), places it at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, with Mount Sinai in Arabia.
Why is there no Egyptian record of it?1 paragraph
Kenneth Kitchen, in On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003), argues that the argument from silence is weak here. Egyptian royal inscriptions record victories, and a state that chiselled out the names of its own inconvenient pharaohs would not record losing a slave force. The record does show the Delta full of Semitic populations and slaves. It shows Egyptian loanwords and local colour woven accurately through the narrative, and a covenant form at Sinai that fits the second millennium.
What the Text Leaves Unsaid
four silences of Exodus, and what readers infer from them
Exodus names neither the pharaoh who enslaved Israel nor the pharaoh who let them go. It gives counts of years in place of a calendar date.
Now the duration of the Israelites’ stay in Egypt was 430 years.In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites had come out of the land of Egypt, in the month of Ziv, the second month of the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, he began to build the house of the LORD.The verse gives the one count of years between the exodus and the building of Solomon's temple.
Exodus 12:12 and Numbers 33:4 say the LORD judged the gods of Egypt, and neither names a god for a plague, so a table matching each plague to one Egyptian god is an inference. Exodus never calls the lamb Christ; Paul does.
The Grammar of Redemption
four elements of rescue, first set at the exodus
1. Initiated1 verse, 1 paragraph
God moves first, before Israel prays rightly, and the initiative is entirely His (Exodus 2:24 and Exodus 6:5). Paul finds the same order at the cross.
But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.2. By blood1 verse, 1 paragraph
An unblemished lamb dies in the place of a household, and its blood is applied as well as shed (Exodus 12:5 to 7 and Exodus 12:13). Peter names the price of the new rescue in the same terms.
For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life you inherited from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or spot.3. From and to2 verses, 1 paragraph
One Hebrew root covers slave-labour and worship, and Israel changes masters. Freedom is transfer of ownership.
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and tell him that this is what the LORD says: ‘Let My people go, so that they may worship Me.you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body.4. Sealed by presence2 verses, 1 paragraph
The rescue finishes when the glory of the LORD fills the tabernacle and God travels with Israel (Exodus 25:8 and Exodus 40:34). John's verb for the Son's dwelling is the verb of pitching a tent, and Revelation ends the Bible with the same picture.
The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and He will dwell with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God.How the Teachers Read It
four voices from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first
1509 to 1564 · John Calvin
John Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva, reads the fifth plague as a message to Pharaoh himself.
“The murrain is appositely called God's ‘hand,’ because it arose from His just judgment; for this expression is opposed to natural causes, to the arts and devices of men, and to accidental chances -- as if Moses had said that the hand of God would appear in ‘the very grievous murrain,’ that Pharaoh may perceive the Deity to be wroth with him.”
John Calvin · Commentaries · on Exodus 9:3Reformed
1703 to 1791 · John Wesley
John Wesley, who led the Methodist revival, carries the Passover of Egypt into the life of the church at Corinth.
“Purge out therefore the old leaven - Both of sinners and of sin. That ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened - That is, that being unleavened ye may be a new lump, holy unto the Lord. For our passover is slain for us - The Jewish passover, about the time of which this epistle was wrote, ver. 11, was only a type of this.”
John Wesley · Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament · on 1 Corinthians 5:7Evangelical
1802 to 1910 · Jamieson, Fausset & Brown
Robert Jamieson, Andrew Fausset and David Brown read the wilderness journey as a picture of Christ.
“Christ is the pillar cloud that screens us from the heat of God's wrath. Christ as ‘the light of the world’ is our ‘pillar of fire’ to guide us in the darkness of the world. As the rock when smitten sent forth the waters, so Christ, having been once for all smitten, sends forth the waters of the Spirit.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible · on 1 Corinthians 10:2Reformed
1934 to 2018 · Chuck Missler
Chuck Missler, who taught the Bible through Koinonia House, points to one law of the Passover meal.
“Exodus 12 is a key chapter on the Lamb and in Exodus 12:46, the Scripture states that not a bone was to be broken.”
Chuck Missler · Passover (article) · on Exodus 12:46Evangelical
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Chuck Missler
The Date and the Event
whether Israel came out of Egypt as the text says, and whether it left about 1446 BC or about 1260 BC
A historical exodusJames Hoffmeier
James Hoffmeier, in Israel in Egypt (1997), holds the historic Christian reading: Israel came out of Egypt as the text says. The reading stands whether the company was large or small.
Its evidence includes the Merneptah Stele of about 1208 BC, which names Israel in Canaan.
A later national storyIsrael Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman
Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, in The Bible Unearthed (2001), read the exodus as a national story written later, with a small historical core at most.
Their strongest case: no trace of a large population camped in Sinai has been found, and the places the story names fit the seventh century BC better than the thirteenth.
The fifteenth century BCEugene Merrill
Eugene Merrill, in Kingdom of Priests (1987), reads the 480 years of 1 Kings 6:1 as a plain total, which places the exodus about 1446 BC.
The objection: Exodus 1:11 names the store city Rameses, a name that belongs to the thirteenth century.
The thirteenth century BCKenneth Kitchen
Kenneth Kitchen, in On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003), reads the 480 years as twelve generations and dates the exodus to the thirteenth century, about 1260 BC.
The objection: 1 Kings 6:1 gives a count of years, and the count reads as years.
Keep the Feast
Paul's charge to the church, 1 Corinthians 5:8
Israel kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days each year to remember the night it left Egypt.
Therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old bread, leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and of truth.Paul makes the feast the believer's whole life.
The Vocabulary of the Rescue
the words the rescue gives the rest of Scripture, from Exodus and from Luke
A table of five words: four Hebrew words from Exodus and one Greek word from Luke 9:31, each with its Strong's number.
| Word | Number | Sense in this place |
|---|---|---|
| pesach | Hebrew, H6453 | Passover, to pass over, spare, shield |
| ga'al | Hebrew, H1350 | to redeem; God's verb at Exodus 6:6 |
| padah | Hebrew, H6299 | to ransom; the father's verb for his firstborn at Exodus 13:13 to 15 |
| matstsah | Hebrew, H4682 | unleavened bread, leaven purged |
| exodos | Greek, G1841 | a going-out, a departure |
Ga'al and padah give two pictures of the same act. Ga'al is what a relative does: the kinsman with the right and the obligation to buy back what his family lost. The book of Ruth later uses the word of Boaz.
Padah is what a buyer does: a price handed over and a captive released.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- John Calvin, Commentaries, on Exodus 9:3.
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, on 1 Corinthians 5:7.
- Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, on 1 Corinthians 10:2.
- Chuck Missler, Passover (article), on Exodus 12:46.
- Eugene Merrill, Kingdom of Priests, 1987.
- Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 2003, chapters 4 and 6.
- Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 2001, chapter 2.
- Egeria, Travels (Itinerarium Egeriae), about AD 383, the journey to Sinai and Clysma.
- James K. Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai, 2005.
- James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 1997.
- Colin J. Humphreys, The Miracles of Exodus, 2003.
- The Merneptah Stele, Cairo Museum JE 31408.
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