Saviors before Sinai

Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph (Exodus 1:8).

In one short sentence, the Hebrew Bible sets up what is arguably the most influential story in human history. Many ages after its ancient roots were committed to writing, the Exodus continues to hold a central role in the three major Abrahamic faiths, and it is as vital and active today as it ever was. If there is a story that has moved more bodies, traveled more places, lifted more hearts, inspired more retellings, spawned more meanings, or changed more worlds, I don’t know what it is.

Our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ (1 Corinthians 10:1-4).

With these words, Paul sets the stage for one of the most consequential narrative adaptations in human history. Paul’s account of Christ’s death and resurrection, an account that would shape all subsequent Christian theology, is, in essence, a retelling of the Exodus. The world presently groans under slavery, the Apostle explains, but Christ has come to liberate us and lead us into a new world of freedom. Slaves no longer, we are, in Christ, adopted heirs of God. The Exodus was the first--and is still the foremost--metaphor for Christian salvation.

(In the Restoration’s expanded canon, the award for first explicitly Christian theological adaptation of the Exodus probably goes to Lehi’s son Jacob. In an important sermon interpreting Isaiah in light of his father’s messianic prophecies, Jacob alludes to the Israelites’ captivity and deliverance in Egypt when he says that “death and hell must deliver up their dead, and hell must deliver up its captive spirits, and the grave must deliver up its captive bodies, and the bodies and the spirits of men will be restored one to the other; and it is by the power of the resurrection of the Holy One of Israel” [2 Nephi 9:12].)

Long before it was theology, though, the Exodus was the story of a people’s suffering. With spare, penetrating detail, the Hebrew Bible conveys the depth of Israelite humiliation and anguish. Pharaoh presses the people into hard labor in the construction of the royal cities of Pithom and Rameses. He adds irony to cruelty by making them raise monuments to his own oppression. They break their backs to make bricks, set mortar, and labor in the fields. The slave masters work them ruthlessly--that is, without “ruth,” or compassion, regardless of any human cost. Whips and quotas are the tools of exploitation: production quotas drive their feverish labor even when the necessary materials are denied, and whips beat their exhausted bodies when they fail to produce. Their hearts and minds suffer no less: the text observes the Israelites’ initial apathy at the prospect of liberation “because of their discouragement and harsh labor” (Exodus 6:9, NIV).

It’s no wonder, then, that “the Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out” (Exodus 2:23, NIV). And it’s no wonder that Exodus 1-6 has spoken with a plain and powerful indignation to oppressed peoples in all times and places. Enslaved African-Americans sang:

Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt's land
Tell old Pharaoh: Let my people go. . .
O let us all from bondage flee: let my people go
And let us all in Christ be free: let my people go.

In his Autobiography, Frederick Douglass rebukes those who cite these songs “as evidence of [enslaved peoples’] contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”

The epic story of Israelite slavery contained in the opening chapters of Exodus provided some measure of dignity and accompaniment to enslaved Americans in conditions of unthinkable injustice--and it has done the same for more downtrodden souls, in more circumstances of suffering and cruelty, than any archive could ever recover.

Now I add a second brief observation to my first point about the Israelites’ enslavement. It will seem unrelated at first, but I’ll bring the two points together in the end.

In these chapters, a large cast of women ensures Moses’s physical survival. Time after time, we see women go to extraordinary lengths to save a life that, as of yet, is just one of a teeming Hebrew cohort. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah cannily defy Pharaoh’s infanticide decree and preserve the entire generation of which Moses is a part. Jochebed, Moses’s mother, risks her life for months to conceal her infant--and then, with perfect faith, entrusts her child to the waters meant to drown him. Miriam intervenes with bold wit at precisely the right moment to return the baby to his mother’s arms. Pharaoh’s daughter, for her part, recognizes that the child is Hebrew and saves him in defiance of her father’s decree. She goes so far as to memorialize her act of salvation in the name she gives the baby: “I drew him out of the water.” Finally, Zipporah, Moses’s Midianite wife, saves his life yet again in the cryptic episode of chapter 4, when she performs the priestly rite of covenantal circumcision that Moses himself seems to have left undone. Without these women, there is no Moses; without Moses, there is no Exodus.

I draw a simple lesson from the story of Moses’s early life: women and men need each other for the survival of their mutual society. The first chapters of Exodus seem to suggest that, with the cooperation of the sexes, a people can thrive even against the headwinds of extreme political or economic adversity--as the Israelites’ demographic vigor in Egypt illustrates. And the amity of the sexes is needed not just for sexual procreation and the formation of families, though that is foundational. Men and women must further cooperate as friends and fellow laborers to serve and preserve human life in all circumstances. Men and women must offer their comparative strengths in service to one another and also, when called upon, must act beyond their wont to do what is needed. This is the lesson of Shiphrah and Puah, Jochebed and Miriam, the princess and the priestess, who, together with Amram, Jethro, and Aaron, saved the life of a slave’s infant child. All unknown to them, that child would one day stand before a burning bush and ask the name of God.

This, too, is the lesson of Frederick and Harriet, heroes of Black liberation in our own history. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were acquainted through their abolitionist work and regarded one another with respect. Both were born into slavery on Maryland’s eastern shore. Douglass became the orator, writer, and statesman, while Tubman acted directly to save individuals and lead them to freedom. In 1868, Douglass wrote to Tubman and assured her that

You ask for what you do not need when you call upon me for a word of commendation. I need such words from you far more than you can need them from me …. The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You on the other hand have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night.… The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.^[1]

God is our first and final liberator. The Savior whom Moses knew as “I Am,” Paul introduced to the world under the name of Jesus Christ. But, as revealed by a modern prophet who wielded a rod like Moses (2 Nephi 3:17), the saving work of God proceeds by means of small-s saviors, men and women who labor as fellows in the day and in the night: in the temple, in the fields, in the clinic and the classroom and the council room. Among the lives we save and serve may well be those who, when it is most needful, lead us out from bondage into freedom.