What happens if we read the Exodus as a story of divine conflict? By reading the Exodus with an explicitly mythological lens, we can gain a new level of meaning. I’m going to briefly outline what that could look like. But it will only be an overview of a very complicated subject with lots of disagreement over how it should be read and understood within its socio-historical and literary contexts.
The Myth of the Exodus
I have been persuaded by the argument that we should read the Exodus within a mythological framework. This does not mean we should assume there was no historical Exodus event. I think the literary, historical, and archaeological evidence all support such a claim. However, the telling of the story and the way it is presented in the Bible are framed within a mythological scheme. That is, the story is told from within the perspective that the gods of Egypt are real and are in conflict with the God of Israel. Both sets of divine combatants are represented by their champions and the whole story is given as an example of God’s power and victory over the might of Egypt.
To understand the story, we need to get ourselves into the mindset of those ancient people, as much as is possible. A basic belief was that the might of a people or state was commensurate with the strength of their gods.
The Egyptians were the super-power of the ancient world. They had endured for thousands of years by the time of the Exodus, and they had managed to win most wars they fought. They were wealthy and powerful. As such, their gods must have been incredibly powerful as well. More powerful than the gods of the people they defeated in battle.
In contrast, the rough federation of tribes which constituted the Israelite people, the Hebrew people, did not even know who their God was anymore. That element of the Israelite people in slavery in Egypt had forgotten their ancestral God and, as slaves, were obviously a weak people with weak gods. Even those Israelites still in Canaan were weak, fractured, and little more than a loose association of related tribes.
YHWH vs. Ra
This is the greater context for the conflict between Israel and Egypt, between Moses and Pharaoh, and between YHWH and the Egyptian deities. The mighty and powerful super-power Egypt verses a small group of slaves from a fractured and divided tribal association of no importance and no power. There is a clear imbalance of power right from the very beginning. So when we start the Exodus story by YHWH hearing the despair of his people and deciding to act on it, we enter a story which is already in motion.
Within that broader context, of gods squaring off against each other over the destiny of a group of slaves, we come to the divine representatives. A Pharaoh, and a slave child. The Pharaoh, probably Ramesses II, was one of the most powerful men in the world at that time. He had immense personal power, huge resources to draw from, and one of the strongest military forces in the Mediterannean basin. Then of course there is the mythological ement to consider.
The Pharoah was a divine representative. He was a priestly figure, responsible for carrying out a series of special rituals throughout the year for the sake of the survival of Egypt. But more than a mere priest, Pharoah was himself a semi-divine figure. The Pharoah was believed to be the son of a god. Specifically, the sun god Ra (or Re depending on the period). At the time of the Exodus, Ra was the most important deity in the Egyptian pantheon. The Pharaoh was a form of incarnation of that deity, considered to be a demi-god themselves, through whole Ra would work.
Again, let’s contrast this with Moses.
Who Was Moses?
Moses is born to an enslaved person. He is at risk of death right from his birth, and his mother has to give him up to the river in order to try and keep him alive. While raised in the royal court, he goes into exile and returns back to his people. But he is always apart from the Israelites. Raised in the oppressors home. Married to a foreign woman.
He represents the forgotten and alien YHWH, not only in his words and signs but in his own alien nature. Ramses is the all-powerful demi-god Pharaoh. Moses is the exiled and sinful child of slaves. They represent the power dynamics at play. They are representative figures within this story. They are historical individuals, but for the context of the story being told, they are also representing their people and their gods within their own personal contexts.
Understanding Names
Now, a quick note about names. Because names are important in the Bible. They tell us about the people in the story and what their role is. Lets start with Pharaoh. In ancient Egyptian, Msy means child. The name Ramesses means child of Ra. We have already said that Ramses was understood to be a living god, a child of Ra, the divine incarnation of the sun-god who was invested with divine power in his person and actions. So Ramses name tells you exactly who he is – a human child of a divine being who is himself semi-divine.
Now lets talk about Moses’ name. There is some controversy here. In the Torah, he is given the name Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter because he was ‘drawn up out of the water.’ However, the Hebrew word Mshe can be derived from water, but it lacks the nuance of being drawn out, which would have been Mshidihu. But even if this were true, why would Pharaoh’s daughter give her adopted child a name in the slave language? Why would she even know the derivation of Hebrew naming conventions? It is far more likely that the link between the name Moses and the Hebrew meaning was introduced by a later editor to create some distance from the Egyptian culture.
So we should assume that Moses’ name derives from an Egyptian root and not from Hebrew, although recognising that it has been given a Hebrew gloss. Some scholars have suggested that the name Moses is similar to two Egyptian words for water and seed and so suggesting that the name means ‘child of the Nile’ given where he was found. This is a sound argument. However, I think that it is a more complicated explanation for the name and that the simpler reason is more likely.
I agree with the argument which says we should read the name within the broader context of the story and that we should therefore interpret Moses’ name within the mythological telling. As such, we should see Moses’ name as being derived from an Egyptian name which sounds similar to Mshe but which means ‘son’ or ‘child’ as seen in Pharaohs such as Thutmose or Ramesses. However, whilst Ramesses means child of Ra, Moses simply means child or son. There is no father in his name to give him history or power or status. Moses simply is. But as a representative of the forgotten and alien YHWH, Moses stands in the place for everyone else who is not Ramesses.
Divine Conflict
The conflict between these two figures is prepared. On one side is the demi-god child of Ra, the Pharaoh of a super-power. On the other, is a fatherless child without a name who is called by a forgotten God of a people enslaved. It seems an entirely one sided conflict. But it is meant to seem like that. The power imbalance within the story is the whole point of the mythological gloss being given to the telling of the Exodus. Because the Exodus is not just the origin story for the people of Israel, is a kind of origin story for YHWH as well.
The moment of divine conflict begins when Moses and the Egyptian sorcerer-priests make their staffs turn into serpents. Moses’s staff eats the magician’s staffs. There is already a display of dominance in this set-piece confrontation. But it is only a warm-up, the main event is about to take place. Here come the plagues. Each of the ten plagues of Egypt is a direct attack against one of the Egyptian deities.
At first, the Magicians are able to respond. But soon the divine power of YHWH is demonstrated as superior to that of the Egyptian gods. Each plague showed that YHWH had dominion over the most powerful of the Egyptian gods. Including Ra when YHWH blackened the sun in an eclipse. Then the final, horrible, terrible last plague when the first born are killed brings a direct attack against the sovereignty of the Egyptian gods to protect their people.
The plagues are not random. They are not only a demonstration of God’s power over nature. In a sense, the historicity of the plagues is not important for their inclusion in the story. It doesn’t matter if they happened or not. The story is using them to demonstrate that YHWH, the gods of an enslaved people, was more powerful than the gods of Egypt.
The Lord is a Warrior
The Israelites were not being set free by their own power, but by YHWH alone. They could make no claim to greatness for themselves, nor could they make great claims for the origins of their nation. They were dependent upon YHWH’s power and might for their freedom.
In the the escape from Egypt the Israelites leave with money and treasure. They have plundered Egypt just as they would have done if they had defeated Egypt in battle. This is a symbolic display of victory. It is what happened at the end of a war. YHWH has given the Israelites victory over the Egyptians in a divine battle, fought through creation, where the real enemies of Israel, the Egyptian gods, were defeated by YHWH’s mighty army.
Thus the Israelites take their spoils of war and run away. But the Egyptians pursue them with the mightiest weapons in their arsenal. The battle-chariots of Egypt had defeated all their enemies. They were the equivalent of modern battle tanks or fighter jets. But again, Israel did not defeat them. Israel ran away. It was YHWH who turned back the waters against them and destroyed them. It was YHWH who gave them victory.
That is why immediately after the escape, a prophetess sings that YHWH is a warrior. It was not Israel who won their own escape from slavery. It was YHWH who gave it to them by defeating the powers that underpinned Pharaoh’s power. The mythological telling of Exodus establishes the dominance of YHWH over the dark spiritual powers of the world and gives warning to any other nation who comes across those stories that the Israelites were protected by a God more powerful that the Egyptian gods.
While we may not believe that the mythological telling is true, we should understand the way it has informed the Jewish and then the Christian tradition in its understanding of God. Particularly when it comes to Easter. We can read Easter as we read the Exodus, as form of divine conflict. Not between a good god and an evil god, but by Jesus destroying and defeating the dark spiritual forces that humanity creates through our idolatry. Those false gods that we create are shown to be empty and powerless. To be little more than shadows. But instead of striking the nations with plagues and with death, God sacrifices himself to defeat death itself in a final confrontation which sets everyone free, not only one nation.
When we start to read Exodus as a kind of divine conflict with Moses and Ramesses as representative figures, we can also start to read Easter as a divine conflict with Jesus and Caesar in those same roles. Then perhaps we might also start to better understand the role of Easter in our everyday life. What are the false gods in your life, in our society, which we need God to unseat and depose in order for us to be set free?
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