Book of Exodus

Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament and of the five books of Moses, tells how God brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt by the Passover and the crossing of the sea, gave her the Ten Commandments at Sinai, and made His dwelling among her in the tabernacle; the Church receives it as the work of Moses, and the Orthodox Study Bible gives its major themes as "God's covenant with Israel and the judgment of her oppressors."

For Inquirers

Imagine a family that came to a foreign country as honored guests, stayed for generations, and woke up one day as slaves, forced to make mud bricks for a king who had forgotten why they were ever welcome. Exodus is the Bible's account of how that people got out, and its name simply means "departure."[^name] It begins with a baby. Pharaoh has ordered every Hebrew boy thrown into the river, and one mother sets her son afloat in a little basket smeared with tar, where the king's own daughter finds him, raises him as her son, and names him Moses, because she "took him out of the water."[^ex1-2] Grown up, he runs away to the desert, and while he is minding sheep on a mountain he sees a bush that is on fire and is not burning up; a voice speaks out of it and sends him back to Egypt to bring his people out.[^ex3] Pharaoh refuses, plague after plague strikes the land, and on the last night every Hebrew household kills a lamb, marks its doorposts with the blood, and eats the meal dressed for travel.[^ex12] They leave in the night, the army chases them to the edge of a sea, and the water stands up on either side like a wall so that they can walk across on dry ground.[^ex14] The rest of the book follows them into the wilderness, where bread appears on the ground each morning, to a mountain wrapped in smoke where God speaks ten commandments, through the grief of a golden calf made while Moses is away, and at last to the tent in which God's glory settles over the camp like a cloud.[^ex-rest]

For the Church this is more than a rescue story from long ago. The night of the lamb gave her greatest feast its name, for Pascha comes from a Hebrew word meaning "passing over," and the services of that feast say that on this very day God made Israel pass over the sea and has now brought the whole human race up out of the power of death.[^pascha-syn] Christians in the early Church who came up out of the baptismal water were told that it had been their own sea, and that the tyrant who chased them to its edge did not come out the other side.[^cyril19] The burning bush has a place in her prayers as well: the hymns say that as the bush burned and was not consumed, so the Virgin Mary bore a child and remained a virgin, and icons show the bush with Mary at its heart.[^bush-lit]

None of this is easy to hold at first. Rivers turn to blood, a sea stands up in walls, and a whole people is fed from the sky, and a reader may fairly wonder what to make of it. Orthodox writers also differ on smaller questions: they place the departure from Egypt in different centuries, and the Orthodox Study Bible's introduction names no year.[^date-inq] Tradition says Moses wrote the book, though its opening gives no author's name, and the Church does not make the book's place in the Bible depend on settling that point.[^oca-auth] Whatever is made of the dates and the details, the book itself says plainly what it wants known about God: that He heard slaves groaning, that He gave Moses His own name, and that He promised to make His home in the middle of His people.[^ex-heart] Thoughtful readers who disagree about the rest have found the book large enough to keep returning to.

Overview

• Exodus is the second book of the Old Testament and the second of the five books of Moses, the Torah or Pentateuch. Its English name comes from the Greek translation and means "departure," since Israel's departure from Egypt is the book's dominant event; its Hebrew name is taken from the opening words, "These are the names," and the "And" or "Now" that begins that Hebrew sentence suggests that it is the sequel to Genesis.[^name][^pent]
• The Church's tradition ascribes it to Moses. The Orthodox Study Bible rests the tradition on Christ (Mark 1.44), His disciples (John 1.45), and the book itself (Exodus 17.14), and dates the writing to Israel's forty years in the wilderness; the book's own wording is that the Lord told Moses to "Write this for a memorial in a book" and that Moses "wrote all the words of the Lord."[^osb-intro][^moses-wrote]
• It stands second in the Old Testament lists of Cyril of Jerusalem and Athanasius, in canon 60 of the Synod of Laodicea (whose authenticity has been doubted), and in Jerome's account of the Hebrew order, which calls it "Hellesmoth, which is named Exodus."[^canon-lists]
• Its shape, on the Orthodox Study Bible's outline, is five movements: deliverance from bondage in Egypt (1:1-15:21), wandering in the wilderness (15:22-18:27), God's covenant with Israel at Sinai (19-24), instructions for the sanctuary and its ministers (25-31), and the golden calf (32-34). Bishop Alexander (Mileant) adds the closing narrative of the tabernacle's construction (35-40).[^outline]
• Its central themes are God's covenant with Israel and the judgment of her oppressors; the revelation of the divine name, which the Orthodox Study Bible glosses as "I AM the Existing One"; the Passover and the passage of the sea as the act of redemption; the Ten Commandments and the covenant sealed in blood; and the presence of God among His people in the tent of meeting.[^osb-intro][^themes][^oca-pass]
• The Church reads it as the pattern of her own life. The OCA calls the passover and exodus "the central event of the entire Old Testament history"; the Song of Moses at the sea (Exodus 15) is the first of the nine biblical odes sung at Matins; and the book supplies the readings of Holy Saturday and of the eve of Theophany.[^oca-pass][^odes][^holy-sat][^theophany]
• The Greek text the Church reads differs in places from the English wording quoted by the OCA, OrthodoxWiki, and Bishop Alexander: in the length of the stay in Egypt, in the interval from the exodus to Solomon's temple, in the order of three commandments, in the wind at the sea, and in the English rendering of the divine name. The section on the manuscripts and the text sets out each case.[^text-diffs]

Summary

Exodus takes up where Genesis closes: Jacob's sons are in Egypt, and "there arose up another king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph," who sets taskmasters over the Hebrews so that "they built strong cities for Pharao, both Pitho, and Ramesses, and On, which is Heliopolis" (Exodus 1.8; Exodus 1.11). When Pharao orders every male child cast into the river, a Levite woman hides her son and then lays him in an ark smeared with bitumen among the reeds, and Pharao's daughter lifts him out and calls his name Moses, "saying, I took him out of the water" (Exodus 1.22; Exodus 2.3; Exodus 2.10). A grown man, Moses strikes down an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, hides him in the sand, and flees to Madiam; the king of Egypt dies, and "God heard their groanings, and God remembered his covenant made with Abraam and Isaac and Jacob" (Exodus 2.12; Exodus 2.15; Exodus 2.23; Exodus 2.24). At the mount of Choreb "an angel of the Lord appeared to him in flaming fire out of the bush," and the bush "was not consumed"; the voice that calls him from it sends him to Pharao and, asked for a name, answers, "I am THE BEING" (Exodus 3.2; Exodus 3.10; Exodus 3.14). With Aaron at his side Moses demands that the people be sent away; the Lord says, "I will harden his heart," the Nile is turned to blood, and plague follows plague, down to a darkness "that may be felt," until at midnight "the Lord smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 4.21; Exodus 5.1; Exodus 7.20; Exodus 10.21; Exodus 12.29). On that night Israel eats the passover with "your loins girded, and your sandals on your feet," the blood on the houses a sign by which the Lord will protect them, and departs from Ramesses "to the full number of six hundred thousand footmen," led by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night (Exodus 12.11; Exodus 12.13; Exodus 12.37; Exodus 13.21). At the sea, Pharao's horses and chariots go in after them, but "the water of it was a wall on the right hand and a wall on the left" for Israel, and "Israel saw the Egyptians dead by the shore of the sea" (Exodus 14.22; Exodus 14.23; Exodus 14.30). Moses and the children of Israel sing, "Let us sing to the Lord, for he is very greatly glorified: horse and rider he has thrown into the sea" (Exodus 15.1). In the wilderness the bitter water of Merrha is made sweet by a tree, the Lord says, "I will rain bread upon you out of heaven," and water comes out of the rock in Choreb (Exodus 15.25; Exodus 16.4; Exodus 17.6). On the third day at Sina there are "voices and lightnings and a dark cloud," the Lord speaks the ten words, and when the people stand afar off, "Moses went into the darkness where God was" (Exodus 19.16; Exodus 20.1; Exodus 20.21). The people answer, "All things whatsoever the Lord has spoken we will do and hearken therein," and Moses sprinkles them with the blood of the covenant (Exodus 24.7; Exodus 24.8). He goes up for forty days and nights and is told to make a sanctuary "according to all things which I shew thee in the mountain; even the pattern of the tabernacle," and is given the two tables "written upon with the finger of God" (Exodus 24.18; Exodus 25.9; Exodus 31.18). Meanwhile the people say to Aaron, "Arise and make us gods who shall go before us"; he forms a molten calf, and "the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play" (Exodus 32.1; Exodus 32.4; Exodus 32.6). Moses breaks the tables, burns and grinds the calf, and pleads, "if not, blot me out of thy book" (Exodus 32.19; Exodus 32.20; Exodus 32.32). Then the Lord passes before him and proclaims His name, "pitiful and merciful, longsuffering and very compassionate, and true," and the skin of Moses' face is "made glorious" (Exodus 34.6; Exodus 34.30). The book closes as the tabernacle is raised and "was filled with the glory of the Lord," and Israel is led by the cloud by day and the fire by night "in all their journeyings" (Exodus 40.34; Exodus 40.38).[^summary]

Author, Source, and Intention

Exodus differs from Genesis in one respect that bears on the questions below: the man the tradition names as its author is also the man at the center of its action. Moses is drawn out of the river in the second chapter, hears his name spoken from the bush in the third, passes between the walls of water in the fourteenth, and goes into the darkness where God was in the twentieth, and three separate passages speak of his writing.[^moses-wrote] Genesis closes on a coffin in Egypt (Genesis 50.26) before Moses is born, whereas Exodus brings him on stage. The questions that Exodus shares with the whole Pentateuch, chiefly the meaning of "Mosaic" authorship and the Documentary Hypothesis, are set out at length in Book of Genesis and are only summarized here; what belongs to Exodus in particular is given in full.

Who wrote it

The Orthodox Study Bible's introduction states the tradition in two sentences and names its three witnesses: "According to Hebrew and Christian tradition, Moses is the author of Exodus. This is the teaching of Christ (Mk 1:44), of His disciples (Jn 1:45), and of the book itself (17:14)."[^osb-intro] OrthodoxWiki's article repeats the claim, adds the verse in which Moses "wrote all the words of the LORD," and in its opening lines words the tradition with a qualifier, saying that the book was "mostly written by the Prophet Moses."[^ow-ex-auth] The paragraphs below set out what the book and the Orthodox writers say about how far the attribution reaches.

The book does speak of writing. After the battle with Amalec the Lord says to Moses, "Write this for a memorial in a book" (Exodus 17.14). At the foot of the mountain "Moses wrote all the words of the Lord," builds an altar and sets up twelve stones, and then "took the book of the covenant and read it in the ears of the people" (Exodus 24.4; Exodus 24.7). After the calf the Lord tells him again to write the words on which He has established His covenant with Israel (Exodus 34.27). F. F. Bruce, introducing the canon, points to the narrative of Exodus 24:4-8 as the account of how the terms of the Sinai covenant were set down in a document (p. 9, paraphrased).[^moses-wrote] None of the three passages says that the whole book of Exodus is what Moses wrote. They say that he was a writer and that the covenant was committed to writing, and that is as far as the text itself goes.

The New Testament carries the tradition further, and for this book the nearest word is Christ's own. Answering the Sadducees about the resurrection, He asks, "haven't you read in the book of Moses about the Bush, how God spoke to him, saying, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'?" (Mark 12.26), and Luke's version has Him say that "even Moses showed at the bush" (Luke 20.37). Philip tells Nathanael that he has found the one "of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets, wrote" (John 1.45), and the Orthodox Study Bible adds Christ's words to the cleansed leper about "the things which Moses commanded" (Mark 1.44).[^nt-moses] The Mark passage comes nearest to naming Exodus, because it assigns one particular scene, the burning bush, to "the book of Moses" by name; it does not say that Moses wrote every page of it.

Two second-century apologists take the same view of Moses. Theophilus of Antioch, setting out the commandments from Exodus in his letter to Autolycus, says of that divine law that "Moses, who also was God's servant, was made the minister both to all the world, and chiefly to the Hebrews."[^theoph-9] Justin Martyr, telling the story of the bush in his First Apology, sends his readers to the source for the rest: "if you desire to know, you will learn them accurately from his writings."[^justin-62] Neither sentence defines what "his writings" included. Between them they show that two second-century Christian writers spoke of Moses as the lawgiver and the writer behind the books they sent their readers to.

How far the attribution reaches is a separate matter, and Orthodox writers are plain about it. The OCA's short article on the Law says that "Scholars tell us that the Law was not written by the personal hand of Moses" and that the books show evidence of several oral and written traditions and of material from later periods; it adds that nevertheless, in the tradition of Israel and of the Church, the Law is essentially connected with Moses.[^oca-law] Bishop Alexander (Mileant), a firmer voice, says in his Apologetic Sketches that the tradition "does not claim that he wrote each word in these books."

What he does claim is narrower, and he places it at the points that matter most: "Certain parts of the Pentateuch, especially those containing Divine revelation, were written by Moses personally."[^mileant-sk] The attribution to Moses, on his account, holds for the book as a whole without requiring that every word came from Moses' hand.

Fr. Stephen De Young, speaking to a parish audience, states the claim together with its limits. If "write the Torah" means that Moses sat down and wrote out the Hebrew words we now have, he says, the answer is no, because that form of Hebrew did not yet exist: Moses "did not personally write down those exact words," and "probably did not record the events following his own death."[^dy-torah]

What the tradition means by calling the Torah "from Moses," in De Young's account, begins with the fact that "Moses did write." He "received things in writing, like the covenant from God that he wrote with his own finger, that he brought down from Mount Sinai," and so, in his words, "there are written documents from Moses that form the basis of what we have." After Moses the material was copied, handed down, and carried into the Hebrew of the oldest manuscripts we have.[^dy-torah]

To show what he means by a passage that is "one of the oldest parts of the Torah," handed down "without any editing," De Young points to the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 and to the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32. The Song of the Sea is in Hebrew so ancient and so little updated that "this looks like something that could have existed at the time of Moses exactly as is," whereas elsewhere in the Torah a text names a place and adds "which used to be called" an older name, an example he takes from Genesis.[^dy-torah]

The Church makes nothing depend on how these questions are settled. The OCA teaches that, because the whole Bible is inspired by God, "Who in this sense is its one original author," the identity of the human author is incidental to a book's interpretation, and "In no case would the Church admit that the identity of the author determines the authenticity or validity of a book."[^oca-auth] OrthodoxWiki's article on the canon applies the same principle to Moses by name: a newly unearthed document that scholars agreed came from his hand "would not be added to the canon," and an existing book proved not to be from its traditional author "would not be removed from the canon."[^ow-canon] The attribution to Moses is therefore a claim about the book's origin and authority that the Church holds as tradition, and her canon does not hang on it.

What lies behind it

Stephen, in his speech before the council in Acts, says that Moses "was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts 7.22), and Mileant adds that Moses, "a writer and legislator," had been raised at Pharaoh's court and so had an education that was excellent for its time.[^mileant-sk] The book itself puts records at the scenes that matter most: a memorial book after Amalec, the book of the covenant at the altar, and the tables of testimony "written upon with the finger of God" (Exodus 17.14; Exodus 24.7; Exodus 31.18).[^moses-wrote]

Exodus also expects to be told aloud. When the first Passover is instituted, the Lord says that if the children ask, "What is this service?", the answer is to be the story of the night (Exodus 12.26; Exodus 12.27); the same instruction returns in "thou shalt tell thy son in that day, saying, Therefore the Lord dealt thus with me, as I was going out of Egypt" (Exodus 13.8); and the Lord says of the plagues themselves that they are done "that ye may relate in the ears of your children, and to your children's children" (Exodus 10.2).[^retell]

Mileant says of the Pentateuch's sacred history as a whole that "It was sung beside the desert campfires, it was commemorated in the liturgical feasts, such as Passover, and it was transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation."[^mileant-pent] He does not tie the remark to these verses, but read beside them it fits: the feast is both something the book commands and a way the story it tells was carried forward. De Young speaks in the same spirit when he describes the Torah as a tradition that begins with Moses and "forms into the Torah as we have it today."[^dy-torah]

A few verses in Exodus read as though their writer stood beyond the events. Brenton's text of Exodus 16.35 says that "the children of Israel ate manna forty years, until they came to the land they ate the manna, until they came to the region of Phœnicia," a sentence that looks past the end of the wilderness, and a doubled one at that. Mileant says only that the Mosaic books contain "some additions that were obviously made after his death," and De Young says that names were updated "so people reading it would understand"; the verse is named here because any reader of the Greek can see it.[^ex16-35]

Mileant's booklet on the Pentateuch takes up the Near-Eastern background in a single paragraph. He grants "some similarities" between the Ten Commandments and the laws of the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu (2050 BC), the Amorite king Bilalam, the Sumer-Akkadian ruler Lirit-Ishtar, the Babylonian king Hammurabi (1800 BC), and "the Assyrian and Hittite laws composed around 1500 B.C.," and he accounts for them by the claim that the moral law is "ingrained by God into the human soul."[^mileant-laws] He then draws the line at religion, saying that whatever the likeness of details, the Law of Moses "has nothing in common with them in its religious values," because its center is the worship of "one single, invisible and just God." The names, dates, and comparisons are Mileant's own, and the account here goes no further than his.

Why it was written

Egypt, the Orthodox Study Bible's introduction says, "was judged by God for its treatment of the Hebrews and its rejection of Him as the One True God," and the forty years of wandering are "the consequence of Israel's sins, as well as a necessary time of preparation to inherit the promised land as a people set apart for God."[^osb-intro] A book with that double purpose is as much about Israel as about Pharaoh, and the Lord's own words at the sea say so: the Egyptians are to "know that I am the Lord," and the people are to "stand and see the salvation which is from the Lord" (Exodus 14.4; Exodus 14.13).

The covenant is the hinge of the whole book. Before the commandments are spoken, the Lord tells Moses what to say to the house of Jacob: "ye shall be to me a peculiar people above all nations," and "a royal priesthood and a holy nation" (Exodus 19.5; Exodus 19.6). The Decalogue itself begins by recalling the rescue, "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20.2), so that every command that follows rests on a deliverance already given. Mileant calls the Sinai covenant "rightfully regarded as the key to the Old Testament," because through it Israel becomes God's people and God becomes Israel's Lord, and the Orthodox Study Bible takes up the phrase of Exodus 19:6, noting that the priestly calling of all believers was foretold there and "finds its fulfillment in the Church."[^covenant]

The tabernacle supplies the book's third purpose, that God should live among His people. "Thou shalt make me a sanctuary, and I will appear among you," the Lord says, and later in the instructions He adds, "I will be called upon among the children of Israel, and will be their God" (Exodus 25.8; Exodus 29.45). The closing scene of the book answers the promise, when the cloud covers the tent and "the tabernacle was filled with the glory of the Lord" (Exodus 40.34). The Orthodox Study Bible's note on the tabernacle says that it was "the specific place where God was encountered in Israel," while adding that "this did not exhaust His Presence, for as Almighty God, He has always been everywhere present."[^osb-tab]

For the Church the intention that gathers up the rest is Christ. The Orthodox Study Bible's note on the Law, set at the Decalogue, says that "The pre-incarnate Christ gave Moses the Law," that "Christ, not Moses, was the Author of the Law," and that "The grace of Christ and the Law of Moses are complementary, not contradictory."[^osb-law] St. Paul reads the passage of the sea and the manna and the rock in the same light, "and the rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10.4), and the Lord Himself says, "for he wrote about me" (John 5.46). Gregory the Theologian, preaching at Pascha, takes the whole Exodus as a figure to be completed in a believer's life and closes his reading of it by saying, "Such is the Mystery of the Passover; such are the mysteries sketched by the Law and fulfilled by Christ."[^naz-45-intent] Bruce observes that the Old Testament itself presents the return from exile as a repetition of the saving power shown in the exodus, and that the New Testament writers see the history from Egypt to Canaan repeated in the experience of the Messiah and of the messianic people (pp. 59-60, paraphrased).[^bruce-recap] On this reading the book is meant to be retold, and the Church tells it again each year as the story of her own passage.

Manuscripts and the text

No autograph of Exodus survives, and every translation of it stands on copies. The streams are those already described for Genesis: the Hebrew of the Masoretes, the Greek of the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Dead Sea scrolls, which show that the Hebrew of their period was not uniform. The evidence for each is gathered in Book of Genesis and applies to Exodus alike, so what follows is what can be added for this book. It is thin in places and specific in others.

One witness to Exodus among the finds at Qumran is a Greek one. Bruce lists, among the Jewish copies of the Septuagint known to survive, a fragment of Exodus from Qumran Cave 7, labeled 7QLXXEx, alongside fragments of Leviticus and Numbers from Cave 4 (p. 44, paraphrased).[^bruce-7q] Bruce gives no date for it, and OrthodoxWiki says only that the Dead Sea Scrolls date broadly from about 150 BC to AD 75.[^masoretic] Of the great Christian codices, Bruce's lists show Exodus in Vaticanus and in Alexandrinus, which OrthodoxWiki dates to the fourth and fifth centuries, and they record Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy as missing from Sinaiticus as it now survives (p. 68, paraphrased).[^bruce-codices] This is the reverse of Genesis, where Vaticanus has lost its opening chapters. Brenton's English, whose title says it follows "the Vatican text" with the principal readings of Alexandrinus, rests for Exodus on Vaticanus, which Bruce's list shows as including the book.[^lxx-ow]

The differences between the Greek the Church reads and the wording that Orthodox writers quote can be seen by setting the two side by side. The first is the length of Israel's stay. Brenton's Greek of Exodus 12.40, which the Orthodox Study Bible's printed text also follows, says that "the sojourning of the children of Israel, while they sojourned in the land of Egypt and the land of Chanaan, was four hundred and thirty years," so that the figure takes in the patriarchs' time in Canaan as well as Egypt. Mileant's booklet reads the verse as counting from Jacob's arrival, saying that four hundred and thirty years had passed since their ancestor Jacob "had first come to live in Egypt."[^ex12-40] Theophilus of Antioch, writing in the second century, says that the Hebrews had "sojourned, then, in Egypt for 430 years."[^theoph-10] Whether his copy read differently from Brenton's or he was summarizing is not clear. The New Testament has its own numbers: Stephen says that Abraham's offspring would be aliens and slaves for "four hundred years" (Acts 7.6), as Brenton's Genesis 15.13 also has it, and Paul says that the law came "four hundred thirty years after" the promise (Galatians 3.17).[^ex12-40]

A second figure that differs reaches the date of the exodus itself. Brenton's Greek of 1 Kings 6.1 (the Septuagint's Third Kingdoms) puts Solomon's building of the temple "in the four hundred and fortieth year after the departure of the children of Israel out of Egypt," and the Orthodox Study Bible's printed Third Kingdoms says the same. OrthodoxWiki's article on Exodus and Mileant's booklet both quote the verse as "the four hundred and eightieth year," the reading on which the case for a fifteenth-century date is built; the OrthodoxWiki passage is nearly word for word Mileant's, so the two are one witness rather than two.[^kings-6-1] Theophilus, using neither, says that Solomon built the temple "566 years after the exodus of the Jews from Egypt," and Brenton's Greek of Exodus 13.18 adds that "in the fifth generation the children of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt."[^theoph-22] None of the sources cited here reconciles the three numbers, and the point returns in the section on the date.

The divine name in Exodus 3.14 reads "I am THE BEING" in Brenton, "I AM the Existing One" in the Orthodox Study Bible, whose introduction glosses it as the Name "YAHWEH, meaning 'I AM the Existing One,'" and "I AM WHO I AM" in the OCA's article on the Passover, which quotes an English Bible it does not name.[^name-3-14]

The commandments against adultery, theft, and killing stand in that order in Brenton's Exodus 20.13-Exodus 20.15 and in the order murder, adultery, theft in the Orthodox Study Bible's printed text; the New Testament itself gives the three in both orders, "Don't commit adultery," "Don't murder," "Don't steal" in Luke 18.20 and "Do not murder," "Do not commit adultery," "Do not steal" in Mark 10.19, and none of the sources cited here explains the Exodus difference.[^decalogue-order]

The wind that drives back the sea in Exodus 14.21 is "a strong south wind" in both Brenton and the Orthodox Study Bible and "a strong East wind" in the OCA's account of the Passover and in Mileant's retelling.[^ex14-21] And the Orthodox Study Bible prints Exodus 12.11 as "It is the Lord's Pascha," where Brenton has "It is a passover to the Lord," an apparent difference in the English word chosen, since the Orthodox Study Bible's own note says that Christ becomes our Passover, "pascha in Greek," and Archimandrite Ephrem Lash's Paschal synaxarion explains "Pascha" as the Hebrew for "Passing Over."[^pascha-word]

The Church's services keep their own readings. Lash notes, on the Exodus reading appointed for the Meeting of the Lord, that it is a selection from Exodus 12:51-13:16 with other verses added, that "The text in The Festal Menaion is misleading, being from the Hebrew, not the Greek of the Menaion," and that the Greek of the Menaion "differs noticeably from the LXX."[^lash-meeting] The note shows that the Menaion's Greek is not simply the printed Septuagint, and that the English of the Festal Menaion follows the Hebrew rather than the Greek of the Menaion.

The Greek and Hebrew accounts of the tabernacle (chapters 25-31 and 35-40) are not compared here, and the readings of the Samaritan Pentateuch in Exodus are likewise left aside beyond Bruce's general description of that text.[^bruce-sam] On the question of which text governs, OrthodoxWiki says that "the Orthodox Church continues to regard the LXX as its only canonical text of the Old Testament," and that the Orthodox Study Bible's Old Testament follows Rahlfs's edition "with reference to the Brenton translation," using the New King James wording only where the Greek would match the Hebrew.[^lxx-ow] Augustine's two principles for adjudicating between the Greek and the Hebrew are set out in the entry on Genesis.

Translations

The book's English name is a Greek word. OrthodoxWiki says that "Exodus" comes "from the Greek translation (Septuagint, LXX) because the departure of Israel from Egypt is the dominant historical fact in the book," and the same article says that the Hebrew title was the opening words, "elle-shemot."[^name] Jerome, describing the Hebrew order in his Prologus Galeatus, gives the Hebrew title in his own transliteration as "Hellesmoth, which is named Exodus."[^canon-lists] The Pentateuch was the first part of the Hebrew Bible to be put into Greek, according to OrthodoxWiki, in the third century before Christ at Alexandria, so Exodus belongs to the oldest layer of the Septuagint; the legend of its making, the later Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and Origen's Hexapla are treated in the entry on Genesis.[^lxx-ow]

For the Latin West, OrthodoxWiki reports that Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome in 382 to produce a standard Latin Bible, that the Old Latin translations before it "were considered to be crudely done and 'provincial,'" and that Jerome translated the Old Testament first from the Greek Septuagint and then, from about 390, from existing Hebrew texts, a version that "was not accepted by many, including Augustine, who felt the Septuagint was slighted."[^vulgate] OrthodoxWiki says of the Orthodox Church, by contrast, that she regards the Septuagint as her only canonical Old Testament text.

English versions of Exodus therefore divide according to their base text. The first English translation of the Septuagint, OrthodoxWiki says, was Charles Thomson's of 1808, and Brenton's of 1844, "according to the Vatican text," has "continually been in print" and is the English text on which this entry draws for Exodus.[^lxx-ow] The Orthodox Study Bible of 2008 gave the Pentateuch a new English rendering from Rahlfs's Greek with reference to Brenton, keeping New King James wording only where the Greek matched the Hebrew text. Its Exodus 14:21 reads "south wind" and its Exodus 3:14 reads "the Existing One." OrthodoxWiki lists the Eastern/Greek Orthodox Bible, a revision of Brenton; the New English Translation of the Septuagint of 2007; and the LXX2012, an American-English revision of Brenton.[^lxx-ow] The other readings described above are the ones found in the English wording that the OCA and Mileant quote, whose Bibles the sources do not name.

Controversy and Contestation

Exodus describes the founding act of Israel's life, and the arguments about it have been fought over morals and history as well as over meaning. The opponents taken up first, outside the Church and inside her margins, attacked the character of its God and the honesty of its heroes. Later readers had to work out how the Law the book contains stands to the Gospel, and what to do with a commandment that the Church's own writers count differently. The modern questions are of another kind: when the departure took place, whether Egypt's silence counts against it, and who set the book down. They are taken here roughly in that order.

Ancient objectors, heretical readings, and the voice in the bush

One charge against the book is a moral one, and it hangs on a single verse. The Lord tells Moses that every woman is to ask her neighbor for "articles of gold and silver, and apparel," and adds, "spoil ye the Egyptians"; on the night of the departure Israel asks the Egyptians for the same things, and "they lent to them; and they spoiled the Egyptians" (Exodus 3.22; Exodus 12.35; Exodus 12.36). The Marcionites, as Tertullian reports them, laid this at the Creator's door as an order to fraud and theft. Tertullian does not deny the facts. He changes the ledger: the Egyptians, he says, put in a claim for their vessels, the Hebrews entered a counter-claim for generations of unpaid labor on the cities and palaces, and the Creator's command, on that reckoning, "was plainly less than their due."[^marcion-spoil] The objection is known from Tertullian's report of it, since Marcion's own writing is lost, and the answer is that of a polemicist whose testimony is to be used with care. It shows, all the same, what the argument was: whether a command that looks like theft can be the payment of a debt.

Other heretics took the story in and made it their own. The Refutation of All Heresies, which OrthodoxWiki counts among the works of Hippolytus of Rome, describes the Peratae as reading Egypt as the body, the Red Sea as "the water of corruption," and the exodus as the soul's escape from the flesh, with the serpents of the wilderness as the stars that destroy those who only think they have crossed.[^peratae] The same work reports the Docetae as taking the Greek word for the bush, batos, to mean the air through which fiery light passes, so that the God who spoke from the bush was the fiery deity whom they held to have made this world.[^docetae] Chrysostom does not answer these readings by name, but his comment on Paul's "baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea" shows how the apostle handled the events, for he insists that the manna and the water were real things that were also sacraments: "though they were things of sense which were produced, yet were they spiritually exhibited, not according to the order of nature, but according to the gracious intention of the gift."[^chrys-1cor-23] The Peratae and the Docetae, as the Refutation reports them, read the story as a sign of something else, the soul's escape from the body or the fiery maker of this world; Chrysostom's apostle reads the same events as history that is also a sign.

The pagan answer was a counter-history. Theophilus tells Autolycus that Manetho, the Egyptian chronicler, "impiously charged Moses and the Hebrews who accompanied him with being banished from Egypt on account of leprosy," and he replies on Manetho's own ground by taking two admissions from him: that the ancestors of the Hebrews were shepherds, and that they went out of Egypt. "So that Manetho has unwillingly declared to us ... two particulars of the truth," he says.[^theoph-21] Manetho's charge is known here only as Theophilus gives it. The exchange does show that Egyptian testimony about the departure was already being argued over in the second century.

A quarrel with the Jews, which Justin Martyr carries on, concerns who it was that spoke from the bush. Justin says that "our Christ conversed with him under the appearance of fire from a bush," and that the Jews, who "maintain that He who said this was the Father and Creator of the universe," know neither the Father nor the Son.[^justin-63] His proof is in the text, and Brenton's Greek does show the alternation he relies on: "an angel of the Lord appeared to him," then "the Lord called him out of the bush," then "I am the God of thy father" (Exodus 3.2; Exodus 3.4; Exodus 3.6). Bruce, a Protestant historian of the canon, thinks Justin wrong, because Jesus Himself, in quoting Exodus 3:6 to the Sadducees, plainly identified the speaker with the Father and Creator, and Justin's rule that the "angel of the Lord" is the Son could not be dislodged by it (p. 64, paraphrased).[^bruce-justin]

Ambrose sides with Justin, saying flatly that "It was not the Father Who spoke to Moses in the bush or in the desert, but the Son," and OrthodoxWiki reports that Orthodox belief takes the angel to be the Logos, the "Angel of Great Counsel" of the Septuagint's Isaiah 9:6.[^ambrose-ow] The Orthodox Study Bible's note at the Decalogue goes a step further and teaches that the pre-incarnate Christ was the Lawgiver.[^osb-law]

The date of the exodus

No single date for the exodus can be taken from the reference works, and the reference works disagree with one another and, in one case, with themselves. OrthodoxWiki's article on Exodus says in its opening lines that tradition has the book "mostly written by the Prophet Moses 1,300 years before Christ," argues further down that the departure "falls sometime in the mid 15th century BC," and names Thutmose I as the probable Pharaoh; OrthodoxWiki's article on Moses says that he "was born in the thirteenth century BC"; and the OCA's synaxarion for his feast puts his birth about 1689 BC and his death in 1569 BC.[^dates-list] The OCA's article on the Law gives only a range, saying that the events from the call of Abraham to the death of Moses "probably took place sometime in the second millennium before Christ (2000–1200 BC)."[^oca-law] Subtracting the eighty years that Mileant gives for Moses at the departure from the synaxarion's birth year gives 1609 BC; that is an illustrative sum of this account's own, not a figure any of these sources states, and it falls in neither the fifteenth century nor the thirteenth. The sources' figures cannot all be right, and none of them is relied on here; what can be set out is the reasoning behind each.

The mid-fifteenth-century date rests on one verse and one sum. In the reading that Mileant and OrthodoxWiki quote, 1 Kings 6.1 puts the start of Solomon's temple "in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt," and Mileant adds that Solomon "is thought to have begun construction about 960 BC," which "places the time of Exodus to the midst of the 15th century BC."[^early-date] He argues from the Egyptian side as well: Joseph came to Egypt under the Hyksos, the Egyptian nobles of Thebes drove them out, a new dynasty began under Ahmose I with a policy of forced labor, and the Pharaoh of the exodus "most probably was Thutmose I."

Mileant's booklet is not wholly consistent on this line, as two of its passages show when set side by side. In its life of Moses it names Thutmose I, with a "possibly," as the king who "did not know Joseph," and it says that Moses and Aaron stood before "the reigning Pharaoh (probably the successor of the ruler from whom Moses had fled)," which fits Brenton's Exodus 2.23, where after a long time "the king of Egypt died." On that reading a different king reigned at the exodus, and that does not fit the earlier passage, which names Thutmose I as the Pharaoh of the exodus itself; the tension is this account's observation, not Mileant's. OrthodoxWiki's article reproduces the first passage nearly word for word, as a comparison of the two texts shows, and so inherits the argument along with the tension.

Against it Mileant sets, in a parenthesis, the other view: the king who did not know Joseph may have been Rameses II, "in the 13th century BC", whom he calls "the greatest builder in Egyptian history." The city of Rameses is in the text, for Brenton's Exodus has the Hebrews build "Pitho, and Ramesses, and On" and has them depart from Ramesses (Exodus 1.11; Exodus 12.37), and OrthodoxWiki's life of Moses sits on the later side with its thirteenth-century birth. The case is not argued further here.

The Fathers who date the exodus reckon for another purpose, to show that Moses is older than Greek wisdom, and they count by the synchronisms of Greek and Egyptian history. Theophilus, following Manetho, says that Moses was expelled by "Pharaoh, whose name was Amasis," lists the kings who followed, and puts the building of "Peitho, and Rameses, and On" under a king he calls Tethmosis, so that, in his words, "Moses and his followers are proved to be 900 or even 1000 years prior to the Trojan War."[^theoph-20] Clement of Alexandria places the departure under Amosis and the Argive Inachus, and Julius Africanus under Ogygus, 1237 years before Cyrus.[^clem-africanus] Set side by side, the three share a purpose and give three different dates, each reckoned by synchronisms with Greek history.

Underneath the differences lie the texts' own numbers, which do not agree either. The Greek of 1 Kings 6:1 reads 440 years where Mileant and OrthodoxWiki quote 480; Theophilus says 566 from the exodus to the temple; Brenton's Greek of Exodus 12:40 counts 430 years in Egypt and Canaan together where Mileant counts them from Jacob's arrival in Egypt; and Brenton's Exodus 13:18 says that Israel went up "in the fifth generation."[^ex12-40][^kings-6-1] As an illustration of the arithmetic, and not a figure any source states, adding the Greek 440 to Mileant's 960 BC for the temple gives about 1400 BC, and adding the 480 that he and OrthodoxWiki quote gives about 1440. The Orthodox Study Bible, which dates the writing of Exodus to the wilderness years, gives no year for the event itself, and no Orthodox source cited here makes the faith depend on one.[^osb-intro]

Egypt's silence, the miracles, and the mountain

The objection that no Egyptian record mentions the plagues or the drowning of Pharaoh's army is the one OrthodoxWiki's article on Exodus sets out to answer. Its reply is that the absence of such records "should not give rise to speculation on whether the account is historically authentic," because, it says, Egyptian historiography "did not permit records of what was considered embarrassing and ignominious defeats of the Pharaoh."[^ow-silence] The objection appears here in OrthodoxWiki's words and not its critics', and the reply is an argument from the habits of royal record-keeping that cannot be checked from the texts at hand. Both are given as the Orthodox reference work gives them. Stated plainly, the objection is that an event on the scale the book describes would be expected to leave some trace in the records of the nation that suffered it, and the reply is that the objection depends on a kind of record the Egyptians may not have kept. That is the reasoning on each side as OrthodoxWiki's article implies it; the critics' own statement of the case is not quoted here.

Mileant's booklet attempts something different, a naturalizing gloss on several of the miracles while still insisting on the miraculous. It suggests that the crossing "may have happened in the area of the Bitter Lakes," that the manna "may have been the resin-like substance that is exuded by the tamarisk trees," and that the quail were migrating birds that "could easily be snared (as the desert Arabs do today)"; it also calls the English "Red Sea" an incorrect rendering of "Reed Sea." Yet of the crossing itself the booklet says, "Nothing but a miracle could save them."[^mileant-nat] The Greek text the Church reads has "Red Sea" (Exodus 13.18; Exodus 15.22), and nothing here examines the Hebrew word behind Mileant's remark.

Basil holds the miracle and the sign together. Answering opponents who pointed to the Israelites "baptized unto Moses" to belittle baptism into the Spirit, he says of the sea and the cloud that they "for the time being led on through amazement to faith, but for the time to come they typically prefigured the grace to be."[^basil-hs-14]

The place is as disputed as the date. OrthodoxWiki's article on Mount Sinai says that in Orthodox tradition the mountain in the Sinai peninsula is the one associated with Moses, the bush, and the tablets of the Law, and that "Many scholars dispute the association of today's Mount Sinai with the biblical mountain" and name other candidates in Saudi Arabia, elsewhere in the Sinai, Israel, and Jordan.[^ow-sinai] St. Catherine's Monastery, which OrthodoxWiki says Justinian founded in 527 and whose proper name is the Monastery of the Transfiguration, stands at the foot of the mountain, "built at the site where Moses is believed to have seen the Burning Bush," which OrthodoxWiki says "is alive and on the grounds."[^ow-catherine] The tradition and the dispute stand side by side in OrthodoxWiki's articles, and neither is settled here.

The hardening of Pharaoh's heart

A moral question runs through these chapters: why should God harden a man's heart and then judge him for it? The Greek text states the matter three ways, as a count of Brenton's wording shows. Sometimes God does the hardening: "I will harden his heart" (Exodus 4.21), and "the Lord hardened Pharao's heart" (Exodus 9.12). Sometimes the heart simply "was hardened," as when "Pharao saw that there was relief" (Exodus 8.11). And sometimes Pharao does it himself: "he continued to sin; and he hardened his heart" (Exodus 9.34).[^hardening]

The objection needs no heretical premise to bite. The Lord says "I will harden his heart" before the first sign is worked (Exodus 4.21; Exodus 7.3), and a reader may fairly take the refusals that follow as part of the plan. Origen reports how it was used in his day: "if he is hardened by God, and commits sin in consequence of being so hardened, the cause of his sin is not himself," and if that holds for Pharaoh it holds for every man who perishes. Origen says the heretics who teach that souls are lost or saved by their natures rely chiefly on these passages.[^origen-pharaoh]

Origen replies that a man whose nature was fixed would not have needed to be hardened "not once, but several times, unless indeed because it was possible for him to yield to persuasion," and that God used Pharaoh's resistance to numerous miracles "for the saving of the multitude."[^origen-pharaoh] Chrysostom, preaching on Romans 9, takes the phrase of the apostle and says that "Pharaoh was a vessel of wrath, that is, a man who by his own hard-heartedness had kindled the wrath of God," one who "after enjoying much long-suffering ... became no better"; God's patience, on this account, was real, and it was the man who turned it to account in the wrong direction.[^chrys-rom-16] Tertullian, against Marcion, says that Pharaoh "deserved, however, to be influenced to his destruction," having already denied God and burdened His people, and he names the Egyptian worship of "the ibis and the crocodile" as part of his guilt.[^tert-pharaoh] Origen and Chrysostom say outright that the hardening presupposes a heart that could have yielded, and Tertullian implies it by saying that Pharaoh had already denied God. The three differ over whether God's part is to occasion the resistance, to extend patience that is misused, or to give a judgment already earned, and the sources do not decide among them.

The Law, the Ten Commandments, and the images

St. Philaret of Moscow's Longer Catechism, examined and approved by the Russian Synod and published in 1839, lists "I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods beside me" as the first commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image" as the second, the name taken in vain as the third, and the Sabbath as the fourth, and it explains the two tables as the two loves, of God and of neighbor.[^philaret] Augustine, answering the Manichaean Faustus, counts three commandments that concern the love of God and seven that concern the love of neighbor, and he calls the prohibition of the name taken in vain "the second commandment" and the Sabbath "the third."[^aug-faustus] His first, in the same book, is the Shema, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord," and in On the Spirit and the Letter he names "the making and worshipping of idols and of any other gods than the one true God" in a single clause.[^aug-spirit] That suggests he takes the prohibition of idols and of other gods together as one commandment, where Philaret's catechism separates them. The OCA prints the commandments in the catechism's order, and the Orthodox Study Bible's note on images argues from "the second of the Ten Commandments" in the same sense.[^oca-commandments]

The count matters because the second commandment, counted as the ban on graven images, was the text turned against the holy images. The OCA records that when Emperor Leo III issued his edicts against the icons, "the Iconoclasts invoked the second of the Ten Commandments" as their Scriptural support.[^oca-icon] St. John of Damascus, who led the defense of the icons, rested his case first on the Incarnation. The OCA gives his main point as the claim that icons of Christ are entirely appropriate because the Son of God "really took human flesh and became man," and quotes him: "In former times God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake."[^oca-icon] He also distinguishes the veneration (proskynesis) due to icons, relics, the Cross, and the Gospel Book from the worship (latreia) due to God alone, and he reminds the iconoclasts that the Lord who commanded "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image" also commanded golden cherubim over the mercy seat.[^oca-icon]

Calvin reads "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image" as the Lord's way of curbing "any licentious attempt we might make to represent him by a visible shape," and he rests the reading chiefly on Deuteronomy 4:15, where Moses reminds Israel that at Horeb "ye saw no manner of similitude in the day that the Lord spake unto you ... out of the midst of the fire," lest they make a graven image. From this he concludes that God "declares against all figures," and that the ban cannot have been meant for one nation only.[^calvin] The cherubim over the mercy seat give him two arguments, and he keeps them apart. The mercy seat "was so framed, as to intimate that God is best seen when the mind rises in admiration above itself": the cherubim shaded it with their wings and the veil covered it, and Calvin therefore calls it "mere infatuation" to defend images of God and the saints by their example.[^calvin] His second argument is separate, and it concerns the age: "the Cherubim in question belonged to the old tutelage of the law," a time of "puerility" that has passed.[^calvin] His opponents are those he calls the Papists and, later in the chapter, the defenders of the Second Council of Nicaea; he does not name John of Damascus.[^calvin]

Calvin does not condemn images wholesale. He writes that he is "not, however, so superstitious as to think that all visible representations of every kind are unlawful," and he holds that sculpture and painting are gifts of God, to be used purely and lawfully; what he forbids is giving God Himself a visible shape, and he allows that historical pictures are of some use for instruction or admonition.[^calvin] He doubts, though, that churches should contain images of any kind, since on his account Christian churches were free of them for five hundred years, and he cites Augustine to the effect that images set up where people pray lead weak minds toward worship.[^calvin] The distinction by which his opponents defend the honor paid to images, dulia against latria, he rejects as a Greek term used to say that one worships images without worshipping them.[^calvin] The Westminster Larger Catechism gives the position confessional form. It counts as Philaret's catechism does, naming the graven image as "the second commandment" (Q. 107); it requires believers to oppose false worship and, "according to each one's place and calling," to remove "all monuments of idolatry" (Q. 108); and it forbids "the making any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever," together with "all worshiping of it, or God in it or by it" (Q. 109).[^wlc]

The Orthodox appeal to the tabernacle is older than the Reformation, and it addresses the cherubim directly. A sidebar of the Orthodox Study Bible takes up the objection: if the second commandment forbade every artistic representation, the Lord would have contradicted Himself in the same book by commanding the cherubim, having them woven into the curtains and the veil, and Scripture shows that "it is not the image itself which is faulty or prohibited, but rather its improper use."[^osb-images] Calvin disclaims the position that sidebar refutes, since he allows sculpture and painting as gifts of God, so the question between the two traditions is narrower: whether the Lord's own command for the cherubim authorizes images that are venerated, and whether, since the Word became flesh, the Son may be depicted. St. John of Damascus puts the first point in his own words: "I prove to you that in the old law God commanded images to be made, first of all the tabernacle and everything in it."[^jd-images] Tertullian had drawn the line at the same place against Marcion. The prohibition, he says, is aimed at likenesses made to be bowed down to ("You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them"); the brazen serpent "afforded no pretext for idolatry" but was made for the cure of those who were bitten, and the golden cherubim "were purely an ornament in the figured fashion of the ark."[^tert-images]

On several points the two sides agree by their own statements. Both hold that the divine nature cannot be pictured, Calvin because God has forbidden any visible shape for Himself, and John of Damascus because God, being without form or body, "could never be depicted" before the Incarnation. Both hold that the worship due to God alone may not be given to a picture. They part over whether the veneration the Seventh Council allowed is a lesser honor, as John and the Council say, or worship under another name, as Calvin argues against the dulia distinction; and over the Incarnation, which is John's main argument and is not one that Calvin's chapter takes up.[^oca-icon][^calvin]

The Law as a whole raised a second question, whether Christians are bound by it. Justin's Dialogue with Trypho gives the Jewish objection in the words of Trypho, Justin's own literary character: what puzzles him most is that Christians, "professing to be pious," observe no festivals or sabbaths and have no circumcision, and "yet expect to obtain some good thing from God, while you do not obey His commandments."[^trypho] Justin's answer is that the Law was given on account of Israel's hardness, and he points to the calf: "your nation appeared unrighteous and ungrateful to God, making a calf in the wilderness: wherefore God, accommodating Himself to that nation, enjoined them also to offer sacrifices."[^justin-calf] Origen takes another road and says that the letter of the Law cannot always be kept. Of the direction in Exodus that "ye shall sit each of you in your houses; let no one go forth from his place on the seventh day" (Exodus 16.29), he says, "it is impossible to observe literally; for no man can sit a whole day so as not to move from the place where he sat down," and he dismisses the computation of two thousand cubits advanced by those of the circumcision as "empty and trifling tales" and the rule of Dositheus the Samaritan, that each man stay in whatever posture the Sabbath found him, as something still more ridiculous.[^origen-sabbath]

Augustine, for his part, asks in On the Spirit and the Letter what there is in the ten commandments, "except the observance of the Sabbath, which ought not to be kept by a Christian," that a Christian ought not to keep; the Sabbath alone is the exception.[^aug-spirit] Mileant, whose booklet is one bishop's summary, divides the Law: the moral and religious laws "did not lose their importance," because in the Sermon on the Mount Christ "has taught the deeper level of their understanding," while the civil laws and religious rites "were revoked by the Holy Apostles in the council of Jerusalem," which is his own reading of Acts 15.[^mileant-law] The Orthodox Study Bible's formula for the whole is that the grace of Christ and the Law of Moses "are complementary, not contradictory."[^osb-law]

Moses and the sources

The modern challenge to the traditional account of the Pentateuch is treated at length in Book of Genesis: De Young's account of how the documentary hypothesis arose, the labels J, E, D, and P, and the replies of De Young, Mileant, and Bishop Nathanael. What belongs to Exodus in particular begins with the Orthodox admission already quoted from the OCA, that "Scholars tell us" the Law was not written by Moses' personal hand and that the books contain "material of later periods"; OrthodoxWiki's page on the Pentateuch adds that Deuteronomy "is believed by many scholars to be a later summation of the first four books."[^oca-law][^ow-pent]

The divine name comes next, since De Young reports that the critics took the places in the Torah that call God Yahweh and the places that call Him Elohim as coming from two different sources.[^dy-torah] Exodus is where the text itself speaks of the name. In Brenton's Greek God gives it to Moses as "The Lord God of our fathers," "this is my name for ever" (Exodus 3.15), and later says, "I appeared to Abraam and Isaac and Jacob, being their God, but I did not manifest to them my name Lord" (Exodus 6.3). Together the two passages are where the book itself takes up the question of the name.

Bishop Nathanael (Lvov) supplies a reply, answering Professor Kartashev's critical conclusions about the Law by pointing to the prophets: Amos knew "the circumstances of Exodus," and Hosea "knows the book of Exodus," as his citations of Hosea 2:15, 9:3, 12:13 and 13:4 are meant to show; and, he adds, Stephen's use of Amos in Acts 7:42-43 tells against Wellhausen's reconstruction.[^nathanael] His argument bears on Exodus directly: the prophets presuppose the Law, and Christ and Stephen treat it as Moses' Law.

Behind all of it stands the principle, stated by the OCA and applied to Moses by name in OrthodoxWiki's article on the canon, that the identity of the human author does not decide a book's authority in the Church.[^oca-auth][^ow-canon] The case for the hypothesis is given here only as its Orthodox hearers report it.

Methods of Criticism

The methods modern scholars bring to Exodus are the ones they bring to every book of the Pentateuch, but this book tests them at a particular point: a saving event, a body of law, and a building plan are bound into one story, and each method has to say what it makes of that combination. The methods are described here chiefly through Orthodox writers who answer them, and each claim about a method that rests on such a report is marked as such.

Textual criticism asks what the original wording was in a book whose first copies are lost and whose later copies disagree. The conclusions of the discipline are not reported here, but the material it works on is plain: the Greek the Church reads differs from the wording quoted by other Orthodox sources in the length of Israel's stay (12:40), in the interval from the exodus to the temple (1 Kings 6:1), in the order of three commandments, in the wind at the sea, and in the English rendering of the divine name, as the section above sets out, and a Jewish Greek fragment of Exodus is among the finds at Qumran.[^bruce-7q][^ex12-40][^kings-6-1] On the point of principle OrthodoxWiki is plain, and on method it is silent. It says that the Church "continues to regard the LXX as its only canonical text of the Old Testament," and that the Orthodox Study Bible's Old Testament follows Rahlfs's critical edition; it states no policy on critical editions beyond that.[^lxx-ow] Origen's Hexapla, described in the entry on Book of Genesis, was an early comparison of the Hebrew and Greek texts made within the Church.

Source criticism asks what earlier materials lie behind the book and, for the Pentateuch, has meant the documentary hypothesis. What it has claimed about Exodus in particular is not reported here, only the general scheme, in which the Torah combines strands labeled J, E, D, and P, and De Young's account of its reasoning, which the entry on Genesis sets out.[^dy-torah] The Orthodox reception runs, as there, from De Young's critique of the method's coherence (no one has found a copy or fragment of the supposed documents, and the supposed sources were subdivided until single verses were broken in three), through Bishop Nathanael's appeal to the prophets and the Church's testimony, to the OCA's concession that the books show several traditions and later material while remaining essentially connected with Moses in the Church's use; OrthodoxWiki adds only that many scholars take Deuteronomy for a later summation of the first four books.[^dy-torah][^nathanael][^oca-law][^ow-pent]

Form criticism looks at the smaller units, the stories, poems, and laws, that circulated before they were written, and asks what setting in life produced each. What it has claimed about Exodus is not reported here. Mileant holds that the sacred history of the wilderness was sung and kept in feasts, and that Passover was one of the settings in which it was passed down; the text of Exodus itself prescribes the question and answer by which children were to be taught the meaning of the feast (Exodus 12.26; Exodus 12.27; Exodus 13.14); and De Young singles out the Song of the Sea as an ancient poem handed down without updating.[^mileant-pent][^retell][^dy-torah] The liturgy preserves one such unit: OrthodoxWiki lists the Song of Moses as the first of the nine biblical odes at Matins, from which, as another Orthodox booklet explains, the first ode of a canon takes its pattern.[^odes][^canon-ode]

Redaction criticism takes the book as it stands and asks what editors did with their material. No redactional analysis of Exodus is reported here. The Orthodox Study Bible's outline sets the instructions for the sanctuary and its ministers (25-31) before the golden calf (32-34), and Mileant describes the narratives of the tabernacle's construction as following only after the renewal of the covenant (35-40), so that the plan of the tent is given once as command and once as execution with the sin of the people between.[^outline] Whether one hand or several arranged it that way is not said. De Young's remark on the updating of names, and the verse at Exodus 16.35, show that the text was handled after Moses; nothing in the sources says by whom.[^dy-torah][^ex16-35]

Historical-critical and comparative study sets the book in its ancient world. The questions it raises about Exodus, as Orthodox writers report them, are the ones taken up above: the date, Egypt's silence about the plagues, the likeness of the Ten Commandments to the law codes of Mesopotamia, and the site of Sinai. Mileant meets the work with enthusiasm, writing that the Egyptian sojourn, the exodus, and the conquest "are now much better understood as the result of the triumphs of scientific archaeology since 1800," and takes the likeness of the codes as evidence of a common moral law.[^mileant-arch][^mileant-laws] OrthodoxWiki defends the narrative against the argument from silence.[^ow-silence] Behr, from the academy, objects to the method's governing question, saying that the study of Scripture has been "dominated by the presuppositions of a historical-critical method—looking for the original text, its context and redaction, and its interpretation (in terms of what it meant rather than means)."[^behr-12] McGuckin names the difference of aim from within the Church's history: the ancient writers "tended to read the text symbolically," so that the escape of Israel through the Red Sea "was a macro symbol of salvation," whereas modern historical research "follows a very different set of prescripts and methods."[^mcguckin] Bruce notes that Childs's commentary on Exodus replaced Martin Noth's in the Old Testament Library (p. 329, paraphrased).[^bruce-childs] Social-scientific approaches to Exodus are not treated here.

Narrative, literary, and canonical approaches read the book in the form the Church received it, and Exodus gives them a great deal to work with. Bruce describes Childs's commentary on Exodus as a work that takes full account of all that historical-critical exegesis can say about the text and yet holds that the church's canon and life are the context in which the text is most fully understood; he reports that the primary sense of Exodus is to be sought within the book itself or at least within the Pentateuch, and that later Christian interpretation brings out a deeper, plenary sense by uncovering layers of meaning implicit in the primary one (pp. 329-330, paraphrased).[^bruce-childs] Bruce adds that Childs insisted the Jewish interpretation also has its place in the full exposition, and counts Calvin, Drusius, Rashi, and Ibn Ezra among the giants to be heard together with Wellhausen and Gunkel (p. 329, n. 32, paraphrased). Childs's commentary itself is not quoted here; what is reported is his statement, in a book on the New Testament, that his canonical approach insists on the integrity of the final form of the text, which he does not treat as a monolithic block, against the critical habit of first sifting it for date, author, and levels of composition (p. 41, paraphrased).[^childs-41] De Young approaches the Torah in a similar way, though he does not use the label. He calls the Torah "teaching" in the broadest sense and treats Genesis as a prologue that sets up the patterns, among them the Sabbath, that Exodus and the books after it unfold.[^dy-intro] Behr states the Orthodox difference: the meaning of Moses' words "lies in how he speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ," and is not a meaning to be retrieved by reconstructing the past.[^behr-moses]

The patristic and Orthodox alternative

The Church's way of reading Exodus is older than any of these methods, and it keeps the history while reading the history as a figure. OrthodoxWiki describes the Fathers' practice: Scripture has a literal or historical sense, an allegorical or typological one, a moral one, and a mystical one, and "That a text had an allegorical or typological meaning did not negate the historical sense of the text." Its article on typology gives Exodus examples: "Moses the Lawgiver foreshadows Christ, the ultimate Lawgiver," the manna foreshadows the Eucharist, and "The Burning Bush foreshadows the Theotokos."[^ow-typology] An Orthodox booklet on FatherAlexander.ORG about the Old Testament in the New Testament Church lists the correspondences in a row, among them "Crossing the Red Sea; Holy Baptism. The unconsumed bush; the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God. ... Manna; the Lord's Supper of the New Testament. ... Sinai; the Sermon on the Mount. The tabernacle; the New Testament Church."[^ot-nt] The New Testament already reads the book this way.

Paul says that "Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place" (1 Corinthians 5.7) and that Israel "were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea" and drank from a rock that "was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10.2; 1 Corinthians 10.4); the author of Hebrews reads the tabernacle as "a copy and shadow of the heavenly things" built to the pattern shown on the mountain (Hebrews 8.5).

John says that "The Word became flesh and lived among us," where the Orthodox Study Bible's note renders the verb "tabernacled" (John 1.14); and Luke says that Moses and Elijah on the mountain "spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" (Luke 9.31), a word Bruce notes is "exodus" in the Greek (p. 59, n. 16, paraphrased).[^nt-types-ex][^osb-tab] The Fathers follow that lead, and Origen defends it on principle: where the letter of the Law cannot be kept as written, the reader is sent to a spiritual meaning, and he cites Paul's use of Exodus and Numbers, "These things happened to them in a figure," as his warrant.[^origen-spiritual]

The Passover and the sea

The Fathers' reading of the Passover begins with the lamb. Melito of Sardis, in a homily for Easter night that Behr quotes, addresses the angel of death: "Tell me angel, what turned you away? The slaughter of the sheep or the life of the Lord?" and answers that the angel turned away because he saw "the mystery of the Lord" in the sheep.[^melito] The Orthodox Study Bible's note at Exodus 12 draws out the details: the lamb was a male without blemish, its blood on the doorposts saved the firstborn, and "The Passover lamb had none of its bones broken (Ex 12:10, 46); Jesus also had no bones broken as He was sacrificed (Jn 19:31-36)."[^osb-passover] John's Gospel itself names the correspondence when it says that these things happened "that the Scripture might be fulfilled, 'A bone of him will not be broken'" (John 19.36).

Gregory the Theologian, preaching at Pascha, turns the Passover into a description of the believer's own night: "Then we flee from Egypt, that is from sullen persecuting sin; and from Pharaoh the unseen tyrant, and the bitter taskmasters, changing our quarters to the world above."[^naz-45-xv] The sermon goes on to lead the hearer through the pillar, the sea, the manna and the rock, and into the promised land. Cyril of Jerusalem, speaking to the newly baptized, sets the two histories side by side: "There we have Moses sent from God to Egypt; here, Christ, sent forth from His Father into the world ... there, the blood of a lamb was the spell against the destroyer; here, the blood of the Lamb without blemish Jesus Christ is made the charm to scare evil spirits." Then comes the sea: "The tyrant of old was drowned in the sea; and this present one disappears in the water of salvation."[^cyril19]

Basil reads the sea as baptism, and he does so to answer a challenge. Some argued that, since Israel was "baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea" (1 Corinthians 10.2), baptism into the Spirit proves nothing about the Spirit's divinity. Basil replies that the sea "is typically a baptism bringing about the departure of Pharaoh, in like manner as this washing causes the departure of the tyranny of the devil," and that "The sea slew the enemy in itself: and in baptism too dies our enmity towards God."[^basil-hs-14] He then asks the objector to see that a type does not shrink what it prefigures: if the greatness of a gift were measured by its shadow, he says, not even God's love in giving His Son would be great, because Abraham did not spare his son. Chrysostom reads the same passage of Paul and gives it a double application: "this was a symbol of the Font, and that which follows, of the Holy Table. For as you eat the Lord's Body, so they the manna: and as you drink the Blood, so they water from a rock."[^chrys-1cor-23-font]

The Fathers do not all weigh the figures alike. Origen, commenting on John's mention of the Jordan, sets the sea beside the river and judges the first the lesser: "even if those Paul speaks of were baptized in the cloud and in the sea, there is something harsh and salt in their baptism," since they were still afraid and crying out against Moses, while the crossing of the Jordan under Joshua, in sweet and drinkable water, is "in many ways superior to that earlier one."[^origen-jn-vi] OrthodoxWiki prints a passage from Gregory of Nyssa, without naming the work, that carries the figure through the whole wilderness: "The soul has been purified by crossing the Sea; ... It has tasted of the waters of Marah ... It took within itself the bread of heaven. It overwhelmed the foreign host—a victory due to the extended arms of the Lawgiver, which thus foreshadowed the mystery of the Cross."[^nyssa-ow] The Orthodox Study Bible's own note at Exodus 12 draws the same line in a sentence that credits Gregory of Nyssa, whom it abbreviates "GrgNy": "Christians pass 'from Egypt, from the burden of sin,' being 'set free and saved' through the waters of Holy Baptism."[^osb-passover]

The bush and the Theotokos

Justin and Ambrose, as noted above, heard the Son in the voice, and Bruce disputes it. About what the bush showed, the two liturgical texts that follow speak alike. The Dogmatikon of the Second Tone, which Lash's translation of the Paschal services prints at Vespers, says that "The shadow of the law has passed now that grace has come, for as the Bush in flames was not consumed, so as a Virgin you bore a Child and remained a Virgin; instead of a pillar of fire the Sun of righteousness has dawned, instead of Moses Christ, the salvation of our souls."[^dogmatikon] The OCA's synaxarion for the feast of the Unburnt Bush icon (September 4) explains the type in one sentence, saying that the bush "signifies the Mother of God's sinless conception of Christ when the Holy Spirit came upon her and she was overshadowed by the power of the Most High," and its kontakion calls the bush the sign of her "seedless birthgiving."[^bush-lit]

The bush has a place in the Church's calendar as well. Lash's list of Vespers readings for feasts of the Mother of God sets Jacob's ladder (Genesis 28:10-17), Ezekiel's shut gate (chapters 43-44), and Proverbs' house of wisdom (9:1) together, and adds Exodus 3:1-8, one of two second-Vespers readings that Lash notes "are not found in the Menaion."[^lash-readings] The same family of types lies behind the Orthodox Study Bible's remark that the tabernacle also "prefigures Mary the Theotokos, whose womb will be the tabernacle in which the Lord will dwell as He takes His flesh from her."[^osb-tab] A patristic homily preserved under the name of Gregory Thaumaturgus, whose attribution is not examined here, makes the same comparison in a dialogue between the Lord and the angel: "if the fire in the wilderness injured the bush, my coming will indeed also injure Mary; but if that fire ... fertilized the bush, and did not burn it, what will you say of the Truth that descends not in a flame of fire, but in the form of rain?"[^thaum-hom] OrthodoxWiki adds a further claim, that in Orthodox tradition the flame Moses saw was "God's Uncreated Energies / Glory," and it adds that the Orthodox definition of salvation is this vision of the Uncreated Energies, a theme that recurs in the works of theologians such as John S. Romanides; the Fathers quoted in this section do not state it in those terms.[^ow-bush]

Sinai, the darkness, and the ascent

The Greek text of Exodus 20.21 says that "the people stood afar off, and Moses went into the darkness where God was," and the Orthodox Study Bible's note on the Law treats Sinai and the Transfiguration together: on Tabor, the note says, Moses appeared with Christ and "conversed with Him as friend with friend," and his presence "shows Christ as the fulfillment of the Law," as Elijah's shows Him the fulfillment of the Prophets.[^osb-law] The Church reads the Sinai passages at the feast itself: a booklet on the Transfiguration at FatherAlexander.ORG reports that the first two readings at its vespers come from Exodus, Moses' stay on the mountain (24:12-18) and the glory of the Lord shown to him (33:11-23; 34:4-8).[^transfig] Gregory of Nyssa takes the mountain as the picture of the knowledge of God, and reads the cloud as the place where knowledge becomes unknowing; OrthodoxWiki's article on apophatic theology quotes his Life of Moses in just that sense: "The true knowledge and vision of God consists in this—in seeing that He is invisible, because what we seek lies beyond all knowledge, being wholly separated by the darkness of incomprehensibility."[^nyssa-apo] Exodus gives the limit in Brenton's words, "no man shall see my face, and live," and the promise that Moses will see "my back parts" (Exodus 33.20; Exodus 33.23).

The tabernacle and the temple of the Church

The tabernacle occupies chapters 25-31 and 35-40, and Orthodox writers read it as a pattern for the Church. The Greek text makes the point itself: "thou shalt make for me according to all things which I shew thee in the mountain; even the pattern of the tabernacle" (Exodus 25.9), and Hebrews reads it as "a copy and shadow of the heavenly things." The Orthodox Study Bible's note at Exodus 35 pulls the strands together. The tablets of the Law, the manna, and Aaron's staff in the ark prefigure Christ as Lawgiver, Bread of Life, and the Cross; the veil "foreshadows the Incarnation"; and "The tabernacle as a whole prefigures Christ, the eternal Word of God," and then the Theotokos, the Church, and each baptized Christian as "a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit."[^osb-tab] The same note quotes Gregory of Nyssa: "Moses was earlier instructed by a type in the mystery of the tabernacle, which encompasses the universe. This tabernacle would be Christ, who is the power and the wisdom of God."[^osb-tab]

For John of Damascus the tabernacle is also the Church's warrant for the use of images. He describes it as "an image of the whole world," and he reminds the iconoclasts that Moses "made an image of the cherubim who were looked upon by those worthy of the honour, the material image offering them an immaterial and intellectual sight."[^jd-images] Mileant, summarizing what survives into the Church's own worship, says that "The priestly dresses, altars, candlestick and other ordinances of the OT temple worship were made by Moses after the examples directly revealed by God on Mt. Sinai, and are still used in modified form, in our church services."[^mileant-vestments] On Mileant's account the Church's worship is the tabernacle's descendant, and the entries on The Tabernacle and The Church Building may be read alongside this one.

The golden calf and the intercessor

Chrysostom, in the passage already used, says that Paul recalls it because its parent was "luxury and gluttony": the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play (Exodus 32.6), and the apostle turns that line against the Corinthians who ate at idols' tables.[^chrys-1cor-23-calf] Justin, as shown above, uses the calf as the explanation of why God gave Israel sacrifices at all.[^justin-calf] The calf's counterpart is Moses' prayer, "if thou wilt forgive their sin, forgive it; and if not, blot me out of thy book" (Exodus 32.32). Mileant's Passion Week booklet hears it on Good Friday, when Exodus 33:11-23 is read at Vespers, and says that "Moses, praying for the sinful Hebrew nation, served as the image of the universal Intercessor on Golgotha, Jesus Christ."[^passion-intercessor]

In the Church's worship

On Holy Saturday, at the vesperal liturgy, fifteen Old Testament readings are sung before the epistle, and the OCA says they include "the passover-exodus of the Israelites in the days of Moses in Exodus," together with the canticle of Moses; Mileant's Passion Week booklet lists the Passover institution (Exodus 12:1-11) and the crossing of the sea (13:20-14:32), and says that at the end of the latter the choir sings, "For gloriously is He glorified."[^holy-sat][^passion-sat] The OCA adds that the same service replaces the Trisagion with the baptismal verse "As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ," so that the readings of the exodus and the clothing of the newly baptized meet in the one liturgy. The eve of Theophany gathers readings about water, among them the crossing of the sea (Exodus 14:15-18, 21-23, 27-29), a second reading from Exodus 15:22-16:4, and the finding of the infant Moses on the river (2:5-10).[^theophany] And the Church's hymns draw the same lines in the poetry of the feast itself. In the forefeast of Theophany the first ode of the canon begins, "The Red Sea was cut by a cutting rod, while the deep nurse of waves grew dry; it became a pathway for the unarmed, and a tomb for the fully armed."[^theophany-ode] On the Sunday of the Cross in Lent the Katavasia sings that "The godlike Moses prefigured your Cross of old, when he led Israel through the Red Sea, cutting the water with his rod."[^cross-sunday]

The OCA says that on Holy Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday the Old Testament readings are "from Exodus, Job, and the Prophets," and OrthodoxWiki's list of the Presanctified readings names Exodus 1:1-20, 2:5-10, and 2:11-22 for those three days, so that the Church begins Holy Week with Israel's slavery and Moses' birth and flight.[^holy-week] On the feast of the Meeting of the Lord the Vesper reading is a selection from Exodus 12:51-13:16 on the consecration of the firstborn, and the feast of the Elevation of the Cross opens with the reading of Marah's bitter water made sweet by a tree, "the symbol of the Tree of the Cross."[^meeting-cross] The Paschal synaxarion in Lash's translation states the whole design in a sentence: "We call the present Feast 'Pascha', which in Hebrew means 'Passing Over'; for this is the day on which God from the beginning brought the world out of non-existence. On this same day he also made the people of Israel pass over the Red Sea and snatched them from the hands of Pharao."[^pascha-syn]

The book that begins with slaves making bricks is thus the book the Church reads at the opening of Holy Week, at the threshold of Pascha, on the eve of Theophany, and at the feast of the Cross, and when she speaks of Baptism, of the Theotokos, or of Pascha itself she is drawing on its pictures: Moses stands behind her talk of the lawgiver and the intercessor, Passover and Typology in Scripture behind her way of reading the lamb and the sea, and The Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant behind her understanding of the place where God dwells.

Sources

[^name]: OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus"; The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Exodus; Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch. [^ex1-2]: Exodus 1.22; Exodus 2.3; Exodus 2.10 (Brenton). [^ex3]: Exodus 3.1-Exodus 3.2; Exodus 3.10 (Brenton). [^ex12]: Exodus 7.20; Exodus 12.11; Exodus 12.29; Exodus 12.41 (Brenton). [^ex14]: Exodus 14.21-Exodus 14.22 (Brenton). [^ex-rest]: Exodus 16.4; Exodus 16.14-Exodus 16.15; Exodus 19.18; Exodus 20.1; Exodus 32.1-Exodus 32.6; Exodus 40.34 (Brenton). [^pascha-syn]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Paschal services, Synaxarion of Pascha. [^cyril19]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, Lecture 19 (first Mystagogical Catechesis), 2-3. [^bush-lit]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Paschal services, Vespers; Orthodox Church in America, synaxarion "Unburnt Bush Icon of the Mother of God," September 4; OrthodoxWiki, "Theotokos the Unburnt Bush icon." [^date-inq]: OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus"; OrthodoxWiki, "Moses"; Orthodox Church in America, synaxarion "Holy Prophet and God-Seer Moses," September 4; The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Exodus. [^oca-auth]: Orthodox Church in America, "Authorship." [^ex-heart]: Exodus 2.24; Exodus 3.14; Exodus 25.8 (Brenton). [^pent]: OrthodoxWiki, "Pentateuch." [^osb-intro]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Exodus. [^moses-wrote]: Exodus 17.14; Exodus 24.4; Exodus 24.7; Exodus 31.18; Exodus 34.27 (Brenton); F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 9. [^canon-lists]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, Lecture 4.35; Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.4; Synod of Laodicea, canon 60; Jerome, Prologus Galeatus. [^outline]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Exodus, outline; Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "Exodus"; OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus." [^themes]: OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus"; Exodus 24.8; Exodus 40.34 (Brenton). [^oca-pass]: Orthodox Church in America, "Passover." [^odes]: OrthodoxWiki, "Biblical Odes." [^holy-sat]: Orthodox Church in America, "Holy Saturday"; John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006), 19. [^text-diffs]: Exodus 12.40; 1 Kings 6.1; Exodus 3.14; Exodus 14.21; Exodus 20.13-Exodus 20.15 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, Exodus 20.13-15; OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus"; Orthodox Church in America, "Passover"; Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch. [^summary]: Exodus 1.8; Exodus 1.11; Exodus 1.22; Exodus 2.3; Exodus 2.10; Exodus 2.12; Exodus 2.15; Exodus 2.23-Exodus 2.24; Exodus 3.2; Exodus 3.10; Exodus 3.14; Exodus 4.21; Exodus 5.1; Exodus 7.20; Exodus 10.21; Exodus 12.11; Exodus 12.13; Exodus 12.29; Exodus 12.37; Exodus 13.21; Exodus 14.22-Exodus 14.23; Exodus 14.30; Exodus 15.1; Exodus 15.25; Exodus 16.4; Exodus 17.6; Exodus 19.16; Exodus 20.1; Exodus 20.21; Exodus 24.7-Exodus 24.8; Exodus 24.18; Exodus 25.9; Exodus 31.18; Exodus 32.1; Exodus 32.4; Exodus 32.6; Exodus 32.19-Exodus 32.20; Exodus 32.32; Exodus 34.6; Exodus 34.30; Exodus 40.34; Exodus 40.38 (Brenton). [^ow-ex-auth]: OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus." [^nt-moses]: Mark 12.26; Luke 20.37; John 1.45; Mark 1.44 (WEB). [^theoph-9]: Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 3.9. [^justin-62]: Justin Martyr, First Apology 62. [^oca-law]: Orthodox Church in America, "Law." [^mileant-sk]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), Apologetic Sketches, "The book of Genesis." [^dy-torah]: Stephen De Young, "Introduction to the Torah," The Whole Counsel of God (podcast, July 10, 2023). [^ow-canon]: OrthodoxWiki, "Biblical canon." [^retell]: Exodus 10.2; Exodus 12.26-Exodus 12.27; Exodus 13.8; Exodus 13.14 (Brenton). [^mileant-pent]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch. [^ex16-35]: Exodus 16.35 (Brenton); Bishop Alexander (Mileant), Apologetic Sketches, "The book of Genesis."; Stephen De Young, "Introduction to the Torah," The Whole Counsel of God (podcast, July 10, 2023). [^mileant-laws]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch. [^covenant]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch; Exodus 14.4; Exodus 14.13; Exodus 19.5-Exodus 19.6; Exodus 20.2 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, note at Exodus 28. [^osb-tab]: The Orthodox Study Bible, note "The Tabernacle" at Exodus 35. [^osb-law]: The Orthodox Study Bible, note "The Grace of Christ and the Law of Moses" at Exodus 20. [^naz-45-intent]: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45, 21. [^bruce-recap]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 59-60. [^bruce-7q]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 44. [^masoretic]: OrthodoxWiki, "Masoretic text." [^bruce-codices]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 68; OrthodoxWiki, "Codex Vaticanus"; OrthodoxWiki, "Codex Alexandrinus." [^lxx-ow]: OrthodoxWiki, "Septuagint." [^ex12-40]: Exodus 12.40; Genesis 15.13 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, Exodus 12.40; Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "The Prophet Moses"; Acts 7.6; Galatians 3.17 (WEB). [^theoph-10]: Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 3.10. [^kings-6-1]: 1 Kings 6.1; Exodus 13.18 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, 3 Kingdoms 6.1; OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus"; Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "Exodus." [^theoph-22]: Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 3.22. [^name-3-14]: Exodus 3.14 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, Exodus 3.14 and introduction to Exodus; Orthodox Church in America, "Passover." [^decalogue-order]: Exodus 20.13-Exodus 20.15 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, Exodus 20.13-15; Luke 18.20; Mark 10.19 (WEB). [^ex14-21]: Exodus 14.21 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, Exodus 14.21; Orthodox Church in America, "Passover"; Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "The Prophet Moses." [^pascha-word]: Exodus 12.11 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, Exodus 12.11 and note "Christ Our Passover"; Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Synaxarion of Pascha. [^lash-meeting]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Readings for Vespers, February 2 (Meeting of the Lord), reading 32 and note. [^bruce-sam]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), on the Samaritan Pentateuch. [^vulgate]: OrthodoxWiki, "Vulgate." [^marcion-spoil]: Exodus 3.22; Exodus 12.35-Exodus 12.36 (Brenton); Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.20. [^peratae]: Refutation of All Heresies 5.11 (attributed to Hippolytus); OrthodoxWiki, "Hippolytus of Rome." [^docetae]: Refutation of All Heresies 8.2 (attributed to Hippolytus). [^chrys-1cor-23]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Hom. 23.3. [^theoph-21]: Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 3.21. [^justin-63]: Justin Martyr, First Apology 62-63. [^bruce-justin]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 64. [^ambrose-ow]: Ambrose, Exposition of the Christian Faith 1, 83; OrthodoxWiki, "Burning Bush." [^dates-list]: OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus"; OrthodoxWiki, "Moses"; Orthodox Church in America, synaxarion "Holy Prophet and God-Seer Moses," September 4. [^early-date]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "Exodus"; OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus"; 1 Kings 6.1. [^theoph-20]: Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 3.20-21. [^clem-africanus]: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.21; Julius Africanus, Chronography, frags. 12-13. [^ow-silence]: OrthodoxWiki, "Exodus." [^mileant-nat]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "The Prophet Moses." [^basil-hs-14]: Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 14.31-33. [^ow-sinai]: OrthodoxWiki, "Mount Sinai." [^ow-catherine]: OrthodoxWiki, "St. Catherine's Monastery (Sinai)." [^hardening]: Exodus 4.21; Exodus 7.3; Exodus 8.11; Exodus 8.28; Exodus 9.12; Exodus 9.34 (Brenton). [^origen-pharaoh]: Origen, On First Principles 3.1.7-10. [^chrys-rom-16]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Hom. 16. [^tert-pharaoh]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.14. [^philaret]: Philaret of Moscow, The Longer Catechism, Q. 489 and 492 (Blackmore translation). [^aug-faustus]: Augustine, Against Faustus 15.5, 15.7. [^oca-commandments]: Orthodox Church in America, "Law"; The Orthodox Study Bible, note "Images and Imagery" at Exodus 20. [^oca-icon]: Orthodox Church in America, "Iconoclasm" (quoting John of Damascus, On the Holy Images 1.16). [^calvin]: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.11.1-3, 1.11.11-16 (Beveridge translation). [^wlc]: Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 107-109. [^osb-images]: The Orthodox Study Bible, note "Images and Imagery" at Exodus 20. [^jd-images]: John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, First Apology (Allies translation). [^tert-images]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.22. [^trypho]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 10. [^justin-calf]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 19. [^origen-sabbath]: Exodus 16.29 (Brenton); Origen, On First Principles 4 (Rufinus text), 17. [^aug-spirit]: Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, chs. 23-24. [^mileant-law]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "Exodus." [^ow-pent]: OrthodoxWiki, "Pentateuch." [^nathanael]: Bishop Nathanael (Lvov), The Holy Bible, appendix "Concerning the Book of Professor Kartashev." [^canon-ode]: Booklet, The Church of God, glossary entries "Canon" and "Irmos." [^mileant-arch]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "Introduction." [^behr-12]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006), 12-13. [^mcguckin]: John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 25-26. [^bruce-childs]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 329-30. [^childs-41]: Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 41. [^dy-intro]: Stephen De Young, "Introduction to Genesis," The Whole Counsel of God (podcast, July 17, 2023); Stephen De Young, "Introduction to the Torah," The Whole Counsel of God (podcast, July 10, 2023). [^behr-moses]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006), 44. [^ow-typology]: OrthodoxWiki, "Typology." [^ot-nt]: Booklet, The Old Testament in the New Testament Church. [^nt-types-ex]: 1 Corinthians 5.7; 1 Corinthians 10.2; 1 Corinthians 10.4; Hebrews 8.5; John 1.14; Luke 9.31 (WEB); F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 59, n. 16. [^origen-spiritual]: Origen, On First Principles 4 (Rufinus text), 13-17. [^melito]: Melito of Sardis, On Pascha 32-33, 59, as quoted in John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006), 20. [^osb-passover]: The Orthodox Study Bible, note "Christ Our Passover" at Exodus 12; John 19.36 (WEB). [^naz-45-xv]: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45, 15. [^chrys-1cor-23-font]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Hom. 23.3. [^origen-jn-vi]: Origen, Commentary on John 6.26. [^nyssa-ow]: Gregory of Nyssa, as quoted in OrthodoxWiki, "Gregory of Nyssa." [^dogmatikon]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Paschal services, Vespers; Orthodox Church in America, synaxarion "Unburnt Bush Icon of the Mother of God," September 4. [^lash-readings]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Readings for Vespers, March 25 and feasts of the Mother of God, readings 39-41a and note. [^thaum-hom]: Pseudo-Gregory Thaumaturgus (attributed to Gregory Thaumaturgus), Homily 3 on the Annunciation. [^ow-bush]: OrthodoxWiki, "Burning Bush." [^transfig]: Booklet, The Transfiguration. [^nyssa-apo]: Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, as quoted in OrthodoxWiki, "Apophatic theology." [^mileant-vestments]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, Part 2: The Pentateuch, "Numbers." [^chrys-1cor-23-calf]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Hom. 23.4. [^passion-intercessor]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), Passion Week, Great Friday Vespers. [^passion-sat]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), Passion Week, Great Saturday. [^theophany]: Booklet, The Feast of the Theophany, Vespers of the eve. [^theophany-ode]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Menaion, January 4 (forefeast of Theophany), Compline, Ode 1. [^cross-sunday]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Matins of the Third Sunday of Lent (Veneration of the Cross), Ode 1, Katavasia. [^holy-week]: Orthodox Church in America, "Holy Week"; OrthodoxWiki, "Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts." [^meeting-cross]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, Readings for Vespers, February 2; Orthodox Church in America, "Elevation of the Cross."