Ex. 4-6 - Moses: the shy murderer

The readings - Day 19 - Exodus 4-6

Rightly or wrongly, there's a certain type of image that pops into your head when you hear about a guy whose on the run, being hunted down for killing a man as vengeance for an injustice.

Being so shy that you become a distinct irritant to the Creator of patience Himself usually doesn't fit in to this picture...

Ex. 1-3 - Zooming out

The readings - Day 18 - Exodus 1-3

Nowhere in the Bible is it as easy to trick yourself into thinking that a cover-to-cover read might just be full of smooth transitions as going from Genesis to Exodus. (Maybe between the Samuels, Kings and Chronicles - we'll find out in a couple of months, I guess...)

But for all the carry-over from Genesis 50 to Exodus 1, there are some fairly significant shifts that happen in these chapters that mark Exodus as an entirely different entity than Genesis.

"Zooming out" is a pun I couldn't resist, but it also just fits with what's going on at the very beginning of the book. In Genesis, one main, overarching theme could be described as God's relationship with people: Adam, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob...

Exodus seems to be setting itself up, in a very clever way, as a story of God's relationship with a people: the people of Israel. By starting the book with a recap of the basic genealogy of Jacob, the author draws a direct line, without actually tracing direct lines, as it were, from the individual God-human relationships of Genesis to the corporate God-human relationship that will become the theme of... well, the rest of the Bible, really.