Exodus 3

1. Exodus 3 Moses’ Call

2. Moses’ Call • This block of narrative moves the exodus story from the obscurity of one man’s quiet, isolated life in Midian to the introduction of Yahweh. • The (re-)revelation of the name Yahweh (3:1–15) is central to the direction of Moses’ call. • The Burning Bush Theophany (3:1–12)

3. Moses’ Call • 3:1 • The main purpose of this first verse in the third-person description of Moses’ life-changing encounter with God is to provide a brief explanation for how Moses came to be located far from normal Midianite haunts, at Sinai, where God would reveal himself to him. • Important subsidiary information, however, is revealed in the process. • We learn, for example, that Moses’ identification with his own ethnic people was now so strong that he was willing to serve in the occupation of shepherd, an assignment that no one who still thought of himself as an Egyptian would ever have taken on, so loathsome was shepherding to Egyptians. • In other words, it is apparent that should he ever return to Egypt, he would go as an Israelite, not as an Egyptian.

4. Moses’ Call • 3:1 • Additionally, we learn that he did not have his own flock but tended that of his father-in-law, suggesting that he had not come into substantial means of his own. • In contrast to his days as an Egyptian princeling, he was now, even if in a favored way, at least in some sense a household worker. • Of significance for the story of the exodus is the placing of Horeb (Mount Sinai) west of/to the far side of the desert from Midian. • Various theories have been advanced in favor of locating Mount Sinai somewhere in Midian, but this verse is part of the contrary evidence. • Moses apparently had gone with the flock from Midianite territory (located mainly east of the east fork of the Red Sea) westward past Elat/Ezion-geber and then southwest into the Sinai wilderness—weeks away from home, taking advantage of the available high grassy slopes whose value to feeding the sheep was worth the great distance required for him to traverse. The special distance may even have been occasioned by poor grass conditions in Midian itself that year. At any rate, Moses had gone no small distance toward Egypt in his cattle drive.

5. Moses’ Call • 3:2–3 • Suddenly a supernatural encounter of great consequence took place, continuing the third-person description. • Nothing prior to this in the book is demonstrably supernatural, in the sense of the miraculous suspension of the usual laws of nature. • Now, however, God, in the form of the “Angel of the Lord” appeared in a fire theophany (to Moses, a special personal appearance of God to an aging exile working as a shepherd, to initiate the divine call for this unlikely candidate to be his prophet for the purpose of delivering the Israelites from Egypt.

6. Moses’ Call • The Angel of the Lord • The term malʾākyahweh, usually translated “the Angel of the Lord,” appears sixty-seven times in the Old Testament. Exodus 3:2 is its only occurrence in Exodus, though it was already prominent in both Gen 16, the story of Hagar, and Gen 22, the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. • Grammatically, malʾākyahweh is a construct and according to the rule of constructs, both elements must be either definite or indefinite. Since the proper noun “Yahweh” is intrinsically definite, the noun that precedes it musts also be definite; so the phrase cannot therefore mean “an angel of the Lord” but must connote greater definiteness, in other words, “the Angel of the Lord.” • A useful analogy is found in the well-known expression nĕharpĕrāt, [the] River Euphrates, also an appositional construct in which the second noun is intrinsically definite by reason of being a proper noun. Consider the nature of the River Euphrates: it was not a river in or of Euphrates; r; rather, all of [the] Euphrates was the river, that is, the River Euphrates or [the] Euphrates River.

7. Moses’ Call • The Angel of the Lord • Likewise, malʾākyahweh is grammatically appositional and best translated as “the angel that is Yahweh” or “the Angel Yahweh” or “Angel Yahweh.” • Strikingly, in Exod 3 the “Angel of the Lord” said to be “in flames of fire from within a bush” (v. 2) is in v. 4 called both Yahweh [Lord] and God. • These and other passages indicate that the Angel of the Lord is the Lord God himself and not merely one of heaven’s angels standing in for God or speaking with his authority. • What reason, therefore, would there be for God to take the form of an angel in so many instances? Why not just show up in person, as it were? • Because of his omnipresence, God is not limited to any space. Therefore, when he occupies a small space for purposes of revelation, he typically does so by representation.

8. Moses’ Call • The Angel of the Lord • He has made humans his representatives to do his will (Gen 1:26; Matt 6:10) on the little space in the universe that we call the earth, and he has chosen angels as his representatives from heaven to earth (Heb 1:14). But he sometimes has specially represented himself in human form, such as through the angel who could be called Angel Yahweh and most brilliantly and importantly of all through his own Son in human likeness. • Since Pentecost, both the Son and the Father are represented by the Spirit within believers—an extremely personal and significant representation that goes beyond even the benefits of visibility and voice provided by an angel. • Such appearances have the advantage of giving people something to look at and listen to, since looking and listening are so basic to relating.

9. Moses’ Call • The Angel of the Lord • This was a reason for the expulsion of the first humans from the Garden after they sinned, a reason for God’s dwelling among his people by indirect representation in the tabernacle/temple and in Zion/Jerusalem, and through his occasional appearance in visible and audible form as the Angel Yahweh. The Angel Yahweh was not all there was to God but was a true and real representation of him, much as a videoconferencing call brings a valuable sense of the presence of an individual into a room through a video screen and speaker—visibility and voice—even though the individual is not actually fully present thereby.

10. Moses’ Call • Fire Theophany • The term “theophany” (“appearance of God”) is normally used to refer to instances recorded in Scripture where God appears in some way to humans. • God’s appearances do not represent his totality or the fullness of his essence. They instead are occasions in which he is visible in some fashion—normally, through a shape that is not exactly natural (i.e., he does not look like a human); but he can nevertheless be looked at and focused on by a human, an appearance often accompanied by fire. • A pot of fire is thus how God represented himself in his covenant with Abraham in Gen 15:17. • To lead the Israelites through the wilderness, he showed himself as a pillar of fire (Exod 13:21 and thereafter).

11. Moses’ Call • Fire Theophany • At Sinai he “descended in fire” (Exod 19:18 and thereafter) to meet with Israel and reveal his Law. • Later, again at Sinai, he accompanied his visit to Elijah with fire (1 Kgs 19:6). • He often is actually identified as fire (e.g., Deut 4:24) and his coming as accompanied by fire (e.g., Ps 50:3). • Ezekiel saw him as a fiery shape (Ezek 1; 8) • Daniel, as one sitting on a throne of fire (Dan 9:7) • John, as one with eyes of fire (Rev 1:14; 2:18; 19:12). • Often his judgment is described as coming in the form of destructive fire (e.g., Num 11:1–3; 16:35; 2 Kgs 1:12–14; Job 1:16; Amos 1:4–2:5) • The baptism of Christ, which resulted in judgment against sin (Matt 3:11) • The second death, in the fire that consumes fully and cannot be quenched in any way (e.g., Matt 18:8–9; 2 Pet 3:7; Jude 7; Rev 20:14).

12. Moses’ Call • Fire Theophany • The present passage, Exod 3, thus provides one of the many instances in the Bible of God’s representation of himself in a fire theophany. Of course, not all fires indicated God’s presence (indeed Exod 3:3 indicates that initially Moses made no such assumption about the origin of the fire that kept the bush burning), and a number of other phenomena also are used to indicate his theophanic presence (storms, wind, clouds, smoke, blazing light)—with or without any accompanying fire.

13. Moses’ Call • 3:2–3 • These two verses describe the encounter both in summary form from the point of view of the reader, who is told immediately that what Moses began to see was in fact an appearance of the Angel of the Lord, and also from Moses’ point of view, which makes clear that at first he had no idea what he was seeing beyond the fact that it was a bush on fire that kept burning steadily. • The term used for this bush, sĕneh, denotes a relatively small (at most a few feet in diameter) thorny bush/shrub. Moses, knowing how to keep warm on cold nights in the wilderness, would have been well aware of how quickly bushes burn and would thus have been struck by two factors: • first, a single bush on a hillside without anyone else around it was on fire; • second, instead of burning up it burned on and on.

14. Moses’ Call • 3:2–3 • Moses was naturally attracted to this unusual phenomenon and chose to try to understand it by getting closer. God thus used this burning bush, as he so often uses various sorts of circumstances, to begin to bring someone closer to himself. The Hebrew term ‘asurah denotes a departure from where Moses was headed, as an interruption. Not only did he go to investigate the burning bush, but he was leaving his obligations other responsibilities to do so. • But why a bush? • It may only be because God’s likely choice was between rocks and bushes—the two sorts of objects that can typically be found sticking out of the ground in that terrain—and he simply chose a bush. But it may also be that the similarity between the sounds of sĕneh, “bush,” and sı̂nāy, “Sinai,” fit his purposes. • Indeed, so close are the two words that in Deut 33:16 the expression šōkĕnı̂ sĕneh, “the one who resided in the bush,” sometimes has been emended to šōkēnsı̂nāy, “the one who dwells on Sinai” (e.g., nrsv).

15. Moses’ Call • 3:2–3 • At any rate, it is certainly conceivable that the mention of the bush, sĕneh, was designed also to become a reminder of its location, sı̂nāy. Because in biblical culture bushes or trees can symbolize people or groups, the use of a bush on fire to gain Moses’ attention would not have been outside of his cognition: he could have adapted quickly, as he did to the idea that an angel/the angel of the Lord/the Lord himself had manifested himself (to get Moses’ attention) within that bush.

16. Moses’ Call • 3:4–5 • After God’s method of attracting Moses closer to the bush worked, as of course he knew it would, God then began to reveal himself (v. 4) from within the theophanic fire by addressing Moses through a speech pattern (“Moses! Moses!”) that may be called “repetition of endearment.” • In ancient Semitic culture, addressing someone by saying his or her name twice was a way of expressing endearment, that is, affection and friendship. Thus Moses would have understood immediately that he was being addressed by someone who loved him and was concerned about him. • Moses’ reply, hinnēnı̂ (“Here I am”), has no special meaning beyond being the standard way in Hebrew of replying “Yes?” when one is called.

17. Moses’ Call • 3:4–5 • Without yet identifying himself, God began to teach Moses about the holy nature of his presence (v. 5). • The theme of the divine Presence is a major topic of Exodus. It often is emphasized by commands requiring distance from God so as not to intrude too far on his holiness, proximity to which carries with it danger to the person not properly prepared (sanctified). • There are many references in the Bible to taking off or putting on sandals, but none has any connection with holiness except this one. • Presumably, taking off shoes was done when entering the presence of a superior person, which usually would occur formally when one was at the superior person’s house, palace, or tent. • Thus Sinai/Horeb is here implicitly identified as “Yahweh’s place.” Thus the very ground is holy—something said of no other location in the Bible.

18. Moses’ Call • 3:6 • This verse is noteworthy for the precise designation of whom Moses is talking to, that is, who the true God is, as well as of the history of divine relationships with the descendants of Abraham that Moses now joins. • No special significance should be read into the fact that “the God of” is repeated. Greek can avoid the repetition by stringing out genitives (thus, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”), but strings of genitives (i.e., the governing words in construct phrases) are much less common in Hebrew. • This need not imply, however, that Amram, Moses’ biological father, was somehow of equal importance to the patriarchs or that Amram knew the true God as closely as they. • God’s mention of Amram was more likely a means of assuring Moses • That he was now in the Israelite tradition of faith and had the opportunity to know the true God just as his father and all who preceded him since Abraham had • God’s faithful provision over all the many generations since Abraham, according to the promises made him in Gen 12; 15, was beginning to come to fruition.

19. Moses’ Call • 3:6 • Moses’ fear of seeing God has various parallels and represents a general assumption in ancient Near Eastern culture that if one were actually to look at a god (except in the form of an idol, according to pagan notions of the concept), he or she might be in great danger because gods—and certainly the one true God—guarded their full presence from humans (cf. John 1:18; 6:46; 1 John 4:12).

20. Moses’ Call • 3:7–10 • What the reader has already learned from mention of the patriarchal covenant in 2:23–25 (and which was implicit in the reference to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in 3:6) Moses now heard spelled out explicitly: • Yahweh cared about his people and planned to deliver them from Egypt to Canaan. • Two great challenges to Moses’ faith appear here implicitly, at either end of these verses. • The first (v. 7) is a challenge shared by all believers: to trust that God has always and continues to be concerned about their suffering since in the present fallen world, God allows suffering. • That the Israelites had been suffering oppression such a long time without rescue begs the question of God, “If you are willing to help now, why didn’t you help earlier?” The Bible provides clear answers in principle to such a question, but individuals or groups cannot normally know why their particular suffering is so severe or has gone on as long as it has.

21. Moses’ Call • 3:7–10 • The second challenge (v. 10) involves Moses’ past: • how could one who tried and failed to help his fellow Israelites on an individual scale forty years before (2:11–14) now, in his late years, be God’s choice as deliverer of the whole nation? • Verse 7 summarizes the plight of the Israelites in their forced labor with four terms: “misery … crying out … slave drivers … suffering.” With three verbs God announced his compassion: “I have indeed seen … I have heard them … I am concerned.” • The first of these, “I have indeed seen” (rāʾōhrāʾı̂tı̂) involves the Hebrew infinitive absolute construction, which connotes the sense “I have carefully watched” or “I have paid very close attention to,” thus by itself indicating the intensity of God’s interest in the misery of his people. • Note also that God called Israel “my people,” echoing but also more grandly superseding Moses’ reference to “his own people” in 2:11.

22. Moses’ Call • 3:7–10 • Verse 8 declares God’s rescue plan. • The wording “I have come down [descended]” is characteristic of many biblical passages related to theophany and divine rescue of humans and should not be understood as suggesting a primitive view of God within a three-tiered universe. • He promised to bring them to a place ample in both sizeand nourishment for them. • By mentioning the six (or seven) Canaanite-Amorite groups, God both clarified for Moses exactly which territories he planned to give his people and proleptically identified the future enemies in the war of conquest fought by Joshua.

23. Moses’ Call • 3:7–10 • Verse 9 reiterates that God had not forgotten his people, was deeply concerned for them, and would act on their behalf. • Nevertheless, as the ensuing portions of the narrative make clear, it was not easy for Moses to hear the command of v. 10, with its demand that he go as God’s prophet (“I am sending you”) to Pharaoh to bring Israel out of Egypt. • Not only was Moses to be involved in the exodus but he was to lead it, in defiance of the greatest potentate on earth, the Egyptian Pharaoh.

24. Moses’ Call • 3:11–12 • The two verses together constitute the first of several patterns of hieros logos followed by Moses’ protest—pairs of elements that take the narrative all the way to 4:17. • Moses’ protest in v. 11 conforms to the usual pattern in such cases: being called to a task by God, he properly and respectfully expressed his humility at being given such an important assignment. • In other words, Moses’ question, “Who am I?” is a pro forma question, not an expression of actual lack of self-confidence. At this point, at least, he was not trying to get out of the job Yahweh was calling him to perform but was being mannerly according to the dictates of his culture. • The exact expression, “Who am I” (mı̂ʾānōḳı̂) occurs two other times in the Old Testament, in each instance as part of expressing polite acceptance of an honor rather than as an attempt to decline it. From the wording of his response, it is clear that Moses understood the nature of his assignment.

25. Moses’ Call • 3:11–12 • God’s reply (v. 12) contains two key elements: • a promise of help and guidance (“I will be with you”) • For God to “be with” someone means that he provides that person direct, special help and guidance that, in turn, can cause people to recognize that person’s worth and/or authority in given situations.42 • and a fulfillment sign. • A fulfillment sign is a confirmation that a prophet or leader has completed a key part of a task assigned him by God. The fulfillment sign for Moses’ call was a successful exodus followed by arrival at Mount Sinai and worship there by all the people (“you will worship” is plural). • This is significant because it is not merely measurable by the movement of the people from one place to another but also by their movement from one faith to another. • They would get to Sinai, but more importantly they would get to saving belief in the only true and living God. • Fulfillment signs require faith since they promise proof to follow after an interval of time rather than immediately; in doing so they encourage faith. This one is no exception. It would be fulfilled three months after the start of the exodus (Exod 19:1) but would continue to provide its retrospective reassurance for forty more years.

26. Moses’ Call • Revelation of the Name Yahweh (3:13–15) • Knowing the name of God would be for Moses both a comfort and a credential in his dealing with the Israelites, and for the Israelites in turn it would become a first means of designating true faith and worship.

27. Moses’ Call • 3:13 • Moses’ protest at this point is appropriate for someone willing to respond favorably to a call of God, particularly in light of the culture he and his fellow Israelites lived in. • Theirs was a polytheistic, pantheistic, and syncretistic world in which all people groups and nations—there are no known exceptions—believed that there were many gods, that all nature partook to some degree of divinity, and that all religions had at least some validity no matter how many or what sort of gods or goddesses those religions worshiped and regardless of the contradictions a modern person can immediately see between any two such religions. • Moses therefore wondered Which God am I speaking to? since “the God of your fathers” (a summation of v. 6) might have different meanings to different Israelites.

28. Moses’ Call • 3:13 • Having lived in the midst of pagan cultures all their lives, all Israelites were at risk for heterodox beliefs and/or the distortion of whatever correct beliefs they may theoretically have inherited. • Moreover, since the true God was known by various names and titles in the patriarchal era (e.g., El Elyon, “God Most High” in Gen 14:18–22; PahadYitṣḥaq, “Fear of Isaac” in Gen 31:42, 53; El Shaddai, “God of the Mountain, Elohim “God Almighty”; El Roʾi, “The God Who Sees Me” in Gen 16:13; El Bethel, “God of Bethel” in Gen 31:13) specificity was desirable. • Perhaps most importantly was the assumption in that culture that to call on a god—that is, to pray to and worship him—involved calling on his name, specifically naming him in prayer and worship (cf. 1 Kgs 18:24–26).

29. Moses’ Call • 3:14 • Here appears God’s re-revelation of his actual proper name. • Yahwehwas already known by early generations (Gen 4:26) and used thereafter by the patriarchs (Noah, Gen 9:26; Abraham, Gen 12:8; Isaac, Gen 26:25; Jacob, Gen 28:16; Laban, Gen 30:27)—but it was not used, or not prominently used, by any of the children of Jacob, at least in terms of what is in the biblical record. • It appears that Moses, as he had constructed the narrative we now call the book of Genesis, intended that we realize that the generation after Jacob and all subsequent generations up to his own had lost at least a measure—and probably, over time, a greater and greater measure—of the knowledge of the true God and therefore, presumably, of the practice of praying to him and worshiping him regularly and properly, by his name.

30. Moses’ Call • 3:14 • An analogy is found in the way the book of Esther is written: God is not mentioned in any manner in that book, not because he was not involved in the events of the story but as a stylistic device to provide for the reader the constant, ongoing, didactic impression that the Jews of Esther’s day had become largely paganized. Moses carefully avoided any mention of the name Yahweh until now for a presumably similar reason in this narrative.

31. Moses’ Call • Yahweh • Here the name Yahweh is first given in its first-person form, as the simple imperfect tense of the verb “to be” (in the earliest Hb. hwh, later hyh), thus ʾehyeh, though to be “I am,” means “I cause to be.” • The name should thus be understood as referring to Yahweh’s being the creator and sustainer of all that exists and thus the Lord of both creation and history, all that is and all that is happening—a God active and present in historical affairs. • The well-established vocalization of the third-person form of the divine name, yahweh, clearly a causative, strongly points to the original vocalization of the first-person form of the name here as ʾahyeh, also the causative (hiphil) sense “I create/sustain.” • At any rate, the causative was obviously at least one of the intended understandings since the causative Yahweh—not the simple verb “to be” form, which would be Yihw/yeh (“I am/will be”)—became the form thereafter employed, as in 13:15 and subsequently. • By this reasoning, what some version necessarily translates as “I am who I am” probably was actually heard by Moses as “I cause to be because I cause to be.”

32. Moses’ Call • 3:14 • By authorizing Moses to say, “I am/cause to be” has sent me to you,” God made Moses his ambassadorial representative, that is, prophet, assigned to speak on his behalf to the Israelites. • They would have recognized, if they perceived the situation correctly, that what he said was not of his own making but was the word of Yahweh, the God of their forefathers.

33. Moses’ Call • 3:15 • What had just been revealed in terms of the divine name was now reiterated with connection to the Patriarchs, so that the Israelites in Egypt would be able properly to draw the conclusion that Moses was not coming to them in the name of a new god but the true God of old, the God their own ancestors worshiped, and thus the God who should logically be their national deliverer. • God also made clear that the third-person form of his name, Yahweh, was to be employed immediately (since no human could use it properly in the first-person form) and would identify him to his people for the generations thereafter.

34. Moses’ Call • Summary of Commission and Prediction of Acceptance by Israelites (3:16–22) • Here God’s assurances include: • the revelation of the divine name to the leaders of Israel (v. 16) • a prediction of the fulfillment of the homeland promise originally given to Abraham (v. 17) • the Israelite strategy for requesting freedom (v. 18), prediction of the Egyptian resistance (v. 19) • the power of God on behalf of his people over the various powers of Egypt and its people (vv. 20–22)

35. Moses’ Call • 3:16–17 • God assigned Moses to report on his theophany to the Israelite leaders so they could share with him the knowledge that the God of their ancestorswould help them out of their suffering as well as an understanding of what a wonderful future God had planned for them in the land he promised centuries prior to Abraham. • We should not miss the significance of pāqōdpāqadtı̂ (“I have been carefully watching over you”), which is an instance of a biblical semantic idiom in which when God said that he had noticed/ seen/ known/ remembered/ watched over/ paid attention toor understood what he meant was not merely that he was aware but that he was going to do something about it. • This is, for example, the implicit meaning of “I have seen” and “has reached me” in 3:9 and “[God] remembered” in 2:24 (cf. 6:5). • The different wordings are all variations of an idiom that is essentially a synecdoche—a part for the whole—in which because of God’s nature, his own overt mention of his being aware automatically implies additionally his determination to act. Thus God’s announcement of awareness of a problem was at the same time an announcement that he would attend to that problem—because it could not be solved by human means, not even “by a mighty hand” (v. 19).

36. Moses’ Call • 3:16–17 • These verses repeat much of the language used in vv. 7–9, and v. 17 in particular repeats almost verbatim the end of v. 8. • This was not a failure on Moses’ part to vary his vocabulary in telling his story (the sort of thing a modern writer might do) but part of the ancient, well-established narrative method known as “command-fulfillment style” in which the narrator tells what was commanded and then, using entirely or largely the same vocabulary, tells either how it was to be fulfilled or how it actually was fulfilled.

37. Moses’ Call • 3:18 • As part of the continuing hieroilogoi of this section (3:14–22), God here assures Moses of success—not yet success at bringing the people out of Egypt but success at convincing the leaders of his own people to believe in Yahweh and to join Moses and Aaron in confronting Pharaoh with God’s demands. • Even though the Israelites were in desperately hard conditions, it could not have been easy for them to rally to a former Egyptian criminal, whose help previously had been spurned (2:14), to accept on faith his report that Yahweh (to many of them a name from the distant past or a new name entirely) had appeared to him as their representative (thus the language “has met with us”) and to demand from the great king the right to leave Egypt.

38. Moses’ Call • 3:18 • According to God’s instruction, the elders were to identify themselves as Hebrews rather than Israelites, thus using terminology Pharaoh would understand. • They also were to speak in the name of Yahweh (because the demand was his, not theirs) in spite of the fact that this name might be completely new to Pharaoh, as it indeed proved to be (5:2). Moreover, they were to ask to leave Egypt. • This latter request is easily misunderstood because of its wording here and in several subsequent locations in the story. “Let us take a three-day journey into the wilderness [niv desert]” seems like a modest enough request. It actually implied, however, full and permanent departure from Egypt, yet without seeming to do so, and thus requires some explanation.

39. Moses’ Call • 3:18 • We must appreciate the way people in many Eastern societies, including those of the ancient Near East, have preferred to use suggestive, gentle, restrained, and limited ways of making requests as opposed to simply coming right out and asking for what they wanted. • There are few analogies in North American/Western culture, but the following might be illustrative: “Would you please hand me the remote?” is actually a way of saying, “I’m going to control what we watch, if you don’t mind.” Likewise, “Dad, can I have the keys to the car?” usually means, “Dad, may I use the car for the next several hours, with no one else being able to use it?” • In particular, English-speaking cultures do this sort of thing with requests for time; “Have you got a second?” is not literal at all but really is a way of saying, “I’d like to take an indefinite amount of your time,” and “He’ll be with you in a moment” is not literally true but can mean “Keep waiting; he’ll be free whenever he’s free.” In these expressions the amount of time literally stated is minuscule compared to the amount of time actually expected.

40. Moses’ Call • 3:18 • This is how “Let us take a three-day journey” functions in the speech Moses and the elders of Israel were to make to Pharaoh. “Three-day journey” was an idiom in the ancient world for “a major trip with formal consequences.” • Pharaoh would have heard it that way and would also have heard it as meaning “We want to leave Egypt for however long we choose.” • Moreover, the demand for the people to “offer sacrifices to the Lord our God” was yet another way of implying—without quite saying so in so many words—that the people would leave Egypt since, as develops later in the actual event (10:25–26) the Israelites expected to worship Yahweh far from Egypt at Mount Sinai, completely out of and free from any Egyptian oversight, having taken all their possessions with them.

41. Moses’ Call • 3:19–20 • These verses constitute a summation of the upcoming plague account. • No human threat (the “mighty hand” here refers to human power, not to God’s mighty “hand,” which is introduced immediately thereafter by way of contrast) can intimidate the most powerful potentate in the known world of that day—something Moses, with his experience of living near Egyptian power, could understand well. • Here God showed his full knowledge of people’s character and thinking processes by predicting that Pharaoh would remain stubborn, thus also anticipating the “hardness of heart” theme that recurs in the plague stories (4:21 and commonly in chaps. 7–14).

42. Moses’ Call • 3:19–20 • The solution for what otherwise would be an impasse was divine intervention against the Egyptians, those who were oppressing God’s people, through his “miracles” (niplĕʾôṭay, “my miracles” ). • He would not perform these miracles merely for display but as punishments, and thus he would strike/strike down (hiphil of nkh) the Egyptians with supernatural acts. • “Stretch out my hand and strike” is effectively a hendiadys for “unleash my destruction” or “powerfully strike down.” • God did not yet reveal to Moses how many plagues and of what sort he would employ, but clearly there would be a variety, and they would be impressively destructive. • Divinely unleashed plagues, not any human persuasion, would cause Pharaoh to let the people go. • The “you” at the end of v. 20 is plural because God here assigned Moses what he was to say to the leaders of the Israelites and what they were therefore to expect.

43. Moses’ Call • 3:21–22 • Moses is the only Old Testament writer to use the precise idiom nāṭan + ḥēn + bĕʿēnê, “make favorably disposed toward” (lit., “give favor in the sight of”). • He employed this wording previously (Gen 39:21) to describe Joseph’s being in the good graces of the chief jailer at his prison, that is, in narrating the reversing of an expected hostility. • Hereafter he used it only twice more (Exod 11:3; 12:36), both times in contexts similar to the present one. • God here predicted that he would reverse the attitude of the Egyptians, which had been so anti-Israelite that the Egyptian people in general could be expected voluntarily to help kill Israelite children (1:22), so great was their dread of the Israelites (1:12). • Now God would engineer events so that Egyptians would willingly give valuables and clothing to Israelites.

44. Moses’ Call • 3:21–22 • Clearly, the women in an ancient family, as often in modern cultures, were normally the custodians of clothing, jewelry, and similar family valuables. • By introducing the term “plunder” (nṣl, piel), a term otherwise associated with gathering up the spoils after battle, God brought to the people’s attention through Moses the concept that they would be involved in a holy war against the Egyptians. • Here again God’s beneficent foreknowledge was operating: he knew that their sojourn in the wilderness would be very long and that a poor group hardly could expect to survive without supplies and financial reserves. So from their former persecutors he would supply those needs, further demonstrating his power and control over all people and circumstances.

45. Moses’ Call • 3:21–22 • Assumed in the language of these two verses are two further concepts: • In some cases Egyptians and Israelites lived together in the same household (“any woman living in her house”), not necessarily because Egyptians were tenants of Israelites but more often probably because Israelites were household workers in Egyptian homes (cf. Gen 39:2; Prov 31:15). • The “sons and daughters” would need clothing and other valuables because God knew that their generation would grow up in the wilderness; this is the first focus in the narrative on the second generation to whom Moses would eventually preach what we call Deuteronomy. Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus, vol. 2, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), 105–182.