Exodus 5-6

1. Exodus 5-6 Facing the Challenge

2. FACING THE CHALLENGE • This block of narrative moves the exodus story to the decisive challenges of a nation demanding its freedom—in the name of Yahweh—from the vastly superior Egyptians. • The need for perseverance and reassurance (5:22–6:12) becomes obvious as both the pharaoh (5:1–14) and the Israelite work supervisors (5:15–20) react negatively to Moses’ message.

3. FACING THE CHALLENGE • First Audience with Pharaoh: Harsh Results • With Chapter 5 the encounters with Pharaoh begin. • Three key themes of those encounters are included already in the first verses (5:1–14): • The demand made by Yahweh, and quoted prophetically by Moses and Aaron, that “my people” be allowed to leave Egypt to worship “me” in the wilderness (vv. 1, 3) • Pharaoh’s resistance, showing no sufficient fear of Yahweh (vv. 2, 4); • Pharaoh’s stubbornness, shown in either doing nothing or doing the opposite of what Yahweh demanded (vv. 4–14, in this case resulting in even harsher conditions for the Israelites). • At this point in Moses’ narrative, the reader is exposed only to Pharaoh’s initial resistance and stubbornness, which, fierce from the start, did not abate even as the plagues were unleashed and grew ever more severe.

4. FACING THE CHALLENGE • First Audience with Pharaoh: Harsh Results (5:1–14) • Nothing less than the tenth plague, the already-predicted (4:22–23) death of the firstborn (chap. 12) would break the intransigence of Pharaoh, his advisors, and the Egyptians in general. • Until then, as this pericope invites us to appreciate, the Israelites not only would not make progress toward freedom, but they would actually suffer more harsh oppression as a result of their God’s demands on their behalf. • The reader must not lose sight of the identity of the combatants. • It is easy to assume that the contest for Israelite deliverance was between Moses and Pharaoh, or between Israel and Pharaoh, or between Israel and Egypt. It was none of these. • Rather, it was between Yahweh and Egypt’s gods, the pharaoh being a devotee of, representative of, and human focal point for those gods.

5. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:1 • “Afterward” (wĕʾaḥar) is a simple way to cover the indeterminate time Moses wishes to bridge in order to get right to the story of the initial encounter with Pharaoh. • Mark’s frequent “right afterward” (euthus) has the same sort of narrative purpose. • It might be thought unusual that Moses and Aaron would have the right to see the great king personally. • They were members of a hated and suppressed people group. • The reason probably was not related to Moses’ long-past status as an Egyptian princeling but rather to a right of audience with a monarch in the traditional legal system of much of the ancient world. • Kings were seen as expected to be available to the lowliest and greatest alike, a requirement that Israel’s prophets used regularly, often in highly critical, confrontational ways and sometimes even with the purpose of denouncing the king’s own personal behavior.

6. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:1 • Here is the first actual use in the Bible of the prophetic messenger speech formula “Thus says the Lord” (kōhʾāmar Yahweh) • In 4:22 Moses was taught this form in advance of the requirement to use it • In this instance “the God of Israel” is added in definitional apposition to explain to Pharaoh who Yahweh was. • Pharaoh would surely have recognized the messenger speech form, judging from its regular use in the Amarna Letters. • Without the addition of “the God of Israel” he might at first have assumed that “Yahweh” was some minor king or leader of the Israelites rather than their God since the name was otherwise new to him.

7. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:1 • Moses used the messenger speech formula “Thus says the Lord” regularly in his confrontations with Pharaoh during the plague stories but otherwise only one other time in Exodus, when God through him commanded the Levites to attack Israelite idolaters (32:27). • The formula is never found in the Pentateuch outside of Exodus. • God’s demand that his people be allowed to “hold a festival” (ḥgg) to him in the wilderness (or “desert”) recalls 3:18. • In the style of Near Eastern requesting favors, the initial request was purposefully stated in a modest way, although what was really being sought was much more: full permanent departure.

8. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:2 • The theme of Pharaoh’s not knowing Yahweh follows a certain progression, especially from this point to the end of the plague accounts. • There are two meanings to “Who is the Lord?” • Pharaoh started out not knowing who Yahweh was in the sense of not recognizing the name Yahweh • “Who are you talking about? I don’t recognize that name.” • Thereafter he obviously recognized the name but did not realize who Yahweh reallywas

9. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:2 • “What makes you think I would care about obeying Yahweh?” The latter usage is found, for example, in Prov 30:9 (“Or I shall be full, and deny you, and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ / or “I shall be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God” [nrsv]). Thus when Pharaoh said further, “I do not know the Lord” (lōʾyādaʿtı̂ ʾet-yahweh), he was employing in concept the second sense of “Who is the Lord?” namely, “to take the Lord seriously”. • Finally, before it was all over, he knew very well who Yahweh was and was sorry that he had to find out the hard way. • In comparison to the pharaoh who did not know Joseph (1:8), we now read of a pharaoh who did not know Yahweh. Moses and Aaron had received their first refusal, as God had predicted, and there would be many more.

10. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:3–5 • In saying, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us” (v. 3), Moses and Aaron used “Hebrews” rather than “Israelites” in accordance with the common practice of identifying themselves to foreigners. • Most of what they said to Pharaoh was word for word what they were told to say in 3:18, with the added statement “or he may strike us with plagues or with the sword,” presumably their way of assuring Pharaoh that they were deadly serious about obeying the Lord and that obedience was not something about which in their minds there was any option. • Ironically, it was the Egyptians, not the Israelites, who would eventually be struck with plagues (the ten) and the sword (“sword” being a standard ot synecdoche for defeat and death in battle) • “Plague” and “sword” are two of the famous three expressions summarizing all the various curses of God against his enemies.

11. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:3–5 • It is possible that by his statement “Why are you taking the people away from their labor?” the kingmeant to suggest only that Israelites had been shirking work ever since, or at least recently as a result of, being organized by Moses and Aaron into the beginnings of a resistance movement. • Reports had surely reached him of Israelite work stoppages and slowdowns • However, since the Hebrew imperfect verb form employed here (taprı̂ʿû) in context can convey not merely “why are you taking the people away?” but equally as likely “why would you take the people away?” it is probable that Pharaoh also was verbalizing the implications of what he understood they were asking for in the name of their God—an actual physical departure from the site of work. • At any rate, it is clear from v. 5 (“the people of the land are now numerous, and you are stopping them from working”) that most or all Israelites may at that moment not only have stopped work.

12. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:3–5 • Pharaoh’s language in v. 5 carries an overtone of the Egyptian xenophobic paranoia described in 1:9–14, where the dangerously large population of the Israelites (as seen from the Egyptian point of view) resulted in a long-term plan to suppress them by heavy labor. • Accordingly, Pharaoh took control, as his office and training dictated, and next proposed a workload increase that made perfect sense from the point of view of the agreed-upon Egyptian remedy for a large, potentially hostile Israelite population.

13. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:6–9 • The remedy proposed by the king was predictable: if work was the way to keep the Israelites quiet and obedient (a method that had worked well for decades), more work was the way to restore quiet and obedience. • According to 1:14, the forced labor burden on the Israelites was related mainly to brick making (“brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields”). Presumably the “work in the fields” was not originally focused on gathering the straw for the bricks but on planting, tending, and harvesting crops. The Egyptians must have used some other group for the straw. Now, ratcheting up the workload, Pharaoh ordered the Israelites to gather their own straw. • From the reader’s point of view, however, if the old attempt to keep down the Israelite population growth and aspirations for freedom failed (1:12), there was little chance that this greater oppression would turn the tide in favor of Egypt and against Israel.

14. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:6–9 • The “slave drivers” (nōgĕšı̂m, probably a synonym for the term “slave masters,” śārêmissı̂m) were likely Egyptian • The “foremen” were clearly Israelite (cf. 5:14–15, 19). Thus immediately (“that same day”) upon hearing Yahweh’s demands on him on behalf of his people, Pharaoh showed his contempt by making his demands on Yahweh’s people—the same brick output as previously, with a greatly increased supply problem relative to the straw. • In 3:18 and 5:3 the Israelites are quoted as asking for permission to “offer sacrifices to [Yahweh] the Lord.” Here Pharaoh characterized their request as a desire to “sacrifice to our God,” leaving out the name Yahweh. • This omission subtly and efficiently conveys the impression of Pharaoh’s disdain for Yahweh—who was to him in effect merely “the god these people worship.” • To him, Yahweh’s words were not valid; they were just lies. • This is ever the view of the nonbeliever: God’s words are lies that keep you from conforming to the expectations of the world you live in and from enjoying life on your own terms (a concept that began early in human history, according to Gen 3:4).

15. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:10–14 • The Israelites had believed in the Lord, and Moses and Aaron had faithfully spoken his word to Pharaoh, but things got worse rather than better. • Surely this relatively detailed account of the increased workload and the suffering it engendered makes a principal point: God’s people must not assume that carrying out his commands will increase their own comfort. • Of course, Moses had been forewarned that Pharaoh would be resistant (3:19; 4:21), but the severity and breadth of the suffering his resistance would cause the Israelites was not explicitly stated; it is likely that Moses, Aaron, the Israelite foremen, and the Israelites in general were caught unprepared for a punitive workload increase.

16. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:10–14 • What Pharaoh required was not simply that the Israelites themselves start gathering and chopping straw, a job previously done by others. Rather, “I will give you no straw” means that they could not have any or grow any of their own—no straw (teben) at all was to be provided them—not by others, not by their own hand (v. 10). • What they then had to do, according to v. 12, was go everywhere looking for stubble (qaš) to serve as a substitute for straw (teben). • Straw is preserved plant stalks from the more rigid long-stalk grains and vegetables. Straw comes from those plants that are harvested but whose stalks are inedible to humans and/or animals. • Stubble is the very short remaining stalks of plants after harvesting: the bit between the root and where the reaping scythe or sickle cut the plant.

17. FACING THE CHALLENGE • 5:10–14 • It was only a relatively poor substitute for straw, making the process of producing suitable bricks much harder, but it also was much harder to gather from harvested fields even when the season is right (requiring careful, tedious hand pulling and cutting) as compared to the purposely preserved (and usually bundled) straw and was almost hopelessly difficult to gather in the off season. • The fact that the Israelites under the new rules simply could not meet their brick quotas is not surprising: Pharaoh had made the task virtually impossible. • When the foremen, even under the penalty of being beaten, could not get the people to produce any more bricks (vv. 13–14), the situation was obviously intolerable. • It is not surprising that an anguished appeal to Pharaoh for relief followed (vv. 15–16), even though such an appeal was essentially an act of desperation, presumably having little chance of success.

18. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Negative Reaction of the Israelite Foreman • 5:15–21 • This section of the story contains several repetitions of information already known from prior verses in the chapter. • The repeated material reinforces the severity of the problem confronting the Israelites. • Its special emphasis lies in its focus on the rejection of the appeal and the hopelessness of the Israelites: when Pharaoh said, “You will not be given any straw, yet you must produce your full quota of bricks,” the Israelite foremen realized they were in trouble. • Thus the situation had transformed from one of hopefulness and faith (4:31) to resentment and doubt. Why?

19. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Negative Reaction of the Israelite Foreman • 5:15–21 • Because of Pharaoh’s intransigence. • He clearly is portrayed here as unyielding, determined to put the Israelites in their place, suggesting that the Israelites were going to need something much stronger than words to convince him to change his mind. • As v. 20 indicates, Moses and Aaron did not attempt to return to the royal court to handle this appeal, suggesting that they saw no hope in it or realized that they would not have been welcome. • Pharaoh was the final court of appeal, the equivalent of the supreme court of his country. Thus his final verdict had been rendered to Moses and Aaron already, and they may even have been barred from seeing him so soon again on essentially the same issue.

20. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Negative Reaction of the Israelite Foreman • 5:15–21 • Someone else, however, might have had the opportunity to address the king on the topic of the impossibility of fulfilling a royal edict (making a full quota of bricks without straw) under the court rules of that time (assuming the ancient Near Eastern general right of access) • It was perhaps thus that the Israelite foremen tried themselves to appeal the penalty assigned in response to Moses’ and Aaron’s representation of Yahweh’s demand. • When the bad news was delivered and the foremen had left the court and found Moses and Aaron outside (by all appearances, waiting in order to be supportive), the resentment and frustration engendered by their defeat at court boiled over into an angry accusation at the two brother leaders (“You have made us a stench to Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us,” v. 21).

21. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Negative Reaction of the Israelite Foreman • 5:15–21 • It is noteworthy that the foremen did not state that they had lost faith in Yahweh. Apparently they had not actually overthrown their newfound faith. • They apparently thought, however, that Moses and Aaron could not have properly represented the case or handled it well and thus had disobeyed Yahweh (“May the Lord look upon you and judge you!”). • Behind this rebuke appears to be the conviction that Moses and Aaron needed judgment because the nation’s God, Yahweh, would not have let such a thing happen without his will having been thwarted by these leaders. • The presumption that a good God never lets dangerous or harmful events happen to his people, false as it has always been, is a very old belief.

22. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 5:22–23 • The wording “Moses returned to the Lord” is not a reference to his going to any particular location (as if there were already some sort of tent of meeting erected or as if he went back to Sinai) but to Moses’ leaving the scene of the encounter with the furious foremen and taking his own discouragement privately to God in prayer. • The wording could also be translated “Moses turned to the Lord,” which is the more common translation of šûb in descriptions of prayer (e.g., 2 Kgs 23:25; 2 Chr 15:4; Ps 78:34; Dan 9:3; cf. Acts 9:35; 11:21). • His repeated refrain, “brought trouble upon this people,” is attributed to God as the ultimate cause and Pharaoh as the immediate cause. • The foremen had blamed Moses and Aaron; Moses now blamed God. • Moses apparently was genuinely dismayed by what had happened.

23. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 5:22–23 • He had been told to anticipate pharaoh’s stubbornness, but he had not anticipated cruel retribution against the Israelites themselves as a result of his mission (“Is this why you sent me?”). • “Ever since I went to Pharaoh” suggests what 5:10–14 implies: that a considerable time had elapsed between Pharaoh’s rejection of the request to leave Egypt and this point in time—time taken by the publication of the new, harder requirement, by the desperate attempts to meet it, by the failures, by the process of beatings that followed the failures, and by the foremen’s appeal. • By concluding his prayer with “you have not rescued your people at all,” Moses showed what he had actually been thinking:

24. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 5:22–23 • God’s promised deliverance would occur relatively quickly and would not involve setbacks or disappointments. • From a literary point of view, Moses was telling this story on himself. That is, writing for the wilderness generation and beyond, Moses included a detail that shows how he himself was unreasonably impatient for God’s deliverance. • The wilderness generation—and all that had succeeded it—had a similar tendency, and what Moses eventually learned, all believers have had to learn for themselves: • God’s timing only sometimes coincides with our expectations, and his idea of the hardships we need to go through only sometimes coincides with our idea of how much we can take.

25. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:1 • Using “by a mighty hand” (bĕyādhĕzāqāh) twice in this verse, God answered Moses’ complaint not by addressing its component parts each in turn or by explaining why he had chosen to allow things to be so difficult for Moses and the Israelites. • Rather, he answered by reference back to his original promise in 3:19 that it would take something greater than human power to move Pharaoh to let the Israelites go.

26. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:1 • No pronoun appears in the Hebrew occurs in the verse. • The language is an idiom connoting “by force,” and the niv routinely translates it in other contexts (though not consistently so) as “by a mighty hand” rather than “because of my mighty hand.” • God here promised Moses that he would force Pharaoh to let the Israelites go—not just for a three-day festival but he would “drive them out of his country.” • What God was planning for and reassuring Moses about was nothing less than the full exodus.

27. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:2–5 • God’s reassurance to Moses continues with covenant language, reminding him that he is Yahweh (v. 2), the God of the patriarchs, that the patriarchs worshiped him by that name, and that the patriarchal promises included their descendants’ possession of Canaan. • To possess Canaan required leaving Egypt, and therefore the patriarchal covenant was always, implicitly, also an exodus promise. • This is the first time in Exodus that God says “I am Yahweh” (or “I am the Lord”). • He had said these words (ʾănı̂ yahweh) only twice before, in Gen 15:7 to Abraham and in Gen 28:13 to Jacob, each time in connection with the promise of the land to their descendants. • Again here the promise of the land follows.

28. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:2–5 • In v. 3 God explains to Moses something else that up to this point had been only implicit: • He, Yahweh, was the El Shaddai (“God the Mountain One”) referred to in the patriarchal stories (Gen 17:1; 28:3; 35:11; 43:14; 48:3; cf. also the early use of the name in Job 8:5; 13:3; 15:25, and the later use in Ezek 10:5). • Thus Moses should assume full continuity between the promises to the patriarchs and the need for confidence in the present difficulties. • Those promises held central the eventual gift of the land to the descendants of Abraham after their being enslaved in a foreign land and mistreated but liberated and enriched in the process—in other words, the whole exodus story in a very compact form.

29. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:2–5 • Read Gen 15:13–16. • What the patriarchs trusted would one day happen was now underway, and God encouraged Moses here to believe that fact. • Verse 5 recalls 2:24, including much of its vocabulary. “I have heard” and “I have remembered”are both idiomatic ways of saying “I will respond to your prayers and am now going into action relative to my earlier promises.”

30. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:6–8 • God had just reassured Moses. • Next he gave Moses the words with which to reassure the Israelites, words that represent an expansion on his reassurance to Moses—similar in some ways to it but adding some important particulars as well. • These words summarize God’s plan for his people. • The prophetic speech to the Israelites will also begin with I am Yahweh. • The language of freedom from the “yoke” (v. 6) is language idiomatic of freedom from servitude (Gen 27:40; Lev 26:13; Deut 28:48; 1 Kgs 12:4).

31. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:6–8 • The reference to “an outstretched arm” and “with mighty acts of judgment” in that same verse connotes the upcoming plagues that would force Pharaoh to do what he otherwise never would have done and would serve as a judgment against Egypt. • Egypt had unfairly oppressed the Israelites—they were never a real threat, they never would actually have joined with Asiatic enemies to try to take over Egypt (1:10), and they were therefore illegally placed in servitude. • Accordingly, God would not merely rescue his people from the Egyptians but would also overtly punish the Egyptians in the process.

32. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:6–8 • Verse 7 contains a special declaration of divine covenantal election of Israel in the words “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.” • Similar statements modeled on this one, often with somewhat varied wording but always with “my people” and “your God” as the key vocabulary, are found in later contexts referring to this covenant promise or to the breaking of the covenant or to keeping the Mosaic covenant in general. • By these words God assured Israel of a special status: they were, corporately, his own people in a way that no other people were. • The actual gift of the covenant at Sinai would flesh out the blessings and responsibilities associated with this election. • For the time being, he assured them of his particular interest in them and of the coming ratification (at Sinai) of this promise of election.

33. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:6–8 • When would he “take” them as his people? • That question is actually answered immediately in v. 7: “Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.” • The expression “then you will know …” is found commonly in prophetical passages, where “proof by fulfillment” is a type of incentivizing to encourage the people to believe and act upon the divine word. • Here what God was saying was, in effect: “Trust me that I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. What is the proof? I won’t give you any yet, but when you are out of Egypt and at the place where I will take you as my own people (which any reader understands to be Sinai since Moses wrote Exodus after Sinai), you will be able to look back on what has happened and see that I accomplished everything that I promised you.” • Only at Sinai, with its occasion of full ratification of the covenant, would God fully take Israel as his own people. The process began here, however, with their assent in faith to the promise that he would do so after having rescued them from Egyptian bondage.

34. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:6–8 • Verse 8 hearkens back to the repeated forward-looking formal assurances given by God to the patriarchs that he would bring their descendants back to Canaan (Gen 15:13–20; 24:7; 26:2–5; 28:15; 35:12; 48:4). • The solemnity of the promises is signaled in the wording “I swore with uplifted hand,” an idiom for “I formally promised.” • In saying “I will give it to you as a possession,” God indicated that he would not merely let the Israelites live in Canaan but would actually let them own Canaan. • They had never owned land—thus making Abraham’s purchase of land to bury Sarah an exceptional event worthy of a special story in Genesis (Gen 23:3–20). • But now they would have the land where the patriarchs resided as resident aliens given to them as a gift from God. Here was an incentive to follow Yahweh indeed!

35. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:6–8 • The words “I am the Lord” that appear at the end of v. 8 had also opened this section of divine response to Moses’ complaint (vv. 2–8), forming an inclusio for the entire divine speech. • These two words (in Hb. just ʾănı̂ yahweh) have profound significance theologically in two different ways. • First, they function as a synecdoche to bring to mind God’s impending covenant because identification of the giver of a covenant is part of the preamble (identification of the parties to the covenant), that is, the initial content of a typical ancient Near Eastern covenant. • “I am the Lord” is almost tantamount to saying, “I am Yahweh, your covenant God.” • Second, “I am the Lord” is a statement of identity—not just theoretical identity but relational identity. • It invites the hearer to say: “I have a connection to him. I know him personally. He is not just any god. He is mine.” • This direct relationship, so crucial to our Christian sense of conversion and salvation from sin, is signaled in God’s identifying himself personally.

36. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:9–12 • Optimism is often dashed by suffering, especially ongoing suffering. Faith is often diminished by hardship because emotions play a powerful part in most human thinking, and thinking can become increasingly pessimistic when any sort of pain continues unabated. • Accordingly, it is understandable that the Israelites would not listen (v. 9) to Moses’ latest message of divine reassurance, even though they had previously welcomed Yahweh’s words (4:29–31). • Pharaoh’s strategy (5:7–9) had proved remarkably successful. The people were overcome by impatience for relief and by hard slavery (“discouragement and cruel bondage”).

37. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:9–12 • This presented an obvious tactical problem for Moses, which he voiced in v. 12. If the Israelites, who would be his natural allies and who stood to gain from the message he was speaking on God’s behalf, would not listen, how could he ever expect to meet success by carrying on with the task of demanding freedom from Pharaoh, who was his natural enemy in this situation and who stood to lose hugely from an Israelite exodus? • Nevertheless, God assigned him to confront Pharaoh once again and demand Israel’s exodus (vv. 10–11). • The wording of the request reflects less of the previous “opening bargaining style” now. • In 5:1 the request was stated as “let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the desert.” • Now it is less modest in scope: Pharaoh was to “let the Israelites go out of his country”—using the more blunt, full-exodus language that God had first used with Moses in connection with the exodus demand he was eventually to deliver (3:10).

38. FACING THE CHALLENGE • Moses’ Complaint and God’s Covenant Assurance (5:22–6:12) • 6:9–12 • At the end of v. 12 Moses reverted to his earlier protest mode (as seen in chaps. 3 and 4, esp. in 4:10–13), still seeking release from the difficult assignment. • He employed here a variation on his earlier description of himself as “never … eloquent … slow of speech and tongue” (4:10). • The niv “I speak with faltering lips” misses the connection with 4:24–26 that the more literal translation “My lips are uncircumcised” (ănı̂ ʿăralśĕpātāyim) would suggest. • Moses was not saying that he had a speech impediment (“faltering lips”); he was rather saying (disingenuously) that he was “not ready for public speaking,” using the metaphorical language of circumcision. • Moses was still desperate and desperately discouraged and pessimistic. He wanted out. God, however, knew better. Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus, vol. 2, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), 105–182.