Forced Redemption
But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, from Egypt, to be a people for His own possession, as today.Deuteronomy 4:20 NASB
Brought you out– In a parallel passage, God’s act of redemption is described in Moses’ final speech with the Hebrew word qereb (Deut 4:34). In that description, Moses recalls the astounding redemptive act as forcibly extracting one nation “from the midst” of another. This is shocking. It implies that the people are so intertwined with Egypt that they simply do not want to be redeemed. They may want God to come to their rescue, but they want Him to fix things where they are. They really don’t want to leave Egypt. They just want God to bring back the “good ol’ days” under Joseph.
That isn’t in the cards. “God forcibly removes His people, torpid, assimilated to the fetal condition, from the deathly hold of the Egyptian mother-body. . . Both God and Israel would emerge from the redemptive moment bearing the marks of trauma.”[1]
The midrash on this passage suggests that God had to pull Israel out of Egypt like a forceps delivery of a stuck birth. And when we review the complaints and attitudes of the people after leaving Egypt, we can see just how entangled they were. They want what we want—“Come and fix things for us, Lord, but don’t really ask us to leave our environment, our familiar tombs. They are what we know best. So just straighten out the troubles we are having so we can go on living where we want without disturbance.”
But redemption doesn’t accommodate staying put. Redemption is dislocation and relocation. Redemption is forced expulsion. It has been so since the Garden. “Get out—and become human,” seems to be God’s plan. Adam and the woman are expelled from the Garden in a birth story. We think it is punishment. God thinks it is necessary for us to become the vice-regents in His creation. Home isn’t Paradise. It is wilderness dependence.
And so Israel, languishing in the death grip of Egypt, must be expelled. It will never take on the role of prophet and holy nation without forcible ejection. The Hebrew word itself implies such: “This noun denotes the internal. It can represent the inward part(s) of human or animal bodies, or of groups of people, or of social structures.”[2] With an Egyptian umbilical cord wrapped tightly around its neck, Israel must be evicted to be born. I wonder if that isn’t true today. Maybe redemption leaves a lot more scar tissue and trauma than we want.
Topical Index: redemption, in the midst, expel, qereb, Deuteronomy 4:20, 34
[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus(Schocken Books, New York: 2001), pp. 84-85.
[2]Coppes, L. J. (1999). 2066 קרב. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 813). Chicago: Moody Press.
