History

Now these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob; they came, each one with his household:  Exodus 1:1  NASB

The names – Something remarkable happened with the Exodus.  Oh, I don’t mean the miracles, the release from slavery, the grand escape.  All those events were remarkable, but there was also something else happening—something that forever changed all humanity.  Jonathan Sacks notes this enormously important occurrence in two comments:

The God of Abraham differed in two ways from the religions of the ancient world.  First, He is transcendent.  He is beyond the universe because He created the universe.  None of the gods worshipped by the ancients was remotely like this.

Second, God acted in history.  That too had never been conceived before.  For the ancients, the gods were in nature.  They were the rain, the river, the sun, the storm. In nature, time is cyclical.  Things are born, grow, reproduce, and die, but nothing really changes.  Things are as they are because that is how they were and will always be.  With the Exodus, God changed history.  More precisely, with the Exodus, God created history.[1]

“God created history.”  That is an incredible claim.  What does this mean?  Well, to begin, we must first understand that history is not merely the record of chronological events.  History is the sequence of the events and the meaning of these events.  In other words, history is the what and the why about the who.  For most ancient cultures, the sequence of events was cyclical.  Just like the seasons, things came to be, expired, and began again.  There was no real meaning because everything was simply repetition of a previous sequence.  All of this changed when the Hebrews left Egypt.  For the first time, the sequence of events wasn’t just another lap around the sun.  Now human beings, particularly the Jews, were going somewhere.  Not just to Canaan but to a destiny that had never occurred before.  Now the sequence of events had cosmic purpose and divinely appointed meaning.  “You shall be a holy nation and the royal priesthood.”  Nothing like that had even occurred before.  An entire people group was chosen to fulfill a divine objective; a new objective never seen before.  And they are still on the way toward that goal.

From this point onward, the myth of eternal return (as Mircea Eliade termed it) was broken.  No longer did men just rotate around the sun.  Moses supplanted Shakespeare:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.[2]

“You shall be holy for I am holy” casts aside all the sound and fury.  If you want to be on the side of history instead of “a tale told by an idiot,” then you need to be aligned with the God who created history and join the people of the names who came out of Egypt.

Topical Index: history, exodus, Eliade, Shakespeare, Sacks, Exodus 1:1

[1] Jonathan Sacks  Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Leviticus: The Book of Holiness (Maggid Books & The Orthodox Union, 2015), p. 10.

[2] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, lines 17–28