“Who is Yhwh that I should listen to him” Pharaoh

The story of the Exodus is not so much the story of Moses vs. Pharaoh but a story about God vs. all of us. God in this story is more than an annoyance. He is a threat and a trouble maker. On this Moses and Pharaoh agree.

In the New Testament, especially in the gospel of John the Bible talks about “the world”. It is our system for how things work. At this time and place Pharaoh is on top of this system and the system is doing what it is designed to do. The system of the world is utterly practical, utterly obvious, and completely understandable. If I can derive well being at the expense of others, it helps me out-compete, out-produce, and out-survive my competition. Pharaoh is top dog in his world in this game.

Moses, who has not formally agreed to God’s plan has nevertheless gone with his brother Aaron to deliver the message of Yhwh to Pharaoh. Pharaoh’s response is utterly reasonable and understandable.

1. Pharaoh doesn’t know Yhwh, or Moses and Aaron for that matter. Why should he listen.
2. In the purview of Biblical polytheism Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt are powerful and successful gods in comparison to this unknown god of the Hebrew slaves. Why should they pay attention to Yhwh’s demands. Yhwh has no status in their system of “the world”.
3. If your goal is to maximize the amount of value you can extract from people, a reasonable hope for a better future is a threat. The sooner you can squash people’s hopes the more secure you can make your system for extracting value from them. As long as people think “this is the best I can reasonable do” you will keep them compliant and locked into the system that is extracting their value. The minute they imagine “there might be something better for me” you begin to lose control. Pharaoh knows this and acts immediately and ruthlessly to quell the potential threat that even hope, however reasonably unfounded, might arise.

The LORD has brought Evil to his People

Just as in chapter 1, when Pharaoh first realized the potential threat that Hebrew multiplication (accomplished by this troublesome God behind the scenes) posed to the world he wished to preserve, he now moves to once again counter this God and his work with the Hebrew people. His task masters are now ordered to keep the same brick quota but to no longer provide straw for the production of these bricks.

The system being what it is kicks the new harsh duty down to the Egyptian overseers who kick it down to the Hebrew overseers (population control always requires a population within to effect the change from without) who kick down hard onto the people. One commentator notes that we hear from everyone in this drama except the people themselves.

We should also remember that in Pharaoh’s previous attempt at control, through genocide the Hebrew element in the plan, the midwives, courageously resisted Pharaoh and defied him. The male Hebrew overseers seem to lack the courage the women had.

Everyone in the story blames Yhwh for breaking the status quo. The Hebrew taskmasters will blame Moses and Aaron and Moses will then turn and blame Yhwh directly. Everyone in Egypt now agrees, Yhwh is to blame. The situation would be better off without him.

Giving Us What We Demand

The Heidelberg Catechism says “I have a natural tendency to hate God and my neighbor”. This story illustrates both. We are deeply selfish and deeply fearful. We will be complicit in a world that abuses and oppresses as long as we can find a tolerable space within it to at least get something for ourselves.

Into this world God comes as an intruder. He will make it stop whether we like it or not.

The transitional verse between chapters 5 and 6 says this:

Exodus 6:1 (NET)

¹ Then the Lord said to Moses, “Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh, for compelled by my strong hand he will release them, and by my strong hand he will drive them out of his land.”

Robert Alter, one of the foremost Jewish scholars of the Hebrew Scriptures has this comment on this verse:

through a strong hand will he send them off and through a strong hand will he drive them from his land. The “strong hand”— that is, violent force— becomes a refrain in the story, here repeated in quasipoetic parallelism. The phrase refers to the violent coercion that God will need to exert on Pharaoh. It is noteworthy that the semantically double-edged “send” (to send away ceremoniously, to release, to banish) is here paired with the unambiguous “drive them from his land.” In the event, God’s strong hand will compel Pharaoh to expel the Hebrews precipitously, so that “let my people go” is reinterpreted as something like “banish my people.” The Exodus, in other words, extorted from a recalcitrant Egyptian monarch by an overpowering God, will prove to be a continuation of hostility, a fearful and angry expulsion of the slaves rather than a conciliatory act of liberation.

Alter, Robert (2008-10-17). The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (Kindle Locations 7414-7421). Norton. Kindle Edition.

What Yhwh is saying to Pharaoh is this. “If you persist in working your cost/benefit analysis in your exploitation of the Hebrew people, I will change the costs on you so severely that their slave labor will be so expensive in annoyance, pain and suffering that you yourself will drive them out!”

This of course will be what happens and what Yhwh predicted would happen. The Egyptians will PAY their former slaves to leave. God will re-write the labor contract and the Hebrew work force will become more than Egypt can afford.

Evil is always more expensive than we imagine

The Apostle Paul will later say “the wages of sin is death”. One way to look at justice is to actually force someone to pay for what they are doing. Pharaoh will pay for the genocide of the Hebrew boys. He will be given multiple opportunities to get out early, but Pharaoh will take none of them.

The God Who Won’t Leave us Alone

The only place God finally leaves us alone is hell.

Moses and the Israelite task masters want God to leave them alone. They prefer Egyptian enslavement to God’s meddling in Pharaoh’s affairs. Later in the story the people, who are silent sufferers in this story, will echo this protest. “God should have left us in Egypt”. This God will not.

Protests over Yhwh’s involvement in the book of Exodus continue. People today still complain about this meddling God even if they don’t believe the story. It is offensive to us.

Christians believe that thousands of years later Yhwh came to Israel in the form of Jesus Christ. This time we hated him because he didn’t do to Caesar what Yhwh had done to Pharaoh. He in fact seemed soft on Caesar. For that fact they had Caesar kill him.

Yhwh then did his most obnoxious thing, he raised Jesus from the dead.

What will you do with such a God? You can plead to finally be left alone, and he will eventually relent and assign you to the space where he gives up on us. Christians call that space hell.

The alternative is to relent, to give in, to stop trying. To finally give that God exactly what he wants, to make us free from the system of the world and to bless us. That choice is ours.