The towering figure in the Hebrew Bible is without doubt Moses. He is deliverer of the people from Egypt; he is giver of the Torah at the sacred mountain; he is mediator between YHWH and the fearful and recalcitrant people; he is interpreter of the given Torah. In all these ways Moses is unmatched in the story of Israel, the crucial prophet in the long tale of Israelite bondage, freedom, evil, and final entry into the land of promise. In... Read more

I am a member of a church here in Los Angeles that is in the midst of a 21-day challenge to explore issues surrounding the evident racial divisions in our nation. Our congregation is a majority white one, with only a few persons of color—black, brown, and Asian—on the rolls. I am a 74-year-old, cis-gendered white male, and as such am the epitome of power and privilege in a world established and controlled primarily by persons just like me. In... Read more

There is something deeply incongruous about the portrait of God presented to us in the book of Exodus. On the one hand, God is mightily overt, choosing Moses for the unenviable task of removing the people of Israel from the clutches of pharaoh, offering to him full support for the work, and finally providing ten increasingly powerful plagues that in the end persuade the Egyptian monarch to let the people go. One can hardly imagine a more direct picture of... Read more

Ex 32 is truly one of the great story chapters in our Bible. The so-called “story of the golden calf” is far more than that as this brief look hopes to show. Perhaps the first thing to note is that no preacher of this material can stop at vs 14. That would be like reading only the first half of a rich novel. In fact, the entire story, begun at chapter 32, does not really end until chapter 34. But... Read more

So the pesky 10 words have come around again, and it is, as always, difficult to know quite what to do with them. We know well enough the culture wars that have sprung up about their placement on courtroom walls, public spaces, schoolroom doors, among many other spots. Even a Supreme Court judge of the state of Alabama was forced to leave the bench because of his refusal to remove these ten from his own courtroom. These Ten Commandments have... Read more

The theme of the grumbling, whining Israelites continues in this short vignette from the lengthy Exodus tale. There is a very loose geographical concern as the story unfolds. In Ex.16, we are told that the “whole congregation of the Israelites” find themselves, not long after exiting Egypt, in the “wilderness of Sin, between Elim (“gods” in Hebrew) and Sinai, that famous place where they will receive the Ten Commandments from YHWH via Moses. Apparently, in Ex.17, they now depart that... Read more

As we continue our traversal of the grand story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt and its journey toward the land of promise, today we watch the whole crowd, directly after their escape through the Sea of Reeds and their entry into the forbidding wilderness of Sinai, continue their basic attitude toward YHWH and toward Moses and Aaron; they love to complain! Older translations rendered the verb as “murmuring” or “grumbling,” but both readings seem too soft to capture what the... Read more

After last week’s talk of the necessity of festival celebration right in the middle of the drama of Israel’s escape from Egypt, that drama heightens in intensity as the escapees, first feeling glad for their newfound freedom from the terrors of Egypt, soon are trapped in the wilderness, confronted by the Sea of Reeds (wherever that may be!) and pursued by the grand army of pharaoh. The ruler of Egypt, after allowing Israel to leave his service, has apparently awakened... Read more

It seems quite astonishing that in what the Common Lectionary names a “semicontinuous” romp through the entire book of Exodus that they would offer precisely no texts from the long tale of Moses’s awe-filled and justly famous confrontation with pharaoh by means of the ten plagues against Egypt, culminating in the death of the Egyptian first born. This iconic story covers fully 8 chapters of text where we witness Moses’ unyielding demands for freedom for Israel matched by the equally... Read more

Today presents to us one of the Bible’s best-known stories, Moses at the burning bush. Who could ever forget this tale, portrayed in cartoons, live-action movies, song, art, and every other sort of medium both today and in centuries past. I well remember waiting in a long, very hot line to enter a theater in Phoenix in 1956 in order to see Cecil B. Demille’s epic film, “The Ten Commandments,” nearly four hours of biblical pageantry. I was 10 years... Read more