Lessons from Exodus about Egypt

  • exodus-and-cairo_sm.jpgWhy didn’t I think of that? Bruce Feiler, the author of “Walk­ing Through the Bible”** found “6 Lessons from the Bible for Egypt Today.”

    Those include:

    1. The peo­ple rarely suc­ceed on the first try
    2. The leader has henchmen
    3. The peo­ple have pow­ers, too

    and this one that I liked:

    4. The leader will harden his heart.

    let-my-people-go_sm.jpgBut still pharaoh resists. The Bible uses very pre­cise lan­guage here. After the first plague: “Pharaoh’s heart stiff­ened;” “He turned and went into the palace.” After the sec­ond plague: “Pharaoh became stub­born this time also, and would not let the peo­ple go.” Twenty times the Bible describes the pharaoh’s heart as hard­en­ing. The mes­sage is clear: The tyrant of Egypt is cal­lous, evil, and fully respon­si­ble for the suf­fer­ing of the peo­ple. In his speech on Thurs­day, Pres­i­dent Mubarak clearly looked like a man who’s heart had hardened.

    That is cer­tainly so. It’s an amaz­ing time in Egypt’s amaz­ing his­tory, but I wouldn’t have believed that the des­tiny of an entire nation hung on the ego of a sin­gle per­son. I don’t know any­thing about the great mat­ters of for­eign pol­icy and Egypt­ian affairs, but you couldn’t miss Mubarek’s errant stall tac­tics and weirdly patron­iz­ing expres­sions about “the Egypt­ian peo­ple” (as if those weren’t the ones who wanted him deposed or executed).

    Who knows what the pharaoh of Exo­dus really had in his heart? But with him out of the way, as with Mubarek in exile, one story ends and another begins. What do you do after the tyrant is gone? That’s when Israel started to have a dif­fer­ent sort of jour­ney and a dif­fer­ent kind of suf­fer­ing. In Feiler’s arti­cle, he concludes:

    All end­ings are begin­nings, too. And in the Exo­dus, at least, the reboot­ing of the coun­try leads to a pro­tracted wan­der­ing in the desert full of anx­i­ety, regret, doubt, and rebellion.

    That les­son from the Bible may prove to be the most endur­ing: While vic­tory is sweet, the road to the Promised Land of free­dom has many detours ahead.

    exodus-and-cairo.jpg

    Related posts:

    1. St. Mary of Egypt
    2. St. Mary of Egypt Sun­day ’09
    3. Updates on terrorism
    4. Lessons learned from leaves
    5. St. Mary of Egypt

    February 13th, 2011 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 02.13.2011

    nice. I was talk­ing to a few monks this week and we were dis­cussing the fact that 40 years of daily his­tory are summed up in a few verses of scrip­ture so we don’t get the day to day faith­ful­ness and strug­gles that lead to the record­able events.

  • Mimi

    I’ve been teach­ing on the Old Tes­ta­ment and the way that it pre­fig­ured Christ in the New Tes­ta­ment, and WOW, my expe­ri­ences as we have been through Advent and now approach Lent have been greatly expanded. I hope my stu­dents feel the same way.
    I liked “Walk­ing the Bible” I read it a month or two ago.

  • Grace

    It took me two years to go through the entire Ortho­dox Study Bible, but some things were really brought home to me in the Old Tes­ta­ment. I don’t know whether it was a worth­while insight or not, but I found myself sym­pa­thiz­ing with the “stiff-necked” Israelites more than I used to. It doesn’t mean I missed the point that they angered God by their unright­eous­ness in the desert. But still, they were cho­sen out of all the peo­ple on earth to be made ready for the com­ing of the Lord’s Christ. And for all their sins, there must have also been extra­or­di­nary faithfulness.

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