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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Exodus, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
God’s Identity and Power
Redemption and Deliverance
The Covenant
Mediators and the Priesthood
Summary
Analysis
A Levite couple bears a healthy baby boy, and his mother hides him for three months. But when the baby boy can no longer be hidden, his mother places him in a papyrus basket among the reeds along the Nile. The boy’s sister waits nearby to see what will happen.
Levites were descendants of the tribe of Levi, one of the patriarch Jacob’s sons. Later, Levites will have a special status among the tribes of Israel as priests and assistants in worship. By introducing Moses this way, the writer suggests that Moses’s Levitical status is fitting for a future leader and lawgiver of Israel.
Themes
Soon, Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the river to bathe and spots the basket in the reeds. She feels sorry for the crying baby inside and knows it must be a Hebrew child. The baby’s sister approaches and asks if Pharaoh’s daughter would like her to fetch a Hebrew nurse for the baby. When Pharaoh’s daughter says yes, the girl brings her mother. Pharaoh’s daughter then hires the mother to nurse the baby for her. She does, and the baby grows up. After that, Pharaoh’s daughter adopts the boy and names him Moses because she “drew him out” of the water.
Moses’s rescue, and upbringing in Pharaoh’s house, suggests that God has special intentions for him and that the reader should therefore trust him as a leader. Moses’s preservation in a basket on the river also echoes the story of Noah’s survival of the flood in an ark in the early chapters of Genesis—suggesting God’s overarching plan to preserve his people. Again, too, women’s cleverness and knack for survival is highlighted here. The etymology of “Moses” is “he who draws out,” which hints at Moses’s future role (drawing the Israelites out of Egypt).
Themes
One day, when Moses is an adult, he goes out among the Hebrews and sees their slavery firsthand. When he witnesses an Egyptian beating one of his relatives, Moses kills and buries the Egyptian. The next day, he intervenes in an argument between two Hebrews. One of the Hebrews asks Moses if he intends to kill him like he killed the Egyptian. Pharaoh also hears about the incident and tries to have Moses killed.
According to Jewish tradition, Moses is 40 years old at this time. Even though Moses would have been raised relatively sheltered and privileged in Pharaoh’s household (and nothing is told about his awareness of his origins), he unquestionably sides with his people, even at risk of his own life. Again, this suggests Moses is to be trusted as a leader of Israel.
Themes
So Moses flees from Pharaoh and settles in Midian. While he’s sitting by a well, the daughters of Midian’s priest come to water their flocks, but some shepherds drive the women away. Moses comes to the daughters’ defense and waters their flocks for them. Later, the daughters tell their father, Reuel, about the kindly “Egyptian” whom they met by the well. Reuel invites Moses to his home and later gives Moses his daughter Zipporah as a wife. Zipporah bears a son named Gershom, from the Hebrew for “alien.”
Midian is thought to have been a wilderness on the Arabian Peninsula, across the Red Sea from Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula. Wells were traditional meeting places for biblical patriarchs and their future wives, so Moses is being placed within that tradition. Note that while in this scene Moses’s father-in-law is named Reuel, in other parts of the Bible it is treated differently: later in Exodus, Moses’s father-in-law will be called Jethro, while in the book of Numbers, Reuel is named as being Jethro’s father.
Themes
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Many years later, the king of Egypt dies. The Israelites groan because of their slavery, and God hears their cry. God remembers his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and takes notice of the Israelites’ suffering.
The reassertion of the covenant resolves the tension that’s overshadowed Exodus’s opening chapters. God has never forgotten his people (when the Bible says God “remembers,” it means he is about to take action on his people’s behalf), he knows their oppression, and he remains faithful to them, just as he was faithful to their ancestors.
Themes
