Alter proposes that the Book of Exodus is preeminently about Moses. “The general rule in Exodus, and again in Numbers when the story continues, is that what is of interest about the character of Moses is what bears on his qualities as a leader—his impassioned sense of justice, his easily ignited temper, his selfless compassion, his feelings of personal inadequacy…. Moses, as forger of the nation and prince of prophets is, after all, not an absolutely uniques figure but a man like other men.” God has also transformed. “God in Exodus has become essentially unseeable, overpowering, and awesomely refulgent.” Alter discusses the structural form of Exodus, “The narrative is organized around three thematically defined spaces: Egypt, the place of bondage; the wilderness, a liminal space where freedom will be realized and new obligations incurred, where a tense struggle between leader and people will play out as part of the initiatory experience of nationhood; and the promised destination of the Exodus from Egypt, the land that remains beyond the horizon of this book. Egypt is associated with water…. The wilderness is, antithetically, a zone of parched dryness…. Finally, beyond well-watered Egypt and the burning desert where uncanny fires flare, the new Israelite nation is repeatedly told of a third space, a land flowing not with water but, hyperbolically, with milk and honey.”
In Exodus 2:3, Alter comments, “she took a wicker ark…. The basket in which the infant is placed is called a tevah, “ark,” the same word for Noah’s ark…. As the ark in Genesis bears on the water the saving remnant of humankind, the child borne on the waters here will save his imperiled people.” In Exodus 2:10, Alter calls attention to the etymology of the name, Moses. “This is an authentic Egyptian name meaning “the one who is born,” and hence “son.” The folk etymology relates it to the Hebrew verb mashah, “to draw out from water.” Perhaps the active form of the verb used for the name mosheh, “he draws out,” is meant to align the naming with Moses’s future destiny of rescuing his people from the water of the Sea of Reeds.” Further along, in Exodus 2:13, Alter calls attention to a biblical device, “Why should you strike your fellow? The first dialogue assigned to a character in biblical narrative typically defines the character. Moses’s first speech is a reproof to a fellow Hebrew and an attempt to impose a standard of justice (rasha’, “the one in the wrong,” is a legal term).”
Alter will admit when there is deabte about the proper translation of the Hebrew. In Exodus 3:14, he relates, “‘Ehyeh-‘Asher-‘Ehyeh. God’s response perhaps gives Moses more than he bargained for—not just an identifying name (the implication of offering one such name might be that there are other divinities) but an ontological divine mystery of the most daunting character…. “I-Will-Be-Who-I-Will-Be” is the most plausible construction of the Hebrew, though the middle word, ‘asher, could easily mean “what” rather than “who,” and the common rendering of “I-Am-That-I-Am” cannot be excluded.” In Exodus 6:3, Alter expounds, “as El Shaddai, but in My name the Lord I was not known to them. The designation El Shaddai, which is in fact used a total of five times in the Patriarchal Tales, is an archaic, evidently Canaanite combination of divine names. El was the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, though the Hebrew term is also a common noun meaning “god.” No satisfactory explanation for the meaning or origin of the name Shaddai has been made, but some scholars link it with a term for “mountain,” and others associate it with fertility…. Were the patriarchs in fact ignorant of the name YHWH?” In Exodus 6:7, Alter relates, “you shall know that I am the Lord your God Who takes you out from under the burdens of Egypt. This idea is emphasized again and again, in the Torah as well as in later books of the Bible. It is the cornerstone of Israelite faith—that God has proven His divinity and His special attachment to Israel by the dramatic act of liberating the people from Egyptian slavery.”
Alter points out where the biblical text deviates from the geography, natural phenomena, or history of the referenced time period. In Exodus 10:13, he states, “an east wind. The Hebrew idioms were coined in the geography of Canaan, not of Egypt. In Canaan, locusts and parching winds come from the deserts to the east. In Egypt, such winds and blights would typically come from the Sudan, to the south.” In Exodus 10:19, Alter continues, “west wind. The literal meaning is “sea wind,” but because of the geographical situation of ancient Israel, “sea” (that is, the Mediterranean) is often used to designate the west. Again, the wind reference reflects the geography of Canaan.” In Exodus 13:17, Alter explains, “by way of the land of the Philistines…. The Philistines in this period are an anachronistic reference, they arrived from the Aegean region (and thus are known as the Sea People) in this coastal strip during the twelfth century B.C.E., perhaps as much as a hundred years after the conjectured date of the Exodus in the later thirteenth century.” Finally, in Exodus 13:18, “the Sea of Reeds. This is not the Red Sea, as older translations have it, but most likely a marshland in the northeastern part of Egypt. (Marshes might provide a realistic kernel for the tale of a waterway that is at one moment passable and in the next flooded.) But it must be conceded that elsewhere yam suf refers to the Red Sea, and some scholars have recently argued that the story means to heighten the miraculous character of the event through the parting of a real sea. Even if the setting is a marsh, the event is reported in strongly supernatural terms.”
Alter discusses the importance of Exodus 21:1, “And these are the laws. After the ten divine imperatives, couched in absolute terms and addressed to each Israelite in the second-person singular, we have a series of miscellaneous laws formulated casuistically…. This collection of laws, which make up chapter 21 through chapter 23, is conventionally called the Book of the Covenant…. It is probably one of the oldest collections of law in the Bible; it exhibits numerous parallels with (as well as divergences from) the Code of Hammurabi, with sundry other Sumerian and Akkadian codes, and with Hittite law.”
In Exodus 26:33, Alter comments on how God’s detailed instructions, throughout Exodus, relate to and call forth both the history and the future of the Israeli people, “the Ark of the Covenant, and the curtain shall divide for you between the Holy and the Holy of Holies. If the tent structure of the Tabernacle looks backward to an early nomadic period, its dimensions—exactly half those of Solomon’s temple—and its divisions mirror the structure of the Jerusalem temple…. The 100-cubit length (about 60 feet) of the Tabernacle is divided symmetrically between a western half, or outer court, where there is an altar for burnt offerings, and an eastern half, which constitutes the Holy Place (maqom qadosh), in which the lamp stand, the table, and the altar of incense are located, and a small inner zone, screened by a curtain, the Holy of Holies, in which the Ark of the Covenant is kept. The verbal construct “X of X” has the idiomatic sense in biblical Hebrew of “the supreme X” (compare “the song of songs, which is Solomon’s”).”
In Exodus 32:1, Alter comments, “make us gods that will go before us. Here, and repeatedly in the Golden Calf episode, ‘elohim, which regularly refers to God (in the singular) is used in the plural: despite all the spectacular demonstrations of the Lord’s supreme power, the people have not liberated themselves from polytheistic notions.” Alter later expands, “The Golden Calf is thus a kind of anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark.” Alter contrasts this blasphemous episode with Moses’ concurrent meeting with God, atop Mount Sinai. “Show me, pray Your Glory. We are not likely to recover precisely what the key term kavod—glory, honor, divine presence, and very literally, “weightiness”—conveyed to the ancient Hebrew imagination. In any case, Moses, who first fearfully encountered God in the fire in the bush, is now ready and eager to be granted a full-scale epiphany, a frontal revelation of the look and character of this divinity that has been speaking to him from within the pillar of cloud.” On Exodus 32:3, Alter continues, “I shall make all My goodness pass in front of you. In response to the request that God show Moses His glory, He offers instead to show him His “goodness” (tuv), a manifestation of His moral attributes as divinity. But God’s goodness is not amenable to human prediction, calculation, or manipulation: it is God’s untrammeled choice to bestow grace and compassion on whom He sees fit, as He has done with Moses.” Alter goes on, in connection with Exodus 32:23, “you will see My back, but My face will not be seen. Volumes of theology have been spun out of these enigmatic words. Imagining the deity in frankly physical terms was entirely natural for the ancient monotheists…. Through it the Hebrew writer suggests an idea that makes good sense from later theological perspectives: that God’s intrinsic nature is inaccessible, and perhaps also intolerable, to the finite mind of man, but that something of His attributes—His “goodness,” the directional pitch of His ethical intentions, the afterglow of the effulgence of His presence—can be glimpsed by humankind.”
Finally, Alter discusses the material aspects that recognize the covenantal pact between God and the Israelites in Exodus 40:20, “set the Covenant in the Ark. The Covenant, ‘edut, is a synonym for berit, the other common biblical term for pact, treaty, or covenant, and it clearly refers to the two stone tablets on which the words of the Covenant were written by the finger of God. The Tabernacle, then, has a double function: it is the place where sacrifices are offered, as in all ancient Near Eastern cults, and it is the place where the material document of an eternal contract between God and Israel is preserved.” In Exodus 40:38, Alter closes by stating, “in all their journeyings. Pointedly, “their journeyings,” mas’eyhem, is the last word of the Book of Exodus, just as this same verbal stem inaugurated the Wilderness narrative in 13:20, “And they journeyed from Succoth.” We have been left with a sense of harmonious consummation in the competition of the Tabernacle, likened by allusion to the completion of the tasks of creation; but the condition in which the Israelites find themselves remains unstable, uncertain, a destiny of wandering through arduous wasteland towards a promised land that is not yet visible on the horizon.”
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