The Wicker Basket

Pharaoh had ordered, "Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile ...."  Ex. 1:22.  In response to this infanticide order,  Moses' mother "got a wicker basket for him, and caulked it with bitumen and pitch.  She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile."   Ex. 2:3.   From there she "stationed herself at a distance, to learn what would befall him."  Ex. 2:4.  

What was this wicker basket?  Sarna says this about it: 

The receptacle is called a tevah, a term that, in this sense, appears elsewhere in the Bible only as the ark in which Noah and his family were saved from the waters of the Flood. Its use here underscores both the vulnerability of its occupant and its being under divine protection. Evocation of the Flood narrative also suggests, once again, that the birth of Moses signals a new era in history.

Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus שמות  (Jewish Publication Society, 1991). 


Scripture quotations from:   The Jewish Study Bible, Jewish Publication Society TANAKH translation (Oxford University Press Inc. 2004).

Themes from Exodus

Terence E. Frethem has an excellent commentary on the book of Exodus (hereafter Frethem).  The student has to get the big picture before he reflects on the details.   In Frethem you will find these themes discussed:

Importance of historicity of the exodus   (10)
Theology of  re-creation (12)

Credit:  Wikipedia Commons - file Moses 

Knowledge of God (14)
God's sovereignty - acting on His own (16)
God working through people  (17)
God and the women (chapters 1 and 2)  (17)
God and Moses - friend of God  (17)
Liberation paradigm  (18)
With God - change and newness (19)
Anti-God forces - historical and cosmic  (19)
Violence in Exodus as transmuted by reflection on Second Isaiah and the way of Jesus  (20)
Israel's worship and Yahweh's presence - sacrificial and sacramental  (20)
Who are the people of God? (21)
People of the covenant made with Abraham (22)
Redemptive work of God  (22)
Law at Sinai - a gift to the people  (22)
Law and faithfulness to God  (in worship and in daily living)    (22)
Vocational covenant - kingdom of priests for the benefit of other peoples (22)
The people fail (22)
The golden calf and the mercy of God (22)
The tabernacling presence of God and Israel's mission to the world (22)

Terence E. Frethem, Exodus - Interpretation, a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Knox Press 1991) (with citations  to page numbers from the introduction).

Exodus

The book of Exodus will be my focus over the next 90 days.   You can't understand the Gospels without a solid grounding in this great story of God.  Here is what is coming:

Reversal of Fortune
The Birth and Youth of Moses
The Commissioning of Moses
The Challenge of Leadership: Initial Failure
Divine Reaffirmation

Plagues
The Last Act
Commemorative Rituals
The Exodus
The Song at the Sea: Shirat ha-Yam
Crises in the Wilderness: Water, Food, Amalekites
Jethro’s Visit and the Organization of the Judiciary
The Covenant at Sinai
The Book of the Covenant: The Laws
The Tabernacle
Instructions for the Tabernacle
Installation of the Priests
An Appendix to the Instructions
Violation of the Covenant: The Golden Calf
Renewal of the Covenant
The Construction of the Tabernacle

Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus שמות. Jewish Publication Society, 1991 (Table of Contents).

Food for Thought - Short and Sweet

All blog posts should be short and sweet, but occasionally I run into a blog  that I find particularly strong in that regard.  Brian Davidson's blog,   which I have added to my list,  has that brevity.   Brian says this about his blog:

"I created this blog as a way of collecting and sharing random biblical studies related things that I find interesting. It is an outlet for me to practice clearly articulating my thoughts and a venue for interacting with like minded Bible and grammar nerds."    

http://brianwdavidson.com/about/

Brian approaches the great ideas which arise from the texts or one word from a text, and he succeeds in doing  so using few words.    As an example, lately I have been reflecting on the significance  of word  ἔξοδος (exodos)  which we see in Luke 9:31, and here  Brian briefly provides  some good food for thought on that subject.

Bible Scholar of the Future

If you have dreams of becoming a Bible scholar, Ben Witherington's book, Is There a Doctor in the House?:  An Insider's Story and Advice on becoming a Bible Scholar (Zondervan 2011),  may talk you out of it.  To be proficient,  you better know French and German, in addition to Hebrew and Greek.         You must have a love for history and archaeology, ancient religions and the history of literature and literary theory.   I knew students when I was in college who had the passion for this tremendous field of study, and  were ready to deal with all of these obstacles which I now see listed listed by Ben.    They went on to get Ph.D.'s and they did find work at universities.   But that was 35 years ago.   What about now?   Now, how do you support yourself as a Bible scholar?  New grads are feeling like most teaching jobs have dried up, unless you want to work for $3,000.00 a year as an adjunct.  Well, I hope it's not that bad.

I'm a lawyer, and I am grateful for my work. But  like most lawyers I know I have told my children to avoid the  law business as well.  Out of six children one has become a lawyer, and I am proud of that.  But no more!    There are too few openings for the people coming out of the law schools.   And we see that in other professions requiring graduate degrees  as well, especially with these jobs in academia.  The job market has always been tight for people coming out of "liberal arts" grad school programs, but now it appears forbidding.   We parents of the Gen Y's tell our children to become nurses and engineers.    Jacques Ellul's,  The Technological Society (Knopf trans. 1964) marches forward.  We are cutting out wonder, passion and the poetry of life from career choices.

My solution for those who will swim upstream and go after this honorable  career choice of Bible scholar? I have no solution, other than to say that young people should  think long and hard about it, as Ben Witherington describes in his book.    But one approach for those who are "called"  might be:  To keep the cost down,  attend a public university such as the University of Wisconsin - Madison which still has a strong classics program offering respected Ph.D's.  Live in community, like monks in a monastery. I don't know of any such lay communities here in Wisconsin, but I predict that we will see them.  I've got faith in the human spirit.  We will see young people make these kinds of sacrifices to become Bible scholars.  If the technological society (meaning The Brave New World where technology is all that matters) represents the cultural  gates of hell, the Bible scholar heroes of the future will be among those making sure that these evil forces will not prevail.  

Bloggers Not Blogging

Bible bloggers are not doing much blogging lately.  With the Middle East in flames and with the genocide of Christians in Iraq and Syria people feel  that  reflections on Scripture are a luxury.   We all want to enlist in the military and restore peace to the Holy Land, and bring the surviving  Christians back to their homes.  We all want to help.  I will give money to the Knights of Columbus for their work helping the persecuted Christians, and the desperate Yazidis.   The Knights will make sure the donations go where they should go.    I'm not sure what else I can do.  We are all trying to figure that out.

Well, I'm going to keep blogging. The Apostle Paul found time to write in a war torn world. The priests exiled to  Babylon wrote much of what we call the OT in the middle of their wars and persecutions.  There is nothing wrong with the Jesuit idea of contemplation in action.  Blogging is contemplation.

James Dunn Part 4 - Gospel Faith from First Encounter with Jesus

I'm coming back to James Dunn and his book, Jesus, Paul and the Gospels where Dunn says this: 

According to the Gospels, these first disciples dedicated themselves to following Jesus. They left their homes and their means of livelihood for his sake. They trusted this Jesus with their lives. He was the focus of their hopes. This can quite appropriately be described as ‘faith’. And given that there is a high degree of continuity between Jesus’ own leading followers and the leadership of the first churches — Peter and John in particular — there is bound also to be a similarly high degree of continuity between the early trust of Jesus’ first disciples and the faith they went on to express regarding this Jesus. Indeed, they would presumably regard their subsequent faith in Jesus as a vindication of their initial trust in him, their subsequent faith in Jesus as in at least some degree rooted in and springing from the encounter with Jesus in Galilee which so transformed their lives.

James D.G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul and the Gospels (Wm. B. Eerdmanns Pub. Co.  2011).  People make pilgrimages to Israel because they want to walk these same roads in Galilee.  A faith rooted in history is a great treasure.