Exodus 2:11-15

Hey, everybody.
Welcome back.
As we close out a week in Exodus chapter 2,
continuing with the story of Moses, we saw yesterday Moses’ infancy,
the birth story, the backstory, the narrative.
We then skip, as the Bible sometimes does,
as it is interested in getting to the next part of the story,
we skip some significant period of time.
We don’t really get told exactly what that is.
But as we now join Moses,
Moses is an adult.
Moses is functioning as an adult,
possibly a young adult, whatever that means.
It’s unmarried,
so it’s likely he is not real old or maybe very far into adulthood.
But we pick up the story here and it takes us to an interesting place.
So let me read through it,
and then we’ll talk about it.
“One day after Moses had grown up,
he went to his people and saw their forced labor.
He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew,
one of his kinfolk.
He looked this way and that,
and seeing no one,
he killed the Egyptian
and hid him in the sand.
When he went out the next day,
he saw two Hebrews fighting,
and he said to the one who was in the wrong,
‘Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?’
He answered, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge over us?
Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptians?’
Then Moses was afraid,
and he thought to himself,
‘Surely this thing is known.'”
So we mentioned yesterday that Moses is an interesting character in that he really lives in two worlds.
He is born to the Hebrews,
he is of the Hebrews,
he has a tribal lineage,
and yet he then at some point early in childhood goes into the house of the Pharaoh.
We know nothing about Moses’ childhood,
we know nothing about his interaction with either the Egyptian
part of his upbringing or the Hebrew part.
We don’t know if he maintained relationships with
his family.
Did he know who they were?
They’re unnamed in this story,
but maybe he did.
Did he resonate with the Hebrews?
Did he resonate with the Egyptians?
What language did he speak?
All of this stuff is in question,
and it’s fun to speculate about,
but it’s one of those times that,
to be honest, the Bible just doesn’t need us to know that,
so it moves past all of it.
There is a day, though,
when adult Moses goes out and he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew.
It says one of his kinfolk,
which could mean a family alliance,
could mean that he feels a kinship
with him because he is a Hebrew.
And so whatever it is,
he’s moved by this,
and he’s moved to the
side of the Hebrew.
He’s moved against the side of establishment and power and to the side of his nationality,
his lineage, his true family roots.
And he evidently knew what he was planning to do
because he looks around first,
and he kills the Egyptian.
And that seems like a very violent reaction.
The Scripture’s not going to worry about that because it happens in the service
of the Hebrew people defending one of the powerless against one of the powerful.
And maybe we can be troubled about it,
but the story just simply says that is what it is.
And it’s interesting, Michael.
It’s always a little dangerous to speculate,
but it is interesting to
think about this story from Moses’ perspective,
why it is he feels this deep connection with the Hebrews
so strongly that when he sees one of them being abused,
he lashes out in violence and
actually ends up taking the life of an Egyptian.
Sort of fascinating to think about how he gets there.
It is, and it’s maybe a little difficult just to be honest as we come to this story from a Christian perspective.
It’s hard to come to the Old Testament and read a story like this,
which is in many ways saying exactly what it means to say and it being a difficult message for us to
hear.
Let me sort of explain what I mean here.
In verse 11,
you see where it says that he saw
an Egyptian beating a Hebrew,
and then it goes on and says that he doesn’t see anyone.
So in verse 12,
he kills the Egyptian,
which is the same word as beating used in the previous.
It means to strike.
So what we have in the text is
Moses sees that this Egyptian is beating one of his kins,
folks, and so he responds with the same use of force,
but except in this case actually dealing
death towards this individual.
And there is a kind of eye for eye built into this.
There’s a kind of a just retaliation.
There’s a this was happening,
and so therefore Moses takes this action.
I think it’s easy for us as Christians.
We come from this lineage of Jesus teaching, proclaiming grace, forgiveness,
turn your cheek,
walk the extra mile,
all that kind of thing.
But here we encounter the
story where Moses responds,
and he does so violently.
And the idea of the text,
I think, pretty clearly is that this is justified,
if not the death of this individual,
but the fact that the powerless stand up for themselves,
the fact that the Egyptians have
taken action against even the first or the sons of the Israelites.
And so therefore,
this type of violence is at least, at least understandable,
if not in some way, even implicitly condoned.
Right. I think,
you know, without using language that’s maybe too
intense, Michael,
the idea here is that there is a sort of warfare taking place.
The Pharaoh has declared war on the Hebrew people.
As we saw the midwives choose a side,
we now see Moses choose a side.
And
as he attacks this man,
ultimately killing him, hiding the body,
he then is just as
troubled the next day to see two Hebrews being violent with one another.
And he says, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” And again,
this is sort of tribal language.
You know, it’s us against them perhaps.
And why do you fight amongst each other?
And it’s at this point that Moses recognizes
things maybe aren’t what he thought they were.
“Who made you a judge over us?
Do you mean to kill me
as you killed the Egyptian?” And when Moses realizes that someone saw him,
what he did was not secret.
It’s common knowledge, or at least it’s known by some people or a few people or certainly this person,
he is terrified.
Moses was afraid and thought,
“Surely this thing is known.
They know what I did.” And the very next verse,
we’re going to take this just a part at a time,
but the opening of verse 15 here,
“When Pharaoh heard of it,
he sought to kill Moses.”
So now that Moses has declared a side,
the Pharaoh has declared a side,
even though Moses grew up in
the household, whether he and the Pharaoh had any interaction,
we don’t know.
We have to assume.
It seems crazy to think that they wouldn’t have been in the same room on multiple times,
that they wouldn’t have spoken perhaps,
whatever that relationship looked like.
The Pharaoh now,
seeing that Moses has acted against Egypt,
seeks to act against him.
So he sought to kill Moses.
Again,
really rich grounds to speculate about what this did to family
relationships, about Pharaoh’s daughter and Pharaoh and the relationship and what Moses did or didn’t mean to them,
what Moses’ upbringing is like.
There’s a lot here that it would be fun to know,
that we don’t know.
But what the text wants us to know is that when Moses acts on behalf of the
Hebrews and strikes the Egyptians,
the Egyptians seek to strike back and the Pharaoh sought to
kill him.
That’s not hyperbole.
That’s not
flowery language.
That is the reality that Moses now faces.
The Pharaoh wants him dead.
And that is,
in the scope of the story,
the scariest thing you can know about the most powerful person in the realm.
Right.
And let’s not miss that he’s also not standing shoulder to shoulder with his Hebrew kinsfolk.
I mean,
they, in their response to him,
this very jaded, so what, you could kill us too.
That’s not a warm reception either.
So it’s not as if Moses has taken a side and that side has
welcomed him in open arms either.
There’s a sense in which now Moses has made himself alien to both.
I think it’s easy to use that language of imagination,
Clint. It’s easy for us to imagine
this story where Moses gets kicked off as an adopted child and he sees his people and he
wants to be part of them.
So there’s this kind of like,
well, I see this Egyptian doing a wrong
thing, so I’m going to take my place amongst the family.
And then the family says,
welcome, Moses.
We’re glad you’re here.
Sort of a coming of age kind of story.
But the truth is that’s not
what happens here.
And in fact,
the action that Moses is going to take here at the latter part
of verse 15 shows us that he very clearly believes that Pharaoh wants him dead and he
has no other place to go.
So he’s now an alien from both worlds,
the world that he may have
sought to get back to his Hebrew family,
as well as the Egyptian family that had called him as
their own.
Now he has neither.
And that is, I think, one of the most really interesting aspects
of this part of the story for me,
Clint, is because it,
though it doesn’t explicitly share
what Moses is thinking or his motivation,
I think it very much does as the story of Exodus goes on,
helps to illuminate someone who will so often find himself in in between places.
He’ll be in between the people and God.
He’s in between the people and Pharaoh.
He’s in between the people
and themselves.
I mean, Moses so often finds himself trying to navigate these sticky alien situations.
And he already has that in verse 14,
15 of chapter two.
It’s endemic to his person
as we’re told in the story.
At least that’s how I read it.
I think that’s a great insight,
Michael.
I mean, Moses is not in the context of the rest of this
world.
He always seems to stand in the unique territory between.
He is,
in some sense, the word we’d use certainly in the New Testament,
is mediator,
the middle.
He’s in the middle.
And interestingly enough, though I think it’s just sort of accidental language,
the next thing we read
is that Moses flees from the Pharaoh and he settled in the land of Midian and sat down by a well.
We think that Moses,
you could think he has two people.
He has the Egyptians and the Israelites.
The truth is, it seems that he really has neither one,
at least in this point in the story now that
Pharaoh wants him dead.
And so he settles in this middle place,
this place of Midian,
sits down by a well.
And that’s the posture and place of a person without option.
Right.
He has nowhere to be.
He has nothing to do.
He runs away to a land,
a foreign land.
It’s not Israel.
It’s not Egypt.
He sits down by a well.
And I think that’s where we’ll leave Moses.
I think that’s where we’ll leave the story.
But I think that’s a really interesting observation, Michael,
that even here we see something that we will see again throughout Moses’ story is that he
speaks to people and powers that
he is a part of but doesn’t really belong to.
And though I think
in his soul, he feels this connection with the Hebrews,
but particularly as the story progresses,
he’s going to often stand apart from them.
He’s not exactly one of them.
He’s certainly not Egyptian.
He’s going to have lots of conversation with God.
Sometimes that will go better than
other times.
So, yeah,
Moses stands often at the intersection between other peoples,
and we see it already here.
I think that’s a really good catch.
And note that Pharaoh,
who is certainly cast in Exodus as being mighty and strong,
he’s able to make these orders, and he’s able to make things happen,
though he has been tricked by these
midwives previous in the week.
And now here,
once again,
Moses is able to get away.
He flees.
So, even all-powerful Pharaoh can’t catch Moses.
Moses is able to escape the clutches.
And there’s a sense
of even providential power in God being able to rescue Moses from Egypt,
even if that rescue, interestingly,
is the hopelessness of sitting beside a well.
And I just want to point out,
the author of Exodus surely has in mind the book of Genesis.
So, the idea of a well we’ve already
had multiple times in the story of these pivotal characters who either,
you know, you’ve got the story of Rachel at the well,
but you’ve got other stories where the well is built,
and that becomes a place of memory for Abraham or,
you know, all these different…
Sodom and Gomorrah.
The men make their way into Sodom,
and they sit by the well.
And, yeah, the well is often a place of new direction,
I think, in the Scripture,
a place of possibility.
Right.
And in this case,
it’s interesting that the possibility is on the heels of
a terrorized escape.
I mean, this is not a hopeful journey that he’s, you know,
sitting beside the well as a way stop onto something bigger and better.
This is literally a man who’s escaped with his life and now sits with the question,
“What’s going to happen next?”
And that is maybe…
Now, this is me reading into the text clearly,
but as a reader coming into the narrative,
that’s the question that we want to ask is,
“Where is this going?” Because here,
you’ve got a guy who was just spared death as a young man when he’s put in the river and then he’s taken out.
Now,
he’s just been spared death again,
this time at the very hands of Pharaoh.
So what’s going to happen for this guy who’s now literally played every card that he has?
This is the kind of breaking down of the biblical narrative that’s going to precipitate the building
up that God’s going to do.
And really,
one of the amazing fixtures of the Exodus story is the
supernatural, powerful revelation-type moments between Moses and God that happened.
And I think it’s the God-forsakenness of this moment that will later accentuate the God-immanence or revelation
that will happen once we get to the bush.
I’m not spoiling that for anyone,
but this sets that up
in an interesting way.
Yeah.
I mean, you think about a well in a desert-type climate,
what it represents is life and refreshment.
And I suspect as Moses sits there next to one,
he feels neither of those things.
So it is a kind of pivotal moment in this story.
Join us next Monday.
If you can, we’ll see where it goes from there.
Thanks for being with us throughout this week.
Thanks for being with us today.
Hope you all are well and have a great weekend.