Exodus

Egypt in the late Bronze Age was the greatest power in the region, and it built with conscripted labour. Semitic-speaking people lived in the eastern delta in numbers, some enslaved, some in service, a few risen high. Store cities, brick quotas and daily tallies are the ordinary furniture of Egyptian administration, and the opening chapters use that vocabulary exactly.

The book never names its pharaoh, which is the first difficulty for anyone trying to date it. The conventional window is the thirteenth century, under Rameses II, largely because the story names a city that bears his name. Around 1208 BCE a victory stele of his successor Merneptah lists Israel among the peoples of Canaan, the earliest mention of Israel anywhere outside the Bible.

The harder thing to say plainly is this. No Egyptian record mentions the departure, and Egypt kept careful records. Nothing has been found in Sinai from a mass migration, and the archaeology of Canaan points to Israel emerging largely from within it rather than arriving from outside. What the book gives is not a report. It is a founding charter, told and retold by people who believed that a deliverance had happened and who understood themselves by it.

It reached its final shape centuries after the events it describes, from more than one source, among people for whom empire was the permanent condition. That is worth holding while reading. A story about walking out of an empire was carried, and finally written down, by people living inside one.

c. 1279–1213 BCE

Rameses II builds extensively in the eastern delta, including a city bearing his name.

c. 1208 BCE

The Merneptah stele names Israel as a people in Canaan: the earliest mention outside the Bible.

c. 1100s BCE

The Song at the sea, in archaic Hebrew, is among the oldest poetry the book preserves.

700s–500s BCE

The prose traditions are written down and combined, more than one voice kept side by side.

586 BCE

Jerusalem falls and the exile begins. A story about leaving an empire is now read from inside one.

The country between Egypt and Sinai is limestone, gravel and wind, and the whole problem in it is water. Springs are days apart and a bad one ends a march. The itinerary the book gives, Marah, Elim, the wilderness of Sin, Rephidim, reads like a real route, though almost none of the places can now be located with any confidence and the mountain itself is not securely identified.

These chapters work differently from the ones before them. Each stop follows the same shape: a shortage, a complaint, provision, and then something that outlasts the crisis. A day's portion and no storing. A seventh day taught by the way bread behaves. Judges appointed over thousands and tens. The rescue is finished and what is being built now is a way of living, which is why the wilderness material teaches more than it narrates.

One thing is worth naming plainly before the mountain. The man who gives Israel its first working system of justice is a Midianite priest, and he is welcomed, fed and listened to, several chapters before any covenant exists. Whatever the law is going to mean, the book has already established that this God was recognised from outside before he was codified from within.

The mountain cannot be located with any confidence, and it matters less than the shape of what happens on it. The covenant at Sinai is built like a treaty of its period between a great king and a lesser one: the king named, what he has already done for the lesser party recited, then the terms, then witnesses and consequences. Israel took the diplomatic form of its world and put God in the position of the great king, which is a claim about who they now belonged to rather than a literary borrowing for its own sake.

The law itself sits inside a much older legal tradition. Codes from Mesopotamia predate this one by centuries and share its case-law grammar, the long run of sentences beginning if a man. Comparison shows both the borrowing and the divergence. This code is markedly more protective of the debtor, the foreigner and the servant than its neighbours, and it values a person above property in places where they did not. It also permits a person to be owned, which no comparison softens.

These chapters were edited over a long time and the seams are visible. The ten words appear twice in the Bible, here and in Deuteronomy, and the two do not match: the reason given for the sabbath is creation in one and slavery in Egypt in the other. Both were kept. That is characteristic of how this book handles its own traditions, and it is worth knowing before reading a code that later readers have often wanted to be seamless.

The first thing to say is about proportion, because it is the question every reader arrives with. The creation of the world gets thirty-one verses. A tent gets around four hundred, twice over. Read as a story that is badly out of balance. Read as what the book is actually for, it is the argument itself: the point of the rescue was never the leaving, it was that this God would end up living among these people, and the specifications are how that gets arranged. Detail is what care looks like when it is written down.

What is being described is a portable shrine, and portable shrines are known elsewhere in the region, in Egypt and among nomadic peoples. The design is less exotic than it reads. A frame, curtains, an enclosure, a graded approach from courtyard to inner room. What differs is what sits at the centre, which in other sanctuaries would be an image of the god and here is a box with the terms of an agreement inside it and an empty space above.

Most scholars read these chapters as the work of priestly writers, giving the tabernacle a plan that closely matches the later temple in Jerusalem, which is either the temple projected backward onto the wilderness or the tent that the temple was built to imitate. The answer is not recoverable and the effect is the same either way: a people who had lost a temple were handed a description of a sanctuary that could be packed up and carried, which is a pointed thing to give exiles.