Andy Howe

Reflection Paper: How does Moses help create Israel? What is the definition of a nation/people?

1/27/04



Throughout the book of Exodus Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and across great distances in order to establish a new city. Moses plays such an important role throughout the makings of Israel. Without Moses, the future Israelites would never have organized an escape from Egypt without being brought back by the Egyptian Army, let alone having the courage to survive in the wilderness until the city had been established.

From the beginning, the king of Egypt declared, “the Israelites have become much too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country” (Exodus 1:9-10). On this hauntingly bad note for the Hebrews’ fortune in Egypt, all of the male infants were to be drowned in the Nile. One Hebrew mother sent her child, Moses, down the river in a basket. The daughter of the king of Egypt later raised him. When Moses was grown up and fled Egypt from fear of punishment for killing an Egyptian slave overseer, God came to him saying that Moses must be God’s messenger in setting the Hebrews free from Egyptian cruelty.

“And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:9-10). After being sent by God to retrieve all of the Israelites (Hebrews) out of Egypt, Moses found that the Pharaoh refused to release the Israelites from Egypt forcing Moses to plan the Israelite’s escape. Once the plan was executed, the army of Egypt followed them to a great body of water. Moses uses the staff God gave him in order to clear a path in the water for himself and the Israelites to pass through while flooding the army behind them.

After this courageous act, Moses led the celebrating Israelites into the wilderness to the mountain of Sinai. There, the people camped out and Moses went up the mountain and obtained the Ten Commandments from God for the Israelites. Overall, through Moses, the messenger of God, the people of the new civilization of Israel have been lead out of Egypt making their new civilization possible. In addition, the law structure, order, and foundation of the civilization had been given through Moses from God: the Ten Commandments, establishing the Israelites as a nation.

It is amazing how Moses brought a group of people, the Hebrews/Israelites, who all had life values and religion in common with each other, which set them aside from all of the other peoples of Egypt, and made them into a nation. “…they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly… The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, ‘When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him but if it is a girl, let her live. The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live’” (Exodus 1:12-16). Through this quote it is evident that the Egyptian king singles out the Hebrews as a separate group of people from the Egyptians, due to their customs and religion. Clearly a group of people alone can be distinguished from a nation in that they are bound together by their morals, beliefs, lifestyles, and the like.

In contrast a nation is a group or groups of people living together and governed by the same body. Here, the Egyptian king threatened when this group of people becomes impressively numerous and he worsens their work and living conditions. Eventually the king resorted to ordering the midwives to kill all of the male infants of the Israelites at birth. When they did not follow the king’s infanticide orders, sparks of the need for rebellion and an establishment of a separate and new nation ignited.

- posted by Anonymous @ 10:15 AM