THE UNITY OF EXODUS 1-2

There are two completely different ways to approach any portion of the Pentateuch: those critical scholars of the liberal camp who assume a very late date and a number of different sources for the composition of Exodus and the more evangelical understanding of the text as a unified whole originating with a single first-hand source. In addition, there are other commentators who do see a unity, but one having a very ancient prehistory.

Source Criticism

Without going into undue detail on the subject, here are first some positions taken by the critical scholars:

    Knight: “The book of Exodus is a theological essay in the form of narrative...These events are not necessarily factual.”

    W.H.C. Propp analyzes the book as a heroic fairy tale and finds similarities with Canaanite myths. He assumes that the book reached its final edited form sometime after the Babylonian Exile.

    Schipper: “Although there is currently no consensus on the classification of these different literary components in Ex 1, at least one insight is clear: Ex 1 can be divided into three layers—a priestly source, non-priestly passages, and post-priestly additions.”

As an example of this lack of consensus, here are the sources assigned to the various passages within Exodus 1-2 by three recent commentators. The sources are commonly known as P (Priestly), E (Elohim), J (Yahweh), and R (for the final redactor or editor):

    Propp: 1:1-5a (P or R); 1:5b-6 (R); 1:7 (P or R); 1:8-12 (J or perhaps E); 1:14 (P); 1:15-21 (E or perhaps J); 1:22-2:10 (J or E); 2:11-22 (J); 2:23a (unknown); 2:23b-25 (P)

    Durham: 1:1-7 (P); 1:8-12 (J); 1:13-14 (P); 1:15-22 (EJ); 2:1-22 (E or J); 23a (J); 23b-25 (P)

    Childs: 1:1-5 (P), 1:6 (J); 1:7 (P); 1:13-14 (P); 2:23b-25 (P)

Concerning the remainder of the verses, Childs says, “However, the division of the rest of the chapter between J and E has produced much diversity of opinion...The relation of [2:]11-22 to [2:]1-10 remains a problem since solid criteria on which to make a source judgment are lacking.”

Commenting on these and similar attempted source analyses in the literature, Rendsburg and Hoffmeier state: “It truly is remarkable that source critics are unable to agree on the division of the text and the assignment of the verses to whatever source(s). As another indication thereof, note that Richard Friedman assigns vv. 8–12 to the E source while Joel Baden attributes them to the J source. While these points by themselves do not constitute sufficient cause to dismiss the entire J-E-P enterprise (or other source-critical approaches), they nevertheless raise an eyebrow and suggest that an altogether different approach is worthy of consideration.”

And Cole summarizes the situation by saying, “By the end of the nineteenth century, the dominant critical hypothesis had...reduced Exodus to a mosaic of documents of different dates (but all long after Moses)...[This] old and tidy 'documentary hypothesis' has largely failed by its own success, with ever smaller and smaller units, or unconnected fragments postulated by scholars, instead of major and continuous written sources.”

Even if there were better agreement between these scholars in assigning individual verses to the proper sources, that alone would not prove that the information relayed was of a late date and therefore historically unreliable. To do that, one would have to (a) confidently date each of the sources themselves and (b) totally discount the presence of earlier reliable oral sources behind each source.

Word Studies

Therefore going hand in glove with the findings of Source Critics are the contention of philologists such as Schipper who claim to detect the presence of word forms and vocabulary in the Hebrew of Exodus (and elsewhere in the Old Testament) borrowed from Egyptian and other Near Eastern languages confidently dating to no earlier than the first millennium BC. Gary A. Rendsburg (Rutgers University) and James K. Hoffmeier (Trinity International University) have recently responded to Schipper's contention in a rather technical article two-part article published in the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections with particular attention to the linguistic evidence. They summarize their findings in the following words: “It is determined that: a) the transcription of ra-mz-zw as 'Rameses' coheres with the Semitic evidence of the 13th‒12th centuries BCE; b) the word 'corvée' is not a borrowing from Neo-Assyrian (or any other Akkadian dialect) but rather constitutes a pure West Semitic word; c) the word 'storages, storehouses' also is [indicative] of a good West Semitic derivation; d) the narrative of Exodus 1–2 should not be divided into separate sources, but rather should be read in a holistic manner; and e) the two chapters are dated on linguistic grounds to the earliest stratum of Biblical Hebrew narrative prose literature.”

Structural Criticism

If in contrast to the above atomization of the text, one treats it as a unified whole, then the first two chapters of Exodus look suspiciously like a section unto itself with the general organization:

a. frame (1:1-6)

b. Israel enters slavery, Moses' youth (1:7-2:22)

a'. frame (2:23-25)

The two framing sections do indeed have verbal parallels to one another in that both mention Jacob and the death of a key personage. But since there appears to be more than one discrete story in Unit b, these verses should be examined in more detail. The result of this examination is the parallel structure shown below:

                                                Figure 1: The Literary Structure of Exodus 1-2

Introduction: Joseph dies (1:1-7)

A. Egyptians afflict Jews (1:8-14)

B. Attempt to Kill Jewish Children Fails (1:15-22)

C. Moses Drawn out of Water by Pharaoh's Daughter (2:1-9)

D. Moses becomes her Son (2:10)

A'. Egyptians afflict Jews (2:11-14)

B'. Attempt to Kill Moses Fails (2:15a)

C'. Moses draws Water for Jethro's Daughter (2:15b-21)

D'. Moses has a Son (2:22)

Conclusion: the King of Egypt dies (2:23-25)

This structure emphasizes Yahweh's personal overseeing of all the events in Moses' life. The parallelism shows this to be true in the relatively mundane events of A'-D' as well as in the more spectacular way in which his life was preserved at birth. Moses' close identification with his people is, of course, directly portrayed in Exodus 2:11-14. However, the same point is made in a more subtle manner by the parallelism between units B and B'. An interesting contrast between the two cycles in this section occurs in the varied usages of the key word “fear” in these passages. In the first cycle, the midwives are twice said to fear God (1:17, 21). By contrast, Moses feared for his life in 2:14. The play on these two definitions occurs again in the central passage of the book, Exodus 19-24.

Additional evidence for the two-cycle arrangement of this section is found in Greenberg's observation that the verses in the first cycle contain seven appearances of the word “child” plus one use of the plural “children” while the second cycle contains seven occurrences of “man” plus one of the plural “men.”

Thus, a holistic way of reading the text has been demonstrated to be the best way to understand it.