"And You Shall Tell Your Son..." The Concept of the Exodus in the Bible (review)

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 238 Reviews "AND YOU SHALL TELL YOUR SON•••" THE CONCEPT OF THE EXODUS IN THE BIBLE. By Yair Zakovitch. Pp. 144. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991. Cloth, $10.00. Yair Zakovitch is a professor of Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has published a number of books and articles on inner-biblical and post-biblical Jewish interpretation of the Bible. In this study he traces the influence of the Exodus tradition on the literary and conceptual shaping of biblical historiography. He shows that the Exodus theme affected the recounting of events both before and after it. It is for the most part a wellproduced book, but unfortunately a number of lines are missing at the bottom of p. 83 and the top of p. 84. The author's most important interpretive argument, presented in the third and last chapter, is that the Exodus myth was created to "encourage the Israelites to accept the revolution of monotheism and to believe that they make up an exceptional creation completely different from the nations surrounding them..." (p. 133). Because the ancestors of the Israelites were actually Canaanites, it was all the more important to reinforce and intensify the Exodus myth in order to inculcate a strong sense of separate identity. Focusing on this theme of the people dwelling apart (Num 23:9), which is centered in the Exodus story, Zakovitch shows how it informs much of the biblical corpus. It functions in Genesis to explain why the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt: the enslavement was a "measure for measure" punishment for the sins of the ancestors. Abraham left Canaan for Egypt and abandoned Sarah to spare his own life; Sarah and Abraham mistreated the Egyptian Hagar and her son Ishmael; Joseph's brothers cast him into a pit and sold him to traders traveling to Egypt; and Joseph enslaved Egyptians and showed favor to his own brothers. In "The Many Covert Faces of the Exodus Pattern," chap. 2 of the book, the author demonstrates a "W" pattern from Genesis through 2 Kings. That is, crises and journeys form a geographical schema that can be drawn as a W: Haran Canaan Egypt Haran Canaan Canaan Egypt Mesopotamia Canaan Zakovitch makes a case that various biblical stories, ranging from the wifesister tale in Genesis to Esther, have been cloaked in the Exodus pattern. Especially noteworthy is his lengthy discussion of the shadow that Moses Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 239 Reviews casts over other biblical figures such as Joshua, Gideon, David, Jeroboam, Elijah, and Elisha. He maintains that some features of the original Moses traditions were blurred but their echoes may be found in other figures, for example, Jeroboam as king and priest supervising the worship of the bull calves (Exodus 32/1 Kings 12) and the ascent of Elijah (Deuteronomy 34/ 2 Kings 2). On the whole, this is a very instructive work, whose appeal is all the greater for the author's extensive citation of rabbinic midrash. His literary and hermeneutical delineation of the Exodus myth would mesh well with Norman Gottwald's historical-sociological hypothesis that Israel began as an indigenous revolution of Canaanite peasants against their overlords. There is much good material here for exegesis and hermeneutic reflection . At times, however, I wonder whether the use of the overarching Exodus pattern is overstated. For example, the wife-sister tale in Gen 12:10-20 and its similarity of structure to the Esther story: may this be an example of a convention that was widely employed rather than the influence of the Exodus tradition as such? (See R. Alter, The Art ofBiblical Narrative [New York: Basic Books. 1981] and J. Williams. Women Recounted [Sheffield: Almond, 1982]). Likewise the book of Ruth, which Zakovitch describes as "an Exodus-like story" (p. 82), could be considered a variation on the betrothal convention in stories of Abraham's servant and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and the seven daughters of Midian. (Again, see Alter and Williams.) My own view of these conventions is that they are adaptations of a common stock of mythic-literary motifs which have been transformed in the Israelite setting by a generative structure operating at the...