Exodus, Part 3

The Exodus in Post-biblical Second Temple Judaism

(avg. read time: 3–6 mins.)

References to the exodus are less prevalent in post-biblical Second Temple Jewish texts, but the fact remains that these texts can still illuminate the significance the event had in Jewish faith. There is no longer a rough canonical-topical order to follow here, so I will instead go by textual divisions typically observed in scholarship. First, I will examine themes of the exodus as they arise in the OT Apocrypha, OT Pseudepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then I will briefly consider remarks about the exodus from Josephus and Philo.

I noted last time how the exodus often appears in summaries of the history of Israel as a crucial historical reference point. That trend continues in Second Temple Jewish texts with Jdt 5:12–16. More remarkably, as Wisdom of Solomon examines biblical history, it refers to the exodus first as an act of God’s personified Wisdom (10:15–11:16) and it is likewise recounted at length as part of a critique of idolatry in chs. 16–19 and a contrast of God’s people with the Egyptians. The same function appears at multiple point in the Pseudepigrapha (1 En. 89:13–27; Sib. Or. 3.248–260; cf. Sib. Or. 11:34–40, 306–314; 4 Ezra 3:17; Hel. Syn. Pr. 12:66–67, 73–76). Of course, the Second Temple era also saw the emergence of entire books that recast biblical texts and biblical history with extra content, which included references to the exodus in texts such as Jub. 48–49; L.A.B. 10; 15:5–6; 19:9; 23:9–10; 32:7. This also included Philo’s biographical work on Moses (see esp. Moses 1.147–334), which is in many ways starkly different from most of his other works. In a similar vein, albeit with a more apologetic edge, is Artapanus, whose work exists in fragments. The fragments that exist portray Abraham, Joseph, and Moses as shapers of Egypt. Moses is portrayed as the founder of Egypt’s cults prior to his encounter with YHWH (Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.27.4, 9, 12), and so there is an extra layer of significance to his confrontations with Egyptian idolatry in the signs God performed through him. The fragment of his work dedicated to Moses ends with a recounting of the exodus (Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.27.34–37). (Also note the historical references of Apoc. Abr. 32; T.Sim. 9:2; T.Jac. 3:7–11; T.Mos. 1:4; Jub. 1:1; 4Q392 2 + 4Q393 1; 4QDibHam[a]/4Q504 6, 10.)

Likewise, as noted in the last installment, the exodus sometimes serves as a historical endpoint to refer to the beginning of the history of Israel as a people. That is the case in Jdt 6:5, where the people of Israel are referred to as people who came out of Egypt. More similar to biblical statements is Bar 1:19–20, which describes Israel as having been disobedient “from the time when the Lord brought our ancestors out of the land of Egypt,” and other statements in Second Temple texts (4 Ezra 14:29–30). Likewise, the glory of the Torah is linked to the course of the exodus in which it was revealed (4 Ezra 9:29–31; cf. Hel. Syn. Pr. 5:9–12).

Relatedly, the exodus is used as an identifying event. In Add Esth C 13:16, the people of Israel are identified as those God redeemed for himself out of Egypt (cf. Jub. 1:21). In Bar 2:11, this event is used as an identifier for the God who brought the people out of Egypt (cf. 2 Bar 75:7–8; 4 Bar 6:23; 7:20). It is also a means by which God self-identifies in at least two cases in the Dead Sea Scrolls (11QT[a]/11Q19 LIV, 16–17; LXI, 14). (Also note the Christian interpolations of 4 Ezra 1:7, 10, 12–14; 2:1.)

In other cases, the exodus is still invoked as a paradigmatic action of deliverance. This is the point of the reference in 1 Macc 4:9. It is also cited alongside the stories of the Daniel tradition saving Susanna, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Apoc. Zeph. 6:10 as a paradigmatic act of deliverance. It is cited for this reason as well in 3 Macc 2:6–8; 6:4. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, it also appears paradigmatically in the War Scroll (1QM XI, 9–10).

One reference to the exodus has no equivalent function in the OT: the events of the exodus as paradigm for revelation. In 4 Ezra, when Ezra is commissioned, God tells Ezra of when he revealed himself to Moses and sent him to lead his people out of Egypt. But this story is supplemented once it arrives at Mt. Sinai, where Ezra is told that he revealed many secret things to Moses that he did not publish openly (14:3–6). In the same way, Ezra is to keep the revelation secret.

Another fascinating work that uses the exodus in an unprecedented way is Ezekiel the Tragedian’s Exagōgē (“Leading Out”). This work is a tragic drama that recounts the story of Exodus 1–15. It exists in fragments in the works of Eusebius, Clement of Alexandria, and Pseudo-Eustathius, which have been collected in works such as the second volume of James Charlesworth’s edited Old Testament Pseudepigrapha collection. There are some interesting bits of adaptation for the story—for example, all the signs, or the ten “plagues” as they are often referred to, are covered in a speech in ll. 132–151 and not enacted, and there are portents accompanying the crossing of the Sea of Reeds in ll. 220–242 as in Wis 19—but what is most significant for our purposes is the existence of the drama itself. We have no other Jewish drama composed in Greek from this time before Christ and it is surely not coincidental that the drama assigned such significance and preserved by multiple authors in fragmentary form is a drama about the exodus.

In Josephus’s apologetic work Against Apion, he argues with historians of Egypt on the matters concerning Israel’s time in Egypt (1.223–320). Such argumentation also concerns their accounts of the exodus (1.304–320). Interestingly, this includes a dispute about the origin of the name of Jerusalem, which Lysimachus claimed meant “the robbers of the temples” (which fits the Greek word ἱεροσυλία, but not the Hebrew name) as a reference to what the Jewish ancestors did as they left Egypt after a campaign (rather than the miraculous escape of the biblical story).

The last reference of interest to us is from Philo’s Questions and Answers on Exodus. Philo was by no means a one-trick writer in making frequently philosophical (often metaphysical) allegorical readings of the OT. I have noted already his more biographical recounting of the events in his Life of Moses. But in Questions and Answers he draws on his more frequent method of interpretation when he turns to the exodus. The exodus and the Passover celebrating it are taken to symbolize the liberation of the mind and the liberation of the soul from the body (1.4). This same paradigm is applied to many other points, of which I will only make a few references here. One, the blood on the doorposts and lentils symbolizes the marking of the soul by participation in virtue (1.12, 23). Two, the unleavened bread signifies a humble and prudent soul, as opposed to an arrogant one, while the bitter herbs manifest a migration of the soul after becoming bitter towards a former way of life (1.15; likewise, leaven is said to symbolize sensual pleasures in 2.14). Three, the tabernacle is the pattern of incorporeal and archetypal reality, the reality to which the soul belongs (2.52, 82).