Intro to the Torah Book of Shmot (Exodus)

Shalom. This is an induction to the book of exodus shawmut. First of all, it is used to be called safety, it is the rhyme, the book of the exodus in Egypt and then the Greeks named exodus after from the Greek word for departure. And, the Jews now call all the books, all the portions by the first major word of that book reapportion, and so the first major word here shawmut, which means names, the names of the descendants of Jacob.

So the book begins hundreds of years after the book of genesis. We have now the Jews settled in Egypt and doing well. And it says by akamela hadash, a new king arose and knew not Joseph. As you can watch my video on the torah portion of shawmut, the big first portion to learn more about this.

In any case, and I also have a video is the exodus story true? Which question some of the historical aspects of this? We have one famous commentator named Simcha, said, what people would invent the slave pass for themselves, which kind of make sense. Why would they invent such a story if it was not true? Now, what are the reasons for the exodus? Theologically, of course Jews are always willing to blame ourselves for the genocidal horrible intentions of others. Torah clearly says this pharaoh wanted to kill all the Jewish babies, males and when midwifes would not do it, he had them tossed into the river and that is how Moses got there eventually. His parents wanted to save him by putting him on his basket.

And there was this lady who was now departed. This was a very famous story teacher and she put it on a couple of interesting things. First, she talked about the educational motive for the exodus, which was that the torah says, you shall not wrong a stranger, nor oppresses them for you are strangers in the land of Egypt. It is obviously very important to god. That is from exodus 22:20. It is very important to god because god identified God himself in the beginning of the Ten Commandments because I am the Lord thy got to take you out of the land of Egypt. And the torah says it over and over. You shall have one law for Israel and stranger alike and do not oppress the stranger for you are strangers in the land of Egypt. So it is clearly an educational motive and the slavery experience. God wants to teach the people to be compassionate and so were slaves. Now, of course that seems like god will never do such a thing. It is certainly an important lesson that we learned in the whole story the pass over settler try to teach that lesson.

In addition, and on the bible often teaches that bad thing that happened are cause for sin. Now, the book of Job completely rejects that idea and I did a video on god and evil to help explain this. But at least on the theology of some in the bible, so would be the sin, the sin was, and some of the orthodox Jews still hold this theology that the Israelites were assimilating into Egyptian society and the slavery was a punishment for that. And I think that I do not like that theology at all, I do not think it is valid, but that is certainly one of the theories.

But the book of exodus has a very important historical aspect. The first time the word “Am” nation in context of the Israelites was used is the book of exodus, certainly forged the Jewish people into a nation. And it applies the framework for this people hood. It contains the most significant historic memories until no matter of times. We often refer back to the exodus even though it is over three thousand years ago. It is underpinning of much of Jewish traditions and it provides the key legal and ethical rules. We have the first set of the Ten Commandments. We have many other commandments, as I will go through in my minister series in this fascinating book.

And so as we encounter it, enjoy it, thoroughly I suggest that you read it or the last few sections of it deal with construction of the tabernacle which is also interesting, but the first big chunk of the book deals with the whole historical experience of the exodus. Shalom.