A Thought on Communication
We begin our annual study of the book of Exodus this week. The first portion of the book, Parashat Shemot, opens with a brief account of Jacob’s family entering Egypt. We read that the family numbered seventy persons, excluding Joseph, who was already in Egypt. The central crisis of the early part of the book is the accession to the Egyptian throne of a Pharoah “who knew not Joseph,” and his concern that the Israelite people had grown “much too numerous” and so constituted a threat.
In the book of Genesis 15:13 God had told Abraham that his “offspring” would become strangers in a land not theirs and would be “enslaved and oppressed four hundred years.” In Gen 17:19 God makes it clear that the covenant of the land would pass through the line of Isaac; Ishmael would be blessed also, but the “offspring” referenced in 15:13 was Isaac and his line. So, one question that naturally arises is: “did Abraham tell Isaac about the 400 years of oppression?”
The text does not include any mention of Abraham telling Isaac about any of God’s messages, whether about the covenant of the land or the period of oppression. In Gen 26, God extends the covenant of the land to Isaac directly. He tells Isaac specifically not to go down to Egypt and the text includes no mention of the time his offspring would spend in exile. Isaac, then, could not have told Jacob about the period of oppression.
In Gen 35 God extends the covenant of the land directly to Jacob and his line and He tells Jacob not to fear going down to Egypt. In Gen 46:4 God says, “I will descend with you to Egypt, and I will raise you up again.” But God says nothing to Jacob about the period of oppression, as He had said nothing to Isaac.
If the Hebrews/Israelites in Egypt knew that God had assigned a specific duration to the time of their oppression, we have no inkling of it from the later accounts in Exodus. If they had known that the end of their suffering was near, we would expect them to anticipate that in some definite way, but they seem completely taken aback by the return of Moses and by all of the events that led up to the redemption.
It seems fair to conclude that Abraham did not tell Isaac about God’s promise of redemption after a specified period of oppression, and that God did not tell either Isaac or Jacob about that promise. It follows that the oppressed Israelites did not know that the time of their liberation was fixed and approaching prior to Moses’s return.
That also raises the point of communication among the generations of patriarchs. The covenant of the land is made directly by God to Abraham in Gen 15 and 17, to Isaac in Gen 26, and to Jacob in Gen 28, 35, and 46. Whatever communication there was between Abraham and Isaac and between Isaac and Jacob, it did not transmit the covenant promise. God makes the promise directly to each of the three patriarchs. We implicitly acknowledge that in the language of our prayers when we reference “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”
The “Too Numerous” Issue
Our text tells us in Ex 1:5 that, “the total number of persons that were of Jacob’s issue came to seventy, Joseph being already in Egypt.” And in Ex 1:9 the king of Egypt says that “the Israelite people are much too numerous for us.” The question arises, how could such a small group grow so large that they would seem “much too numerous for us” in the period of time the text describes.
There are several elements to the analysis of that quesiton. What was the actual starting size of the Hebrew population? How long was it before they grew to a size that might seem threatening to the Egyptians? What does the king mean when he refers to “us?”
Ex 1:5 tells us only about the family of Jacob. It does not tell us that only Jacob’s family went down to Egypt. Many years before that time we know from Gen 14:14 that Abraham’s entourage included 318 men of fighting age, which probably meant that; counting the old, the young, and the women; his “camp” might have numbered 1,000 or more. It is certainly possible that the population around Jacob was at least that large or even much larger. That would make the math of the expansion easier to accept.
One approach to explaining the expansion is a bit fanciful. Rashi’s comment on Ex 1:7 quotes Midrash Tanchuma which says that during the years in Egypt each Hebrew woman gave birth to six children at a time and that there was no infant mortality. Only with such assumptions could the population grow to the size the text tells us it was at the time of the Exodus. The calculations change, though, if the starting number is substantially increased.
The calculations also change if the length of time changes. How long was it before the population grew to alarm the king of Egypt? The math on that question is not at all straightforward. From Gen 15:13 we get the idea that there will be a 400 year period of exile and oppression. In Ex 12:40-41 we are told that the exodus event occurred after 430 years. But the text also presents some difficult problems with that idea.
One problem the rabbis and commentators grapple with is based on the lifespans of Levi, his son Kohat, Kohat’s son Amram, and Amram’s son Moses. The text at Gen 46:11 tells us that Kohat was among the sons of Levi who came to Egypt with Jacob. The rabbis piece together the references to the lives of Levi, Kohat, Amram, and Moses and conclude that the time in Egypt could not have been 400 years or 430 years. Some say it was 210 years, others that it was 215; but it is agreed among the commentators that the duration was not 400 or 430 years.
So, how do they explain the discrepancy when we have texts that clearly specify 400 and 430 years? They look back to Gen 15:13 and conclude that we should understand the “sojourning” period to begin when Abraham actually has “offspring” from Sarah; that is from the time of Isaac’s birth. They reason that sojourning is both a spiritual and a physical condition and that, essentially, the entire period from Isaac’s birth to the exodus event was a sojourning of Abraham’s offspring that lasted for 400 years. The additional 30 years was the period from Gen 15:13 to the time of Isaac’s birth.
It is interesting that Septuagint Greek version of Ex 12:40-41 explicitly says that the 430 year period refers to the period when the children of Israel “lived in the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan.” And the Samaritan Pentateuch says the same thing but specifies that it was when “the children of Israel and their fathers lived in the land of Canaan and in the land of Egypt.”
If the actual period of the Hebrews’ living in Egypt was only 210 or 215 years, the math problem of the multiplication of their numbers is made that much more difficult. There is another approach that might explain the Egyptian king’s statement without resorting to unnatural birth experience, though.
Some believe that the period of Hebrew oppression in Egypt coincided with the Hyksos domination of the country. The Hyksos were a mix of various eastern Semitic peoples who conquered Egypt during the mid-second millennium BCE. Estimates put the size of their occupying population between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, which was relatively small given an overall Egyptian population in the millions.
If the Egyptian king who found the Hebrews “much too numerous for us” was actually a Hyksos king and the “us” he was referring to was an occupying population numbering in the tens of thousands, his statement might very well make sense.
CRL 1/05/2024