Exodus 10:1-2 says, Now the Lord said to Moses, 'Go in to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his servants, that I may show these signs of Mine before him and that you may tell in the hearing of your son and your son's son the mighty things I have done in Egypt, and My signs which I have done among them, that you may know that I am the Lord'.
Here, God is implying that the reason he hardened the heart of the Pharaoh was to provoke a situation whereby he could demonstrate His power so that Israel could forever recount this very story. He did not tell Moses that He was going to destroy Egypt and her Pharoah for purely moral reasons, but because He wanted Israel to recount the story of her Exodus. This reflects other statements by God throughout the Torah, whereby he justifies a given commandment not because of its morality - do this because it is the right thing to do - but because with a mighty hand He delivered us from Egypt.
Rabbi Yitzhak famously said that the Torah should have started at Exodus 12:1, when God first introduced the Passover. I discussed this in another article on the Book of Numbers, but to summarise, Rabbi Yitzhak, who no doubt did not believe we should be ignoring Genesis and the start of Exodus, was revealing a profound truth about the Torah and about the importance of the Exodus as a story we recount every year. The genius of his comment was that, logically, it made sense. We have come to understand, correctly, that the Torah are a set of laws, or guidelines as others prefer, God commands us to obey for the betterment of our lives. From a purely literary sense then, it would have made logical sense for the Torah to begin at Exodus 12:1, and to include only those parts that articulate the laws we are to follow.
Yet, the Torah does no such thing, throughout its text it weaves legal commandments with grand stories and elegant poetry. What the Rabbi was illuminating was that without this literary artistry, a singular focus on the law risked believers falling into legalism and being blinded to the spirit of the Torah - something our Messiah commented on often. The point of the Torah has not been the law in and of itself, as we read in Psalms, God has never had any need of our sacrifices, but the law has also existed as a means to point us towards a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Laws have always been expressions of meaning, values and purpose, but no legal text of itself has been able to reveal its spirit without a narrative foundation. The Exodus has existed as this story, not only for Israel, but for Western Civilization.
It is therefore appropriate to see the Exodus story as archetypical, like many of the stories in Genesis. Whilst no doubt the stories of Genesis described what happened, there enduring importance exists because these stories also describe what always happens, as Leon Kass explains. Exodus, likewise, is a story about Israel's foundation, but is also the paradigm we all follow as we begin our walk with God. It is, at its heart, a story of struggle, against Egypt, against ourselves, and against God - a story that mirrors Jacob's life of continuous struggle before he became Israel. What though gives our struggle meaning and purpose is the story of Exodus. No more do our struggles descend into a void of Godless nihilism, but rather, our struggles exist within God's grand narrative, a story that includes lows and high's as we are bought closer and closer to our God, the greatest story teller there is.
(These themes are further explored here - https://www.hebrewrootsmelbourne.com/post/the-poetics-of-the-law-and-the-book-of-numbers)
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