Book Of Exodus Research Paper

God delivered Israel from Egypt to fulfil His covenant promises to the patriarchs (Reist 1969:227; Kaiser 1990:293). The Book of Exodus showed us how the Abrahamic covenant was fulfilled and how Israel moved from the position of slaves to become a nation under God’s theocratic rule. Thus, the Book of Exodus was a documentation of the formation of Israel as a nation under theocratic rule. Amongst the promises to Abraham was the assurance that his descendants would be fruitful and multiply (Gen 12:2; 15:5; 17:6). This actually took place during their sojourn in Egypt (Ex 1:7). When the covenant was instituted, Abraham was also told that his descendants would be enslaved for 400 years in a foreign land (Gen 15:13). This was fulfilled in Egypt.

God protected the baby Moses from Pharaoh’s plan to kill all the Hebrew boys. The baby Moses was saved by Pharaoh’s daughter. In Exodus 2:10, it was recorded that Pharaoh's daughter raised Moses as her own son. This account showed that God not only thwarted Pharaoh’s plan to kill Moses, the irony was that Moses was raised up under the nose of Pharaoh as a “son” of her daughter (“Moses” in Egyptian means “son”) (Childs 1974:19). As part of God’s plan to save and train Moses, God allowed Moses to be raised and trained for 40 years in Pharaoh's court. This would also mean that Moses had the opportunity to be exposed to Egyptian learning and the administration of Pharaoh’s court (Acts 7:22). All these would be God’s preparation of Moses for a future task of leading Israel (Cole 1973:59). At the age of forty, Moses killed an Egyptian in his attempt to protect his fellow Hebrews. For his crime, he fled into the wilderness to escape from Pharaoh. Moses then stayed in the wilderness for forty years till God called him at the age of eighty. After forty years in Egypt and forty years in the wilderness, God was about to call Moses for the next forty years of ministry (Acts 7:23; Ex 7:7) (Tanner 1996: