Saturday, August 29, 2015

Exodus chapter 6 Part 1

After reading chapter 6:

*Yaweh says  now Moses will see what he will do to Pharoah to make him let the Israelites go. Oh, and by the way, he is the same God that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob worshipped. They just called him something else, "God almighty," not Yahweh.  He's the god that made the covenant to give them the land of Canaan. After hearing the trouble the Israelites were in, he remembered the covenant.

*The word God  in God almighty is another form of El, the Canaanite high God. Of course the God of the land of Canaan could decide who he wanted to live in that land, right? What the bible does not tell you is that many gods in ancient times were generally fixtures of geography. Egyptian gods would be worshipped in Egypt, Canaanite gods would be worshipped in Canaan. There were also times when one people group would say to another, hey this particular God of yours looks just like that particular God of mine, they must be the same God! This happened to the Greeks and Romans, because  the Romans happened to admire Greek culture.  Yahweh says he's the same God as El. We will see later that Israelites definitely do not admire Canaanite culture, but they claim the land as their own, and generally speaking, the land comes with its own God. What we see from a purely historical point of view is that gods evolve along with culture.

*Continuing on with the story, Yahweh tells Moses to tell the Israelites that he is going to be their God and will take them out of Egypt to the land he promised their forefathers. Moses told them, but they did not listen to him. Can you blame them? Then Yahweh tells Moses to go talk to Pharoah again. Moses does not want to go. Can you blame him? Why doesn't God talk directly to the Israelites or Pharoah? Why go through all this nonsense? Why can't they worship him in Egypt?   These questions are unanswerable, unless you make up your own answers. Faith supplies answers that don't exist.

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