The First Meeting -- Exodus 5:1-5

5:1-5 - After talking with the Hebrew leadership, Moses and Aaron were probably thrilled that the people accepted their words and seemed on board with the mission. The next step was to go to Pharaoh and get him to free the people, so they go and tell him, “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.” TB did an interesting thing when reading through this chapter for his class and he used a version of scripture that used the name YHWH for each instance of the word “God” or “Lord” here and it’s used MANY times in this chapter specifically. The purpose of this is to set the stage for how the ancient world would have really understood this interaction.

We have to remember that anciently people believed in many gods who ruled only over a small territory and that knowing anything about these gods personally, such as their name, gave the humans power over the gods. In fact, in the case of Egypt specifically, Pharaoh was considered to be the human incarnation of the most powerful Egyptian god. So Moses and Aaron (M&A from now on when referred to together) went to Pharaoh, the conversation didn’t happen the way that I understood which was that they told another human, “the almighty, most powerful, and only God that we all accept as such, has commanded you, puny human, to let his people go.”

The way that Pharaoh probably understood the conversation is more like, “we know that you are the most powerful god in Egypt, but our god from a far away place that has no power here, whose name is YHWH, told us to come tell you that he wants his people to go worship him in the desert for a few days and stop working on your projects.” From Pharaoh’s perspective, M&A knew their god’s name so he already wasn’t that powerful, and they were talking about the god of a territory far away from Egypt so he would have had no power there. TB notes that Pharaoh would have seen Yehoveh (YHWH) as “an unwanted rival” because Pharaoh was the god of Egypt.

Further demonstrating this point is that Pharaoh’s first question isn’t “how long will you be gone,” or “how will you make up the work that will be missed,” but instead, “Who is the Lord that I should obey his voice and let Israel go?” He’s trying to figure out where this new god that just showed up fits into the pecking order of the established order. Pharaoh obviously declines to let the people go to worship God in the desert, and in his mind this is a non-issue. This god has no power there, who is he to tell Pharaoh, who considers himself to be a god, what to do?

There is a paragraph on TB’s lecture on this chapter which is kind of long, but I feel like it gives an excellent overall summarization of Pharaoh’s perspective of this encounter. TB notes of Pharaoh’s response, “Pharaoh doesn’t deny a) there IS a god called Yehoveh, nor b) that this Yehoveh is Israel’s god. He simply doesn’t see what all that has to do with him. I mean, we’re in Egypt… right? Therefore, by all understanding of the people of that day about how gods are supposed to operate, this is the realm of the Egyptian gods. And, Pharaoh things, the Egyptian gods are powerful and many so why worry about one measly god, and on top of that, one who is god to a bunch of slaves! After all, if this Yehoveh was so powerful, how could his people be slaves to Egypt? This was de facto evidence to Pharaoh that the Egyptian gods were more powerful than the Hebrew god and that he had no reason to pay attention to Yehoveh.”