Israel's
deliverance from Egypt is commonly known as the Exodus and
is one of the pivotal events recorded in the Old Testament. Moses returned
to Egypt and told the pharoah, the ruler of all Egypt, that
the Hebrew people must be freed.
When
the pharoah refused, the Egyptians were afflicted with ten plagues.
The plagues included the fouling of the Nile River, frogs and insects, and
other diseases and darkness that made life miserable for the Egyptians.
Finally,
after the firstborn children and animals of each Egyptian household suddenly
died, the Egyptians relented and the people of Israel fled eastward by night. As
you can see in the image at left, the Bible says that they were led by a great
pillar of fire by night, and a cloud by day.
The
Egyptians pursued them, but the Israelites escaped recapture
by crossing a sea while the Egyptian chariots were swept away by the water.
It is perhaps the most dramatic scene in the entire Old Testament and we can
say that this event, the exodus, is what created the nation of Israel
more than three thousand years ago.
Question
3
Does
it bother you that the people in Egypt were afflicted with plagues? Is it
moral of God to take such an action (St. Augustine, the great Christian
saint, worried about this)?
Question
4
Why
are the Israelis and Palestinians fighting in the Middle East? Hint:
what happened in 1948 (ask your parents)?
The people of Israel began their new life of freedom by remaining in the desert
regions east of Egypt for about forty years, from approximately
1275 to 1235 before the time of Christ. The central event of this period was
establishing a covenant relationship between God and Israel
at a mountain in the Sinai desert.
The
covenant reminded the people that it was God who had brought them "out
of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Exodus 20:2), and
called upon them to honor God alone and reject the gods of other nations.
The primary part of this covenant, known as the Ten Commandments,
became Israel's founding document as a nation. After departing from Mt.
Sinai, the people gradually moved north and east into what is now the kingdom
of Jordan. The generation that escaped out of Egypt,
including Moses himself, died as the people of Israel approached the Jordan
River and prepared to enter the land of Canaan once again.
Israel's
deliverance from Egypt is commonly known as the Exodus and
is one of the pivotal events recorded in the Old Testament. Moses returned
to Egypt and told the pharoah, the ruler of all Egypt, that
the Hebrew people must be freed. 