Exodus

Moses cried out to the LORD, “What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.”

—Exodus 17:4

I was surprised to find myself very connected to the story of Exodus. It’s a great story, a big, sweeping story about the sea and the desert and the sky, but it’s also a story of incredibly fine detail, like a Fabergé egg, like a large painting with teeny tiny brushstrokes. As much as it’s a very important story, about big themes and pervasive truths about the nature of God and his people, a finely wrought web of ideas and ideals, it’s also about blood and bones and midwives and frogs and fires and bread.

Exodus, and the Bible as a whole for that matter, usually comes sanitized and shrink-wrapped, like chicken breasts at the grocery store in their flat, tidy little plastic packages. But when I read it this time, it seemed more like a bunch of chickens in somebody’s backyard, kicking up dust, squawking and screeching and pecking each other, with red and black and white feathers glinting in the hot sun. It’s less like a commentary, with footnotes and indexes, and more like a crime novel or a gothic tale of love and belief and betrayal, a story about family and fear and animals and anger.