Autonomy, Independence, and Dependence in Exodus

The relationship of the people of Israel to God is obviously a key theme of the book of Exodus. The relationship can be read in many ways: that of a people rescued from slavery by its God, in the way a parent might rescue his child from a kidnapper, for example. More interestingly, the people of Israel are not a fully constituted people at the beginning of the saga. They lack leaders, institutions, and laws. In the course of the story, leaders and priests are chosen by God, and in some cases are self-selected. Laws are promulgated. The question of the autonomy of the developing nation comes to the foreground in numerous episodes. The battle against the Amalekites is a good example of a change in the people's ability to act. The people are able, for the first time, to fight for their survival, yet the presence of God is more than implied by the actions of Moses and his aids. They must somehow keep God propitiated, or at least keep God in the minds of the people, during the battle.

What are the limits on, and the demand for, the Israelites' autonomy? Autonomy, for the purposes of this essay, will be defined simply as "self-governance." Autonomy, as I understand it, is not necessarily the same thing as independence. A city-state, corporate body, or a person might be able to exercise considerable autonomy without being completely independent. Many Christian churches, for example, give individual congregations considerable autonomy, while still holding them in the folds of some kind of hierarchy or organization. The city-state of Hong-Kong is nominally autonomous, although Mainland China seems to be threatening its self-governance as time goes on. Regardless, autonomy is best seen as the ability of a people, nation, or body to be self-governing. Independence is a different concept. An independent entity or being would conceivably never be forced to answer to another entity or being. The Israelites in the story of Exodus are most definitely not on the road to complete independence from any higher authority whatsoever.
This paper is an attempt to delineate the process whereby the Israelites gained autonomy. Additionally, the limits of their autonomy, and the demands made upon it will be investigated with a view to the goal of trying to figure out what enables a people to gain and maintain a healthy and hearty autonomy - one that will remain within the limits placed on it by human nature and by God.

The Israelite people are basically slaves of the Egyptians in the beginning of Exodus. Although they were at first welcome guests, "a new king arose over Egypt who knew not Joseph" ( Exodus I:8) . The Israelites had multiplied and presumably been economically successful, and threatened the Egyptians. However it happened, they soon found themselves reduced to forced labor. The Pharaoh's dislike of the Israelites leads him to the extreme of ordering the killing of the firstborn sons of the Israelites. Eventually, "their plea from the bondage went up to God. And God heard their moaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the Israelites, and God knew" (2:24-25).
Presumably, God could have used his immense power to free the Israelites right then and there, but he chose the more circuitous route of choosing a human agent by the name of Moses. Why? Moses winds up being vulnerable to charges similar to those made recently against deceased Pope John Paul II by Christopher Hitchens. The Pope claimed that the Virgin Mary had deflected the assassin's bullet from its path:

He openly announced that the bullet that hit him was prevented from taking his life not because of the skill of his physicians, but because its trajectory had been guided by Our Lady. She let the assassin fire and hit, in other words, and only then took action. (This reminds me of Bertrand Russell's comment on the practice of placing covers on the baths in convents so as to avoid offending the sight of God. The creator can see through the roof of the convent, and down into the bathrooms in the basement, but is hopelessly baffled by a sheet of canvas.) (Slate, April 8, 2005)

If one takes a Hitchens-like attitude, then the story of Exodus becomes nothing but the case of another obscurantist pulling one over on the people. However, I believe that it is possible to defend the divinity of a God who acts through people and events, and does not take all into his own hands. In that view, the story of Exodus (and even the Pope's belief in divine intercession in his case) can make more sense. Part of the defense of indirectness to many of God's actions and plans may be attributable to the need for a place for human autonomy.
Coming back to the question of Moses, why did God choose Moses in the first place? The answer probably lies in Moses' character. Even as a young man, he showed himself to be capable of acting under his own power, to an extent that was almost precipitous and poorly planned. He killed an Egyptian man who struck one of his fellow Hebrews. Moses was capable of seeing injustice, and acting to correct it. If his first attempt was accompanied by a possible injustice (was death the right penalty?), at least he was capable of acting.

The Egyptians pose a different problem. Throughout the interactions between Moses and the Pharaoh, we glimpse a society that is under the almost complete domination of one man. Pharaoh has godlike powers in Egypt, and does not seem to be bound by any law other than his own whims. Even his advisors want to let the Hebrews go, but Pharaoh does not relent until the bitter end, when God kills all the firstborn children of the Egyptians. During the plague of locusts, "Pharaoh's servants said to him, 'How long will this fellow be a snare to us? Send off the men, that they may worship the LORD their god. Do you not yet know that Egypt is lost?' " (10:7) Pharaoh is not a man to take advice.
A number of passages tell us that God has decided to "harden" Pharaoh's heart, so that he will not relent until the final plague has taken place. If God literally inserts ideas or emotions into Pharaoh's soul, we are faced with a troubling question: what kind of a deity would interfere in human affairs in order to bring misery and disaster to an entire people, even if the end goal is laudable?

The Egyptians are already slavish in their relationship to their king, and in their relationship to nature and their nature/animal gods. Pharaoh himself, however, is a willful human being, willing to go head-to-head with the god of the Hebrews. After the first nine plagues, and after repeatedly going back on his word and suffering the consequences, "…the LORD toughened Pharaoh's heart and he did not send off the Israelites from his land" (11:9).
The most obvious reason for this hardening of Pharaoh's heart is stated by the LORD himself:

And the LORD said to Moses, "See, I have set you as a god to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother will be your prophet. You it is who will speak all that I charge you and Aaron your brother will speak to Pharaoh, and he will send off the Israelites from his land. And I on my part shall harden Pharaoh's heart, that I may multiply my signs and my portents in the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh will not head you, and I shall set My hand against Egypt and I shall bring out My battalions, My people the Israelites, from the land of Egypt with great retributions, that the Egyptians may know that I am the LORD…" (7:1-5).

This brings up another perplexity. After the first attempt to convince Pharaoh to release the Israelites so that they could sacrifice in the wilderness, Moses says to the LORD, "Look, the Israelites did not heed me, and how will Pharaoh heed me, and I am uncircumcised of lips?" (6:12) Moses had previously been told by God, at least twice, that Pharaoh would not let the people go "except through a strong hand" (3:19). "But I on my part," God told him, "shall toughen his heart and he will not send the people away" (4:21). Thus, Moses should have known that the Pharaoh's refusal of his request was predestined, and part of God's plan. Moses, however, is upset at the suffering of the people. Also, despite his knowledge of God's plan, he may have been hoping to demonstrate his own effectiveness in the world as a leader of the Israelites, and as an intermediary between God and man. In other words, Moses may have been hoping for more independence from God than was proper. God had given him a charge, and expected him to act on it. God had given him freedom and autonomy, but not independence. Moses was expected to use his own powers, gifts, and skills as a human being as best he could in the service of his people and in the service of God. He should not, however, have expected that he could achieve goals above and beyond those set out by God in revelation.

The Egyptians fall victim to a different error. Moses wants to go beyond what God has revealed. The Egyptians do not even acknowledge, by their actions, that any power or deity stands above their civilization and its devotion to nature and the technological control of nature. Despite repeated signs that they were face to face with a power that far transcended their own, their leader rebels against this knowledge. The outcome of this rebellion - pestilence and death - may tell us that Moses' error is less deadly than that of the Egyptians. It may be better to be too enthusiastic in the pursuit of God's will, than to reject it altogether.
Before Moses even begins to carry out his task of returning to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses irritates God with his reluctance:

And he (Moses) said, "Please, my LORD, send, pray, by the hand of him You would send." And the wrath of the LORD flared up against Moses, and he said, "Is there not Aaron the Levite, your brother? I know that he can indeed speak, and, what's more, look, he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you, his heart will rejoice. And you shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth, and I Myself will be with your mouth and with his mouth and I will instruct you both what you should do, and he will speak for you to the people, and so he, he will be a mouth for you, and you, you will be for him like a god. (4:13-17)

We see a nice interplay here between the finite powers of a single man, God's plan for this man, and God's solution to his chosen agent's limitations. Human community can strengthen autonomy. Aaron will be the first addition to the group of leaders, followed by the elders of Israel; eventually, following his father-in-law's advice, Moses will institute a very formal hierarchy of judges for the people in chapter eighteen. The subtlety of the development of the powers for self-government of Israel is quite striking. The people, so dependent on Moses and God in the beginning, start to develop real powers of self-governance. They still fumble and fail, of course, as the episode with the golden calf will demonstrate.
The disasters that befall the Egyptians, or that they bring on themselves, may have a purpose beyond that explained by God when he states, "And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD when I gain glory through Pharaoh, through his chariots and through his riders" (14:18). The plagues and military defeat may be a warning for future generations. The Egyptians sought not just a peaceful and psychologically healthy autonomy that would enable them to use and develop human powers in a productive way. They sought to dominate and enslave other peoples, as well as contriving to control and propitiate nature herself. Caught up in a hermetically sealed world of striving for control of the social and natural world, the Egyptians lost sight of justice and the importance of supra-natural values. In fact, human society itself is really just a part of nature for the Egyptians. Even the immortality that they seek utilizes embalming techniques, and seeks to preserve the body in the material plane.

The alternative view of the divine and the holy that is being given to the Israelites involves a deity who lies outside of the cycles of nature. Man, to some extent, is thus called upon to transcend natural exigencies. Keeping the Sabbath involves a day of rest. This could be viewed as following the inevitable cycle of work and rest, but man has shown himself to be more prone to never stop working, especially in more technologically advanced civilizations where effort and skill are rewarded with success and wealth. Simply keeping the LORD in mind - through prayer, reflection and sacrifices - is a way of acknowledging the trans-natural basis of the ultimate foundation of the world. In the desert, the Israelites come face to face with extreme natural limits, and they are delivered by the supernatural. Moses wants them to memorialize this fact:

This is the thing that the LORD commanded: a full omer of it to be kept for your generations, so that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out of the land of Egypt" (16:32)

For those who find such miracles in the wilderness impossible, a look at the state of modern cosmology would be fruitful. Cosmologists are stymied when they approach within a few milliseconds of the Big Bang. At that point, ontological honesty might recognize the possible presence of a gift in the wilderness.
Another possible novelty of the law given to the Israelites by God, and through Moses, is the way in which the covenant is to be enforced. The people voluntarily choose to accept the covenant. When it is quickly broken at Mount Sinai, it is the people who must choose to enforce it:

And Moses stood at the gate of the camp and said, "Whoever is for the LORD, to me!" And the Levites fathered round him. And he said to them, "Thus said the LORD God of Israel, 'Put every man his sword on his thigh, and cross over and back from gate to gate in the camp, and each man kill his brother and each man his fellow and each man his kin.'" (32:27-28)

Many people in our course were made uncomfortable by the nature of this justice or retribution. As someone pointed out, however, the death of a few thousand was better than the complete destruction of everyone but Moses. Moses took on a grave responsibility by interceding for the Israelites, and convincing God to relent. Perhaps God never meant to really carry out his threat and destroy the children of Israel. He presumably had faith in Moses' sense, and knew that Moses would take on the role of a mediator. Moses uses reason and justice in his intercession, along with mercy. In other words, three rational categories that are often in conflict or at cross-purposes are somehow brought into a kind of harmony:

"Why, O LORD, should your wrath flare against Your people that You brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a strong hand? Why should the Egyptians say, 'For evil He brought them out, to kill them in the mountains, to put an end to them on the face of the earth?' Turn back from your flaring wrath and relent from the evil against Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel Your servants, to whom you swore by Yourself… " (32:11-13)

When Moses went up to the mountaintop for forty days, the people had a hard time accepting his absence. "Rise up," they said, "make us gods that will go before us, for this man Moses who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him" (32:1). The people are still overly dependent on the leadership principle. This is the same principle that saved Vienna and Western Europe from the Mongols in the thirteenth century. The death of Ogodei Khan sent the Mongol armies into retreat, in order to choose a new leader. The Israelites, in contrast, are being steered away from a political principle that is not much more advanced than that of a wolf pack. Their institutions and future civilizations will be based on directives that come from beyond what human rationality can deduce from the brute facts of nature or primitive human society. Contradicting Rousseau, the state of nature is not seen is an ideal state to regret losing.
Moses, perhaps, was dangerously close to becoming a supreme leader. Even if he were an ideal philosopher-king, there would be no guarantee that his successors would not become tyrants. In that case, the forty-day absence of Moses makes sense. Trying to wean the Israelites from the continual reassuring presence of Moses while the law and the covenant were being proffered, God perhaps knows that they will fail. This failure itself becomes an opportunity for Moses to take on a different role and persona for the people. He is not just a leader and a giver of God's law, but a mediator and a locus of responsibility and justice. He was partly that before, but the episode of the "golden calf" was an existential threat to the existence of Israel, and was therefore transformative.

There is some confusion, however, about the whole matter. In Exodus 19:8, the people agree to abide by the covenant. The timeline is unclear, but it appears that the people are agreeing to a covenant before they know any of the content of this covenant. In chapter twenty, we are given specific rules and laws, but it is still unclear whether or not the people have heard it. Did God give the people these initial commandments before or after Moses ascends to the mountaintop for forty days and forty nights in Exodus 24:18? If the people didn't know of the commandment stating, "You shall have no other gods beside Me," should they have been responsible for breaking it? Even if they knew, was the reaction of both Moses and God excessive? Before we can answer that, we might speculate on the fate of the Israelites without the law given in the covenant.
The covenant may be a supremely important device to enable the Israelites to avoid the fate of eastern tyrannies. Without the law, the people might be experiencing a brief moment of freedom between slavery and anarchy, or between slavery to Pharaoh and slavery to a tyrant. Even anarchy is a form of slavery, preventing any individual or group from building on human trust and the buildup of wealth from generation to generation.

The story of Exodus tells us something about the conditions of true, workable autonomy. Self-restraint is necessary, because people are prone to desire things that they wouldn't choose to desire. To give a specific example, many heroin addicts desire heroin, but they most likely would not choose to have the desire for heroin if they could snap their fingers and make it go away. Addicts, the mentally ill, and even average people give in too easily to temptation. Forbidden things have an immediate appeal that can overpower rational calculation. In fact, who is to say that giving in to destructive temptations isn't rational? Any calculus that tries to add up the pleasures of an addiction or forbidden activity against the costs to the individual or society is completely arbitrary. One person might rate a single injection of a powerful drug to be worth any amount of future pain. There is simply no rational way to add and subtract pleasures and happiness, which is why utilitarianism, especially in its hard Benthamite form, is so problematic.

The way out of the trap of rational calculus is divine law. Both individuals and nations can benefit from such law, if they are open to it. "And as for you," God tells the people of Israel, "you will become for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6) Even more than other nations, Israel has been called to reject a purely rational or nature-based law. Does it matter if this divine law is real or make-believe? In other words, did Moses make it all up? That's a question for another essay, but if we accept the book of Exodus as history, it seems unlikely that the people would believe or accept what Moses tells them without some kind of manifestation of the divine or supernatural. They show enough recalcitrance in numerous instances to suggest that they would likely have rejected the leadership of Moses, or followed him, without the miracles in the desert that provided them with food and water.

Exodus suggests that belief in a supra-human law is necessary for a people to become self-governing, and to maintain this autonomy for any significant length of time. The danger of idolatry is that a people may invent its own gods - gods that permit everything. The scene that Moses sees when he comes down the mountain with Joshua in chapter thirty-two is indicative. The people are engaged in an orgy of eating, drinking, dancing, and licentiousness. The people have, in the absence of Moses, "evolved" their religion to allow them to follow their lower desires. Perhaps such a regime of human-made gods is fun and tolerant, but the people have gone back on their word to the source of their salvation.

A people that does not have the guidance of a god that transcends nature may be caught by something akin to the nature-based gods of Egypt. There would be an emphasis on nature's cycles, propitiating multiple gods of nature, and the worship of gods that are often based on animals. Animalistic behavior would therefore be more acceptable, at least during Dionysian festivals. A nation that strays from the way of the truth may be doomed, even if it is economically and technologically sophisticated. In fact, sophistication can lead to a rejection of limits. In a finite world, something or someone must suffer from limitless aspirations, whether it is the nation itself or those affected by it.

When Moses intercedes for the people after the episode of the molten calf, God relents and even agrees to accompany the people on their journey. The tabernacle is finally built, and becomes a locus for the people's worship of God. This suggests that a people needs something to represent its tie to the principle that binds it, something visible or physical. For modern Americans, the Constitution fulfills this role, or maybe the flag. The Founding Fathers are the equivalent of Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel. Furthermore, natural law based on some form of deism or theism seems to genuinely underpin the idea of self-government in the United States, despite the attempt to stress secular elements of the founding, and to downplay the religious. Every nation seems to have its founding myths, from ancient Rome to nations newly freed from the Iron Curtain. Might it be dangerous to undermine the stated ideals of the United States by claiming that references to inalienable rights endowed by a "Creator" are merely rhetorical or metaphorical flourishes? This would be a good topic for another paper.
Regardless, the tabernacle will serve as a focal point for the worship and reverence of the Israelites. The law on the tables will be stored in the ark, and will provide positive and negative laws on conduct - at least the core of such laws. The ark and the tabernacle are visible and semi-permanent reminders to the people of the covenant, forming a parallel with the rainbow that serves as a reminder to God of his covenant with mankind. They thus serve to strengthen and at the same time govern the autonomy and freedom which was God's gift to the people of Israel.

Autonomy is not a synonym for independence, and dependence does not preclude autonomy. In fact, a people that recognizes something beyond itself, harkens to the call, and polices itself in an attempt to live within the prescribed limits given to it by divine guidance, will live a much better life, and enjoy the fruits of civilized life. This may apply to other peoples and their "true" gods. Witness the flowering of Indian or Chinese civilizations. (The potential truth or harm of Unitarianism is neither implied or denied by this statement!) But all successful civilizations - those that allow the people a measure of freedom, dignity, and autonomy - seem to recognize the need for limits to human behavior that come from a sempiternal source. Hinduism and Confucianism are very different examples of this idea, and any parallels would be an interesting topic for yet another future essay.