Exodus - Lesson 8

Dr. Carmen Imes 
Exodus 
OT605-08 
Genealogy
Lesson Transcript

Okay, we have come to the part that you've all been waiting for, the genealogy. Now I know really most people think genealogies are boring, but I am persuaded that genealogies are fascinating if we'll just slow down long enough to sit with them, to draw them out on paper, to notice what's unique about this, what clues have been left behind. And as I've spent time on this particular genealogy in Exodus chapter 6, I feel like it holds the key to us understanding how the book of Exodus got to us and what's important to the narrator.

It is, it's the sort of thing that usually when we start reading a genealogy, our brain switches into autopilot. We start thinking about what are we going to make for dinner or what, oh, am I ready for that meeting tomorrow? We're, we don't know how to say the names. If, you know, heaven forbid, we should be asked to read this aloud in Bible study because who knows even how to say these names? I don't, and I have a PhD in Old Testament.

And so we stumble our way through them and then we breathe a sigh of relief when we get to the other side. But if you hang with me, I hope to make the case that this is actually a fascinating section of Exodus and that it will actually yield up some secrets for us that will help us understand the book. So the first thing to say is that, the first thing to notice is what comes immediately before and immediately after the genealogy.

You might notice here that it sounds kind of similar. So picking it up in verse 10, Yahweh said to Moses, go tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelites go out of his country. We've already heard this.

In fact, Moses already said it in chapter five. Why is God saying this again? We might need a reiteration of God's command because of what has elapsed. Pharaoh's given impossible demands.

The people have been frustrated. Moses has complained. The people are dispirited and they, they're not listening to God's promises.

And God says, no, this is the plan. We're going to stick with the plan. Go tell Pharaoh this again to let the Israelites go or to send them away.

Moses' response is interesting. Moses said to Yahweh, if the Israelites will not listen to me, why would Pharaoh listen to me since I speak with faltering lips? That phrase faltering lips is more specifically uncircumcised lips, which we'll talk about in a minute. But this is not the first time Moses has complained about not being able to speak.

You'll remember back in chapter four, that this is one of the objections Moses gave at Mount Sinai. I'm not good at this. I'm going to be fallen all over myself.

I have a heavy tongue and heavy lips. And God said, I will be with your mouth. Well, apparently Moses has forgotten this promise.

And he's saying again, that Pharaoh is not going to listen to him. He has uncircumcised lips. Now, if we skip over the genealogy to what comes right after it, listen to this verse 26, actually verse 28.

Now, when Yahweh spoke to Moses in Egypt, he said to him, I am Yahweh, tell Pharaoh, king of Egypt, everything I tell you. But Moses said to Yahweh, since I speak with faltering lips, why would Pharaoh listen to me? Okay, we just had that. Why is this twice? There are so many people through the history of biblical interpretation who have seen something like this and said, ah, we have two different sources that have been combined here.

And that's why we have a redundancy. And I want to say, why is that editor so incompetent that they would fail to remove a redundancy? Why wouldn't they clean things up and make it more efficient? I am more persuaded rather than this being two different sources, I'm more persuaded that this is intentional literary design, that this is a frame. We'll talk later about framing around Mount Sinai.

Here we have some framing around a genealogy. So we have a commission to go to Pharaoh, a commission to go to Pharaoh, Moses complaining, I can't do this. My lips are uncircumcised.

And then we have inside that complaint, we have God saying to Moses, here's the solution to the problem of your lips. And the solution is a genealogy. The solution is to show the pedigree of Aaron and Moses.

So let's look at this more closely together as we work our way. And you'll see this chiasm. There's an ABCBA pattern or a literary sandwich with the genealogy in the middle.

So we've already seen the faltering lips or uncircumcised lips before or after. Verse 13 is a recommissioning. Now Yahweh spoke to Moses and Aaron about the Israelites and Pharaoh king of Egypt, and he commanded them to bring the Israelites out of Egypt.

Skip down to verse 26. It was this Aaron and Moses to whom the Lord said, bring the Israelites out of Egypt by their divisions. They were the ones who spoke to Pharaoh king of Egypt about bringing the Israelites out of Egypt, this same Moses and Aaron.

So we have a very similar repetition on at the beginning and the end of the genealogy. You can even notice a pattern in the order of the names Moses and Aaron. So we have a commissioning of Moses and Aaron in verse 13, and then a mention of Aaron and Moses in the middle of the genealogy in verse 20.

And then in 26, it's Aaron and Moses again, and then Moses and Aaron in 27. So there's a framing of their names that shows that this belongs in the middle. It's very well crafted.

Okay, so what is up with the uncircumcised lips? This could be Moses' sense of expressing again that he has a speech impediment. What is circumcision? It's the removal of a flap of skin on the male body part. So if his lips are uncircumcised, it's like he's got extra skin in the way that's getting in the way of him talking clearly, and he wants it cut away.

So it could be an indication of a speech impediment. But it could also be a sense of disqualification or being unqualified to do the work that God has called him to do, or that he's unfit to do it. He won't be received because he doesn't belong.

Remember on Moses' trip back to Egypt with his family, God meets him and tries to kill him. So he might even feel that this is dangerous. Okay, we had uncircumcision in our family, and it was dangerous to go back.

If my lips are uncircumcised, what's going to happen to me? There are other metaphorical uses in the Bible of circumcision. Obviously, we don't circumcise lips. There's no extra flap of skin around the lips that some cultures remove.

But the concept of uncircumcision is used to describe fruit in Leviticus 19, to describe hearts in Leviticus 26, and Ezekiel 44. It describes ears in Jeremiah 6. So this is not the only place where circumcision is used metaphorically. And whichever of these reasons is bothering Moses, or the reasons that motivate this metaphor, because the two objections frame the genealogy, we can see that the genealogy is the answer to Moses' speech impediment.

It's providing Moses with a spokesman. Why is Aaron qualified to do this job? Well, we're going to see his pedigree in this family tree. Chapter 7 begins with a strange comment, and I want to look at this and then go back to the genealogy, because this is still part of that same literary unit.

Verse 7 begins, Then Yahweh said to Moses, See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. So normally, God gives a message to a prophet who announces it to the people. But God says, I've made you like God to Pharaoh.

So Yahweh is now giving messages to Moses, who will give the messages to Aaron, who will pass them on to Pharaoh. And so he's not saying that Moses is divine, or that he's a deity, but he's standing in the place with relation to Aaron that God normally stands in relation to a prophet. So he's going to pass on the words of Yahweh to Aaron, and Aaron will speak them.

You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his country. But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in Egypt, he will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt, and with mighty acts of judgment, I will bring out my divisions, my people, the Israelites.

And the Egyptians will know that I am Yahweh when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it. Moses and Aaron did just as Yahweh commanded them. Moses was 80 years old, and Aaron 83, when they spoke to Pharaoh.

They spoke to Pharaoh. This is the thing Moses is worried about. He doesn't feel he's qualified to speak to Pharaoh.

So with the genealogy and the explanation of how this transaction is going to work with Aaron, now they go and they're ready to speak to Pharaoh, and that launches us into the signs and wonders. But I promised that the genealogy was interesting, so we better zero in and look at how it works. So picking it up in verse 14, chapter 6 verse 14, these were the heads of their families.

Now again, try hard not to tune out because we have this default of tuning out in a genealogy. We know from Exodus 1 verse 1 that there were 12 sons of Jacob that came into Egypt. Well, 11.

Joseph is already there. The other 11 meet him. And so if you keep your finger here, flip back to chapter 1 verse 1, and it will give you the full list of names.

Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. That's who I'm expecting to read about in chapter 6. And here it begins. These were the heads of their families, the sons of Reuben.

Oh, I expected that. The next verse, the sons of Simeon. Yep, just like what I would expect.

The names of the sons of Levi. Yep. And now the next one I'm looking for is Judah.

And you can look all day long till you're blue in the face and Judah isn't anywhere. And neither is Issachar or Zebulun or Benjamin or Dan or Naphtali or Gad and Asher. None of them are in this genealogy.

All we have in chapter 6 are the first three sons of Jacob. Reuben, Simeon, and then a lot about Levi, and then nobody else. Do you see what I mean about this being interesting? So then we ask ourselves, what's going on here? What I recommend when you come to a genealogy is pull out a blank sheet of paper and a pen and try to draw it.

Draw the family tree. And what's really interesting is to see how many levels there are on the tree. Because any family tree would have an infinite number of levels if you went down far enough, as people keep having babies.

But this particular family tree is very uneven. It's not reporting the fullness of Reuben, Simeon, and Levi. It basically gets a running start with Reuben and Simeon.

The sons of Reuben, the firstborn son of Israel, were Hanak and Palu, Hezron and Carmi. These were the clans of Reuben. So we have only one level under Reuben.

We have two generations, Reuben and four sons. That's it. The sons of Simeon were Jamuel, Jamin, Ohad, Jachin, Zohar, and Shaul, the son of a Canaanite woman.

These were the clans of Simeon. So six sons, all in the same generation, all with the same father. That's it.

That's all we get for Simeon. The only interesting bit there is we have a second wife, the son of a Canaanite woman. So there's an indication of a second wife there, which we're not sure what to do with.

But then we get Levi. And we have as many as six generations with Levi. And it also begins differently.

Instead of the sons of Levi were, with a list of his sons, we have these were the names of the sons of Levi. So the running start for this tribe is slower and more deliberate. It echoes what we had in Exodus chapter one.

These are the names of the sons of Israel. Now we have these are the names of the sons of Levi, according to their records. So we have a different introduction.

And then we have extra according to their records. The NIV is rendering the word records there is rendering the Hebrew word Toledot, which is a key word in the book of Genesis that occurs 10 times. And it's sometimes translated generations or account.

These are the generations of so and so, or this is the account of so and so. And at 10 points in the book of Genesis, we have a genealogy that introduces us to a family line. And Genesis divides into two sections chapters one through 11 and chapters 12 through 50.

And there's five Toledots in each of those. One is the what's often called the primeval history, or the early history of humanity. And the second is the family of Abraham.

And we track with the family of Abraham, five different Toledots in Abraham's family. So it's interesting that the narrator here is picking up on that pattern, but not, not with all the Israelites, just with the Levites. These were the names of the sons of Levi, according to their Toledot.

What the narrator wants us to see is that Levi's family is the next major focus of the narrative. Okay, now that you have our attention, what do we need to know about the clans of Levi? Well, as we read along, you'll notice that it's not just one layer, but we have many layers, and we have extra information about some of them. So Gershon, Kohath, and Merari, he's got three sons, Levi lived 137 years, we didn't get any any ages for the ones in Reuben's family and in Simeon's family, we're not told how old they were.

But we are told how old Levi was, which means Levi is dead now. You don't know how long someone's going to live until after they die. So we have Levi has died 137 years.

And now we're going to get the next layer down. So the sons of Gershon, the sons of Kohath, and the sons of Merari. So the sons of Gershon by clans were Libni or Libni and Shimei.

The sons of Kohath were Amram, Ishar, Hebron, and Uziel. Kohath lived 133 years. Okay, apparently Kohath also died.

So now we have his age. But why didn't we get the age of Gershon? Maybe Kohath's family is the one we're supposed to pay special attention to. The sons of Merari, this is the third son of Levi, were Mahli and Mushi.

And that's all we get, no ages. These were the clans of Levi according to their records. So you can hear the framing on that little bit.

Now we have the first couple of layers, but now then we get more detail. So starting in verse 20, we have again, the narrator gets our attention by introducing somebody in a different way. Amram, so picking one of the names from verse 18, Amram married his father's sister Yocheved, who bore him Aaron and Moses.

Amram lived 137 years. Okay, now it's not so hard to imagine why we might need more information about this family, because we just learned that Amram is the father of Aaron and Moses. But not only did we find out his age, 137 years, we also found out the name of his wife, Yocheved, the mother of Moses.

This is the woman who was anonymous back in chapter two, called the daughter of Levi. And here we get her name. The sons of Ishar were Korah, Nepheg, and Zichri.

The sons of Uziel were Mishael, Elzaphan, and Sithri. Aaron married Elisheba, daughter of Aminadab, and sister of Nashan. And she bore him Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar.

So we have Aaron's wife, and we have the next generation of four descendants. But strikingly, we do not have the name of Moses' wife, or his age, or any of his descendants. We know the names of Moses' son from earlier in the book.

It's not like the narrator didn't have access to that information. They're including the information we need to know for some special reason. And we're just getting the family of Aaron.

So we have Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar. The sons of Korah were Asir, Elkanah, and Abiassaf. These were the Korahite clans.

Eleazar, so now we're back to the son of Aaron, Eleazar, son of Aaron, married one of the daughters of Putiel, and she bore him Phineas. These were the heads of the Levite families, clan by clan. So if you're drawing this on a sheet of paper, then you've noticed that we have very little information, just two generations for Reuben and Simeon.

And in the family of Levi, we get as much as many as six generations, from Levi down to Phineas. We have other layers, so Kohath and his brothers each have another layer that we're told, another generation. But we have a special focus on the family of Levi that ends in Phineas.

So then the question is, why? Why is this particular family interesting? What do we need to know about Phineas? Before we leave this slide, I just want to point out that if you add up the ages of the three dead Levites, Levi, Kohath, and Amram, you get roughly 400 as a total. So it's possible that we have here the solution to this vexing problem about how was it 400 years between the time going into Egypt and the exodus? Where's this number 400 coming from? How do you have 400 years in just four generations? It might be that what we're getting is a total of the ages of these men, even though they would have overlapped in reality, because they're father, son, and grandson. Their ages would have overlapped, but the total of 400 might be saying something important about the Levitical line.

One more comment about Moses and the fact that his sons are not named, which really is so striking, because Moses is the main character besides Yahweh of this book. So we know that Moses had two sons, but what happens to his family after that? In Judges chapter 18, we have a really rough story about the people of God who have gone completely off the rails. They've forgotten God's instructions to them at Sinai.

Their society has run amok, and we have the story of this anonymous priest who has done all sorts of things that are off limits for priests to do. And at the end of this crazy story in which the priest stole and then gave back and then got hired and then agreed to work for someone else, he's breaking his contracts, he's worshiping idols, all sorts of problems. At the end of chapter 18, we're told, there the Danites set up for themselves the idol, and Jonathan, son of Gershom, the son of Moses, and his sons were priests for the tribe of Dan until the time of the captivity of the land.

So Moses' son Gershom had a son named Jonathan, who is this crazy priest who's gone off the rails in Judges chapter 18. So it's possible that the line of Moses is not being preserved for us here because they are not people whose example we should follow. And in any case, Moses' role is not one of a dynasty.

He doesn't pass on leadership to his son. He's a mediator between Yahweh and the people until the priesthood is set up, and then the priests end up handling the administration of the Israelite community. And Moses passes the baton to Joshua as the military leader.

So who is this guy, Phineas, who shows up here? It's interesting to notice that he is the youngest in the genealogy, but he can't have been born yet when we read this, because he survives the wilderness and enters Canaan with the people, which means he's not part of the generation that left Egypt. He has to have been born in the wilderness. Everyone else who was born in Egypt dies before they go into the land besides Joshua and Caleb.

In Joshua 22, verse 13, he becomes the high priest, so we know he's in the high priestly line. Phineas has an Egyptian name, which is interesting, and he's the son of a man with an Egyptian name, Putiel, or some have suggested it's a hybrid name that's a fusion of Hebrew and Egyptian. So Puti comes from Egypt, and the ending L comes from Hebrew.

The name Phineas means the Nubian, so someone from Nubia, and Nubia is south of Egypt, and people there have very dark skin, so it's possible that he's named Phineas because he has quite dark skin. And we have a story about him, a whole story in Numbers chapter 25, which is very memorable. This is after the Israelites have escaped the cursing that Balaam wanted to pronounce on them.

God has made it so that Balaam can only bless them, and he's protected them unbeknownst to them. In the very next scene, the Midianites and Moabites join together to try to lead the Israelites astray, and they lead them into false worship and into prostitution, and Phineas is the one who puts a stop to it. There's a Hebrew man, an Israelite man, who takes a Midianite woman into his tent, and Phineas follows them into the tent with a spear, and he stabs it into both of them.

It goes through both of their bodies, so you can figure out what they were up to. The fact that with one swoop, he was able to get both of them. His zeal in saying, no, this is not going to happen in the Israelite community, we cannot live like this, tells us something about the concerns of the community or the person who put this book together, who's preserving this story for us.

It also suggests that Moses, although he has a strong role in the book, and although there are parts of the book that we're told he writes, may not be the final person writing the book, because Phineas isn't even born until later, and Moses wouldn't have known how the whole thing plays out where he becomes high priest. And so we have a little clue here, it's like a time capsule as far as the concerns of the narrator are concerned. And so I think it's a clue about who wrote the book and what matters to them, but such a surprise that Moses is not front and center in this story.

So I hope I've convinced you that genealogies are actually interesting when you slow down and pay attention to the details. Do you have any questions? So is it significant that the genealogy here as they're entering into the land is of Levi, and the Levites are so important in caring for the temple, they don't get an inheritance, they're a real central part of what God designed to be carrying on the worship in the land. Exactly.

By the end of Exodus we'll have a fully operational tabernacle built at Sinai, and we'll have instructions for how to ordain the Levitical priests to serve in that tabernacle. So this is anticipating where that's going. We don't have a priesthood yet in chapter 6. Why do we need to know about Aaron? In this context, because of its framing, we can see that this is the answer to Moses' speech impediment.

Aaron's going to be his spokesperson, but by the end of the book we see there's a greater significance to the line of Aaron, because Aaron will become the high priest in the tabernacle, and it's his children who will carry that on. And you can even see where it's going with the mention of Aaron's sons. So we're told in verse 23, Aaron married Elisheba, daughter of Amminadab and sister of Nashon, and she bore, by the way, those Amminadab and Nashon are from the tribe of Judah.

So we have a little shout out to Judah here. There's an actual blend of the Levites and the people of Judah in the family of Aaron. And she bore him Nadab and Abihu and Eleazar and Ithamar.

But it's not, you would expect Nadab to be the one then that we find out about his sons, but Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10 are the ones who waltz into the tabernacle when they're not supposed to be there. They offer unauthorized fire and they're zapped by the presence of God and fall dead. So Eleazar then is the one who's left to take his father's mantle and become the high priest.

So we don't have that story yet, but this genealogy already sees where that's going. You can see that it's reflecting some backwards looking, like there's a later perspective being preserved here. It's not like somebody's following around and saying, okay, let me get all the details down.

This isn't all the details. This is the details as they evolve over time.