Moses Moses was the founding leader of Israel as a nation. God used Moses at a critical juncture in the history of his people. He was the prophet who received the law and mediated God’s covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai (Exod 19:3-6). He was also the first known writer of Scripture. The younger brother of Miriam and Aaron, Moses was born in Egypt under dangerous circumstances (Exod 1:15–2:2). The Egyptian pharaoh, fearing a rebellion, had decreed that all Hebrew boys be killed at birth. Moses’ mother, Jochebed, entrusted her infant son to God and set him afloat in the Nile in a reed basket. Pharaoh’s daughter found him and took him into the palace to raise as her own child (Exod 2:3-10). Little is known about Moses’ upbringing. Jewish tradition holds that he received both administrative and military training in Pharaoh’s household. When he was about forty years old, he killed an Egyptian to rescue a Hebrew slave, and then he fled to Midian (2:11-15; cp. Acts 7:23-29). There he rescued some young women who were being harassed as they watered their flocks. Their father (Jethro) invited him home. Moses married one of the women, Zipporah, and began a family as he cared for h...

The Passover The festival of Passover became a central feature of Israelite religious practice. This festival, which celebrated God’s deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt and his sparing of them from the final, deadly plague, was to be commemorated on an annual basis, in accorance with the instructions given in Exodus (Exod 12:1-27). Passover was to serve as a reminder across the generations of God’s saving activity. As such, it was an enacted, participatory festival, in which the people ate only unleavened bread, just as they had done in their hurried departure from Egypt. In that first Passover, a lamb was sacrificed that took the place of the firstborn son of every family of Israel (Exod 12:12-13, 23). Passover thus carries the notion that we can be delivered from death only by means of a sacrifice that takes our place. But while Passover marked an event of tremendous significance in Israelite history, the events of the Exodus did not conquer the universal, fundamental problem of death, a problem that stems from sin (1 Cor 15:56). Many years later, around the time of the Passover festival, Jesus Christ gave his life as “a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28; Mark 10:45) and b...

The Plagues Rescuing the Hebrew people from oppression by the Egyptians was not the main purpose of the plagues. If that had been the case, one climactic miracle would have been sufficient. The real purpose of the plagues was to communicate who God is—to Israel, to Egypt, and to the surrounding nations. The Israelites had likely lost sight of who God was. They had lived for hundreds of years in Egypt, one of the most polytheistic cultures the world has ever known. Whatever the Israelites may have believed about God when they arrived in Egypt, they were certainly infected with the prevailing pagan views during their sojourn there (see Exod 32). The plagues revealed the Lord’s absolute superiority over everything in creation. These cataclysmic events were specifically aimed at elements the Egyptians revered and worshiped: 1. The Nile Turned to Blood (7:14-25): The Nile, revered as a god who gave Egypt life and fertility, became a bloody representation of death. 2. Frogs (8:1-15): The Egyptians revered frogs (represented by Heqet, frog-headed goddess of fruitfulness) as having the key of life beyond death. Now frogs filled the land with the stink of death. 3. Gnats (...