Exodus

Exodus explains God’s rescue of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. This entire historical event serves as a foreshadowing or “type” for how God will save people through Jesus from the world-system and hell itself. Moreover, the presence of abundant miraculous activity demonstrates that God is trying to arrest our attention in this book. The five books of Moses equal one seventh of the entire Bible. Moses himself is mentioned 80 times in the NT—more than any other figure in the OT. So we owe it to ourselves to understand this important section of Scripture.

Key articles on the Exodus

Authorship of the Pentateuch: Why do modern critics deny that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, when the book claims to be written by Moses himself and the rest of the Bible assumes Mosaic authorship? The JEDP theory (sometimes called the Graf-Wellhausen or Documentary Hypothesis) was developed in the 18^th and 19^th century by critical scholars of the Bible. Under this view, the Pentateuch was not written by Moses. Instead, it was the result of a later author/editor, who pieced multiple sources together from multiple different groups of Jewish people. We defend Mosaic authorship in this article.

Date of the Exodus: Scholars vigorously debate the date of the Exodus. Most are split between two different views: the early date (1550-1298 BC) and the late date (1298-1187 BC). We hold that the early date is the correct view.

Canonicity of the Exodus: This book is tied up with Genesis’ authority and canonicity, because it begins with a conjunction (“And these are the names of…”). Grisanti writes, “This seemingly obscure statement at the beginning of Exodus suggests a strong connection with the narrative of Genesis. The conjunction points to the connection of this statement with whatever precedes, in this case the end of the book of Genesis.”^[1]

Consulted Commentaries

We consulted many commentaries for individual passages of Exodus, but we read these specific commentaries below exhaustively. In our estimation, Douglas Stuart offers the best commentary on Exodus that we’ve read.

Walter C. Kaiser Jr., “Exodus,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1990).

R. Alan Cole, Exodus: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 2, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973).

Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus, vol. 2, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006).

Dr. James Allman, Exodus (online class from Dallas Theological Seminary).

[1] Eugene Merrill, Mark F. Rooker, and Michael A. Grisanti, The World and the Word: An Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2011), 190.