Introduction
Read Exodus from beginning to end and you will close it feeling that you have read two books. The first is a story: a family that went down to Egypt has become a people, the sea opens, and at a mountain the people hear ten words and a long body of law. The second is the plan of a dwelling and its building, from chapter 25 to a cloud settling on the finished tent, with the golden calf as the one interruption. Counted by chapters the two are unequal, twenty-four against sixteen. Counted by the units this study works with they are equal: nine units, then one unit between them, then nine.
Here is the puzzle. Why is the story of a people leaving Egypt bound into one book with the instructions for a tent? The text offers a first hint itself. Early in the story YHWH says, “I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you for a deity, and you shall know that I am YHWH your deity, who brings you out from under the burdens of Egypt” (6:7). The sentence is not heard again in full until the middle of the instructions for the dwelling: “I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel, and I will be to them for a deity; and they shall know that I am YHWH their deity, who brought them out of the land of Egypt to dwell in their midst” (29:45–46). Most of Exodus lies between those two sentences. This study asks how the book ties the making of a people to the making known of YHWH, and finds that it does so by the way it is put together.
Method and Scope
This study belongs to a project mentored by Jacob Milgrom during the last years of his life, whose aim was to find the principles of organization used in building the Torah. The first finding was that all five books are made of well-defined literary units, and that each unit is a two-dimensional, non-linear construct: a table, or weave. That made it possible to identify all eighty-six units of the Torah and to see the formal structure of each book. Because the same technique is used at the level of the unit and at the level of the whole book, the Torah appears to have been put together by a single hand or school. The present study applies the method to Exodus.
The analysis is literary and descriptive. It works from what can be seen in the text: changes in the kind of writing, travel notices, bookends, sentences that look back over a stretch of text, repeated words, and the inner design of each unit. It reads the book in its final form and does not reconstruct how it came to be. Verses are cited by the Hebrew numbering; at the end of chapter 7 and through chapter 8, in chapter 20 from the ten words on, and from the end of chapter 21 through chapter 22, an English Bible numbers them one to four verses later. Its scope is Exodus, with Part D following the columns of the page down into Leviticus and Numbers.
The Four Parts: Summary of the Argument
The introduction to Exodus has four parts, and each answers the question the one before it leaves open.
Part A: The Units of Exodus
Where does one unit end and the next begin? Genesis plants its own flags: ten times “these are the generations of,” and three records of a patriarch’s death. Exodus has no such formula, and the sentence it repeats most, “YHWH spoke to Moses, saying,” marks nothing in particular. The boundaries have to be found from several kinds of signal read together, and the inner design of a unit is used only to confirm a boundary already found. The result is nineteen units in four blocks of four, with a single unit between each block and the next. The book runs: four, one, four, one, four, one, four. The three single units are the sea (Unit 5), the covenant at the foot of the mountain (Unit 10) and the golden calf (Unit 15). Six times a section of a unit begins in the middle of a verse; where the verse numbers disagree with the author’s own divisions, I follow the author.
Part B: The Map of Exodus
Do the nineteen units simply follow one another, or were they arranged into something that has to be seen as a whole? Part B starts from the whole book and works inward, and the same shape comes back at every size: one book in two, each book two blocks, each block two pairs, each pair a unit begun and a unit completed. In all eight pairs the second unit completes what the first begins. In five of them the second takes up the first’s own words (Units 1–2, 3–4, 13–14, 16–17, 18–19); in three the completion is of the matter and has to be argued (6–7, 8–9, 11–12). Set out on a page, the units make four rows and five columns, with the covenant on a line of its own at the centre and the sea and the calf in the middle column above and below it. The map follows.
Part C: The Five Columns
The page has been read across its rows. What does it say when it is read down? Part C looks first at how this author builds structures of five parts, in the Ten Words, in the second half of the Covenant Code, in a law code in Deuteronomy, and in units of Exodus, and finds one shared pattern: a scale between two poles, the poles framing the rest, the two inner parts facing each other across the middle, and the middle where the halves meet. The five columns of the page follow that pattern. The first column centres on one man, Moses, to whom the word comes; the last centres on all Israel. The middle column holds the sea, the covenant and the calf.
Part D: Architecture and Meaning in Exodus
The page of Exodus stands on Leviticus, and Numbers stands under that. What runs on down through the three books, and what does the whole arrangement say about the tie the book began by suggesting? Part D sets the page on the pages of the two books below it and reads the columns by the positions that mark the structure of every book of the Torah, the corners and the middles. It then reads the three single units of Exodus against the single units of the three horizontal books, follows consecration down the twelve rows of the three vertical books, and ends where Exodus began, with the names of the sons of Israel and the house of Israel that stands at the close.
The Map of Exodus
Each pair is set side by side, its first unit on the left and its second on the right. The two books stand one above the other, the story above and the dwelling below, with the covenant between them. Each unit links to its text with the literary structure marked.
| First column | Second column | Middle column | Fourth column | Last column |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unit 1 Moses at the bush | Unit 2 Moses back in Egypt | Unit 6 The road | Unit 7 The mountain | |
| Unit 3 The plagues | Unit 4 The Passover | Unit 5 The sea | Unit 8 Case law | Unit 9 The society the cases need |
| Unit 10 The covenant | ||||
| Unit 11 The house to be made | Unit 12 The garments | Unit 15 The calf | Unit 16 The gifts | Unit 17 The dwelling made |
| Unit 13 The consecration | Unit 14 The service | Unit 18 The work counted | Unit 19 The work set up |
Read across any row, each pair runs from what is begun to what completes it. Read down the page, the people’s part stands above what is turned toward YHWH, in each book and in the book as a whole. Two things in the layout are choices of display and should be named as such: the page reads from the left, as the maps of the other books do, and the two units of a pair stand side by side rather than one above the other. Everything else on the page is what the text itself was found to say.
Key Findings
Nineteen units, found from the text’s own signals. A change in the kind of writing, a travel notice, bookends, a sentence that looks back, and the inner design of the unit converge on the same boundaries. Nineteen was not decided beforehand; it is what the markers left.
Four, one, four, one, four, one, four. Three units belong to no block, and they do not fall just anywhere. Each comes after four units. The covenant is the tenth of nineteen, with nine units before it and nine after.
The same shape at every size. A whole is two parts turned in different directions, and each of those is two parts of which the second completes the first. The two relations alternate from the book down to the pair.
Rows that answer each other. The two outside rows hold one relationship at two different times: at the bush Aaron is given to Moses, and at the consecration Moses gives Aaron his office. The two inside rows face each other as opposites that complete each other: the plagues take a world apart, and the plan of the dwelling puts one together.
Columns that run from one to all. Across the page the whole runs from one man at the left to all Israel at the right: one becomes many. Down the page it runs from the sons of Israel who came to Egypt to the one dwelling: many become one. The two directions cross at the covenant, where all the people answer with one voice.
A middle column of division, joining and connection. The sea, the covenant and the calf hold a division, a joining and a connection. Elohim is on stage at the two ends of the column and not at its centre. The first tablets are the deity’s alone and the second a joint effort, and in all three units death stands close by.
Four corners, one boundary. The four corners hold the boundary of the holy, who may come near and who may not. The warning at the mountain returns at the altar with its effect turned round.
Columns that run on. Laid on Leviticus and Numbers, the columns of Exodus run on at the corners and the middles. The nation’s calendar, for example, stands in one column of the three books: Exodus Unit 9, Leviticus Unit 18 (chapter 23) and Numbers Unit 12 (chapters 28–30).
Three single units against three books. The sea answers Babel in Genesis, the calf answers the end of Deuteronomy, and the covenant answers Leviticus 19.
One thread through the book. A book that opens with the names of the sons of Israel ends with all the house of Israel watching the glory of YHWH fill the dwelling. The sentence of 6:7 and the sentence of 29:45–46 stand at the two ends of that movement, and the architecture is what joins them.
Where the Pattern Is Thin
Parts B, C and D each end with a section on the places where the pattern is weak or resists it. The main ones are these.
- The eight pairs are not equally firm. Five rest on shared words; three rest on an argument about the matter, and Unit 8, which looks like the people’s own business, is placed in a pair turned toward YHWH by where it is spoken and what it is for.
- The smallest size rests on few cases. Part B shows the shape inside a single unit, Unit 9, and Part C adds further cases; the claim at that size should be held lightly.
- The scale of the columns is clearest at its ends. The columns between are not graded step by step, and I have not tried to force a ladder on them.
- The two inner columns are not tested by their middles in Numbers, where each has two units and no middle one. The second column runs firmly from Exodus into Leviticus and thinly into Numbers, and the fourth holds only in pieces. I have not given it a name, because I do not think it has one yet.
- Some links cross the columns. The cloud over the dwelling at the end of Exodus returns at the start of Numbers, in the opposite corner of the page. They look like the seams where one book is sewn to the next, but they are real.
- The three single-unit matches are three matches, not a rule, and the smaller single units of the other books have not been looked for.
The approach does not settle questions of authorship or date. It describes the book in the form we have it.
Invitation to Engagement
The patterns described here can be checked against the text, and I invite that. The unit boundaries can be tested against other divisions. The three pairs that rest on argument can be tested against the five that rest on shared words. The pattern of the middle column and of the corners can be tested unit by unit. Whether a reader takes the patterns to show one author, a final editor, or something between, they are features of the text that any account of its composition has to explain.
The four parts present the evidence in full, with the verses. Commentaries on the nineteen units, each read in its place on the page and, where its column runs on, against the unit that stands under it in Leviticus or Numbers, will be added as they are written.