The Exodus is the seminal story of Torah and the Hebrew Scriptures. However, it isn’t the only story.

If we stopped at the end of Deuteronomy, we’d be likely to see the never-failing support of GOD for the chosen people, the Children of Israel (Jacob) in the twelve tribes as complete and eternal.

It is when we turn the page that we discover the story doesn’t stick to that script. The change is stark and immediate. The people conquer and kill, lose sight of GOD and fall away. GOD punishes and brings them back. Every attempt to realize GOD’s dream for them, GOD’s Different World is thwarted, not by outside forces, but by GOD’s own people.

The lesson of Exodus is enriched by this sense of a never-failing support for these people. It is not through military supremacy or maintaining borders and sovereignty of a government, but through presence and readoption when they fail. And keep failing.

Stopping with Exodus

In a recent piece for The Times of Israel, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote about how she sees four lessons of Passover playing out in our world. As a piece of writing, it is compelling and her tone, as a Christian writing to a Jewish audience is respectful.

Those four lessons

1. “Religious freedom”
2. “Caring for one another”
3. “So that they would never again be subjugated, the Jewish people arrive to their own homeland.”
4. “the reminder to keep telling its story”

however, are not the only lessons, nor do they seem to be the most important lessons. Missing are obedience, GOD’s devotion to the people, the revealing of the divine name, GOD’s liberating power, and the bringing of order for a more just community. Just to name a few.

Her four lessons, and more importantly, how she understands them, give me trouble.

I certainly don’t object to her calls for freedom and care, particularly as she names ways of caring that seem very much inspired by Torah, such as caring for the widowed and concern for housing. And her reference to the present-day epidemic of slavery is spot-on and continues to be the gravest and most frightening global concern ignored by our global media.

It is in her unflinching support for the nation of Israel that is problematic. Not simply as a matter of geopolitics, but more importantly, as a matter of faithfulness to GOD.

The Problem

Mrs. Clinton names the arrival to the promised land “so that they would never again be subjugated” as the “most important lesson” of the story. Then she proceeds to speak to the way she has stood by the State of Israel and supported it militarily:

The third and most important lesson of the Book of Exodus comes at the end. So that they would never again be subjugated, the Jewish people arrive to their own homeland. I’ve proudly stood with the State of Israel for my entire career, making sure it always has the resources it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. I also worked to ensure funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system and saw its effectiveness first-hand when I worked with Prime Minister Netanyahu to negotiate a cease-fire in Gaza. Since its installation, this technology has saved countless lives.

There are two big issues I take with this description. One is that this is not the most important lesson of the book. It is not. The more important lesson is about who GOD is to these people, not their arrival in the land. This is a huge difference. This becomes all the more visible when we continue into the rest of the Scriptures.

The second is that she makes the common political decision to conflate the current State of Israel with a people descended from Jacob more than three thousand years ago.

In naming the land and the perpetual freedom from slavery as the most important lesson of Exodus, it makes the last 3,000 years false. The tribes, united by David three thousand years ago, stayed together for less than a century before they were divided again. Then Israel was wiped out in the 8th Century BCE. Whoops. Its people were subjugated. Double whoops.

Then the Babylonian Exile. More subjugation.

In fact, after 8th Century BCE, there are less than a hundred years in which most of the Children of Israel are not subjugated. And then their hold on the land disappears. There is no State of Israel until it is made in the 20th Century.

If this is “the most important lesson of the Book of Exodus” then how can it be so utterly untrue?

A Closer Story

Certainly Mrs. Clinton’s essay for The Times of Israel was a political message of support and not some deep theological work. For what it is, I think she did a passable job.

The problem is that she gets the modern context wrong and applies the wrong story to it.

From the political side, she names the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) Israel for its actions against the Palestinians as anti-Semitic. Of course, these same non-violent approaches were used to end Apartheid in South Africa, which she would agree was a good thing, and have since led to a sustained coexistence in that country. This movement is not so much anti-Semitic as pro-peace.

While BDS is not a perfect solution, it is clearly the only pro-peace one. This is very much not her stance when it comes to Israel. Her support for increased militarization of Israel is far more alarming:

I’ve proudly stood with the State of Israel for my entire career, making sure it always has the resources it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge.

This is not at all the message of Exodus, which involves a good portion of the people getting slaughtered for worshipping a golden calf, but the folly of Solomon, who in 1 Kings, through his “wisdom” amassed great military might, trading arms, and building immense wealth.

It was this amassing of power from other countries and not from faithfulness to GOD which led to his curse and the dividing of the kingdom he inherited from David. This led directly and less than two centuries later to the downfall of the first Israel.

Amassing arms, building up supplies of weapons, waging war with a less powerful subjugated people is not the image of the Children of Israel liberated from the oppression of Pharaoh. It’s the inverse! Better is the image found later in our Hebrew Scriptures which show a people who had lost their way and a leader who had lost sight of GOD. Or worse, saw himself as powerful as GOD, able to manipulate the geopolitics of the whole world.

Global partners in the BDS movement, Bernie Sanders in his recognition of the Palestinian right to exist; these are not Pharaoh standing in the way of religious freedom. These are global partners in building peace.

The Biblical figure in the story most recognizable and conflated into today is not Pharaoh, but Solomon. Only now he goes by Bibi.