ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #33 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> What does it mean when God says to Moses that he has made him like God to Pharaoh? >> Well, this is a small point in the text, David. But it's actually a useful illustration of the different ways that historical critics look at the text and conservatives. And especially this is true for older historical critics. You may remember when we were talking about the history of the interpretation, I mentioned August Comte, the French philosopher was the father of sociology and his theory about how human religion developed. Well, Comte took the view that there was in the Old Testament all sorts of leftover bits from the earlier stages of religious development. And this was picked up by early historical critical commentators. And so if you look at commentaries up to until say the 1930s, it's quite common to find that critical commentaries from the early 20th century will take this text quite literally. And they will see this as a remnant of an older form of religion in which Moses is thought to be some kind of semi God or have divine like qualities anyway. And you often -- well, you'll sometimes at least see this described as a remnant of an old earlier stage of religious development. Fortunately, that has fallen out of acceptability, even among historical critics. So for commentaries written in the last 30 years or so, you're not likely even to find that. But it does illustrate the way that presuppositions about sociology and anthropology often affect the interpretation of biblical text. So as a pastor reading commentaries, you always have to be aware of these kinds of issues that biblical commentators don't simply interpret the biblical text itself. You owe it as a translator, as an interpreter, you always bring something to the text from outside. Now, good ones try to limit that. And they are aware of what they bring to the text and are self aware. But often poor commentators will often be unaware of their own biases and, therefore, let things creep in. Actually as far as this reference to Moses being like God to Pharaoh, I think the answer today that most people -- liberal or conservative -- would accept is really much simpler. Here we simply have a metaphor, an analogy being presented. The key to the analogy is the relationship between God and the prophet. God is the source of the message and the prophet is the agent that communicates that message to the audience. So when Moses complains about not being capable, being uncircumcised of lips or not being persuasive as a speaker, God says to him that he will give Aaron to Moses to speak for him and Moses will be like God. And Aaron will be his prophet. And that metaphor simply means that Moses will originate the message that is to be given to Pharaoh. And Pharaoh (sic) will actually speak it. So you know, this isn't as in the end as mysterious as it sounds as long as you understand the metaphorical nature of the language that's being used in the text. One more thing about Moses that perhaps we should mention here. Moses is the messenger of God. The one who was sent to be God's agent to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt. Later on as we get to the book of Exodus, we'll see that Moses' role changes and develops and expands dramatically in the second part of the book. Moses keeps pretty much his same role as a character in the first part of Exodus. But Moses' role changes dramatically in the second part. So that's something to keep your eyes on as we move toward the latter parts of the book. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***