After Sinai: The Ten Commandments Were Not the Beginning, nor the End, of the Exodus Story

By Mike Shelton

The story of the Exodus of Moses and the people of Israel has been told many times and in many ways, especially in movies like The Ten Commandments. The Israelites are being led to the Promised Land, but because of their faithlessness, most are banished to forty years in the Sinai Desert.

After Sinai takes a completely different look at an old story. Michael Shelton reviews the major threads in the accounts in the books of Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and concludes the problem wasn’t the faithlessness of the Jews; it was the overbearing demands of the one who let his people go and then refused to let his people go back. After Sinai is a remarkable essay of a people who sought freedom but instead left one human pharaoh only to find him replaced by a divine pharaoh. The story sounds more in keeping with Mount Olympus. But it’s Mount Sinai and the drama that took place before, during, and after the Ten Commandments. In fact, the Big Ten is not the climax of the story. It’s the events—the interaction among God, Moses, and the people of Israel leading to the banishment to the wilderness—that make for the real climax.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524555894

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Mike Shelton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

Rev. date: 12/10/2020

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

752188

"It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that

bother me. It’s the parts I do understand."

- Mark Twain

CONTENTS

Prologue

1 Where’s Sinai?

2 After Sinai Recap and Setting

3 You’re only making things worse Complaint #1 Exodus 5:19-23

4 Does God Know Man?

5 Brothers in Sinai: The tragic fates of Moses and Aaron

6 I’m Thirsty Complaints 2 & 3 Exodus 15: 23, 24; Exodus 16:2-9

7 The Shell Game

8 Is the Lord With Us or Not? Complaint #4 Exodus 17:1-8

9 Big Time at the Golden Calf Exodus 32

10 The Making of a Refugee Army

11 The Letter of the Law Kills Leviticus 20

12 Moses, A Stand Up Guy

13 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God The Rebellions Against Moses and Aaron

Flames from Heaven: Better than the Berlin Wall Complaint #5 Numbers 11:1-3

Let our people go back! Complaint #6 Numbers 11:4-35

Rebellion: New Leadership Wanted. Complaint #7, Numbers 13-14:1-25

Rebellion from the Hebrew Elites, Complaint #8, Numbers 16:12-16

Unfriending at Meribah: Moses is Out Complaint #9 Numbers 20:1-15.

Send in the snakes, Complaint #10, Numbers 21:1-9

14 After Sinai: My Boy is Just Like Me

Moses Made Over

1. The Man Picking Up Sticks –Numbers 15: 32-34

2. Dividing Up the Spoils—Numbers 31:1-54

3. Do not leave them laughing Exodus 32:25-29

15 If I were one of the Hebrews

Epilogue

After Sinai ending and options: What do we do with all of this?

Prologue

We waited 430 years for this?

I imagine this is what the Hebrews were thinking in the days, weeks, months, years, and decades since the liberation from Egypt, when the words let my people go had long since stopped echoing in their ears. When the hardships endured in the Sinai never ended. They should not be blamed for feeling fooled. For being fooled.

Disobedience, even in appearance, to Pharaoh meant death. Disobedience to God was worse than death. The differences went beyond some compare and contrast. There was no comparison, no frame of reference looking back at the pyramids, then forward at the Desert Mountains, that did not lead to utter despair at what lie ahead, and regret at what was left behind. Only in fantasy and biblical whitewash were the Jews ever free. The God of Moses was stricter, more exacting, less forgiving, than Pharaoh. Pharaoh let you breathe.

After Sinai is looking at the Exodus story stripped of the rose colored glasses of faith, and clearly at what the Bible actually says about what the enslaved people of Israel went through. I’ve written this extended essay because I’m tired of watching Christian circles with a baby-like view of the Biblical Exodus. They ignore the unseemly facts in front of them to fantasize a loving God liberating the people of Israel from a cruel ruler so he can guide them to a Promised Land of milk and honey. If only they were patient and trusted Him all would have gone well with that plan. Well, not really.

Sit in an average Sunday School and any discussion on the Book of Exodus or Moses will invariably lead to a pooh-poohing of those complaining Israelites. How dare they whine? Why couldn’t they pipe down and trust God? Dying of thirst with assurances of the Promised Land? They should have been patient. Wishing they were waist deep in the flesh pots of Egypt? Ungrateful Jews. Who’d want melons and fish when they could have manna and water from rocks? Didn’t God work mighty miracles on their behalf? Everyone in this circle nods heads in agreement and that’s the end of that.

Many popular imaginations on the Exodus story are shaped by the movies, especially Cecil B. DeMille’s "The Ten Commandments" and more recently Christian Bale’s 2014 "Exodus: Gods and Kings" DeMille in particular, with Charlton Hesston in the lead role, gave a sanitized portrait of the life of Moses and his divine message of selection via the burning bush. A stutterer who found the voice to say Let my people go. His demands on Pharaoh led to spectacular miracles from the ten plagues, the Angel of Death, the pillar of fire by night and cloud shade by day, and of course the parting of the Red Sea, noting a dried sea bed would carry the foot traffic of 2 million fleeing Hebrews. Four hundred years of slavery over just like that Freedom from captivity to…..what? Plenty in the Promised Land as the I AM swore to Moses? Not exactly. A Divine Liberator paving the way and calming their fears? Not exactly. Would they find peace and understanding, harmony and love abounding, their own Age of Aquarius? Wrong song. A quick trip to that place of milk and honey, living life happily ever after? Not even. Not ever.

This essay will take the side of the long-suffering Hebrews over God. Unbelief, mistrust, grumbling, were not the problems. The use of the Israelites as though they were an experiment at the hands of an extra-terrestrial with no sympathy for the foibles of the human race, to be disposed at a whim, was the problem. Using the scriptures themselves, from Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, reading them literally, taken at face value, that they say what they mean, their pain will be given voice. Their hardships. Their fears. Their descent into cruelty and barbarism. New lessons will be drawn from old words.

The period at Sinai and thereafter reminds me of the 17th Century American preacher Jonathan Edwards and his best known sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The God of Moses is angry. He starts angry. He stays angry. He ends angry. These Israelites, his Chosen People, will find themselves his chosen victims. Only Moses will be able to reason with Him, but even Moses, a great and sacrificial leader, will only be able to do so much.

When the Israelites complained they weren’t lacking faith. They were lacking food and water. They were dealing with a God who wasn’t the least sympathetic. His response was Be quiet! Don’t you remember what I’ve done for you? They were force-marched into a dry, parched bitter land, a Promised Land stick dangled in front of them, but in fact to a deepening hell hole of impossible conditions to meet and divine punishments imposed. The normal Christian thinking asks Why didn’t they trust God more? Normal humane thinking screams as at a horror movie, Get out of there before it’s too late! It will be too late. It was too late as