Journey To Sinai

Like beautifully layered rock formations lining the walls of a desert canyon, so is the Biblical text. Story is piled upon story until the foundations are invisible. Those foundations tell a different story—one that only a trained geologist can tease from the rock, one that only a Biblical philologist, trained in the dissection of literature, can find in the text. In the earliest version of the Israelites exodus from Egypt and journey to Sinai the firstborn Egyptians weren’t killed because the Israelites left after the plague of darkness; only 3000 of them left because that is how many Israelites there were, not 600,000; and perhaps most shockingly of all, there were only seven commandments, not ten. In this and many other respects, this early version of the Israelite’s journey to Sinai is very different from what those familiar with the canonical text may recall. Journey to Sinai traces the development of this uniquely divergent account and its slow development into the canonical text we have today.