1.15 Exodus III: The Contract with God at Sinai

History in the Bible

Garry Stevens

History, Christianity, Judaism, Bible, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 693 Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2015

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the defining moment in the history of the Israelites, where they swear allegiance to God in return for a special relationship with the divinity. I discuss how this contract follows the suzerainity treaties of the Hittites and Assyrians. I also throw in a discussion on the Ten Commandments, and how the Jews and various Christian denominations slice and dice them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.
0:24.6	All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles. Episode 1.15, The Contract with God at Sinai.
0:46.2	First, a shout out to listener Amir, who is trying his best to improve my Hebrew pronunciation.
0:52.9	I'll keep working on it, Amir, but those guttals hurt my throat.
0:57.6	In the last episode, 600,000 Israelite men and an unknown number of women and children,
1:04.4	had decamped from Egypt. They had escaped with nothing but the gold, silver, cattle and sheep
1:10.6	that they had borrowed from their oppressors.
1:13.5	God now leads the Israelites out of Egypt with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
1:20.5	God figures that they will be disheartened by the fearsome Philistines who live on the shortest route along the coast.
1:29.1	I'll have a lot more to say about the Philistines in later episodes. So Gauld guides them through the difficult southerly route
1:35.6	of the marshy lands of the eastern delta and into the wilderness of the Sinai. In British English,
1:42.2	this is sometimes pronounced Sinai.
1:45.6	How that happened, I know not, since in Hebrew it is Sinai.
1:50.6	The Israelites arrive at a sea.
1:53.1	In any movie you care to name, this is taken to be the Red Sea,
1:57.4	the sea lying between Africa and Arabia.
2:00.6	This is an exact translation of the ancient Greek
2:03.4	name for that body of water, Erythera Thalasa. The new American Bible still uses the term
2:10.0	Red Sea, following the Greek Septuagint. But in Hebrew, the term is Yarmamsuf, Sea of Reeds.
2:18.5	And so it is translated in the Jewish Study Bible and the Shokken Bible.
2:23.0	There is endless debate about whether the Sea of Reeds is the same as the Red Sea or just some marshy passage.
2:32.1	A debate I will not get into.
	...

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