The Red Sea, and who were these people anyway?

 Welcome to the Daily Bible Chapter. My name is James Leroy Wilson and I invite you to join me as we discover new insights and new perspectives from a very old book.

EXODUS 14

I'm reading Young's Literal Translation (YLT) and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

Between reading Exodus 13 and 14 I read something else: Book II, Chapter 6 of Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The title is "The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru."

I hadn't heard the name "Khabiru" before, but Jaynes claims it means "vagrant." The K had been softened and "Hebrew" emerged. Using the cheat sheet called Wikipedia, I found out the "Habiru" were known throughout the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East from the 18th through 12th centuries BCE, people on the fringe who were nomads, outlaws, rebels, mercenaries and… slaves.

In my commentary on Genesis 43 I wrote: 

One detail I didn't recall is that while Joseph feasts with his brothers, the Egyptians ate separately, because to eat with the Hebrews was an "abomination."

A brief Internet look-up suggests that "Hebrew" means people from "across the river" and refers to Eber, an ancestor of Abraham.

That the Egyptians segregated themselves from the Hebrews perhaps indicates that their cultures were very different.

Wikipedia cites sources that Pharaoh was overlord as far as Lebanon (north of Canaan, or the Promised Land) in the 14th Century BCE and the Habiru rebelled against him.

Jaynes might be accurate in some sense. I suspect That Khabiru/Habiru was a catch-all name for a lot of diverse people wouldn't be uncommon. After all, in the United States a person of black Dominican ancestry and a white Argentinian Jew are both "Hispanic" or "Latino." The Khabiru probably included all Hebrews (supposedly the descendants of Eber) and specifically the Israelites. In the Bible that we've read to this point, the were indeed nomads (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and then slaves.

This is not, however, the chief insight of Jaynes. More importantly, Jaynes argues that at the time these events in Exodus would have taken place, the human mind was "bicameral" instead of "conscious." According to Jaynes, the increasing prominence of phonetic alphabets after 1,000 BCE literally changed the human way of thinking. People didn't think like we do, they would "hear" a voice inside telling them what to do. Over time, this voice quieted down and by the six century BCE the integrated consciousness as we know it was present in literature from Mesopotamia to Greece. 

Jaynes's thesis and explanation is lengthy and can't be adequately summarized here, but a Jaynesian interpretation might say this: In the "bicameral" mind of Moses, Moses actually did listen to a being he knew as the LORD via an auditory hallucination. Moses was taking orders, and had no real moral responsibility in the same way schizophrenics do not. Likewise, the "hardening of Pharaoh's heart" really wasn't his choice; Pharaoh, too, was taking orders from an inner voice and wasn't culpable.

Anyway, this brings us to Exodus 14 where, again, the LORD speaks to and leads Moses, and incites Pharaoh to chase after the Israelites. The LORD parts the Red Sea, an incident you might have heard about.

I mentioned in the last installment that "Red Sea" can also be translated as "Sea of Reeds," a body of water of unknown location. Wikipedia said modern translations also say "Sea of seaweeds." Well, verse 25 says "He [the LORD] clogged their chariot wheels so that they turned with difficulty." 

Whether the writers intended "Red Sea" or someplace else, it's easy to imagine chariot wheels getting caught in seaweed.

As it's described, this parting of the Red Sea might have been the most extraordinary miracle that the Israelites saw in person up to that point. Many other apparently  supernatural events in the Bible so far had few witnesses, and even the plagues of Egypt would have been known to Isrealites mainly by hearsay, because they were geographically segregated from the Egyptians.

In any case, we might find ourselves in crisis but through faith in a positive outcome, the positive outcome unfolds in ways we don't expect. I've been witness to the "Red Sea parting" several times in my life. And it's a lesson that we don't ever need to curl up in despair.

James Leroy Wilson writes Daily Miracles, The Daily Bible Chapter, JL Cells, and The MVP Chase. Thanks for your subscriptions and support!