Exodus Story Quotes

In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.

I don't know if you saw the parting of the Red Sea with the chariots on the horses, I did stuff like that.

It is quite exhilarating to speak about a God who has an incredible bias, a notorious bias in favor of the downtrodden. You look at Exodus and the Israelites' escape from a bottomless pit. God is not evenhanded. God is biased up to his eyebrows.

The Passover experience is an incredibly pedagogic one.

Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.

There's a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It's a narrative of hope.

For nearly 3,500 years Exodus has left such an imprint on people's memories that I cannot imagine it had been invented just as a legend or a tale.

'Creeping Death' - that was a special song for me as a kid, because that was the one that every single Jewish kid thought, 'Oh, Metallica wrote a song for us. He wrote it about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt under slavery.'

Jews don't camp...The last time the Jews went camping, they spent forty years wandering in the desert.

The Jews celebrate Passover by eating unpalatable food to remind them what will happen to their people if they ever leave New York City. The traditional meal often includes gefilte fish. For those of you who don't know what gefilte fish is, it strongly resembles a ball of tuna fish that has been passed nasally. It's not good. During Passover, the angel of death passed over the Jews - an event that, up until the late 1950s, was re-enacted every year by Ivy League colleges and suburban country clubs.

What of the Exodus? That too, is a wonderful story, but from the viewpoint of an historian, it is - to use a word scholars love - problematic. Let's say there are doubts, to say the least, among many scholars, as to whether the Exodus actually occurred. That's a historical issue.

The mandate we have as Jews is for the story of the Exodus from Egypt to be retold every generation.

If you read Exodus 15 carefully, it describes a storm at sea. This is the old Yahwistic source. In the retelling of the story in the later Priestly source, it is more miraculous: The water stands up on either side like a wall. There are walls of water standing up. As you move back in time, oddly enough, the story becomes more historical.