How Do People End Up in the Wilderness?
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Transcript
Welcome to the Bible Project Podcast.
We are studying the theme of the wilderness in the story of the Bible.
It's a place where humans can't really live in and of themselves and their own resources.
And that makes it a place that is dangerous and hostile, and the opposite of God's good purposes for human flourishing.
The wilderness, as a setting, teaches us about the fragility of all of life.
The wilderness provides a really important insight that to be a creature is to be on the precipice of life and death all the time.
My moment-by-moment existence is being sustained by someone who has resources greater than I do.
God planted a garden in the wilderness and it's sustained by his life.
And he puts Adam and Eve there to enjoy it and learn to live by God's life.
When humans are exiled from the garden, it's because they were deceived and then they foolishly went against God's wisdom and command.
In that sense, their exile from the garden is self-caused.
God's the one enforcing it, but they're the ones who brought it on themselves by not trusting God's provision.
Today we go outside of the Garden of Eden and we consider three more stories of how people end up in the wilderness.
We'll look at the story of Cain, who murders his brother and is banished deeper into the wilderness.
We'll look at how Abraham and Sarah, God's chosen couple, tragically becomes the snake that drives a single mother out into the wilderness.
And we'll look at how Moses, the man God chose to rescue Israel from slavery, how he also murders a man and has to flee into the wilderness.
These stories are closely tied together because they want us to meditate on how people end up in wilderness environments and then what God does when he discovers that people are dying in the wilderness.
He sees and he hears and what seems like game over from our point of view is never game over from God's point of view.
Today on the podcast, The Complicated Ways We End Up in the Wilderness and the Surprising Mercy We Always Find There.
Thanks for joining us.
Here we go.
Hey, Tim.
Hey, John.
Hello.
Hello.
Mm-hmm.
Let us continue.
Mmm, into the wilderness.
Yeah, through the wilderness.
Hmm.
Yeah, and in.
Well, we'll go in first.
Into, so that we can go through.
And then out of.
All right.
Yeah.
But right now we're in it.
We are in a series of podcast conversations
about the theme of the wilderness in the story of the Bible.
It's more about the setting.
But the setting of the wilderness is on repeat from...
the first sentences and pages of the Bible and consistent throughout with a very meaningful turning point in the story of Jesus, and then some interesting images of the resolution of the tension in the last pages of the Bible, which for me, that's just what biblical themes are.
So,
the wilderness.
The wilderness.
It's a place where humans can't really live in and of themselves and their own resources.
And that makes it a place that is dangerous and hostile, and the opposite of God's good purposes for human flourishing.
Kind of seems simple when you say it like that.
Is that all we've kind of said so far?
No, we said a lot more in the last conversation because what I was trying to do is work towards what I think the biblical authors are doing with the wilderness imagery, which isn't just to try and tell us about where important biblical events took place.
Yeah.
And then tell us what's obvious about the wilderness: that it's a place where there's no water and it's hard to live.
You can't live.
They are also doing higher-level, like philosophical heavy lifting
about the nature of creation and its relationship to the creator.
And that's kind of what we focused on in the last conversation.
Right.
In storytelling, the setting or the environment of a scene can become really important.
So if it's raining in a scene, in a movie, it's often a foreboding sign sometimes.
Sometimes not.
It's just a heavy mood.
It's a heavy mood.
And so you place something in the desert.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
In a movie, Star Wars opens up in kind of this deserty place.
You know, Mad Max is like in a desert.
Yeah.
It's a mood.
Totally, yeah.
It's an environment that communicates so much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Life is
precarious.
Yeah.
Very fragile.
It's a fragile existence.
And we're on the border of death and life.
Yeah, all the time.
Yeah, the knife edge.
The knife edge.
And the wilderness literally was the opposite of the hill, country, more fertile lands in terms of the biblical authors, their own geography.
We talked about that in the first couple episodes.
But then also the word for wilderness, midbar, and the word field,
sadeh, in Hebrew, can also refer to the transition zone in between the fertile land and just the stark wilderness.
But you're moving up towards the precipice
in that middle zone, and then you're off the cliff when you're full-on in the desert.
The deeper you go into the wilderness, the closer you are to decreation.
And that precariousness, that fragility of life in that physical environment, I started using this binary physical and meta-physical.
So the biblical authors are also trying to think meta, higher level than thinking about the nature of reality.
And the wilderness provides a really important insight into the nature of existence
that also is at work in these stories.
To be a creature in the garden or in the desert is to be on the precipice of life and death all the time.
Even when you don't think you are, you are.
And to have a conditional existence as a creature means that whether I'm in the garden or in the desert, my moment by moment existence is being sustained by someone who has resources greater than I do.
Yeah, in the fertile hill country, it's easy to forget that.
Yes.
Yeah.
Totally.
Even though it's still true.
But it's painfully obvious when you go out into the wilderness.
And the deeper you go, the more stark that gets
you know as we were talking about this it did make me think about the parallel to fasting yeah yeah totally and it's interesting that Jesus went into the wilderness too fast
because
there's this sense of when my body has what it needs when I'm in an environment of plenty it's easy to forget Like I'm actually sustained by something much greater than myself.
And this is way more precarious than I ever imagined.
And allowing yourself to be in that situation and to experience it and then to kind of be tested.
Like, do I trust God is enough?
Yeah.
Can I make it through this moment?
Yep.
And that is a major theme of the wilderness stories, especially of the Israelites in the wilderness later.
It's so important, and there's so much in the Torah connected to it.
We're going to take two conversations after this one
to talk about exactly what you're putting yourself on.
Testing in the wilderness.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
So let's definitely put a big, bright pink pin in that part of this theme.
What I'd like to do before we get there, however, is look at two stories that come before the Israelites wandering in the wilderness.
The first main stories were people get
exiled into the wilderness.
You know what?
A well-known trope of movie tropes is like the person in the wilderness wandering.
Somehow they get dropped there or something terrible happens and now they're there and they have little, no resources and they're like, you know, crawling,
you know, through the wilderness.
There are two moments like that.
One in Genesis, one in Exodus, that happen before the Israelites leave Egypt and go out into the wilderness.
And those two stories are exploring not just what is the wilderness, but also how did did we get here?
How do humans end up in these situations where they find themselves in wilderness-like moments?
And these two stories are
deeply connected.
The biblical authors have hyperlinked them together through all these shared words and phrases to get us to meditate on how did we end up in the wilderness and not in the garden in the first place.
How do people end up in the wilderness?
How do you get to the wilderness?
Yeah, that's right.
Because the Israelites, as they leave Egypt, they are led into the wilderness by God.
So it might lead you to think that the wilderness is always a place where it's sort of like God
making you eat your veggies.
It's like, this is good for you.
You don't like it?
I'm coming of age kind of thing.
But before that ever happens, there are actually a number of other stories where we get a repeated pattern of how people end up in the wilderness in the first place.
And I think for me, that's become really important to emphasize that before you get to the Israelites wandering in the wilderness and God testing their faith and so on.
So, what I'd like to meditate on is real quick recap the exile of Adam and Eve into the wilderness out of the garden.
Okay.
Is that story number one?
Well, I guess there are three stories.
Three stories.
Okay.
And then I want to look at the story of Hagar, or Hagar, the Egyptian slave of Abraham and Sarah, and how she ends up exiled in the wilderness two times.
And then how the story of Moses'
exile into the wilderness of Midian,
how that happens.
And all three of these stories are closely tied together in terms of verbal connections that the authors have put there because they want us to meditate on how people end up in wilderness environments.
And then what God does when he discovers that people are dying in the wilderness or about to die.
So, back to the Garden of Eden.
Let's start there.
Come.
So, the Garden of Eden story comes after the seven-day creation narrative, and it begins with the wilderness with no water.
We looked at that in the last conversation.
And what we learned is in the wilderness, there were no plants, cultivated or wild, because there was no human to do any farming, because there was no water.
And then God solves each one of those one, two, three.
And on the other side of the Eden story at the end of chapter three, when humans are exiled from the garden, they're exiled out there to work the ground.
It's the same phrase that was used right in the opening: there was no human to work the ground.
And then humans go out of the garden to work the ground.
Okay.
What's the significance of that?
Oh, it's just like a little literary frame.
Okay.
Because they were also called to work the same word, avod, in the garden, but it was a very different kind of work.
Yeah, there's a difference between working in the garden and working the ground.
Yeah, that's right.
In the garden, just God provides, and stuff is growing off of trees.
And so the work you're doing is truly like a partnership and it's attending and stewarding,
cultivating.
Whereas God says outside the garden, it's going to be by the sweat of your brow.
There's going to be thorns and thistles, and it's going to be so difficult, it's actually going to run down your body and turn it back into dust.
And then the human goes out of the garden to work that kind of ground.
So it's a different ground in that it's ground in the garden versus ground outside the garden.
But I kind of imagine it being the same kind of work, you know?
Yes, actually, thank you.
That's a wonderful observation.
Yeah.
It's more about where are the resources coming from.
In the wilderness, you're going to have to figure out a way to irrigate dry land.
Whereas in the garden, God just popped a spring up out of the center.
Sure.
And it's just, that's doing all the work for you.
Yeah.
A lot of the work for you.
Right.
But there would still be weeds, I would imagine, in the garden.
Yeah.
But you still have access to the tree of life.
So as you work, you're not grinding yourself into the ground.
That's right.
You're working with the energy of eternal life.
Yeah.
And that surely is a part of the
pun intended intended with God formed the human out of the dust of the ground, so out of the dry wilderness.
That's where the human's made.
And then God rested the human in the garden.
It's the word rest.
Oh, yeah.
But as a verb,
it's trying to show that the kind of work that humans are put in the garden to do is both simultaneously work and rest, because it's done in this environment where you're covered.
Any lack you have in terms of resources or power or energy,
I got you covered.
God's sake.
Yeah, okay.
So there's work and then there's work.
Work and then there's work.
Yeah.
So when humans are exiled from the garden, it's because they were deceived.
And then they foolishly went against God's wisdom and command.
And so God exiles them.
So in that sense, their exile from the garden, you could say, is self-caused.
Like God's the one enforcing it.
Right.
But like they're the ones who brought it on themselves by not trusting God's provision.
Yeah.
And what's the provision?
The provision is just the abundant fruit and seeds of the garden and the water and all of that.
So Adam and Eve story is a portrait of people finding themselves in the wilderness because
God is giving them over to what they desired.
They didn't fully know or perhaps comprehend what would follow, but they did know that they were breaking God's wise command.
And so that's how people end up in the wilderness.
So that sets a pattern that when biblical characters find themselves in the wilderness, there's usually a lot of creative working or shaping in the story to help ponder how did people end up here in the first place?
Why would anybody leave the garden?
Like it seems so paradoxical.
So one way that people end up in the garden is not trusting God's wisdom and not doing what God said.
And so they bring upon themselves actually the disaster of depriving themselves of resources.
So both God is the one sending them out, but the reason God's sending them out is because they're not to be trusted.
The humans aren't to be trusted.
The humans aren't to be trusted.
The humans also don't trust God.
Yeah, God can't trust the humans to do what he says.
And the humans didn't trust what God said.
Yeah, which is how they ended up out there.
But there's a promise of a seed of the woman who's gonna
deal with that deceiver and presumably undo the tragic consequences of everything that happened.
So just this combination of causes of like human folly, but also God's like oversight, God's justice or wisdom.
That's how Adam and Eve end up in the wilderness.
So there's usually complexity.
So what I'd like to do then is go to the next story, which is really the first time, if you look for the word wilderness, Midbar,
in the book of Genesis,
the first time it appears is when Abraham goes and fights a bunch of kings, a coalition of kings, to rescue Lot.
Oh, to rescue Lot.
And you're just told that when those kings came, they tromped on a bunch of people.
And one of those groups was Edomites who live in the wilderness.
It's just a little like side comment.
So the second appearance of the word is the first time a character goes into the midbar.
And that person is an Egyptian female slave named Hagar.
Yeah.
Before we turn to that,
it has struck me though, because the other word is field.
And isn't in the next story, Cain takes Abel into a field and kills him?
Yes.
He takes him out.
Is that the word that's same word, sada?
Sada.
Yes, yes.
It's where the snake crawled crawled in from is where Cain takes Abel from.
Am I supposed to be thinking of kind of the wilderness in a way with that?
Thank you.
That's great.
Excellent.
I overlooked that.
Yes, for sure.
Okay.
Cain takes Abel to the place where the snake crawled into the garden from.
Yeah.
I sometimes picture him taking him out to his own field because he's a farmer.
Oh, right.
But I guess I'm now thinking it more of like into the wild fields.
Yeah, sure.
You know, that boundary area.
Right.
And that's where then the decreation happens.
Yeah.
He decreates his brother.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
That's actually super relevant to what we're talking about.
But the reason he leads his brother out further out from Eden into the Sada, the uncultivated land, is because of his own anger and jealousy.
His jealousy.
Yeah.
And that he gives into it.
And God talks with him right before that happens and is like, listen, there's exaltation for you too.
my friend.
And there's a wild animal crouching.
It wants you.
Yeah.
But you can rule over it.
This is sin.
Yeah.
Sin is the croucher.
Yeah.
So you can rule over this animal, but instead he takes his sin, leads him out into the wilderness.
Yeah.
And
has him kill his brother.
Yeah.
So there it's a distorted desire and a mistrust of God's word.
As God said, like, there's exaltation for you too.
And that lack of trust and distorted desire.
Yeah.
Thank you.
That's great.
I guess now we've done
four stories.
Four stories.
Thank you very much.
That's excellent.
Okay.
So both of those stories, the parents and the son, inform
what's happening here in the story of Hagar later, who's the first person after Cain and Abel and Adam and Eve
to find themselves in the wilderness.
And really, I guess maybe the operative question is: how and why does this person find themselves in the wilderness?
So, the story of Hagar in the wilderness happens in Genesis 16, but let's quick kind of set it up.
Okay,
so when Abram and Sarah went to the land of Canaan because of God's instruction and promise, like I'm gonna bless you there, so they go there, and then there was a food shortage when they go to the lush hillside, go to the lush garden land where I'm gonna bless you, and they arrive, and there's a famine.
Like, oh, okay.
So he goes south to Egypt, lies about his wife, and it's this interesting replay of Adam and Eve's failure to trust God.
And Abram doesn't trust God.
And so God bails him out.
And then we find out that when Pharaoh tries to like shoo Abram out of his territory, get him to leave, he gives him a bunch of gifts.
And one of them is a bunch of slaves, Egyptian slaves, and one of them is a female slave named the immigrant or Hagar in Hebrew.
Hagar means the immigrant.
That's right.
So that's where she's introduced to the story.
Okay.
So she was acquired by Abraham as like a payoff from a king
who was getting punished by God
because God was protecting Abraham.
Yeah.
Even though Abraham was the one.
So it's already like so complicated.
Yeah.
Abraham now has an Egyptian slave
because of a payoff or something that he did that was wrong, but that God still rescued because God has attached himself to Abraham.
Yeah.
And now we're going to read a story about
how he deals with this Egyptian slave.
Yes.
Yeah.
So
it's the Bible.
Yeah.
Or maybe it says humans are complicated.
Yeah, that's true.
And the Bible's just being honest.
It's just being truthful about how complicated humans are.
So a couple chapters later in Genesis 15, Abraham and Sarah still don't have a child that they've produced of themselves.
And God reaffirms Abraham, like, you're going to have a bunch of kids.
In Genesis 15, famously, God leads Abram out at night to look up at the night sky and says, count the stars if you can.
So your seed will be, the seed.
As a metaphor for the children that you'll have.
Right after that, God also tells Abram, when you have a bunch of kids, something actually terrible is going to happen to them.
And that is, in verse 13 of Genesis 15, you should know that your seed will become immigrants in a land that is not their own.
And that word immigrant is Hagar's name, but in the plural.
Okay.
They're going to be immigrants in a land not their own,
and they're going to become enslaved.
That land will enslave your seed, and that land will oppress your seed for 400 years.
But then
I will judge the nation that they're enslaved to, and afterward they will go out with many possessions.
Yeah.
So this is as clear a forecast
forward as you could look for in the Bible.
For the story of Exodus.
Story of Exodus is on the brain.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So
you have an Egyptian slave named Hagar, but your descendants are going to become oppressed, enslaved
Hagars in the land of Egypt.
So there's some important interplay there.
And so you know that's coming.
And it raises the question of, well, gosh, why?
Why, how, when?
Yeah.
Like, because right now he's in the land of Canaan and he's not enslaved.
So like.
Famine's over.
He's back in the land.
It's got a bunch of stuff.
He just needs some kids.
He just needs
at least one.
That's right.
So we visited a moment in the story earlier on in a previous Exodus-inspired series, I think on the New Exodus, which is about
how and why did Abraham's descendants end up in Egypt.
So that was in our New Exodus series.
So
if listeners want a deeper dive into this, like go back there.
What I want to focus on in looking at the Hagar story is how Hagar ends up in the wilderness.
Okay.
Because there's something significant there.
So here I'm summarizing a conversation we had in that New Exodus series.
So the story of Genesis 16 begins with Sarah not yet having a child.
And we learn, however, she did have this slave girl, an Egyptian one, and her name was the immigrant.
So Sarai said to Avram, Look, Yahweh has restrained me from being able to give birth to a son.
Yahweh's not given me the gift yet.
So please go into my slave girl.
Perhaps I can be built up by means of her.
So Sarai, the wife of Avram, took Hagar, her Egyptian slave girl.
This was at the end of ten years of Avram dwelling in the land of Canaan.
And she gave to her husband Avram as a wife.
And he went into Hagar, and Hagar became pregnant.
So
here you have a promise of God.
You're going to have a kid.
But it's been 10 years.
Yeah, it's been 10 years.
You have the wife of the one who was given that instruction and she has a moment where she doesn't trust God, that God will provide a son through herself.
So she comes up with another plan.
And
that other plan involves her taking and then giving to her husband.
So this is all the language patterned after the
Genesis 3 and the story of Adam and Eve.
Where it's the woman in that story who
is confronted by the snake
and doesn't trust the voice of God, takes the fruit and gives it, hands it over to Adam.
Right.
In that story.
Yeah.
Takes the fruit, hands it to the man.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And then he takes and eats
by taking the slave and having sex with her.
So they're both kind of implicated.
They're both responsible.
But then what happens next is interesting.
When Hagar saw that she became pregnant, she looked at her female master, Sarai,
and Sarai became cursed in Hagar's eyes.
So this is a little illusion.
There's kind of like a cultural background here, that
in traditional patriarchal, multi-generational, extended family environments, a wife's social value is very much bound up with the ability to produce children.
So it's as if Hagar sees now that she's in an elevated She's important now.
Yeah, she's important.
And Sarai can see that too.
And so she goes to Avram in verse 5 and she says, may the violence done to me be upon you.
She uses the word Hamas for like physical violence.
So hold on.
She saw that that she was pregnant.
So that's
Hagar saw that she immigrant was pregnant.
And her mistress, that's Hagar.
Her mistress, so Hagar's female master became cursed in her eyes.
Who is that female master?
Sarah.
Okay.
Sarah became cursed in Hagar's eyes.
So Hagar is like, okay.
I'm kind of the more important woman here.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now we're not told like how she felt about this or if she expressed this, if she started like treating her poorly.
Right.
But to become cursed means of you're not in the position of the blessed one anymore.
I am.
Okay.
You're the cursed one.
Yeah.
That's Hagar's relationship.
I have the blessing.
I have the blessing.
You don't.
So you, and you don't.
Yep.
And so you have the curse.
And Sarah can very much feel
the turning.
Yeah, she feels it as violence.
Yeah, she calls it violence.
I'm being done violence.
And you know what?
This is your fault, Abram.
This is your fault.
I gave my slave girl into your lap,
and she saw that she became pregnant, and I became cursed in your eyes.
May Yahweh bring justice between me and between you.
So now
she's really angry at him.
But you're kind of like, but this was your idea.
So Abram said to Sarai, what Abram should have done is like come in as a peacemaker, right?
Like he has these two rival wives now.
And
the right thing to do would be to like come in, right, with empathy, with a sense of fairness, and try and help mediate a reconciliation here.
Instead, he just totally abdicates all responsibility.
He just says, look, your slave girl is in your hand.
Do what is good in your eyes.
And that further cements the analogy the author wants us to make with Adam and Eve at the tree.
Because now
Hagar.
Because they saw the fruit was good.
Yeah, Hagar is like the fruit
that she took
and she did what was good in her eyes, which is what the fruit looked like on the tree.
So then what we learn is Sarah oppressed her.
Sarah oppressed Hagar,
which is the exact word that was used to describe what the Egyptians are going to do to Abraham's future descendants in the previous story.
I see.
So the very next story, and you did bring this up.
So we're told Abraham's descendants, you're going to have a bunch of kids,
big family, they're going to be oppressed.
Yeah.
And then you get the story of the family starting, and it ends.
Sorry.
They're going to be immigrants, Hagars.
Are they going to be Hagars in a land not their own?
And that land will enslave them and then oppress them.
Okay.
And every single one of those words is being activated here.
Yeah.
But the roles are swapped.
Yeah.
This is how your family began oppressing this female
servant, household servant, slave,
and then oppressing her.
Yeah, oppressing the Egyptian and slave.
Whatever that looked like.
Yeah, it doesn't say.
It just says she oppressed her.
He oppressed her.
Yeah.
So much so that Hagar then
takes off.
And where does she go?
Into the wilderness, the mid bar, in the next sentence.
So let's just pause.
We'll see how God responds here, but let's let's just think through how does this person end up in the mid bar in the wilderness?
And what is its relationship to how Adam and Eve and how Cain ended up in the midbar or the Sada?
Well, yeah.
I mean, we've already kind of made many of the comparisons between the stories.
Can you speak really quickly?
Sorry, this is off topic.
Oh, okay.
Can you speak really quickly to this dynamic of the female and the male?
Like, the woman and the man.
It's been taught sometimes where it's like
because of Eve
that Adam was given the fruit.
It's like Eve's fault.
And then in this story, it really does.
I mean, Abraham is pretty delinquent in his responsibilities, but the focus really isn't on her, on Sarah.
So is there some misogyny in here?
Oh, I see.
Well, I mean, I think this story is trying to echo the dynamics that were also at work with Adam and Eve at the tree.
And what you learned there was, remember the sequence was God made Adam outside from the dust outside the garden.
But it was wet dust because that river flowed out.
And then rested the human in the garden,
then gives Adam the instruction about not eating from the tree.
Then God splits Adam in two.
Make male and female.
And the female is the azer.
The female is the delivering ally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Without whom the singular Adam cannot do what God says.
So the story starts with this very elevated view of woman.
Yes.
The essential other.
Yes.
And then the snake targets the woman.
Right.
And the whole thing.
And what some people will say is like because women are weaker and and
that's why the snake targeted.
And that.
Yeah.
People say that.
People say that.
There's no anchor for that in the story.
And you'd be hard pressed to say that that's a view of women in the Hebrew Bible.
There's no sign of intellectual or moral weakness in a figure like
Moses' mom,
Jochavet, or Miriam, Ruth, or Deborah, or Hulda,
right?
All of these remarkable.
And also,
people end up in that position
by taking Paul, the apostle, to mean that in his retelling of this moment, the story in one of his letters to Timothy.
One of the problems with that is that Paul also used the story of the snake's deception of Eve.
not to describe women in general, but to describe humans in general.
In 2 Corinthians, I think it's 11, he says, I am afraid that y'all Corinthians are being deceived as Eve was deceived.
So for him, Eve's deception was a paradigm for human deception, not women in particular.
And also, there's another detail in the Eden story that the snake is just talking to the woman the whole time.
And then when it says the woman saw, she took, she ate, and she gave to her husband who was with her.
He ate.
And this is good Jewish wisdom literature style.
It saves one of the most important details for the last line.
He was with her.
He was standing there the whole time.
Yeah.
And so you kind of get that feeling.
I think that dynamic is reflected here
where Abram's like, he's not absent.
He was a part of all of this.
And he just tries to offload his responsibility when, in fact, he could have stepped in at any moment and helped these two women figure out this tension, but he doesn't.
He just takes advantage of the situation.
At least that's how my understanding.
Yeah.
Does that address what you're noticing?
It helps.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So the real question on the table is: how did Hagar get in the wilderness here?
And so Hagar,
I mean, we don't know a lot about her
at all.
No.
But she is an immigrant that has been handed over to Abraham and Sarah.
Yeah.
So she got transferred from one powerful, abusive man
to another
guy
who also ends up being an abuser along with his wife.
So she's living with this family for 10 years
and then suddenly Sarah, the matriarch, comes and says, here's the deal.
You're going to go get pregnant by Abraham.
I'm going to have sex with my husband.
And you're going to give us a son.
So, I mean, she doesn't have any choice in the matter.
No.
Nope.
And so she does it.
And then all of a sudden, there's this power dynamic that's all screwed up.
And she's now going to get the brunt of that deal.
Yeah.
And so how did she end up in there?
By Abraham's just trust in God's promise because it's not coming at the timing they thought it would come.
Yeah.
I mean, for a good reason.
They're getting old, I'm sure.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, it's not like they're pure evil.
Yeah.
This is an honest portrait of like real.
It's been 10 years.
It's been 10 years.
I can't have a kid.
If you haven't had a kid in 10 years, it's probably not going to happen.
Yeah.
I mean, if you look around, that's the reality.
But then there's also this
sense of, well, then we can treat other people like property
and to the end that will serve us.
And when we do that, if it creates weird power relational dynamics, then we'll let other people suffer the consequences of that.
And those people suffering the consequences of bad decisions, the people who have power
can just say, you're going to have to deal with it, not us.
And that's forcing someone into the wilderness.
Yeah.
Yes.
Such a good summary.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So it's really both like Adam and Eve's exile into the wilderness, except it's a new twist
because the innocent person
is thrust into the wilderness.
because of the Adam and Eve-like behavior of Abraham and Sarah.
Yep.
So it's even more tragic in that sense.
So what's going to happen?
Well, the messenger of Yahweh, or usually translated the angel of the Lord, the messenger of Yahweh found Hagar at a spring of waters in the wilderness.
Oh, that spring is on the way to Shur.
Okay, sure.
Sure.
Sure it is.
Shur,
if you do a concordance search, doesn't appear very often.
It's a way station between the land of Canaan and Egypt.
So she's going home.
But it's an outpost in the wilderness.
But it's an outpost in the wilderness, and she found a little oasis, a spring.
Yeah.
A spring in the wilderness.
This is how all humanity was created.
Yes.
A spring in the wilderness.
There's a spring in the wilderness, yeah.
And the messenger of Yahweh said, Hagar, slave girl of Sarai, where is it you're coming from?
Where are you going?
This is what,
very much like what God said to Adam and Eve after they blew it with the tree.
Where are you?
Where are you hiding?
Yeah, why are you hiding?
It's like what God says to Cain, where's your brother?
Where are you going?
Well, from before the face of Sarai, my mistress, I'm fleeing.
And the messenger of Yahweh said to her, Return.
Go back.
And oppress yourself under her hand.
Hmm, allow yourself to be oppressed.
Yes.
Then the messenger of Yahweh said, multiplying, I will multiply your seed.
I will double multiply your seed, so that your seed cannot be counted because of the multiplying.
You're like, whoa, that's what God promised Abraham.
Yeah, this is the seed of Abraham.
So this child's going to get the Abraham blessing.
The messenger said, Look, you're pregnant.
You're going to give birth to a son.
You shall call him Yishma El.
Which is how you would say in Hebrew, God will hear, because Yahweh has heard your oppression.
So what is God's response this time?
He makes a promise of future seed.
Remember when Adam and Eve were exiled into the wilderness, he made a promise of a future seed of the woman.
Now here, God is as if providing a little Eden
oasis.
at the spring in the wilderness of that there's a future for her seed and Yahweh has heard the oppression.
But you need to return.
There is still a time of oppression under her hand, but it will result in this future seed, as we're going to see, verse 12, that future seed will be a donkey of a human.
His hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand will be against him, and against the face of all of his brothers he will reside.
So liberation is going to come for you and your seed out from under Abraham, but not yet.
There's still a time, And Yahweh has very much heard what's going on with you.
And she takes this as good news.
She called the name of Yahweh who spoke with her.
You are El-Roi.
You are the God who sees.
So God has seen, God has heard, he hears the cry of the immigrant who's oppressed.
And God responds and makes a promise of a future seed.
And then she names the well.
She names the well, Ber Lachai Roi, the well of the living one who sees me.
And then Hagar goes back and she gives birth to Ishmael.
So this is the origin story of Ishmael, who's not going to be the chosen son in terms of the covenant,
but he's definitely recipient of the blessing.
And God cares and hears very much about the oppression of this woman and her son.
So let's just pause there.
God both, he tells her to go back for a time,
even though it will result in eventual liberation.
And what you need to know is God sees and hears, and he's given you this gift of well, and he's going to give you a gift of future seed.
It's such a side quest story.
Because Ishmael is not that important moving forward.
Well, it depends.
It depends.
Yeah, Yishmael and his seed stays very much on the brain through the rest of the Torah and prophets.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
I guess I just don't maybe know that how that works.
Yeah.
This is going back, but in our firstborn series
in the podcast a couple years ago, we were tracing how pretty much all the main players that you meet in the biblical world.
going on in the biblical story all go back to characters whose ancestors are born in these stories in Genesis.
So the Ishmaelites get connected to the Midianites.
Oh, okay.
And in terms of they're all desert dwellers, dwellers in the wilderness, in the south.
Really?
So wait, the Midianites, who Moses is going to marry into?
The Ishmaelites.
Yeah, because Abraham, his third wife, Keturah,
at the end of the Abraham stories, and he has a bunch of kids through her, and Midian is one of them.
Oh, so that's that's not connected to Ishmael.
It's connected to yeah, but the descendants of the Midianites and the Ishmaelites end up like banding together into one tribe.
Oh, they do.
Yeah.
And lo and behold, this is Jethro.
Oh.
Jethro comes from this family.
Oh, okay, yeah.
And Jethro's like, he's very much connected to the next repetition of this story we're going to look at,
which is the story of Moses.
Okay.
So let's just notice this portrait of how Hagar found herself in the wilderness, and how did God respond?
With mercy, with empathy, and with blessing.
He saw and he heard her oppression, and he promises future seed, and he meets her at a well.
So that has developed how people end up in the wilderness.
So the wilderness is kind of self-caused, again, by Abraham and Sarah, but for someone else.
And that's the twist here.
Yeah, Abraham and Sarah has become the snake.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, they've become like Adam and Eve, but then they also kind of are the snake in the same way.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let's keep all of now Adam and Eve's story, Cain, Abel's story, Hagar, Abram, and Sarah's story on the brain as we go to the story of Moses in the book of Exodus.
So, when we turn to the story of the Israelites in Exodus chapter 1, this is three generations down the line from Abram and Sarah.
Those descendants of Abram went down to Egypt because of a famine, just like Abram did.
what we find in the opening paragraph of Exodus is that they are fruitful and multiplying, becoming very strong.
The land was filled with them.
And Egypt's a good land.
It's actually described like the Garden of Eden in Genesis.
When we looked at that map, that whole
Nile Delta is just lush green.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So now we're in that situation.
that God told Abram about a long time ago,
that your seed will become enslaved in the land not their own.
Here we are.
Here we are.
And now they're just fruitful and multiplying like the stars of the sky.
Okay.
And they're like, whoa, God's promise came true.
They're kind of in their wilderness, but they're still black.
Ah, they left Canaan because of a famine, but they went to Egypt.
Well, that's true.
Which is like a garden.
Which is not a wilderness, it's like a garden.
It's like a garden.
And they're multiplying in the garden.
Now it's not their own garden.
The point is, God's promise about the seed like stars has come true.
But a new king, here we go, rose up over Egypt, and he didn't know about Joseph and everything that happened at the end of Genesis.
And he looks at the multiplying of the sons of Israel and says, ooh, let us act skillfully with them, or else they'll continue to multiply.
And man, if there's ever a war,
they're going to join our enemies.
They're going to make war on us.
Can't trust these guys.
Can't trust them.
So we've talked about this scene many times, especially in the New Exodus series and the Redemption podcast series.
So what I just want to focus here is in those conversations, we talked here about how Pharaoh is being set on analogy to the snake.
You have a fruitful and abundant new humanity, Israel in the garden, and you have a snake who's fearful and deals with wisdom and shrewdness.
More shrewd than any of the other beasts of the field.
And so he places over them captains of forced labor in order to oppress them.
Oppress them.
Hagar.
Yep.
Yeah.
And
even as much as they oppressed them, the Israelites just kept multiplying.
Okay.
The blessing is still breaking through.
That's right.
So in the midst of that oppression and enslavement because of a trickster, What's going to happen now?
So this is all, one, the language of Genesis 15 and 16.
They're immigrants in the land, enslaved, oppressed.
But now it's the Egyptians doing to the Israelites what the Israelites' ancestors, Abram and Sarah, did to their Egyptian slave.
So it's that inversion.
And we've looked at that before.
So what is so powerful then is the next scene, which is a story that goes on to involve seven women.
Actually, this connects back to your question about
the portrait of women, yeah.
So Hagar and Sarah are kind of these honest, empathetic, but critical portraits of these rival wives.
Yeah.
And how they relate to Abram is all mapped on to what became the unfortunate distortion of relationship with Adam and Eve.
What's so amazing about Exodus 1 and 2 is that all of the women and their seven women are depicted as brave, God-fearing, trusting God's word, even over the violence of Pharaoh, like heroines, like heroic women.
And the first one is Moses' mom.
So in this interesting scene, she disregards Pharaoh's command to throw the baby boys into the Nile.
We didn't talk about that just now, but that's what Pharaoh does.
That's his third and final solution to deal with the problem of these Israelite slaves.
And so
start killing them off.
So she is crafty in her own way.
She puts her baby boy in the river,
like Pharaoh said to do, but she creates an ark,
the same words as Noah's Ark.
And she put the child in the ark and then put the ark in the Nile.
And then his sister was there.
So this becomes a mother-daughter.
But, you know, there's also this dynamic of it's a mother, an oppressed, enslaved mom,
who now has to surrender her seed over to who knows what?
She has to give him up, but it's an effort to save him.
And so it's precisely that seed through that mother's trust that is going to float into Pharaoh's house and become the downfall of the snake.
So we're kind of playing with the themes of Genesis 3.15 there.
It's really a really interesting way.
And that son, Moses, you know, he's found by the daughter of Pharaoh and her slave girl.
And then he ends up being adopted into the house of Pharaoh.
So I'm really fast-forwarding here because I want to get us to a scene.
So he's named Moshe because that rhymes with the Hebrew word for draw up.
I moshed him up out of the waters.
That's what Pharaoh's daughter says.
Okay, this is really cool.
So Moshe grew up.
This is Exodus 2, verse 11.
And he went out to his brothers.
And you're like, whoa, there's a whole backstory clearly implied there.
That he knows that he's
not Egyptian.
Yeah, somehow he knows that the Israelites are his brothers.
Probably looks it.
Yeah, we don't, I mean, there's so much we don't know.
And it's hard for us not to think of it in terms of the Prince of Egypt.
You know what I've seen?
But what he notices is that he sees an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, which is interesting because the Egyptians are also his brothers.
Yeah.
You mean he just spent like a couple decades.
So it's also, there's this ambiguity of who are his brothers.
See, it's his adopted brothers, people,
striking his biological brothers, people.
And so he looks this way and that way, and he just straight up murders that Egyptian.
Like, whoa,
that's intense.
That's one way to solve.
a dispute.
Yeah.
Kill one of the violent way to solve it.
Yeah.
And then he goes out the next day and he sees two Hebrews fighting.
And he says to the one who was in the wrong, like, what are you doing?
Why are you striking each other?
And the guy's like, what?
Who are you, Egyptian?
Who made you a ruler and a judge over us?
Are you going to murder me?
Just like you murdered the Egyptian?
So it's this interesting story.
And all this language here is actually modeled after the Cain and Abel story.
With the brother language?
It's brother striking brother to murder.
And he wonders about if this other brother is going to murder,
which is the same word Harag used in the Cain and Abel story.
Then Moses became afraid and said, oh my gosh, the matter's become known that I killed that Egyptian.
And he was right because Pharaoh heard about this.
And so Pharaoh sought to murder Moshe, Moses.
So Moses fled from before the face of Pharaoh.
And he went and dwelt in the land of Midian, which
a desert.
That's the desert people.
Yeah, he flees into the wilderness.
And
if I've been tracking correctly, I know that the Midianites are connected to the Ishmaelites.
Yes.
By the end of Genesis, the Ishmaelites and the Midianites are
like two different names.
For the same group of desert dwellers.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
So let's put the whole portrait together.
We have enslaved Israelites who are being oppressed.
We have a snakey trickster, Pharaoh, who's doing this.
You have oppressed slave women who fear and trust God.
So they surrender over the future of their seed.
And that seed ends up floating into the house of Pharaoh.
And he's in tension with his brothers.
We're mapping Adam and Eve's story, but also we're drawing elements from the Cain and Abel story.
And he is like Cain.
He murders his brother.
It doesn't say he went out to the wilderness or even out to a field, but it did say that he went out.
He went out.
He went out.
Then he buried him in the sand.
Then he buried him in the sand.
Oh, that's good.
That's good.
So we're not in the garden.
We're not in the garden.
The murder took place out in the desert.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In the sand.
Yeah.
Yeah, you don't guard in the sand.
Yeah.
And now
we have a guy fleeing into the wilderness.
He flees from before the face of Pharaoh.
That's exactly the same phrase from when Hagar, the immigrant, the Egyptian immigrant, fled from before the face of Sarah.
Okay.
Okay.
So Sarah has it out for Hagar
is going to oppress her.
Don't know what that means.
She flees from the face of her into the wilderness.
Moses knows that Pharaoh has it out for me now.
I'm going to flee.
Yeah.
Hagar didn't do anything wrong in the story.
Yeah, right.
But Moses has killed a man.
Yeah.
So now it's another layer of complexity yet again.
Yeah.
Because he's not fully innocent.
He belongs to the the people who are oppressed.
Yeah.
Though he himself was not oppressed.
No, he grew up in the house of Pharaoh, but he's got this dual identity.
He takes it upon himself to seek justice
in a way that takes the life of this Egyptian.
Yeah.
And then he realizes, I'm going to be in trouble and I need to go.
And so he flees to Midian, which is the desert people, the wilderness people.
Yeah.
And what does he find there?
A well.
Just like Hagar.
He finds a well.
Yeah.
And then what does he find at that well?
Well, he meets a whole bunch of daughters, seven daughters by the well.
And a bunch of bad shepherds roll up and start oppressing or bullying these seven daughters.
And so Moses rises to the occasion and he just says he rescued them.
And he waters their flock.
And then the daughters go back to their dad.
And who's that dad?
Well, his name is here Retwell,
which is one of the names of this character.
His other name is Jethro,
who is the Midianite high priest
of the land.
And he just brings Moses right into the family.
Moses ends up marrying
one of his daughters.
And he lives out there in the wilderness.
And it's this daughter, the wife of Moses, who becomes the seventh of the seven women that you were referring to?
She's the, yeah, one of the seven daughters, and she becomes the seventh woman who rescues Moses' life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In another weird story that we don't have time to talk about.
Yeah.
But my point is that all of a sudden, think of Hagar.
Hagar fled into the wilderness.
Yeah.
Finds a well.
Met God at a well.
Yeah.
God listened and heard
and gives her a promise of future seed.
But that future seed is going to live in tension with his brothers.
brothers, and Yishmael is his name.
And then here, Moses meets descendants
of Yishmael in the land of Midian at a well, right?
Okay.
And marries into that family.
And here's Moses now at tension with his brothers because his Israelite brothers aren't down for him.
Yeah.
His Egyptian brothers are definitely out down for him.
Yeah, he's out on the outs.
Yeah, he's on the outs.
Both.
Yeah.
And then the next paragraph, and we'll have to end here, is the narrator tells us that the sons of Israel groaned because of their slavery, and God heard
their cry.
He remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he saw the sons of Israel.
Those are the words to Hagar.
Yeah.
So what's so remarkable is Exodus 1 and 2 is drawing on these wilderness stories from the Garden of Eden, from Cain and Abel, and from the Hagar debacle, and providing yet another series of twists on them.
So let's come back.
How do people end up in the wilderness?
Oh, my goodness.
According to the Bible.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, first
is not trusting the voice of God and listening to the voice of the snake.
And that
just means you're choosing the domain of the wilderness.
In some way, that's your choice.
That's Adam and Eve.
God enforces it.
So God is also the one exiling them into the wilderness.
So there's this dynamic there.
It's their choice, but God is honoring that choice,
enforcing that choice,
but then giving this hope of this is not the end of the story.
Seed of the woman will crush the snake.
Seed of the woman will come to care of this, but they're in the wilderness.
That's the first way into the wilderness.
The next story into the wilderness is luring your own brother into the wilderness to kill him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Going further into the wilderness, taking his life
by your own twisted desires, which is also called sin,
which is crouching
at the door.
Yeah.
And there it's you're taking him out there because the wilderness or the field is a place where no one lives.
So you can have power.
Do it in secret.
Do it in secret.
Yeah, Moses thought he was killing the man in secret.
That's right.
He looked around.
No one looked around.
No one was there.
Buried him in the sand.
So all humanity is in the wilderness because of these reasons.
We get to the story of Abraham and Sarah, who God says, that seed is going to come through you.
I'm going to bless you.
And that's going to bless all the nations.
They don't have a child.
So they oppress
the immigrant slave, named immigrant,
and to get a child.
And when that creates a bad relational dynamic, they oppress her more.
And then she flees into the wilderness.
So she ends up in the wilderness because of the oppression of others.
God meets her at a well, gives her a promise of blessing, tells her, endure the oppression.
And the promise is about a future seed, but that future seed will be in a struggle with his brothers.
But God heard and saw her oppression and her cry.
Because the Midianites will be like a people that
live in tension with.
Yeah, live in tension with.
Yeah, they're brothers.
Yeah, they're brothers.
So interesting.
They are.
And then we read the story of Moses, who
who is his brother?
Is it the Egyptians?
Yeah.
Is it the Israelites, the Hebrews?
And
what does it mean
to
protect your brother and fight for justice?
And what he does is he goes, well, I can, I'll decide and I'll kill the way I want to kill.
And that puts him
in trouble with both brothers.
Yeah, that's right.
But really,
the Pharaoh will kill him.
That's right.
And so he flees into the wilderness.
So he's in the wilderness from his own
violence.
His own violence.
Yeah.
But he comes ultimately from a people who are oppressed, enslaved immigrants,
oppressed by Egypt.
So what is right, Abraham and Sarah did is now being done to their later sections.
Yeah, it's all complicated in that.
And what the mom has to do is
hand her son over not to the wilderness, but to the waters,
which are, remember, the symbolic
pair of the wilderness is the chaos waters.
Right.
And then God delivers the seed through the chaos waters into the house of Pharaoh.
And that's everything you just said.
And then Moses finds himself fleeing into the wilderness.
Moses is so complicated.
He is the oppressed immigrant, but he grows up in the house of Pharaoh and he's not oppressed.
He is the cane figure that kills his brother, but he doesn't do it because of jealousy.
He does it
out of a sense of moral like
obligation.
And then
when he flees into the wilderness, he then rescues more people.
Like that same impulse of like, I want to do what's right is there.
Yeah.
So yeah, he's
a really complex character.
He's a realistic character, actually.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
He wants to do the right thing.
Sometimes he loses his temper.
Yeah.
And other times he does it well.
And who's he rescuing and where?
He's rescuing the descendants connected to Yishmael at a well and ends up getting a blessing of a wife and a family there in the wilderness with the descendants of Ishmael.
And then God hears and sees the cries of his people.
So the way God responded to Hagar is now how God is responding to Moses and to the Israelites.
So the wilderness is a place,
it's not an ideal place.
No.
But out there,
there is still,
just like a spring came out of the wilderness, and that's how this all began.
Yeah.
When you find yourself in the wilderness,
God can meet you.
There can be springs and he will hear the voice of those who cry out in the wilderness.
So what we just did was we just meditated on the hyperlinks between four stories
of where people end up in the wilderness.
But again, the reason why I wanted us to do this before we do the next thing is because the next series of stories are about God leading people into the wilderness.
And it's become significant to me that all of the stories before that are of people exiling each other into the wilderness through their,
through all kinds of reasons.
And all of the reasons in these stories are an honest depiction of how complicated humans are.
And to me, that is so profound.
Humans don't create the wilderness.
The wilderness is the opposite of creation.
But
we do
find ourselves and exile ourselves and others into these desperate places of being on the knife edge of life and death for a whole host of reasons that feel very complicated to try and address.
But the biblical authors want us to pay attention to them and to meditate on how these stories reflect our own patterns of behavior and the effects that our choices have on ourselves and other people.
We can send others into the wilderness without even fully knowing that that's what we're doing.
Or we can send ourselves into the wilderness by our stupid choices.
And God wants to meet people in the wilderness.
Yeah, he wants to and he does.
And he does.
He sees and he hears.
And what seems like game over from our point of view is never game over from God's point of view.
And maybe that's probably the most important thing to take away here.
There's always the promise of future seed.
There's the provision of the wells
and the promise that this isn't the end of the story.
God wants to lead his people back to the garden.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Bible Project Podcast.
Next week, we're going to look at stories in Exodus and Numbers, where God intentionally leads the Israelites through the wilderness for 40 years.
What we're going to focus on are the moments where God has led his people into the wilderness directly and personally?
And there is a crisis of trust.
People start grumbling and getting angry.
And it becomes a big conflict between God and His people in the wilderness.
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