Exodus as Allegory
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Like any collection of literary classics, the Bible illuminates real life. As psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson has observed, we humans don’t make sense to ourselves. We often act from unconscious impulses. We do things we don’t understand and don’t want to do. Storytelling enables us to describe ourselves to ourselves, in hopes of understanding more about being persons, navigating social life. Through allegorical interpretation, we summarize a story’s insights into human motivation and social relationships. By contemplating and extending a story’s metaphorical language, we discover how patterns embodied in metaphor might actually elucidate life outside literature. The Exodus story, for instance, contains metaphors of enslavement and freedom that outline the process of escaping systems of sociopolitical domination and ending forms of bondage that afflict individuals.
Biblical storytelling often investigates systems of domination. In one of the Bible’s celebrated stories, Moses, the Israelite nation’s first political leader, goes head-to-head with an Egyptian Pharaoh, the ancient world’s most intimidating figure of Imperial Power, who has enslaved the Israelites. After an electrifying vision in which God tells him to lead the Israelites to freedom, Moses, a speech-impaired, insecure hothead from an outsider ethnic group, actually manages to do it. After asking, then demanding, that the Israelites be allowed to leave, Moses contends with Pharaoh, who keeps changing his mind. Supernatural waves of plague hit Egypt, persuading Pharaoh that God supports the Israelites. The tyrant finally relents, allowing the enslaved people to leave, but he changes his mind again and pursues his former slaves. Right before the Egyptian army overtakes the fugitives, God parts the Red Sea: the Israelites cross to safety while the Egyptians drown. It’s a classic underdog story. An unlikely hero beats a super-bad, super-powerful villain. A scrappy band of renegades defeats the world’s primary superpower. It’s like the American story about the raggle-taggle colonist army, with fierce grit and relentless ingenuity, defeating King George and Britain’s royal navy.
Moses leads his compatriots into the Sinai Desert, where food and water are scarce. The Israelites survive for forty years there in desperate conditions. Their extreme privation makes them long for Egypt, imagining that anything--even enslavement--would be better than their precarious wilderness life. During their encampment, Moses climbs Mount Sinai, parlays with God, and receives God’s vision for Israelite culture. In a bitter dramatic twist, Moses comes within sight of Canaan, the Promised Land, but never enters it. He sees it from another mountaintop, then dies; his successor, the great warrior Joshua, leads the nation into the Promised Land. The historicity of these events cannot be confirmed. Read allegorically, however, the story contains such useful insight that its value need not depend on its historicity.
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The Bible delivers insight through what Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung called archetypes--recurring patterns in character types and story types that appear throughout the world's oldest stories, across cultures, in all geographic locations. Jordan Peterson argues that archetypes picture universal human experiences tied to neurobiological structures. Archetypes, Peterson suggests, identify recurring patterns in human emotion and social behavior; by studying stories, therefore, we can understand real-life psychological and social dynamics. Allegorical reading unpacks the psycho-social observations contained by literary archetypes.
Allegory identifies patterns in political life too. Students of the American civil rights movement know that civil rights activists found parallels to black American experience in the Exodus story. American poet-activist Paul Lawrence Dunbar uses the Exodus story in his poem “Antebellum Sermon” to sow hope that American white supremacy would, like Pharoah, eventually lose the battle to dehumanize and disenfranchise black people. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used Exodus imagery frequently in his speeches to convey the idea that for black Americans, the journey from bondage to freedom would be a painful, protracted process, with movement forward and back, involving extreme privation and suffering, but eventually leading to the Promised Land of equality. Whether it happened or not in history, the Exodus story is true: journeys from bondage to freedom are painful, protracted processes, with movement forward and back, involving extreme privation and suffering. I’d like to claim confidently that these journeys always lead to the Promised Land. But that would have to be taken on faith. Dr. King believed it.
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King used imagery from Exodus and the Book of Joshua to deliver a parting vision in his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” given the night before he died. Sounding aware of his own imminent assassination, King says,
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. . . . But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” By re-purposing the metaphorical language of Exodus, King deftly conveys volumes about the process of moving from social and political oppression to full freedom.
Any life experience that involves a process of moving from something that feels like bondage (alcoholism, abusive relationship, unemployment) to something that feels like freedom (sobriety, relational health, financial security) can be understood using the Exodus story, which provides an archetypal blueprint for how that journey will go. According to the story, no one goes straight from bondage to freedom: there’s no going straight from Egypt to the Promised Land. Journeys from bondage to freedom involve lengthy ambivalent processes. The process starts and stalls, moving forward intermittently, with long “in-between” episodes, wandering-in-the-wilderness phases. In the “wilderness” phase, confusion, uncertainty, despair, and nostalgia for the old situation, however dismal, can take hold. The journeyer may lose hope and direction.
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Anyone who has ever journeyed from the bondage of nicotine addiction to freedom from smoking knows this. The initial blast out of Egypt--the first morning without cigarettes--feels liberating, exciting. By afternoon, the power of the substance pursues the newly-freed addict in the form of craving, which feels as forceful as an Egyptian army. If the addict-seeking-freedom makes it across that first Red Sea of craving, obstacle after obstacle awaits him or her or them. Deprived of what felt, despite its tyranny, like comfort, the addict will long for Egypt when the first stressor hits. Successful quitters spend a long time in the dry, uncomfortable desert between substance abuse and freedom from that substance. Some make it to the Promised Land of nicotine freedom; some do not.
Many real-life freedom-seeking processes, collective and individual, follow the bondage-to-freedom pattern illustrated by Exodus. That’s why the stories have lasted for millennia. The Bible’s extended metaphors outline patterns that underlie an inexhaustible range of lived experience—marriage, family, love, hate, passion, power, deception, betrayal, sacrifice, immigration, nation, and more. Perceiving archetypal patterns in the chaotic flux of living makes the chaos slightly less bewildering. Our struggles fit within a larger human story that spans multiple generations and outlasts the particulars of our personal situation and moment in time. Knowing that makes each of us slightly less ridiculous. Slightly less alone.
Sources:
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination.
Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Biblical Series, Episode 1: Introduction to the Idea of God
Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed
Joerg Rieger, Jesus vs. Caesar.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I've Been to the Mountaintop”
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “Antebellum Sermon”
Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols