Exodus

The Hebrew Bible does not call this book Exodus. It calls it Shemot - Names.

Before the bondage, before the plagues, before the sea and the mountain and the tent of meeting, the Spirit writes the names down. In a story about a kingdom that tried to erase a covenant people into an anonymous slave-class, the book begins by naming them - because you cannot erase what God has named.

Shemot: A Hebraic Deep Study of the Book of Exodus is a verse-by-verse journey through all forty chapters, in the conviction that the Hebrew text rewards slow, close attention. The King James English serves as a familiar translation base, but the Hebrew is treated as primary throughout. Again and again this study pauses on a single Hebrew word - pesach, kavod, kapporet, chesed - and opens it, because the Hebrew is carrying freight no single English word can bear.

This is a study that reads Exodus as a Hebraic whole - reading backward into the world of the ancient Near East, where each of the ten plagues dethrones a specific god of Egypt, and forward across the whole canon, tracing the lamb whose bones are not broken, the rock struck once in the wilderness, the bread from heaven, and the blood of the covenant sprinkled at Sinai and lifted again in an upper room.

Inside you will find:

• Every one of the forty chapters treated verse by verse, at full depth
• The original Hebrew opened word by word, transliterated for the English reader
• The Egyptian deity behind each of the ten plagues
• The Passover unfolded in detail - the lamb, the blood, the doorway, and the night of deliverance
• The Book of the Covenant, the Ten Words, and the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy
• The Tabernacle traced from the Ark outward, and the Glory that fills the tent

Exodus is not, finally, a book about escape. It is a book about dwelling - a people who begin unable to see God and end with His Glory filling a tent in the middle of their camp. Not merely freedom from, but Presence with.

The companion volume to Bereshit in the Armored Press Hebraic Deep Study series.