After the covenant with Abraham, there is no disastrous fall like there was with Adam or Noah. Instead, the story of Scripture sees these promises that were given to Abraham fulfilled, in stages. Of course, the first promise given to Abraham was that he would become a great nation. In the latter half of the Book of Genesis and in the Book of Exodus, this promise is fulfilled.
The Exodus: Passover
God arranges for Abraham’s descendants to go down to Egypt, a land where they have peace and safety. There, they become very numerous, enough to be a great nation. They just need a few other things in order to really be that great nation God is calling them to be. They need law, and they need land. Law makes the difference between a mob of related peoples, and a civil society. Land makes the difference between nomads, and an actual nation.
God sends Moses to lead them out of Egypt. The story of the 10 plagues is well-known. What is less known is that the plagues were all judgments upon Egypt’s gods.[1] After all of Egypt’s gods are defeated, as the people of Israel are about to leave, Moses leads them in a very important covenant meal, the Passover. A meal and blood ritual marks their transition from slavery to freedom.
The Passover is so important because it is a premonition, a type, ultimately of the Eucharist which is the meal and blood ritual that marks our transition from a life of sin to a life of freedom as a part of the glorious family of God. Moses leads the people through the first Passover, marking their moment of freedom. Then they leave the land of Egypt, to go out into the desert. And through Moses their leader, God brings them to Mt. Sinai. There, again through Moses, God gives them the law (the Ten Commandments) in the context of renewing a covenant with them. In Exodus 24, Moses sprinkled blood on the people of Israel as a covenant sign that they are becoming blood-kin to God, becoming part of the divine family.
The Exodus: The Idolatry of Israel
Moses would have led them immediately into the promised land so that they could quickly become a great nation. Unfortunately, the people of Israel sin through rejecting God and turning back to Egyptian idolatry, in the episode with the golden calf.[2] They get impatient with Moses and quickly go back to Egyptian bull-worship. This idolatry was the kind of ‘family relationship’ they enjoyed in their previous home; and whatever signs and wonders God had performed to deliver them, the familiar remained attractive to them. They were weak and fickle and unbelieving. The ancient rabbis said, “What the apple was to Adam, the bull was to Israel.”[3]
And so Israel falls into sin, and many negative consequences follow. One of the consequences is that the generation that sinned would not be permitted to enter into the land promised to them. Another one of the results of the sin of Israel is that many, many more laws are added into the covenant with God. These additional laws are in the latter half of Exodus, in the Book of Leviticus, and in the Books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. These laws have a penitential purpose; they’re given to Israel that they might make reparation for their infidelity. In other words, these added laws were meant to address the problem of sin.
The covenant with Moses had a lot of potential, but, unfortunately, as a result of the Israelites’ sin, it became burdened down with these new laws. To follow them perfectly was very difficult for the people of Israel. That difficulty is going to set up the dynamic for the rest of Israel’s history as we move forward.
Relation to Evangelization
What is the relevance of the Mosaic covenant to evangelization? In a lot of evangelistic situations, one is not going to intentionally bring up the covenant with Moses. It may arise however, because many times what are perceived to be the “harsh” laws of the Old Testament become a stumbling block. When you’re trying to share the gospel with someone, they might ask you, “What about all those commands in the Old Testament not to eat fruit bats or swine, and all those animal sacrifices that the people had to offer for their sins? What was going on? That seems stupid and nonsensical to me — why is this in the Bible?”
It’s important to understand that those laws and rituals given to the people of Israel were symbolic, and given to them as penance. It was a result of their sin with the calf that they received the large body of laws which sometimes don’t seem to make a lot of sense. The laws did, however, make sense. For the people of Israel, they made real psychological and religious sense.
For example, the animal sacrifices that God commands for the people of Israel to perform after the sin with the golden calf were symbolic sacrifices of the gods of Egypt. For example, the ram was the sacred animal of the Egyptian sun god. When the people of Israel sacrificed rams to the Lord God, they were sacrificing the symbol of Egypt’s chief god to their own Deity. That was a way of tearing the people of Israel away from the Egyptian idolatry in which they had been so involved. There is a similar dynamic with most of the laws of Moses. Knowing this can be helpful for the evangelist who is sometimes called upon to explain the Mosaic law.
[1] The religion of Egypt was essentially the worship of nature and the things that represent it. Thus, when the plagues were sent, they were the God of Israel demonstrating His authority over nature. For example, the death of the firstborn son was a judgment against Osiris (god of life and patron of Pharaoh); the three days of darkness was against Amon-Re, the sun god and the Nile turning to blood was against Hapi. For further explanations, see John Bergsma and Brant Pitre, The Catholic Introduction to the Bible, Volume I (San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 2018), 172-174.
[2] Exodus 32.
[3] For more information on this matter, see Dr. Joel Kaminski, “Attaining and Forfeiting Adam’s Immortality at Sinai: the Jewish Version of the ‘Fall’.” The Torah.com (2016).