Tyrant Contra God | Biblical Series: Exodus Episode 1

Thank you for joining us as we journey through the Great Book of Exodus, and thank you very much to the DW Plus crew for having the vision and generosity of spirit to make this Exodus seminar produced at no small cost and substantial risk freely available to all who are interested on YouTube. Perhaps you might consider a Daily Wire Plus subscription; it's a bastion of free speech, and we have great content there with much more to come. We journeyed to Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem to film a four-part documentary series on Western civilization, and have additionally recorded specials on marriage, vision, the pitfalls and opportunities for adventure, and masculinity, all of which are exclusively available there. These join many of the Beyond Order public lectures that made up my recent tour, and my extensive back catalog, fully uncensored.

Onward and upward! Thank you for having me. I have the great privilege today of opening a seminar on Exodus, an eight-part seminar. As many of you know, and some of you don't, I did a lecture series on Genesis in the fall of 2017 walking through that old book, and that had a reasonable impact, I would say, for that sort of venture. It was popular publicly; the theater I rented sold out 16 times in a row, and then millions of people have watched it online, and that's really been something. I'd had a dream after doing that, well and before as well, that I would be able to walk through the entire corpus of the Bible over the course of my life. That's a very daunting challenge, but the next step is Exodus, and I've been looking forward to that for a very long time.

I thought before I did the public lecture series, because that's not what this is, that I would find a variety of scholars from around the world if I could and see if I could figure out a way to bring them together to talk about Exodus in detail to help me fill in my knowledge of this book before I do a public lecture series on Exodus, which I plan to do in June of 2023. I've brought together some of the sharpest, most interesting, and deepest people that I've had the good fortune to meet in the last decade or so, and they've all graciously agreed to come here to Miami and to spend eight days concentrating on this book, under the auspices of the Daily Wire Plus group who've flown them in and who are producing this and editing it and have done everything they can to make this possible and beautiful and as available as it might be.

Much of this material will be behind the Daily Wire paywall. We'll have a free-flowing discussion; I'm going to read the text, and I'm going to say what I have to say about it, and hopefully not too much for me, and I'm going to let the gentlemen that are with me have their say, and hopefully, we're all going to learn an awful lot about this ancient story, what it means, and why it's significant today, and, um, and why it's been significant for several thousand years.

So I'll get everybody, first of all, to introduce themselves, and I'm going to start with Dr. Douglas Headley on my left, and we'll go around this way. Dr. Headley.

Dr. Headley: My name is Douglas Headley, and I'm a fellow at the University of Cambridge, fellow of Clare College, and I teach the philosophy of religion. I think there's a crisis in our culture, and the crisis is linked to a certain ignorance of the very backbone of our own culture, and the Bible is very much at the core of our cultural heritage. At the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, there was an inscription: "Know thyself," and we're in danger of not being able to know ourselves because of the ignorance of the very foundations of our culture. That's one reason why I'm particularly fascinated by Dr. Peterson's endeavors in the last few years and intrigued by the developments.

Um, in the next few days, I warmed your invitation because I was born in China, and I was a seven-year-old in the Chinese Revolution. When I was later an Oxford student, I had dinner with Sir Isaiah Berlin, the great Jewish philosopher, and as it turned out, he'd been a seven-year-old in the Russian Revolution, comparing notes on it. We were saying what the revolutions meant but the lack of people today understanding them. For me, Exodus is obviously a classic in its own right, politically the birth of a great nation and people, but many people don't realize this is behind the English Revolution and also behind the American Revolution. To understand that throws an incredible light on the present crisis because, as I say, you've got a basic clash between ideas coming down from the American Revolution, 1776, which came from the Torah, and ideas which come down from the French Revolution. And so we've got a profound crisis, and many people don't understand the roots of it on either side. So what you're doing I think is immensely significant.

Dr. Orr: My name is James Orr. I'm an assistant professor in philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, where I teach philosophy, religion, and moral philosophy, theological ethics. Much of that work focuses on what you might call the Hellenic, that is to say, the fountain of Western wisdom in Greek philosophy. Too often, I think we neglect the Hebraic—that is to say, the contribution to Western thought of the great Hebraic sources and, most of all, of course, the Torah, the Pentateuch. It's thrilling to be able to sit around and talk with these distinguished friends and with you, Dr. Peterson, about the book of Exodus.

Um, as Oz was saying, it has enormous significance historically: the English Revolution, the American Revolution, and, more recently, many of the sort of liberation narratives that we're familiar with in the contemporary political landscape and contemporary debates. So I'm fascinated to be talking about these issues particularly when we get talking about the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments—the significance of this extraordinary claim, almost without precedent, that morality has given not and discovered and not simply invented and constructed. That's one of, I think, many, many vital themes to our age that we'll be exploring productively in the days ahead, I hope.

Dennis Prager: Welcome, Dr. Peterson and all of you. It's a joy to be with you. I am living my dream in my life, being here, and that is to spread the Torah to the world. I am a religious Jew, and I'm blessed to know Biblical Hebrew. I started it at the age of five, and I still have to translate to English whenever I think of a verse. The Torah, this is not known to almost any non-Jew, the Torah is Primus inter pares in the Bible—first among equals. I was raised, and I still believe that the Torah is from God. How God delivered it is his business; I have no particular interest in the methodology, only in the ultimate authorship. I've written three of the five volumes of a Torah commentary called The Rational Bible, including Exodus, which interestingly was the first one that I did, given that it has my favorite document in history: the Ten Commandments.

And as I say on my American talk show, if you want to defund the police, there's actually a way—have everyone live by the Ten Commandments, then you can defund the police. So that is where I come from in this discussion, and I trust you will all differ appropriately to a member of the chosen people. [Laughter]

Dr. Stephen Blackwood: Thanks, Jordan. It's a real pleasure to be here. I'm Stephen Blackwood. I'm the president of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, in an effort to revive and reinvent the traditional university. I grew up reading the Bible quite a lot. I'd say the Bible gave me the primary images through which I came to understand myself and the world. Then when I went to university, I sort of stumbled into the discovery of philosophy and literature, especially of the Greek and Roman, you might say, the backdrop to Western culture in the ancient sense. Since Sanders spent quite a lot of time thinking about the relation between that tradition and the biblical tradition and the way in which those are synthesized and in a way in which that synthesis is fundamentally what gives rise to our principles and institutions in the Western world.

Um, I suppose I'm particularly excited to be here because I, as others have said, I do profoundly think that we're living in a time in which we've lost the images through which we can make sense of ourselves and of the world in a way that's adequate to the longings of our own nature. So, hopefully, these images will come to be alive for us and for those who decide to listen to this afterwards.

Jonathan Pajo: Another Canadian, that's right! So I'm Jonathan Pajo. I am an artist and I'm someone who for a very long time has been reading the Bible and I've been thinking about it more like an artist, I would say, in terms of structure, in terms of rhyme and rhythm. So I'm interested in the book of Exodus more as a mystical text, and based in the Christian—there's actually a small little book called The Life of Moses by Saint Gregory of Nissa, which is one of the foundations of Christian mysticism. So I will be approaching the book mostly through that, through how it describes a structure, narrative structure, which is also a geographic structure—the mountain, the temple, the tabernacle—and how this fits with even our own perception of reality, and how reality comes together, how chaos can be brought into order. And so that is really the way that I'll be looking at it. So I'm really looking forward to this very diverse discussion.

Excellent. So one of the things that's really fascinated me about Exodus, apart from the fundamental structure of the narrative, which is escape from tyranny, sojourn through the desert, and then re-emergence hypothetically into the promised land, it’s a very classic narrative structure: descent and re-ascent. The fact that the manner in which God is represented as the primary spirit in the text is so compelling.

So I've been toying with this idea that part of what the Bible is doing is describing a priori a manner in which perceptions and actions might be prioritized. And for a structure of priority is a pyramidal structure and something has to be at the top. I learned from Carl Jung that whatever is at the top of your hierarchy of assumptions functions as God for you, whether or not you're religious, and maybe you have multiple things at the top, which just means that you're confused. If Jung is correct—and I believe he is—then the question of what should be at the top really exists as the paramount question.

Part of the way the biblical narrative represents that or addresses that is by describing God in some sense as a literary character, as Northrop Frye, a Canadian critic pointed out. And one of the things that's remarkable about the Exodus text is that the highest ethical spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny, and that's put forward as a prime ethical dictum.

So if it's the voice of God speaking to you, so to speak, then it's going to call you out of slavery—maybe the slavery of your own mind, the slavery of external conditions, the slavery of the tyranny. It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And that's really something, that's really something to know. I think something that's deeply true.

All right, so having said that and introduced everybody, we're going to start with the text. And as I said, I'll read it and I'll make comments when they strike me, and we'll have everyone jump in, and away we'll go.

So Exodus 1: Now these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; Dan and Naftali; Gad and Asher. And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls; for Joseph was in Egypt already. And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation. And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them.

So Jacob and the Israelites are presented as sojourners into Egypt. So they’re foreigners; they’re strangers in a strange land, you might say, and they came in under the guidance and patrimony of Jacob, who had a good relationship with the power structure in Egypt. But he dies and the generation after him dies, and relationships between the Israelites and the Egyptians become strained.

[Dr. Prager comments] While you read, okay? Comment at any point you want. Just for all of your edification in Jewish life, if there are ten best-known verses in the entire Torah, "A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph" is one of the ten. It summarizes the human condition of ingratitude perfectly. Joseph had saved the Egyptians from starvation, and the next Pharaoh doesn't even know his name! So he's forgotten the debts entirely.

But this is, as I say, the human condition; we have forgotten our debts in America to Washington, Madison, Jefferson. This—there arose a new generation in America who knew not Madison! That could be a perfect verse, right?

Okay. Okay, now there arose up a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph, and he said unto his people, "Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come on, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to pass that when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies and fight against us and so get them up out of the land." There’s an accusation of a crime before it's committed, right? These people are just a threat and a plague, and we can't trust them.

That's part of this ingratitude as well and a breakdown of trust, and that definitely sets the stage for conflict—the breakdown of trust. Therefore, they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens, and they build for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Ramses.

So the response to the hypothetical crimes of the Israelites was to enslave them. One of the things we should notice very early on in this is that the book of Exodus regards that move of enslavement as fundamentally wrong. It's like an axiomatic precondition of the narrative itself. Modern people, I suppose, don't find that surprising because we all believe that slavery is wrong, but it isn't obvious that most of the countries and nations that in the past practiced slavery regarded it as wrong.

And so this invisible ethic that already permeates the narrative has a revolutionary aspect in that sense. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew; and they were grieved because of the children of Israel. And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service wherein they made them serve was with rigor.

That reminds me that part of what happened under the Nazis— with work camps and in the gulags as well, right? This idea that you identify your enemies, and then you sentence them to hard labor in your service against their will. So you see this idea echoed very early in this story, and something that’s definitely echoed through the 20th century.

But there's really this idea that what the Pharaoh is doing is trying to reduce the Israelites’ potential for Egypt basically. And you'll see it later when he wants to get rid of the men; he just wants women. So in this image, and it repeats even the story of Abraham, you know how Pharaoh wants to take his wife. It's about taking the potential of another people and trying to subjugate it to yourself. So it's a reflection of instrumental usage.

That's right, yeah. And so, you know, you can see that in people's proclivity to use one another interpersonally because when you're talking to someone, you can decide a priori what you want from them and then you can bend your words and your interactions so that you exploit what they have to offer for your purposes, or you can engage in honest dialogue where the purpose is mutual enrichment and that what would you call it instrumental usage doesn’t dominate.

Yeah, so, and you can experience it like at least the mystical fathers; they talk about Egypt also representing your own passions. That is, you become a slave to something and then you become an instrument of that thing. Right? So it's like you— I don't know anything that you have that you'd like to eat, and then you’re there, and at first, when eating knows you, like when your passion knows you, then you're fine—it’s in the right order. Things are in the right order.

But when your passion or desires or whatever behavior you have forgets you, then you become an instrument of it, like think of a drug addict. A drug addict, where everything they do serves this Tyrant; and so all their potential gets reduced to potential for behavior in some sense that might be your stomach or your lust.

And so that's very interesting too because the word Israel means "we who struggle with God." And so what that would mean psychologically is that the part of you that's struggling with the highest is then subordinated instrumentally to something that should be lower in the ethical hierarchy. And that could be your own inner tyranny, and it could be someone else's instrumental will or some state's instrumental will, and that's portrayed as fundamentally inappropriate in this text.

And you'll see—and it's imaged as this idea of making bricks, you know, and that's a reference to Babel as well. You know, it's like this idea of wanting to be higher than God or wanting to replace God, and so we make civilization—that's what bricks are. We make civilization, and then we think that civilization replaces the highest ideal.

I don't know; Dennis would agree with this, but I know some rabbis believe that Israel was judged when they were divided because Solomon was becoming almost a second Pharaoh with a convey of the people and forced labor and so on. And he was bringing a kind of slavery in at the end and getting too much into Israel’s call to be anti-agent, constantly becoming too much for your interests.

There are two tyrannies; this is the overriding theme, I believe, of the whole Torah: external tyranny to pharaohs, internal tyranny to your lusts, etc., to yourself. The Torah actually has a law which many Jews still observe where you count every day between Passover and Pentecost, Shavuot—Chevalot. It's the seven weeks after you do this for seven weeks every day; you actually count with a blessing using God's name: "This is the seventh day of the 49 days" and so on.

Why? You can't have freedom from Pharaoh if you don't have freedom from you. So Sinai is the second freedom; not now—you have to be liberated from external tyranny, and now liberation from internal tyranny is the Ten Commandments.

Well, that begs the question too, doesn't it? That I think the Bible in some sense is aggregated to answer; which is, "Well, is there something other than various forms of tyranny?" And if there is an alternative to tyranny, and maybe that's freedom, whatever that is, or maybe it's holy freedom, then that's qualitatively different than mere subjugation to one tyranny among others.

My students used to ask me when I was teaching my Maps of Meaning course, “How do you know that what you're teaching isn't just another ideology?” Which is another tyranny in some sense. And that's an extremely deep question, and the postmodern types would say, "Well, it's all ideology; it's all tyranny; you just pick whichever tyranny you want to abide by, but it's all a matter of power or something like that. There's no Transcendent orientation that pops you outside of the realm of tyranny in some real sense."

And the biblical narrative insists that that is not the case, so it's a pretty dismal view that it's just a choice among tyrannies. But to pick up Dennis's great point of the two tyrannies: that Lord Acton, the famous saying, "All power tends to corrupt." You know, power oppresses the weak; that's the obvious one, and it happens here, but it corrupts the powerful, right? And that's what happens to Pharaoh.

And there is such a thing as corruption, right? So that's an absolute reality—the corruption that power tends to produce. Of course, that's partly why the Pharaoh's heart is hardened as well. And yeah, it's a very good and very germane observation that slavery corrupts the slaver as much as the slave. Or perhaps you can say perhaps even more, because it incites within the slaver something like a Luciferian presumption and entices him for instrumental reasons into denying the divinity of someone else and then acting in the manner of someone who denies divinity per se—right? Absolutely pernicious and corrosive.

So, and the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of the one was Shipra, and the name of the other Puah. And he said, "When you do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthing stools, if it be a son, then you shall kill him." That's that instrumental usage that you were talking about before; there is a huge issue here—the Hebrew is completely indeterminative whether the midwives were Hebrews or not. And I'm not going to throw out Hebrew often here; I feel very self-conscious at all, but for those who know Hebrew, they'll know what I'm talking about. It can be the Hebrew midwives or the midwives of the Hebrews. There is no possible way, based on those two words, to know which it is.

I am convinced—and Jewish tradition doesn't agree with me, I mean post-biblical Jewish tradition; the Torah I think does agree with me—but Celebi—I don’t, I believe they were Egyptian. I do not believe he would have ordered Hebrew midwives to murder every Hebrew boy.

Do you think there's a purposeful ambiguity there to leave it up to questions?

That's beautiful; it may well be. That's right. Well, it certainly is. The Hebrew is ambiguous, that is, I mean, if a tyranny gets corrupt enough, then people turn against themselves.

That's right. However, just on logical grounds, when he gets angry at them for not doing it, it would be odd if you get angry at Hebrews for not killing Hebrews. But my biggest proof—you're coming to where they said, "It says that they feared God and didn't listen to Pharaoh." Again, it's one of my favorite lines in the whole Bible! You either fear humans or you fear God. Fear God is the root of freedom and wisdom.

And the word for God is not Jehovah or Yahweh; it's Elohim. So when Jews fear God, it's generally feared Yahweh. In this case, it's fear Elohim—the universal word for God—and I'm convinced that they are Egyptians.

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[Dr. Headley]: Douglas, do you have any sense of what it means in this passage and more broadly that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and an appropriate, let's say, precondition for freedom? Why do you think it's conceptualized as fear?

Dr. Headley: Well, I think there's a proper fear that in this case I think is linked to transcendence. So there's the fear of the tyrant, which is normal and natural, and which we are all subject to, but there should be a greater fear: the fear of the transcendence violating that, right?

And of course, this is why the postmodern attack on traditional Western culture is so dangerous; I mean, of course, it goes back to the very origins of Western culture with the sophists, but the idea that there is no such thing as an objective moral order and there certainly is no transcendent basis for that— that would make this whole narrative unintelligible. It also makes the tyrant the final arbiter in some real sense, right? You know, people have asked me, and I'm always embarrassed by this, but people have commented on my courage for speaking up, so to speak, and I think, "You don't actually understand the situation. I'm not courageous in my speaking up. I'm more afraid of the alternative."

Part of the reason for that was that when I was a clinician, I spent thousands, tens of thousands of hours dealing with people's serious problems. One of the things I learned was, and I really learned this, was that you don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost, but that is just not the case.

You will pay the piper when you pay; you might not even notice the causal connection between the sin and the payment. One of the things you do in psychotherapy is people's lives take a twist and they go very badly wrong, and when you walk back through people's lives with them, you come to these choice points where you meet the devil at the crossroads and you find out that, well, you went left, let's say, and downhill, when you should have gone right and uphill, and now you're paying the price for that.

You don't impose that as a therapist; you help people discover that or rediscover, because they often know at the time that they've made an error and then forget and then rationalize the forgetting and then, you know, and then multiply the lies. But that's tremendously difficult to do within a secular frame.

I mean, I think you found ways of doing that, I think, Jordan. I'm thinking actually of somebody like Victor Frankl and his idea that that sense of the logos, of a kind of meaning, is what gives you a kind of existential drive and helped him survive the horrors of the Holocaust. But more typically, it's religion; it's a sort of religious framing that gives people this power to resist tyranny.

Well, that religious framing seems in part, even if you think about it in a secular sense, to like when you're— Maybe you're making a choice to do the instrumental and easy thing, but there's part of you that knows that that's wrong. Not always; sometimes you just make a mistake because you don't know, but often you know and yet you pick the easier path, let's say.

And the part of the manner in which God is portrayed throughout the biblical corpus—but I would say in traditions around the world, as that phenomenon that alerts you to your own misbehavior—and it is really something, again, I really learned from Jung, Contra Freud in some real sense is that there’s something within that is transcendent, because it isn’t only in you; it’s in everyone in some fundamental and real sense, plus it’s eternal in some fundamental and real sense.

And it calls you on your misbehavior. Potentially in God, culture is approaching a kind of crisis point. In other words, the postmodernists, everything's constructive, truth is not there, etc., no reality except what you make it, but of course, truth is always about something, as C.S. Lewis used to say, and what it’s about is reality.

Well, there's this insistence, and people are going to hit the wall at that point today, on the post—because there is reality. It’s as if we're insisting that there is nothing other than towers of Babel. There isn’t anything they’re being built against or shielding us from; it’s just one Tower of Babel after another, and I can’t help but see a real tyrannical demand for power in that because one of the things I’ve often wondered is, well, why are the constructivists—the radical constructivists—so insistent that there’s no core human nature?

When really the evidence that there's a core human nature is pretty damn strong, particularly perhaps if you think biologically. So why this insistence? And I can't help but think it's because, well, you want to remake people in the image of your ideology, and so you have to insist that they have no intrinsic nature, because otherwise the pesky realities of the transcendent nature get in the way of your luciferian pursuit.

No God, no truth; there is only power, right? Right. Well, that's the Dostoevsky issue in some real sense, isn't it?

I just want to pick up on what you said, Dennis, a little before, and I want to propose that there might be a very important narrative reason why the midwives—or Hebrew in this case—and the reason—and I think it’s a good lesson for us today, which is that the tyrant is empowering women to kill their men. That is what the tyrant is doing, and he’s doing it in order to feminize the Hebrews, and I think that it’s important.

And the reason why they won’t do it is because they fear God is because they’re able to see beyond the power that Pharaoh is handing them at this moment. And I think that when we think that that couldn’t happen—look around you! We’re seeing what happened before.

It’s very interesting because it also implies that, well, it’s in the best interest of the tyrant to dispense with those figures who might pose a threat to the tyranny, and those would be tough men, right? Because they’re the ones who keep the real...

Such an intelligent point that it reinforces your reaction to what I said. Maybe the text is purposefully ambiguous about whether or not they were Hebrews or Egyptians.

And you’ve swayed me; I’ve seen that purposeful ambiguity in the other texts. So let me just say, I know I identify a bias in me, and I’ll reveal it. I’m very hopeful—self-aware.

Good! So the first learning episode has actually occurred.

Yeah, right! Exactly! The Torah goes out of its way—this is one of the fundamental beliefs of my life—to portray non-Jews positively and Jews negatively. It’s one of the reasons I believe it’s a divine author. If Jews had made up the Torah, they would have come across much more positively. They come across as awful, as a general rule, and non-Jews from so propaganda—anti-propaganda.

Certainly, Noah is a non-Jew; of course, there are no Jews at that time. But Moses’s father-in-law, who was the great adviser to Moses, is a Midianite priest. The daughter of Pharaoh is a non-Jew; she saves Moses. And it’s just a consistent pattern, and I thought that the midwives were part of that pattern. As I say, God is ethic-centered, not ethnic-centered.

Okay, and this has taken as the first civil disobedience, hasn’t it?

That’s right. That’s the first example of someone standing against a crime against humanity. And I don’t come down either way, but I think you can make a strong point for Dennis’s point that it implies that the relationship with God is actually what enables people to have the strength to stand up against the tyrant.

If you think of the Nuremberg Trial, they didn’t actually have a basis for what they were saying; there’s no international law, right?

Right. So they were reaching. And maybe the same thing is intuitively—they know it.

Well, that's certainly what Solzhenitsyn thought about the Nuremberg trials. He believed that the fact that the Nazi atrocities were regarded as wrong independent of cultural context, he thought that was a signal achievement of the 20th century, because it re-established not so much the existence of good but definitely the existence of evil. And that was something I found unbelievably convincing because I thought, well, you’ve got a real conundrum here.

It’s like, was what the Nazis did evil or not? Because those are the alternatives. And if it wasn’t, then it’s like, okay, well, you can move ahead on that presumption or you can accept that it was evil in a transcendent sense because that's what the Nuremberg trials were about.

And then the terrible implication of that, in some sense, is that if evil genuinely exists, then its opposite genuinely exists, because it’s not going to exist without its opposite. And so as soon as you accept the reality of the evil of Auschwitz, you're in a metaphysical world in some sense because you have to simultaneously posit the existence of a transcendent good that’s at least the opposite of that.

Part of what I've been striving for, for 40 years, I would say, is to identify what is the opposite of the spirit that produced Auschwitz. And some of it Solzhenitsyn detailed out so nicely; it’s the spirit of truth. And Frankl, it's the spirit of meaning. And I think you can make a strong case that it’s the spirit of love. And it's some amalgam of those three things, and that doesn’t exhaust it. And that’s—it’s the spirit of play and voluntary association and freedom—all things that are stressed in the biblical narrative.

And where there is no vision, a people perishes in Proverbs. And I think there—that's very important, this notion of—well, contemplation. We cut—we'll come to that in particularly chapter three—but this sense of a vision of goodness as having an inspiring quality.

And it is a vision too and not just a mere verbal conceptualization, right? Which is why the artistic endeavor is so important, and the architectural endeavor, because it’s not merely propositional, that vision.

One of the things I learned with my students and with my clinical clients was that—and I helped them do this—was to help people develop a literal vision for their life. It’s like, okay, if you could have what you wanted to arm you against the slings and arrows of fate, let’s say, or to at least defend you against it in principle, if you could have what you needed and wanted, what would that look like?

That’s a kind of prayer; it’s like knocking the door will open and asking and you will receive. It’s like, okay, you could conceivably have what you wanted, but you have to specify what it is, and you have to have a vision of it. And part of what the humanities education should do, and the religious education certainly, is to flesh out a vision of a mode of being and a mode of perception that would justify suffering, or maybe even more than justify it.

So, you could say, I suppose, that if theists are faced with the problem of evil, atheists are confronted with the problem of good. They try to figure out how to make sense of goodness; how to make sense of what it is that drives their moral indignation and their great social revolutions. I think one of the most terrifying moments in the Nuremberg Trials was when the Nazis advanced the defense that they effectively—that this was simply victor’s justice; that they had not really broken any laws. They were scrupulous legislators after all.

And so it's following orders, that’s right. And so sort of Western notions of justice found themselves staring into the abyss. How is it that we're going to make sense of our deep intuition that this is evil of an absolute kind? And I think this is one of the great—as a matter of historical fact—one of the most important motivating factors behind the emergence of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, of course, in 1948, and with it the entire sort of rights-based regime of morality that is with us still.

The problem from the atheist front is on what basis can these things be claimed as self-evident? What’s the grounding for that? If it’s just not— and the postmodern critique of that in some sense is that, well, all that nonsense talk about rights and freedoms is just— it’s just instrumental camouflage hiding a more fundamental will to power and desire to oppress, right?

And the worry is that the only answer available in that purely sort of secular framework would be: it's that because this document tells us that this is wrong or this document tells us that this is right, right? So that becomes part of the social contract, in which case the problem emerges immediately again; it's, well, that’s just arbitrary, effectively carries within it the sort of replicates the very problem that it was trying to solve.

That's partly why I'm often interested in talking to biologists. I’ve talked to Frans de Waal most recently and he’s a primatologist who’s worked on elucidating the principles by which chimpanzees organize their social hierarchies.

And the Marxist/ classic biological take on that for simple-minded biologists is that the chimps use will to power, right? The alpha chimp is the most powerful, most dominant, meanest, roughest, you know, boxer, oppressor. And de Waal’s work, conducted over about thirty years, has shown that that’s not all— that’s not just wrong, it’s anti-true in some sense.

So it’s exactly the opposite of the reality. Now, and then you can get a chimp who rules by power, but it destabilizes the troop emotionally and socially, and his reign tends to be short, brutal, and meet an extremely violent and murderous end.

It’s not an effective strategy.

And what de Waal has shown—that is to stabilize the iterative interactions within a troop, the alpha male who sometimes can be the smallest male in the troop has to be more reciprocal than any other individual in the troop. And so the basis of chimpanzee power is peacemaking reciprocity and stable long-term social relations between males and between the more authoritative males and females.

But does that allow us to use the language of goods? Or rather, are we only licensed by de Waal’s analysis to speak of adaptive value, reproductive fitness?

Well, I’m kind of hoping they go like this because, you know, the idea of the reciprocity that allows the alpha chimps to maintain their sovereignty across time is something very much like "treat your neighbor as if he’s yourself."

And so I think that there’s no reason to assume that the ethic, if it’s transcendent, couldn’t emerge out of the material and descend in some sense from the spiritual at the same, without reducing goodness to a mere—morality to a mere survival mechanism, right?

Well, a mere isn’t—it’s not so mere either, right? If it’s a survival mechanism, it’s pretty damn deep.

And we could also think, if we were expanding our notion of what constitutes the biological, we could also think of the patterns of behavior that are most germane to our survival as transcendent. They’re embodied; they’re instinctual; they’re outside the propositional domain, although often it’s the case that we think of the highest moral act as extinction, you know, laying down one’s life—that is, surrendering our opportunities for survival and the survival of our kin.

Yeah, well, right, so there are definitely times where mere proximal survival seems to contradict an even deeper instinct. I mean I would say that the willingness of—sorry, it’s tricky, right?

Because my wife was talking to—I think Janice Semenengel recently—about the behavior of men when the Titanic was sinking, and many men sacrificed themselves to save the women and the children. And in a sense, that violates the purely biological impetus for self-preservation, let’s say.

But if it’s serving a higher-order ethical precept that is even more fundamentally related to survival across time, then maybe the contradiction could be ironed out. I suppose in evolutionary terms, the logical thing would be, though, for the women and the children to go first on the Titanic, yeah.

Well, the men are more expendable, right? Because you need fewer men, if push comes to shove. You need fewer men.

But to go back to the Hebrew Midwife—although the Hebrew or the Egyptian midwives, they’re intuitively saying something against the highest power in their universe, the Pharaoh. And to their own danger—

Exactly, which is quite extraordinary.

You probably know the story of Jordan coming to faith. I mean, he is a self-proclaimed left-wing atheist. Early in World War II, coming to take refuge in New York, he would follow the documentaries weekly television. One weekend, he went in to see the documentary on the siege of Poland and Nazi Stormtroopers bayonetting women and children. It was in the Upper East Side— a lot of Germans—the war hadn’t started yet; America hadn’t declared war.

The German audience cried out, "Kill them! Kill them!" egging on their own countrymen. America was neutral. And Jordan sat there in five minutes and said, "I can’t say this is absolutely wrong; there are no absolutes. That’s old-fashioned whatever’s believe that."

But then he said, "I had to say there was an absolute—if this was absolutely wrong."

And he said later, "I left the cinema the seeker after an unconditional absolute and came to faith in God."

The only basis...

Because it could—he’s like: one of the things I’ve come to realize about the symbol of the crucifix—and I’m just speaking psychologically here and not theologically—is that at the very least what that symbol is is the impetus among billions of people across 2000 years to look at the worst thing they could imagine. And so there’s an idea that you come to understanding of transcendent good most particularly through focusing your attention intently on what is undeniably tragic and malevolent.

And that could be—I really think that’s true psychologically because one of the things I became convinced of studying the Holocaust atrocities and the Gulag atrocities in particular was the absolute reality of suffering and malevolence. And then you think, well, is there anything more real than pain, suffering, and cruelty? The answer would be: yes, that which can transcend those three things.

And it could easily be that you cannot make contact with what transcends those without diving deep into the nature of those as deep as possible.

And I certainly see the biblical narrative focusing, for example, on the crucifixion. But not only that, as the collective attempt of mankind, in some real sense, to come to terms with the worst that life has to offer and to discover as a consequence something that transcends that.

So you know the story of Philip Haleb—that Jewish scholar who spent his life investigating the Nazi war crimes. And one time, he was so depressed by what he was studying, he was ready to commit suicide. Sitting in his study with this wealth of literature, he picked up a little pamphlet he hadn’t read before, and after about five minutes of reading, he thought there was a flying—his heart had been hardened.

And he read the story of the Shambo, the little Huguenot village that rescued 5,000 Jewish children, and he said it was heart-cracking goodness!

Right!

Yeah, and that was his intuitive—

The woman who wrote The Rape of Nanking, she committed suicide.

No wonder! You look at that sort of thing, and if you look at it deeply, it just tears you into pieces, and then the question is, is there anything that can put you back together? And that really is the question—it’s the question everybody faces in life in some real sense, right? How can you not be torn apart into despair and vengefulness by catastrophe and malevolence?

And that is the question that faces everyone.

So, all right, the midwives feared God and did not, as the king of Egypt commanded them, it’s a lot wrapped up in that line, as it turns out, but saved the men children alive. And the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said unto them, "Why have you done this thing and saved the men children alive?"

And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively and are delivered before the midwives come in unto them." Therefore God dealt well with the midwives.

That’s a very interesting line too because, well, do you want the Pharaoh on your side or do you want God on your side? That’s kind of the question. And the people multiplied and waxed very mighty.

So despite their persecution, they’re doing fine. And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God that He made them houses.

And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, "So he’s getting upset here. Every son that is born, you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive." So that’s echoing that emasculation of the people of Israel here in the most fundamental sense.

So, that’s Exodus 1. Exodus 2: And there went a man of the house of Levi and took to wife a daughter of Levi. That’s an important verse! It is my favorite part of writing with commentary over these years is to take these verses that seem like nothing and realize they're so important; these are the parents of the savior of the Jewish people, Moses.

But there’s nothing special about them, and that’s what that verse says—a certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. That’s a slowly birth motif—a lowly birth; both thief—he doesn’t come from royalty or divine stock or anything—just regular folks gave birth to Moses, right? Just regular folks!

Yes, very nice, very nice. And the woman conceived and bear a son, and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.

Remember, the Egyptians were going to kill the firstborn Israelite males. And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes and dubbed it with slime and with pitch—a little boat—and put the child there in, and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.

Can you see? The word for "boat" is the same as Noah’s Ark! Oh, yeah! This is the saving of the world again, right?

Okay, so that’s interesting. So she makes a little structure, right, which is what you do with children; it’s you build a structure around them. But it’s the word for the Noah’s Ark.

Okay, and this is also the first indicator of what becomes a very profound symbolic motif in the Exodus story because Moses is allied with water throughout the narrative, whereas the Pharaoh and Egypt are allied with stone.

And stone seems permanent and immovable, but it’s brittle and hard and lifeless, and Moses is continually represented as a master of water and transformation. And so this is the first time you see that water is—and water, as Moses is undoing, he hits the rock and says, "I will get you water" and not God, and it doesn’t get into Israel, right?

Well, so I guess when he misuses his relationship with his power over water—

And water is chaotic, right?

Except from a symbolic perspective, yes.

And water is associated with what you immerse yourself in when you're baptized. Water is like the pre-cosmogonic chaos that begins that exists at the beginning of time and so for Moses to be a master of chaos and water is also to make him, procedurally, the antithesis of the tyrant.

Because the tyrant wants everything in stone and solid, and Moses is the antithesis of that. And there’s also, I think—there’s also the—one thing that happens is you have this extreme—you have, let’s say, the Pharaoh, and then you have water. And what happens is what Moses is going to be doing between the entire story is making that mediation between what is above and what is below.

Now you have this little image of the ark as being a little microcosm, which is what you see in Genesis—little microcosm of the world that exists in this extreme, right?

Because in the flood, what you have is a return to the beginning where now it’s Heaven and Earth and there’s nothing in between. Like it’s—both of them can’t sustain life. There has to be a hierarchy of reality that gets pulled out of the water.

And that’s what Moses is going to do—he’s going to go up the mountain and bring down the law, and that is going to create that structure, that mediation between—because even in the text, we’ll see later, like God is also just. God and the people doesn’t seem to work because God is constantly wanting to consume them, and it’s like, "No, no, no, no, don’t consume them!" So we need to have this mediation where being lays itself out and kind of falls down into the world in a way that is appropriate.

One of the things Jung said—this is sort of relevant. If you consider psychedelic experiences as well, which can be far more than people can tolerate, Jung said part of the purpose of religious practice was to stop people from having religious experiences.

And he, because he was very interested in experiences that were extreme enough to border on psychosis for example, and that if you don’t have those intermediary structures between you and the absolutely transcendent, which might be reality itself in the ethical and material sense, then that’s just too much.

And you do see that echoed in motifs like the burning bush where God tells Moses later not to look at him directly; at best, to look at his back, right? Because you just can’t withstand that direct contact with something that exceeds your comprehension in every dimension simultaneously. No matter how good it is, no matter how complete it is, it’s just too much for the mortal soul to bear.

And his sister stood afar off to wit what would be done to him. And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river—

Isn’t it interesting that he’s rescued by the daughter of Pharaoh?

Came down to wash herself at the river and her maidens walked along by the riverside, and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it.

And when she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him and said, "This is one of the Hebrews’ children."

That’s an interesting line from the Jungian perspective as well because Jung would have regarded the anima, the animating principle, which is the feminine spirit, as part of that which is constantly antithetical to the stone-like patriarchal tyrant. And it’s very interesting that it’s the Pharaoh’s own daughter who actually proves her compassion—her genuine compassion—for a helpless infant.

So genuine compassion, properly placed, constitutes part of the power that can be used against the tyrant. And she’s placed exactly in the same position as the midwives were. It’s like here is a Hebrew child and now once again it’s a woman who says that.

So it’s like this is the—you could say that—that's the role of the feminine, is to nurture, is to give potential, is to hold, is to do all these things in order for the person to find their independence, right?

And is there not something of a paradox here, or if you say the man from nowhere, the possible figure in a way, and yet he’s discovered by the Pharaoh’s daughter?

So he has dual—he has—

Okay, so you see this motif is replicated unbelievably commonly. As I say, the motif of the orphan, you see this with the comic book character Superman most particularly because Superman has ordinary parents.

I think he lands in Kansas, if I remember correctly, and so they’re just ordinary farmers, but really, his parents are divine, right? They’re heavenly.

And the Superman brings both of those together, and there is this motif that each of us are the sons or daughters of our fathers and mothers—our proximal fathers and mothers—a well, simultaneously, we are the true sons and daughters of the divine culture, let’s say, and the spirit of culture and nature and the spirit of nature.

And so each of us— that’s why when you’re born lowly, let’s say, you’re actually not because regardless of where you’re born, you’re also the child of—well, of everything, of nature and culture and of the transcendent simultaneously.

And indeed, Christ—I mean, born in the stable—carpenter, but the Davidic lineage! So again, you’ve got that. That’s why the descent into Egypt is so important, isn’t it?

It’s clearly sort of recapitulating that—the motif, yeah—but here a very obvious point. All the heroes are women!

Yeah!

Well, it’s so interesting that the proper heroic target of the women’s heroic action is, in fact, the helpless infant, right? The compassion isn’t being misplaced because compassion, as far as I can tell, in that overarching compassion is particularly appropriate when it’s directed towards that which is truly helpless.

But if it starts to be directed as if towards infants, to those who could be competent, then it starts to become destructive, so it’s feminine compassion in the right place here. And so even if it’s the Pharaoh’s daughter, yes, true maternal virtues, right?

Which is the care of the truly helpless and the truly oppressed.

Then said his sister to Pharaoh’s daughter, "Shall I go and call to the nurse of the Hebrew women that she may nurse the child for thee?"

And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Go!" And the maid went and called the child's mother.

So it’s very sneaky of the Hebrews!

And Pharaoh's daughter said unto her, "Take this child away and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages."

And the woman took the child and nursed it. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son.

So now he’s the son of the king—the grandson of the Pharaoh.

So interesting that that’s also a very powerful—as an adoptive father of two sons, one biological, one adoptive—and this has always spoken to me profoundly, that she is regarded as his mother, and she’s clearly not his biological mother.

In Jewish tradition, she is categorized as Batya, the daughter of God. And she is regarded as Moses’s mother; really interesting!

Very interesting! For those who are interested in the Greek and have taken on the Greek philosophy and everything, Saint Gregory of Nissa sees the relationship between the two mothers and the relationship between his allegiance to Egypt and his allegiance to his mother as the relationship that we have with the pagan past.

That is, we are to learn and to be nurtured by our pagan ancestors and the pagan stories and the pagan philosophers, but to a degree—to a limit. And that ultimately, when you’ll see later, Moses discovers or chooses his true religion by ultimately killing the Egyptian. But that he won’t completely discount it, you know?

And it’s—it’s, well, it’s also the problem we all have when we’re being socialized, because to some degree to be socialized in a time and place is to fall prey to the prevailing tyranny, right? To become an avatar of that culture and the tyrannical aspects of that as well; but hopefully to simultaneously unite that with, you could say, the spirit of Israel, which is the striving towards the wrestling with God.

And then to make that paramount—so Moses's lineage is representative of the lineage of all of us.

And we struggle with that, right? Because now people are ashamed of their pharaonic identity, which is the patriarchal tyranny, and the capacity that that has to produce the atrocities of the past.

But we have to come to terms with it! And the notion that Moses kills the Pharaoh is something like the notion that, well, he overthrows that tyrant within, even though you necessarily owe allegiance, and then you follow something higher—something like that.

It’s important. I mean, this is quite an obvious point, but I think it’s just important dwelling on the point that this is—it’s Pharaoh’s daughter, it is a—this is a non-Jewish moral agent who acts in a saintly way.

And I think this gives us a first taste of a theme that’s going to come to dominate, and morality isn’t bound by ethnicity—that’s right.

This is a great gift of the Jewish people, this insight that morality is universal; it’s a gift to the world.

It’s something that all human beings as it were abound to. Pull later in the New Testament makes this point again in Romans 1 and chapter 1 of and chapter 2 of Romans. The Gentiles, as it were, have the law written upon their hearts, and I think this will be something that’s very important when we come to look at the Ten Commandments and so on.

But yeah, so that’s another echo of that notion of a transcendent good, right?

Exactly! Which in the context of ancient Near Eastern religion, it’s difficult to—difficult to sort of exaggerate the point too much. You know, it really is quite extraordinary; this idea that there is a moral code that cuts right across all tribes and all nations—it’s anthropologically absurd in some sense because the anthropological evidence suggests that we’re pretty damn tribal.

And that the fundamental human response in some sense towards people who aren’t of your tribe is that they’re not human.

So it’s really an amazing vision beyond the parochial confines of—well, tribulation.

It’s the first real discovery that morality is a possession that all human beings have, and it’s a crucial point.

I mean, people often say that the Code of Hammurabi and that there are these sort of insights into how other peoples and other tribes are to be treated in ethically responsible ways, but I think here it really is—a remarkable insight—the sort of the universalism, the objectivity of moral values and to Dennis’s point, the elevation of the foreigner to ethical status that supersedes the ethical status of the in-group ethnic member.

Right? Amazing thing! That’s an amazing thing, it’s very hard to account for that.

Relative to that divine authorship, it’s very interesting, relative to that point that we’re talking about the midwives who choose not to kill the children in the case of the mother.

I just think this is an amazing image. I mean, the mother can only save her son by giving him up.

And not only giving him up, but actually commending him to—not simply the river, but to—I mean, the anti-ethnic character of what’s going on here. That somehow she herself must commend her own son to what you might perceive of as the enemy.

Well, that is what happens when you raise a child, though!

And especially true if you raise the son, because the son has to move beyond you into the culture.

And if the culture has a tyrannically patriarchal element, which would be the Egyptian element, let’s say, then in order to foster your son’s development, you have to let the world take him.

And that would even be the case if the broader social world has that tyrannical proclivity.

And if you don’t do that, you fail as a mother, though there’s a deep sense in which the maternal instinct can only be fulfilled by transcending itself. And that’s what you see here. You can only save the son by literally giving him up.

Yeah, well, that’s a sacrifice of the child motif, right? So, which is a very difficult idea to come to terms with.

You see that in the Passover, in some sense, that great Michelangelo statue where you see Mary offering her broken son to the world.

And that’s what mothers do, right? That’s what they have to do.

I think that’s equivalent to the female crucifixion, in some real sense.

It’s like you have to allow your children—you have to offer up your children to be broken by the work—to the world, broken by the world.

Yeah, so, and it came to pass in those days when Moses was grown that he went out into his brethren—that’d be the Egyptians or the Hebrews—and looked upon their burdens, and he spied an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew—one of his brethren.

And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man around, he slew the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

And when he went out the second day, behold, two men of the Hebrews strove together, and he said to him that did the wrong, "Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?"

And he said, "Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me as thou killest the Egyptian?"

And Moses feared and said, "Surely this thing is known."

Now when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to slay Moses, but Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.

So back to the water imagery there—I just want to say about this little text. This is actually one of my if I have a little favorite text in Exodus, it’s this little text because it’s a little microcosm again of what’s going to happen because Moses has to do two things: he has to overthrow the tyrant, and he has to help the Hebrews become something. He has to bring them together so that they become a nation.

And it’s like—that’s right there! He kills the Egyptian, and then he gets into trouble, and then he comes to his own brothers, and they’re like, "Who—who are you?"

Like, who made you king? You know, who made you our chief?

And so he has to go through the entire—this whole process again to now go up the mountain, have this vision of God, even though he's fighting the tyrant. He doesn’t—in caution, he’s doing the right—he wants to do the right thing, and then it ultimately is all going to happen because when he sees God, then he receives from God that authority, receives from God that capacity to then bring the law, and then join and create—not create, but consolidate, let’s say, the Hebrew people into it, right?

So the murderous impulse, which is generated by the moral revulsion against the slavery of his people, is manifest in that careless homicide, and that just about dooms Moses. And that would have doomed the entire enterprise.

Yeah, well, it’s careless in that—

Okay, that’s a fine question. It’s careless in that he presumes it’s only going to be successful if it’s done in secret, and it turns out not to be secret. It turns out to be revealed, and I think that’s part of your point, isn’t it?

Well, I mostly see it that it’s a messy version of what he’s actually going to do with the proper authority from God. He doesn’t yet have the authority from God, so he does this thing. He kills the Egyptian, and it’s messy, and then he tries to reconcile his brothers, and it’s messy, and he has to flee. He doesn’t have what it takes to do it, you know?

And so you can think about it like in terms of your own bad habits or whatever. Now you can try to take them on, right? You can try to change your habits; you can try to consolidate your attention.

Yeah, good luck with that! You have to go through the desert! Like there’s a whole process of prayer and purification that you have to go through before you can attend to those things.

If you try to take on your own tyrants just like that, good luck—like they’re going to come back and smash you down for the job, not yet, that’s right.

But Dennis, you said earlier, though, a couple of Levites, you know, but don’t you know traditions say that Levi was the one who went out and slew the people who raped his sister, and he took things into his own hand—and the Messiah will come from Judah.

And you know he went and got a prostitute to his own daughter-in-law.

The origins of our heroes, or look at what David did; again to the father of the Messiah—the man commits adultery. That’s pretty common, unfortunately, because he has the man killed to sleep with his wife.

And that’s by the way—I have zero interest in bringing any politics into this, so my point is not political at all. But that was my argument with regard to Donald Trump—the idea that because he is a man who has committed many sins, he is not an appropriate leader has no biblical basis.

We’d all be in trouble if the precondition for action was sinlessness, that’s clear.

And wasn’t what William Blake’s dictum? Wisdom through excess.

And there’s also ideas that are reflected in the gospels too that there’s more treasure in some spiritual sense heaped up by those who dare to sin and then are then repent and are reclaimed than those who are too terrified to take any action whatsoever on the off chance that they might make a mistake.

Christ says the same thing in Revelation; when he comes back as a judge, he says that his harshest judgment isn’t reserved for those who are hot or those who are cold, so the good or the evil for that matter, but for those who play both ends against the middle and sit and sit and never commit.

And that’s really an interesting idea, right? Is that in some real sense God—at least how God’s represented in the Old Testament—is definitely the spirit on the side of the adventurous, for better or worse.

And that’s quite something, right? Because it also I think bears some light, sheds some light on this notion of the terrifying element of the transcendent.

It’s not whatever God’s goodness is; it’s not some simple, harmless, all-encompassing weak compassion. It’s something terrifying in its moral breadth, because it would really be something if the spirit of God is on the side of the rampantly adventurous.

I think you can make a strong case for that, at least from within the confines of the biblical corpus. I mean, Abraham’s an adventurer; Moses is an adventurer; Noah is an adventurer; David’s an adventurer—they aren’t people who stayed home and tried to never cause any trouble, right? Which is a kind of emasculation in and of itself, so...

Well, faith is adventure. I think people have faith—I call it the entrepreneurs of life.

And so why make the entrepreneurial connection?

There’s a vision, there’s a venture, there’s a risk, there’s a cost, and the whole thing is wrapped up with that.

Well, I think that it’s lovely to tie that in with faith too because in our culture, people often denigrate faith as belief in the unbelievable—as if it’s a purely—if it’s first of all purely propositional and, second of all, it’s just a denial of evidence.

You see that in the atheist crowds constantly, but to me, faith is something like the willingness to take a risk based on a presumption. And maybe the presumption is, "Well, truth will set you free." It’s like, well, tell the truth and see what happens; is it going to get you in a lot of trouble?

The evidence that aggregates around you, if you tell the truth to the degree that you can.... Isn’t that going to be the easy path forward?

You have to decide; this is something Kierkegaard stressed, right? Is that you have to decide certain things as preconditions for action, independent in some real sense of the evidence, and that’s the faith.

And this is when Abraham, for example, in his great adventure, he follows God’s call out of the safety of the tent. The faith is to heed the call of adventure even though you’ve got everything in some sense that you need if you’re only interested in hedonistic gratification.

But there’s something beyond that, and it’s faith that allows you to make those decisions to step into the unknown future. And that’s coming from Moses, as John was hinting.

I mean, here he does it himself—who sets you up?

He did! And to take on Pharaoh by himself!

Right.

There’s also, though, I think, as I'm going to argue, I think there’s a profound sense in which Moses is a very weak figure and in many respects if the text is, as it were, about the revelation of a kind of transcendent order in history and about our ourselves as readers coming to understand ourselves in that—I mean, I don’t think we should presume that somehow Moses or himself is not a figure who needs that very revelation and to come into it himself, right?

And I think that you know the persistent imagery we’re going to see, Moses here is actually a very weak and doubtless and failing and so on.

So he’s unable to speak, yes. He is himself in need of that discovery of himself in that transcendent revelation as anyone else.

You see the transformation of Moses, although he does make that mistake. You see him move from a character who stands—no, hitting the rock—the one mistake. It’s like for Moses, but he goes from this character who says, "God, I can’t speak. I can’t speak in front of people." And then he ends later as this shining figure that comes down the mountain—and people can’t even look on him.

Because God says, "You will be God for them." And he has to hide his face because he’s so radiant.

And it’s like that transformation is astounding—it’s such an interesting—he finishes with unstoppable words at the end of Deuteronomy: the man that couldn’t speak—he’s very eloquent, right?

Well, and it tells you something about what constitutes the power of true speech.

And the notion there is something like—if the words are from God, let’s say, it doesn’t matter how impaired you are in your utterance of them; that’s a secondary consideration.

And so it’s—despite or maybe even because of your insufficiency in some real sense, if you’re oriented properly, the words will—and I’ve met people like that who are not particularly articulate, but you listen to every word they say because their words are very carefully measured and chosen.

Often purchased at the cost of plenty of suffering, and they just have that depth, that’s uncanny in some real sense. You call those people of genuine character.

And you can certainly—when those people speak, everyone is still, and that’s really something. It’s really something to see.

By the way, there’s a very interesting parallel since Abraham was raised— we know nothing, absolutely nothing about Abraham before God speaks to him, but we know a lot about Moses before God chooses him.

And there are three stories—we’ve just done two—killing the Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, interfering in the fight of the two Hebrews, and now he will defend these women who are not Hebrews against non-Hebrew male bullies—that’s a remarkable man.

And in one case, he killed; in one case, he spoke, and in another case, he just stood up. He is a very impressive man at this point, Moses, and we know no one is going to ask, “Gee, why did God choose him?”

These are three impressive stories, right?

Right, right. So that they’re all elucidating different aspects of his willingness to stand up against tyranny, irrespective of sex and irrespective of nationality.

[Dr. Prager]: Right?! Okay, okay. Well, we come to that now. Now, the priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and drew water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock.

And the shepherds—these bullies that you talked about, Dennis—came and drove them away, and that’s pretty low. I mean, you come across a bunch of women trying to get some water, and your manifestation of your power is to chase them away?! How pathetic!

But Moses stood up and helped them and watered their flock. And when they came to Rule their father, he said, "How is it that ye are come so soon today?"

And they said, "An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds." That’s an echoing phrase, right?

Because that’s another one of these fractal prodromas because the shepherds are the bullying tyrants, and Moses is the delivering—is the delivering force there. And they also drew water enough for us.

So that’s a reference to the pre-cosmogonic chaos again that revivifies in the face of tyranny and watered the flock—amazing imagery in that line.

And he said unto his daughters, "And where is he? Why is it that you have left the man? Call him that he may eat bread." Seems like the right response.

And Moses was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter, and she bore him a son, and he called his name Gershon, for he said, "I have been a stranger in a strange land."

So that means Moses is, obviously, a compelling enough character so that a father is willing to marry his daughter to him, despite the fact that he’s a stranger and a foreigner.

And there’s also in this text like this whole—this whole meeting of the women at the well is super important in terms of understanding this relationship between the woman also and the well itself as this water—the potential—which is the positive aspect of the lower waters, you could say.

And so that’s why you see the patriarchs, they always meet their wives at wells. And ultimately, in terms of Christianity, that leads all the way to the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, which is like the final version of that, where he meets this strange woman, and then, you know, she offers him water, he offers her like a fountain that will go into eternity.

And it’s like this relationship between the masculine and the feminine is so old—it’s the active waters, the fresh water, than the salt water. You see it in Mesopotamian myth—it’s a super old structure, but it’s...

Yeah, the water is revivifying, right?

And so are our water-like ideas! If you’re stuck in the desert of the tyranny of your own mind, then there are certain ideas that strike you as revivifying.

We talked about that in relationship to the revelation you said it was odd and received, right?

And he’s looking at tyranny right in the face, in the movie theater, and a revivifying idea strikes him, and it has this—it has this ability to quench a thirst that’s much deeper than mere physical thirst, and a symbolic analog to thirst-quenching is often provided by women with their animating spirit, right?

So, and it came to pass, in process of time, that the king of Egypt died, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage. That’s a very useful line too because we see here too that not only is it wrong for the Egyptians to enslave the Israelites, but it’s correct for the Israelites to grieve because they’re not free.

And so what we see implicit in the narrative here is this constant insistence that those who wrestle with God—that’s Israel—should be free. That’s a higher moral good!

And you might say, “Well, that’s self-evident, as we discussed earlier,” but it’s not even the Israelites themselves, when they end up in the desert and in the other terrible places their wandering takes them to.

A lot of them pine for the days of their subjugation to tyranny. And if you know anything about nostalgia for Stalin in the former Soviet Union, for example, or the continual worship of Mao—you can understand this.

I read a book at one point that was written by concentration camp guards who were nostalgic for the work they did in the concentration camps in Germany.

And so don’t be thinking that people believe without constraint that freedom and absence of slavery is a positive good—they can be afraid of that.

That necessity for faith—that entrepreneurial spirit demands—they’d rather take the brick walls, the certainty.