Joshua Berman on How the Exodus Story Turns Egyptian Imagery on Its Head

There is an irony set at the cornerstone of Jewish memory. The very texts that proclaim the Jewish people's liberation from Egypt—the Song of the Sea, the Haggadah that we recite at the Passover seder—borrow their most evocative imagery from the propaganda of our Egyptian oppressors. For instance: the phrase "mighty hand and outstretched arm," which the Torah uses to describe God's miraculous deeds, appears hundreds of times in the royal inscriptions of the Egyptian New Kingdom, applied to the pharaoh himself. The Torah doesn't just recount the Hebrew slaves' deliverance from Egypt. The Torah took Egyptian language, Egyptian symbols, and even Egypt's greatest military triumph, and turned it all inside out.

This is the argument that the Bar-Ilan University Bible professor Joshua Berman has been developing for years, including in the pages of Mosaic. And that insight now resides at the center of his new Haggadah, lavishly illustrated with hieroglyphics, photos, and sketches that situate the Passover seder in the historical setting from which the Hebrew slaves escaped. Rabbi Berman joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the book, and the argument that underlies it.

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