Over the second half of the semester, the EU is exploring the book of Exodus at their lunchtime Public Meetings. Across the forty chapters, there’s far more content than we can handle in seven weeks. But as Seth Fellows and I have prepared our public meeting talks, we have felt the burden of wanting to help the students grapple with a part of the Bible that they might be both familiar with and simultaneously have no idea about. 

For every well-known story in Exodus, there are several chapters that are mostly unfamiliar or unknown to today’s generation of students. What do you do with the several chapters of detailed instructions on how to build the tabernacle? Or what about the commands given at Sinai which are difficult to square with our ethical sensibilities? 

That’s why it’s important for the ministry of the EU Grads Fund, alongside the EU, to explore Biblical books like Exodus (or Leviticus, which Rowan did last year), which may be more difficult and confronting for the students to grapple with.

Across the early talks in the series, a unified picture emerges: the God who reveals his name, displays his power, judges injustice, and rescues his people. It also emerges that Exodus cares a lot about the meaning and significance of names. The second book of the Bible, which we know as Exodus but is known to Hebrew readers as ‘And these are the names’, forces us to think hard about names. After all, many characters in Exodus are named because of their significance:

• The sons of Jacob, the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel. 
• The names of Moses and his family, especially his siblings Aaron and Miriam.
• The seven women who rescue Moses in the opening chapters of Exodus. 

Surprisingly, there’s one character you might expect to be named, but isn’t: the Egyptian King, who seeks to bend everyone and everything to his will. Though powerful in his day, this antagonist is known to us only by the titular ‘Pharaoh’. 

Then, significantly, God reveals his name in Exodus. God makes himself known to Moses as the God of his ancestors, the Lord, or ‘I am who I am.’ That piece of knowledge is not something that Moses discovers or discerns on his own. Rather, the book of Exodus invites us to not only know the name, but to know the one who bears the name. After all, to know and be known by name is to be invited into a relationship.