Exodus Quotes

“We love rainy days don't we baby?”
― Kate Stewart, Exodus

“When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over, and that they would soon in the land of Canaan, surrounded by their wives and little ones, forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his power:—'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted.' This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert, and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless, that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart, cannot be accepted as a revelation from God.

When we think of the poor Jews, destroyed, murdered, bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, decimated by famine, butchered by each, other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, deceived, robbed and outraged, how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt, and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah, Pharaoh was a benefactor, and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God.

While reading the Pentateuch, I am filled with indignation, pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert, the prey of famine, sword, and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree, governed by falsehood, plundered by hypocrisy, they were the sport of priests, and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy, and death their only friend.

It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus to Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible, and no further: for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which Tacitus relates were performed by Vespasian, that of curing a lame man, and a blind man, in just the same manner as the same things are told of Jesus Christ by his historians. We must also believe the miracles cited by Josephus, that of the sea of Pamphilia opening to let Alexander and his army pass, as is related of the Red Sea in Exodus. These miracles are quite as well authenticated as the Bible miracles, and yet we do not believe them; consequently the degree of evidence necessary to establish our belief of things naturally incredible, whether in the Bible or elsewhere, is far greater than that which obtains our belief to natural and probable things.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“The desert shatters the soul's arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger. In the desert we trust God or die.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path

“And those who will carefully study the so-called 'Mosaic code' contained in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, will see that, though Jahveh's prohibitions of certain forms of immorality are strict and sweeping, his wrath is quite as strongly kindled against infractions of ritual ordinances. Accidental homicide may go unpunished, and reparation may be made for wilful theft. On the other hand, Nadab and Abihu, who 'offered strange fire before Jahveh, which he had not commanded them,' were swiftly devoured by Jahveh's fire; he who sacrificed anywhere except at the allotted place was to be 'cut off from his people'; so was he who ate blood; and the details of the upholstery of the Tabernacle, of the millinery of the priests' vestments, and of the cabinet work of the ark, can plead direct authority from Jahveh, no less than moral commands.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, The Evolution Of Theology: An Anthropological Study

“Chelnov directed Rubin's attention to the geography of Moses' crossing. From the Nile to Jerusalem the Jews had at most 250 miles to go, and that meant that even if they rested on the Sabbath they could have easily covered the distance in three weeks. Wasn't it necessary therefore to assume that for the remaining forty years Moses did not simply lead them but misled them all over the Arabian desert?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“The workers of Europe ought to henceforth declare themselves as a class a human impossibility... they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

“Jesus Christ is coming back because God's divine plan for humanity involves a second exodus; a supernatural exodus.”
― Felix Wantangntang

“There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs
of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register
their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the
others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built
on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the
government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal
migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and
leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too
leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries
lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five
thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and
kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the
pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to
dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why
was that why was that why was that why was that.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

“¿Quién soy después de este éxodo? Tengo una roca
a mi nombre sobre las llanuras que se asoma al pasado

مَنْ أَنا بَعْدَ هذا ٱلرَّحيلِ ٱلْجَماعِيِّ؟ لي صَخْرَةٌ
تَحْمِلُ ٱسْمِيَ فَوْقَ هِضابٍ تُطلُّ على ما مَضَى”
― Mahmoud Darwish, أحد عشر كوكبا

“Until we meet again, Until we can feel the rain on both our faces. There has to be a time for us in the next life. I don't want any part of a heaven where I don't see you.”
― Kate Stewart, Exodus

“The phrase as weak as a baby doesn’t apply in the kingdom of God, for when the Lord wants to accomplish a mighty work, He often starts by sending a baby. This was true when He sent Isaac, Joseph, Samuel, John the Baptist, and especially Jesus. God can use the weakest things to defeat the mightiest enemies (1 Cor. 1: 25–29). A baby’s tears were God’s first weapons in His war against Egypt (p. 21).”
― Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Delivered (Exodus): Finding Freedom by Following God

“We love rainy days don't we baby?”
― Kate Stewart, Exodus

“In his invitation to The road-weary spiritual seekers, Jesus offered to be to them what God was to the nation of Israel while they wandered in the desert. He promised to those who followed him that he would be their shelter, defender, leader, and provider.”
― Will Davis Jr., 10 Things Jesus Never Said: And Why You Should Stop Believing Them

“....[T]he night terrors were no match for the glory of waking up to a new day in the Land of Israel. In every conscious moment, Yael was aware that she was living through times that would form the legends and myths of future generations. Just as her generation told and retold the story of the Exodus from Egypt—the event that changed the nature of Israel forever—so would her people hundreds of years from now tell of the end of the Great Exile and the return to this land. The wonder of it touched everything around her, casting a golden glow over even the most mundane events. Nothing seemed impossible, and nothing seemed entirely real.”
― Yael Shahar, A Damaged Mirror

“A flat map is fun in its purest state.”
― Michael W. Clune, Gamelife: A Memoir

“I am not a man of words, not yesterday, not the day before, not from the first time You spoke to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.”
― Anonymous, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures

“Looking back at the knowledge economies discussed earlier, we can recognize that the dynamic coupling of human societies and the Earth system not only depended on the generation of knowledge, but enhanced, in turn, the significance of that generation. In a process extending over millennia, scientific knowledge eventually became a crucial component of economic growth; it is now becoming no less important in coping with its consequences. Substantial anthropogenic change on a global scale was evidently already characteristic of the Holocene and the late Pleistocene, from the human-induced extinction of great mammals via Neolithization and urbanization to the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. What characterizes the Anthropocene is the need to actively prevent the Earth system from transgressing planetary boundaries. The emergence of this need is closely related to the cascade of evolutionary processes described above. Just as cultural evolution started as a side-show of biological evolution before it became the conditio humana (the essential condition of human life), epistemic evolution, that is, the growing dependence of human societies on knowledge economies producing scientific knowledge, was, for a long time, no more than a tangential aspect of cultural evolution. But with the onset of the Anthropocene, the survival of human culture as we know it hinges on this.”
― Jürgen Renn, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene

“Exodus is certainly not the loss of all of Egypt, but only of the Egypt that is unable or unwilling to reform, to creatively respond to internal criticism, and to be radically hospitable in ways that enshrine healthy living for its people and the future. Deprived of such work of internal innovation and development, Egypt must be rejected.”
― Kenneth N Ngwa, Let My People Live: An African Reading of Exodus

“It is no longer enough to simply explore how to survive while sharing space with the structure that threatens to eliminate you; one must ask how to redesign the structure.”
― Kenneth N Ngwa, Let My People Live: An African Reading of Exodus

“Fragile systems and ideologies have a way of producing fragile minds and mindsets that rely on marginalizing others. The appropriate response to this reality is ultimately not to switch residential zip codes but to change governing ideology... To shift location from Egypt to Canaan, without changing the underlying social, political, and ideological determinants of marginalization, is to transfer the problem rather than resolve it.”
― Kenneth N Ngwa, Let My People Live: An African Reading of Exodus

“Thus framed the first narrative lacuna, the first release of communal tears, in this storied journey is that the oppressive Pharaoh did not know Joseph. What it is about Joseph that this Pharaoh—only the latest in a succession of Pharaohs within the political institution—did not know is unclear and unstated. But far as epistemological amnesia screams for narrative and interpretive attention. His amnesia is corrosive to the communal and interpret of existence of the Hebrews. And it is from that abyss that the exodus-motif begins to birth Exodus-story.”
― Kenneth N Ngwa, Let My People Live: An African Reading of Exodus

“Against exploitation of human and nonhuman life, the Exodus story’s earthly and earthy focus—the rootedness of home in the earth—signifies that political liberation without ecological liberation is not only insufficient but also deficient and ultimately unacceptable.”
― Kenneth N Ngwa, Let My People Live: An African Reading of Exodus

“But I'm keeping my love story, not because it included both a martyr and sacrifice, or because it's the story I wanted, it's because I would never rewrite it. And I would live it all over again just for the chance to sing with him.”
― Kate Stewart, Exodus

“A fucking Greek tragedy with a Shakespearean twist. And for all my efforts, I can't at all renounce my name. I'll forever be the Capulet without a Romeo”
― Kate Stewart, Exodus

“Where America's WWII generation is often lauded as its greatest, the Chinese contemporaries of that generation deny any claims to such superlatives. Especially when China's 5,000 year history spans hundreds of generations.

Nevertheless, this particular demographic defined by exodus and liberation, possesses the greatness that they share with all who survived the savagery of war, social upheaval, violent extremism, and the desperate scramble to find safe haven anywhere.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“Certainly, what was true for the refugees and exiles of Shanghai remains true for people fleeing catastrophe in contemporary times. Whether these migrants are driven from Syria, Myanmar, Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, or too many other places. These refugees have all faced the agonizing choice of whether to stay, or to flee.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“In a world fractured by turmoil, there's much to learn from the profound human experience shared by the uprooted and displaced.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“There are many lessons to be learned from refugees and migrants that can contribute to the understanding needed to navigate the global tectonics to bring people together, not drive them into flight.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“34:6-7. merciful, gracious, slow to anger, kindness, faithfulness, bearing crime and offense and sin. This is possibly the most repeated and quoted formula in the Tanak (Num 14:18-19; Jon 4:2; Joel 2:13; Mic 7:18; Pss 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; 2 Chr 30:9; Neh 9:17,31). The Torah never says what the essence of God is, in contrast to the pagan gods. Baal is the storm wind, Dagon is grain, Shamash is the sun. But what is YHWH? This formula, expressed in the moment of the closest revelation any human has of God in the Bible, is the closest the Torah comes to describing the nature of God. Although humans are not to know what the essence is, they can know what are the marks of the divine personality: mercy, grace. In eight (or nine) different ways we are told of God's compassion. The last line of the formula ("though not making one innocent") conveys that this does not mean that one can just get away with anything; there is still justice. But the formula clearly places the weight on divine mercy over divine justice, and it never mentions divine anger. Those who speak of the "Old Testament God of wrath" focus disproportionately on the episodes of anger in the Bible and somehow lose this crucial passage and the hundreds of times that the divine mercy functions in the Hebrew Bible.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah