Exodus 1:1-6:1
Destined for an Upgrade
God first appeared to Moses at the burning bush on Mount Horeb, in Midian, where Moses had been shepherding his father-in-law’s flocks. He instructed Moses to go back to Egypt and demand that Pharaoh free the enslaved Israelites. In fact, He told Moses exactly what to say: “Thus says the Lord: Israel is My firstborn son. Now I am telling you, let My son go and worship Me—and if you refuse to let him go, I will kill your firstborn son” (Exod 4:22-23).
The threat had an obvious symmetry about it, firstborn son for firstborn son. But it is interesting to note that Moses never carried out this command. Why not? Perhaps it was not clear to him why Israel might ever be called God’s “firstborn” at all.
Certainly the first human being that God created was Adam; if any human deserved to be called God’s firstborn son, Adam should have been the one. Twenty-two generations separated Adam from Israel’s immediate ancestor, Jacob. Thus, anyone contemplating the great tree of humanity could only describe Israel as a little twig off of a little branch off of a slightly bigger branch off of a still bigger one…
Surprisingly, numerous ancient interpreters of the Bible wrestled with this problem. One solution (found among the Dead Sea Scrolls) held that Jacob was God’s firstborn because God had the idea of creating Jacob first. That is to say: when God made the world in six days and rested on the first Sabbath, He resolved to create His own special people sometime in the future. Although this people’s actual creation was still a long way off, the fact that God had conceived of Israel in that first week of creation was, according to this interpretation, sufficient reason for Israel to be called God’s firstborn—and why Moses, generations later, could be commanded to say to Pharaoh in Exod 4:22, “Israel is My firstborn son.”
There was, however, another explanation among ancient interpreters, and this one ultimately won the day. It maintained that Israel was not born God’s firstborn at all. There was no such thing. Rather, Israel had acquired a certain special status, similar to that of a firstborn son in an ancient Israelite family, because Israel was uniquely under God’s direct supervision from ancient times. Indeed, God gave Israel a great list of do’s and don’ts to observe—the Torah—just as a disciplinarian father might lay down the law in his own family. In short, Israel wasn’t born into being God’s firstborn; it was promoted.
This theme was widespread among Jews in late biblical times. For example, the book of Ben Sira (second century BCE) asserts:
When He apportioned out all the nations of the earth, for each nation He established a [heavenly] ruler, but Israel is the Lord’s own portion, whom, being His firstborn son, He brought up with discipline. (Some mss. of Sir 17:17-18)
The word for discipline in Hebrew is musar, a word that carries its root meaning of “chasten” or “punish.” Indeed, elsewhere the Torah says that “Just as a father disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you” (Deut 8:5). So, while Israel has sometimes suffered for being under God’s watchful eye, it has also been rewarded by dint of its special status, what Ben Sira called “firstborn by dint of discipline.”
Of course, when Moses went in to speak with Pharaoh for the first time, he couldn’t have known what God meant by instructing him to say that Israel was His firstborn: the exodus had not yet started, and certainly the Sinai revelation was far off. Maybe that is why Moses didn’t actually say what he had been told to say, “Thus says the Lord: Israel is My firstborn son” (for what he said instead, see Exod 5:1-3). But later events were to make clear that Israel had been destined for an upgrade all along.