Key Verses: Exodus 19-20

Key Questions


1. Why does God call the people to the mountain but also set boundaries around it? What does this tension between intimacy and distance say about the nature of divine holiness?
2. What does it mean for Israel to be a “kingdom of priests”? How does that reshape their role in the world? How was this calling applied to the church in the New Testament and how might this calling apply to faith communities today?
3. Why is physical preparation (like washing clothes and abstaining from sex) required before meeting God? What does this say about how bodies, boundaries, and holiness are understood in the ancient world?
4. How do the commandments in Exodus 20 build a new moral and social structure in contrast to Egypt’s Empire? Which ones speak most directly to issues of injustice today? How does each commandment undo some part of Egypt’s domination (forced labor, idol worship, disregard for the vulnerable)? How can we read the commandments as a call to social transformation, not just personal piety?
5. What does Sabbath teach us about God’s justice? How is it a radical alternative to the systems of exploitation in Pharaoh’s Egypt—and today?

Theological Insights


“Equality is the holy grail of revolutionary politics. It has often been sought, but never achieved. The two best-known attempts have been equality of wealth (through communism or socialism) or equality of power (through participative, as opposed to representative, democracy). It is unlikely that any such system will endure, because wealth and power are essentially contested goods. The more you have, the less I have. Therefore my gain is your loss. Knowledge is different. If I give all I know to you, I will not thereby know less. I may know more. Equality of dignity based on universal access to knowledge is the only equality likely to last in the long run… At Mount Sinai, all Israel became partners to the covenant. God spoke to everyone – the only recorded revelation, not to a prophet or a group of initiates but to an entire people. Everyone was party to the law, because, potentially, everyone could read it and know it. All were equal citizens in the nation of faith under the sovereignty of God. That is what happened at Sinai… Torah… was not a code written by a distant king, to be imposed by force. Nor was it an esoteric mystery understood by only a scholarly elite. It was to be available to, and intelligible by, everyone. God was to become a teacher, Israel His pupils, and the Torah the text that bound them to one another.” Sacks, Covenant and Conversation.


“[I am the Lord your God] keeps the law personally oriented… Obedience is relationally conceived… Those who are given the law are already God’s people. Hence the law is not understood as a means of salvation but as instruction regarding the shape such as redeemed life is to take in one’s everyday affairs.” Fretheim, Exodus (Interpretation), 223-224.

“In rabbinic legend, the Decalogue was offered by God to all the other peoples of the earth only to be rejected by them. That it was proclaimed in the wilderness, and not within any national boundaries, highlights its universality.” Sarna, Exodus, 109.