The Exodus in the Bible's Teaching and Our Teaching of the Bible: Helping to Reconcile Faith and Critical Study of the Bible Through Threshold Concept Theory

Abstract

For students coming from a religious background to Biblical Studies, it can sometimes be difficult to reconcile faith and critical study of the Hebrew Bible, struggling with the concepts of multiple voices within the text, and multiple methods of interpretation in scholarship. This article will explore the use of the Exodus event as a Threshold Concept in the Bible's teaching, and propose that it can be used as a helpful model for students encountering critical study of the Bible. It will be shown that the Exodus event has differing accounts and multiple interpretations throughout the Bible, and that these function according to the characteristics of a Threshold Concept, by being transformative, integrative, troublesome and affective [Meyer, Jan H. F., and Ray L. Land. 2006a. ‘Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: An Introduction’. In Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts an Troublesome Knowledge, edited by Jan Meyer and Ray Land, 3-18. London: Routledge]. This analysis of a Threshold Concept within the Bible can be used as a model in the classroom for the transformative nature of story, providing a framework for contemporary interpretation of the Biblical texts.

KEYWORDS:

• Biblical Studies
• Exodus
• Threshold Concepts

Notes

1 Please note that my discussion here primarily focuses on the Hebrew Bible, although certainly the concepts relate equally to New Testament study. All Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

2 The precise nature of this challenge for accepting multiple voices and interpretations varies for different students, as illustrated by the three approaches in Brettler et al. (2012). Similarly, it is described by Todd Penner in Sharp and Clark-Soles (2012: 363), ‘At one school the faith issues emerging in the Genesis creation account were already quite challenging to the majority of students. … At another school, to challenge these students you have to press a lot harder and perhaps get them to consider the liberationist and liberative potential in the biblical text …’

3 Cf. Camp in Camp et al. (2013: 257) who discusses a different hurdle, that of encouraging students to face problem texts in the Bible and recognize it as the voice of an Other. She observes that one alternative taken by students is to blame the ‘liberal’ professor, and so it is important the educator does not place herself in this position of the one who oppresses the students with oppressive texts, rather taking a more productive approach.

4 Smith (2013: 133) observes that the reverse also takes place, where educators ignore the student's personal goals for studying religion and he argues that this is counterproductive for effective learning.

5 This documentary hypothesis was made prominent in studies of the Pentateuch by Wellhausen. For a recent overview and fresh analysis, see Baden (2012).

6 Note in Hebrew the name is Yom Suf, Sea of Reeds. However, it has come into English as Red Sea, not to be confused with the modern day Red Sea.

7 Note that most of the examples in this paper come from the narrative books, Psalms and prophetic books. However, there are also examples of uses of the Exodus from other quite different Biblical traditions such as Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs and Daniel (see Zakovitch, 1991).

8 See Propp (1999: 35–36) and Ackerman (2002: 66–71) on the liminality of the Exodus experience, and the literal marking of Israel as ‘betwixt and between’.

9 For example, breaking God's laws results in being cut off from the people, that is, no longer being an Israelite (see Exod. 12.15, and Exod. 31.14).

10 Note that there are multiple interpretations in different traditions for the forty years in the wilderness. In Num. 14.34, it is so ‘you shall bear your iniquity, forty years, and you shall know my displeasure’, that is experience judgment. On the other hand, Deut. 8.2 remembers the forty years as a test, ‘Remember the long way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments’. Both explanations imply hardship and a liminal space for Israel.

11 See Loewenstamm (1992, 26–27) for a discussion of the implication in Ezekiel 20 that God himself appeared to Israel in Egypt. This is in contrast to the Pentateuch traditions where God reveals himself through Moses. Ezekiel 20 also differs from other traditions by asserting that Israel sinned against God in Egypt whereas others (e.g. Deut. 9.7) suppose Israel provoked God only after leaving Egypt.

12 See also how elements of the Exodus are used to give authority to laws, for example in Exod. 22.21 [Hebrew: 22.20], ‘You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’ (Zakovitch, 1991: 108; Loewenstamm, 1992: 57–60).

13 Note the observation that part of the troublesomeness of threshold concepts is that students can mimic understanding but not actually grasp it and use it for themselves (Cousin, 2006: 139–40).

14 The final form of the text reads as one festival of Passover, but it seems there were originally two different festivals in the J and P traditions, the festival of unleavened bread and the Passover (Gesundheit, 2012).

15 On the role of rituals in collective memory, see Connerton (1989: 38) and Misztal (2003: 127–32).

16 Bishop (2006: 182–84) proposes that analogies in science teaching are most successful when the comparison is to a domain with which the students are familiar and when there is more than a single mapping in the analogy, that is, there are several links in the comparison (although he also warns against over-complication). See also Mathews McGinnis (2002) who proposes using the model of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart to encourage students to look at multiple voices in the text; and Gravett (2015) on Moses as a useful metaphor for teaching.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachelle Gilmour

Rachelle Gilmour (PhD, University of Sydney) is Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the Broken Bay Institute, Australia.