The Story I Was Raised On

Words to Know

Exile — when a conquering empire carries a people away from their own land.

Jubilee — the rule that every fifty years, land goes back to the family that lost it, and debts are cleared.

Prophet — not a fortune teller. Someone who tells you what God thinks of what you are doing right now.

You know pieces of this already. Abraham. Moses. David. Daniel.

What almost nobody gets is the order, and why one thing caused the next. That is what makes sense of everything.

Here it is, once, straight through.

It starts with a promise.

Every people has a story about how it began. Mine starts with one man and a promise from God that his family would grow into a nation of their own. A man named Abraham is told to leave home and go to a land he has never seen (Genesis 12:1–3).

His grandson has twelve sons. Those twelve become twelve tribes.

Remember the number twelve. It comes back in Lesson 10, and it will explain something that has been sitting in your Bible your whole life.

One of the twelve is a boy named Joseph, and the next part will not work without him.

His brothers sell him to traders going down to Egypt (Genesis 37). Because he can read the king’s dreams, he ends up running the country’s grain, and he puts seven good harvests in storehouses (Genesis 41). Then a famine comes, and Egypt has food when nobody around it does.

So the family goes down to Egypt to buy food. Joseph, now the second man in Egypt, gives them land there. They stay. So do their grandchildren.

Go deeperJoseph's prison, and why Egypt had food

Before any of that, though, there is a detour the summary skips: he ends up in an Egyptian prison, and only from there does he rise to run the country's grain. And that famine breaks in Egypt's favor for two reasons, not one: the Nile floods and waters the fields whether it rains or not, and Joseph had filled the barns.

Then they are slaves.

Centuries pass. A new king comes to power in Egypt, one who never knew Joseph or what his family had done for the country. He looks at how many of my people there now are, and he says this out loud: if there is a war, they could side with our enemies and walk out of this country. So he gives the order. Put slave masters over them. Work them until it breaks them. Make them build his store-cities, Pithom and Rameses, out of mud brick, under the whip (Exodus 1:8–14).

And then comes the most important sentence my people ever wrote down.

God heard them.

Not their prayers, exactly. Their groaning, the noise a person makes under a weight (Exodus 2:23–25). He heard them because they were being crushed. That was the only reason.

Hold on to that. It is the foundation of everything I ever said. God is not attracted to winners. He notices people being ground down, takes their side, and does something.

They walk out, the sea opens, and they are free.

A man named Moses, born a slave and raised in the Egyptian palace, is sent back to demand that the king let them go (Exodus 3–4). The king refuses over and over, and why would he not? They are his labor force and he has just said he needs them. So ten disasters come down on Egypt one after another, and the last one is the death of every firstborn son in the country (Exodus 7–12).

On that night my people are told to eat a meal standing up, dressed to travel, with the blood of a lamb marked on the doorposts so that the death passes over the house.

That meal is called Passover. My people have eaten it every spring ever since.

Learn that word now. I was killed during that festival, and in Lesson 12 you will see exactly why that mattered to a Roman governor.

They walk out that night. The king changes his mind and sends his chariots after them. They cross the water. The army does not (Exodus 14).

Then comes the law, and the law will surprise you.

At a mountain called Sinai, Moses goes up and comes back down with commandments. Everybody knows the Ten (Exodus 20). But hundreds more come with them, and a huge share of those are about money and the poor. Here are real ones. Look them up.

• Pay a hired man the same day. He needs it tonight (Leviticus 19:13).
• Do not charge interest to a poor person (Exodus 22:25).
• Use honest scales, and do not tilt a court case for the poor man or the important one (Leviticus 19:15, 19:35–36).
• Every seven years, cancel all debts (Deuteronomy 15:1–2).
• Every fifty years, in the jubilee, give the land back to the families who lost it (Leviticus 25:8–17).

Go deeperTwo more laws about money

Two more from that list rarely get quoted.

• Do not harvest the edges of your field. Leave what you miss for the poor and for foreigners (Leviticus 19:9–10).
• If you take a man's coat to secure a loan, give it back before dark. It is what he sleeps in (Exodus 22:26–27).

Now ask what all those rules are trying to prevent.

They are afraid of one thing happening: a few people slowly ending up with everything, and everyone else working for them. Every rule on that list is a brake on that. The people who wrote them down remembered being slaves, so they were not going to build slavery again by accident.

Notice that I said people wrote them down. You were taught that God handed these laws to Moses on the mountain. Many of the people who spend their lives studying these books think they were written and collected over centuries, by priests and scribes who had inherited the memory of Egypt. These lessons do not need that settled. Either way, the laws say what they say.

Remember the shape of that. It is the shape of everything I taught. And by the end of this book you will see exactly where it got removed.

They get a country.

Moses dies before they enter it. A man named Joshua leads them across the Jordan river (Joshua 3). The book of Joshua tells it as a swift conquest. The book of Judges tells it as a slow, patchy settlement with the old peoples still living there. For a long stretch afterward there is no king at all.

Go deeperTown by town, and who led before kings

Getting there was not simple. They took the land town by town, over a long time and with a great deal of blood. And the stretch with no king that followed was not empty either: local leaders held it together, one at a time, as emergencies came up, which is what the book of Judges actually is.

Then they ask for a king.

The people demand one, so they can be like other nations. A prophet named Samuel warns them (1 Samuel 8:10–18). He says a king will take your sons for his army, your daughters for his house, your best fields for his officials, and a tenth of everything.

And then: you will be his slaves.

They say they want one anyway.

They get three kings: Saul, then David, then Solomon.

David is the one to remember, because all of Lesson 10 hangs on him. He is a shepherd’s youngest son from a village called Bethlehem. Samuel pours oil on his head (1 Samuel 16:13). He makes Jerusalem his capital (2 Samuel 5).

And he is given a promise: that his family would hold the throne, and God would not take it away from them (2 Samuel 7:12–16).

Write that promise down. Six hundred years later, people waiting for a rescuer were waiting for a man from that family, because of that sentence.

Solomon builds the Temple, and it is magnificent. He builds it with drafted labor: thirty thousand men, working in shifts (1 Kings 5:13–14). That is exactly what Samuel said would happen.

Keep your eye on that building. The Temple becomes the largest institution in the country: a treasury, the biggest employer in Jerusalem, a slaughterhouse at festival time, and a tax authority with a claim on every grown man. When I overturn tables in Lesson 10, that is what I am standing inside.

Go deeperSaul's anointing, and the hill fort David took

David and Solomon were not the first kings, though: Saul came first, anointed by Samuel (1 Samuel 10:1), and his reign ended badly. David's own anointing is the whole reason the word messiah means what it means, and the capital he made his own was a hill fort he had to capture, not an empty hilltop.

Then the country splits over taxes and forced labor.

When Solomon dies, the northern tribes come to his son Rehoboam and ask him to lighten the load, meaning the forced labor and the taxes his father had used on them. Rehoboam answers that he will make it heavier (1 Kings 12:1–14). So the north walks out, behind a former official of Solomon’s named Jeroboam, and stones Solomon’s labor boss to death (1 Kings 12:18).

Now there are two countries. The north keeps the name Israel. The south, around Jerusalem, is Judah. The split was over taxes and forced labor, and it is right there in the text.

Go deeperAdoram, and whose advice Rehoboam took

The text even names names. Rehoboam takes his advice from the young men around him before answering that he will make the load heavier. And the labor boss the north stones to death is named as well: a man called Adoram.

Then the empires come, and here are the names and dates.

• 722 BC: Assyria takes the north and marches its people off as a matter of policy. Those ten tribes never come back (2 Kings 17:5–6).
• 586 BC: Judah stops paying tribute, and Babylon’s king Nebuchadnezzar burns Jerusalem and the Temple and carries the leading families into exile (2 Kings 25). Every “six hundred years” in this book counts from here.
• 539 BC: Persia conquers Babylon, and its king Cyrus sends deported peoples home, mine among them (Ezra 1:1–4). They rebuild the Temple, smaller. ¹
• 167 BC: The Greek king Antiochus the Fourth tries to abolish our religion (1 Maccabees 1:41–64), and a family of priests, led by Judas Maccabee, revolts.
• 142–63 BC: My people are independent for about eighty years, the one gap in the six hundred. ²
• 63 BC: Rome takes the country, and it is still Rome when I am born.

Go deeperThe empires, one by one

Assyria, 722 BC. The Assyrian army took the northern capital, Samaria, after a siege, and settled other conquered peoples in the vacated land (2 Kings 17:5-6, 17:24).

Babylon, 586 BC. Judah's kings had stopped paying tribute and looked to Egypt for help instead (2 Kings 24:1, 24:20). Nebuchadnezzar's men marched off not just the leading families but the court, the priests and the craftsmen.

Persia, 539 BC. Cyrus ran his empire the opposite way from Assyria: instead of deporting peoples, he sent them home and paid to restore their temples, since a grateful province on a border is cheaper than a garrison. He left a record of that policy in his own words, on a clay cylinder you can see in a museum today. The cylinder itself is about Babylon and never mentions my people, so it does not prove our story; it only shows the policy that sent my people home.

The Greeks, from 333 BC. Alexander of Macedon conquered the entire Persian empire in about ten years, and when he died his generals split it up, leaving our corner under the Greek kings of Syria. Antiochus the Fourth did not just try to abolish the religion in general terms: he banned circumcision, banned the Sabbath, had the scrolls destroyed, and set up an altar in the Temple where pigs were sacrificed. He had emptied his own treasury on wars, had already robbed the Temple once, and had the backing of some of Jerusalem's leading families, who wanted a Greek-style city.

The revolt, 167-142 BC. A country priest named Mattathias and his five sons refused to comply. The most famous son, Judas, was called Maccabee, meaning the hammer. They fought in the hills, where a small force can beat a big one, and their luck held because the Greek kings of Syria kept breaking off to fight each other over their own throne. In 164 BC they retook the Temple and cleaned it out, which is what the festival of lights remembers.

Rome, 63 BC. Two of the Maccabees' own descendants fought each other over the throne and both asked the Roman general Pompey to judge between them. He judged, and kept the country for Rome.

Now feel where that leaves a person.

My people had a story about a God who hears slaves and breaks them out.

And they had six hundred years of not being broken out, with one eighty-year gap in the middle that every grandfather told stories about.

So they waited for a king from David’s family, because of that promise in 2 Samuel 7.

You can watch them praying for exactly that. A Jewish poem written down about fifty years before I was born, the seventeenth of the Psalms of Solomon, asks God to raise up for them the son of David, to drive the foreigners out of Jerusalem. It is not in your Bible, but it survives. ³

The word for that person is messiah. It just means anointed, which, as you learned in Lesson 2, means king.

That is what the word meant. To everybody. Including the people standing in front of me.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 Samuel 8:10–18.

You will find: a warning about what a king will do to ordinary people. Read it slowly. It holds up as one of the more accurate political predictions in the Bible.

Then look up: Leviticus 25:23 — the reason given for the jubilee. It is not kindness. It is ownership.

The Short Version

• My people’s founding story is God hearing slaves and getting them out of Egypt. The festival that remembers it is Passover.
• The law they were given is full of rules protecting the poor and cancelling debt.
• Every one of those rules exists to stop a few people getting everything.
• The empires in order: Assyria 722 BC, Babylon 586 BC, Persia 539 BC, the Greeks, independence 142–63 BC, then Rome.
• By my lifetime, six hundred years of foreign rule, with one eighty-year gap, had them waiting for a king from David’s family.

Think About It

1. Have you ever heard a sermon about cancelling debts every seven years? Why not?
2. Samuel’s warning came true. Why do you think the people wanted a king anyway?