Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 28-29.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

When God tells Moses to bring Aaron and his sons to serve God as priests He names all four of Aaron’s sons: Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar.  Yet back in Exodus 24 when God called Aaron and seventy of the elders of Israel to join Moses in coming before Him on the mountaintop, He only called Nadab and Abihu.  Today, I want to note that the passage groups Nadab and Abihu together and Eleazar and Ithamar together.  Perhaps I should have written about this back when I read Exodus 24, or waited until I read Leviticus 10 where it covers the deaths of Nadab and Abihu, but I saw the way it paired up the Aaron’s four sons, the two who died during their ordination and the two who lived, and thought that noteworthy.

As we continue into the passage we come to where Moses receives instructions that the names of the sons of Israel be engraved on to gem stones.  This has always struck me as incredibly difficult, but two things struck me today.  First, it was not suggesting that they do this engraving on gem stones such as we see today on jewelry.  These were larger stones.  Second, the names would have been engraved in Hebrew lettering, which is more suited for engraving than the letters which we use today.    I am not saying that the engraving was not a work of master craftsmen, just that these realizations make me see this as more realistic than I had previously realized.

Writing about this reminds me that this description is yet another evidence that the Book of Exodus reflects more similarities to Egyptian practices than to Canaanite practices.  The reason I write about this is that a common trope among skeptics is that the worship of YHWH rose out of Canaanite practices.  However, if the elements of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy share more in common with Egyptian cultural practices than with the cultural practices of Canaan, that undermines the theory that the worship of YHWH gradually emerged from Canaanite practices.  That does not mean that the worship of YHWH just emerged from Egyptian practices either.  It would make sense for God to provide the Israelites with symbols which carried meaning from their experience in Egypt while transforming that meaning to His message to them.  I have seen it explained that a careful reading of the passages in the Old Testament which bear a resemblance to the myths of the cultures around the Israelites shows those passages to be a critique of the myths which they resemble.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.