An Atheist Reads the Bible: The Long Game

This is the fourth installment in my series reading the Bible cover to cover as an atheist and ex-Mormon. If you missed the third, you can find it here.

I'll be honest: I hit a wall somewhere around Exodus 5. I missed a handful of days and found myself needing to play catch-up on chapters I wasn't particularly eager to read. The Joseph story, for all its drama, had at least the shape of a novel — personalities in conflict, consequences unfolding. Once we cross into Exodus, we're in different territory. The text gets more procedural. The drama becomes more cosmic and less human. I'll say more about that when we get there.

For now: Genesis 43 through Exodus 7.

Genesis 43–45: Was He Testing Them?

Joseph's brothers have returned to their father and reported that the man in Egypt — the man they don't yet know is their brother — asked whether they had another sibling. I found myself pausing on this. Was Joseph asking because he hoped they'd answer honestly about a brother who was supposedly dead? Was he, in some sense, testing whether they would tell the truth about him?

It's the kind of question the text doesn't answer, and I notice that's often where things get interesting. The surface reading is that Joseph is gathering information, perhaps moved by emotion at learning his father is still alive. But there's a shadow reading: Joseph is a man who was sold into slavery by his own family. He's had years to think about what he'd do if he saw them again. The fact that he made them wait, imprisoned Simeon as collateral, and now arranges things so that Benjamin must come — it doesn't read like a man simply following administrative procedure.

There's a detail in these chapters that caught my attention: the money that reappears in the brothers' sacks. The house steward tells them their God put the treasure there. I don't believe that, and I don't think the text quite believes it either. Joseph put it there. He was the second most powerful man in Egypt. He had both the means and the motive — a compassion that the text suggests he felt for his brothers even as he was tormenting them a little.

It seems a sad thing to attribute the generosity of others to a god that isn't involved. We do this with envelopes of money left in mailboxes, with boxes of food on front porches, with the kindness of strangers that arrives exactly when it's needed. The credit goes upward, and the human beings who saw a need and acted on it disappear from the story.

When Joseph finally reveals himself, he weeps so loudly that the sound makes its way back to Pharaoh's house. It's the most emotionally direct moment in all of Genesis — a man breaking open after years of holding himself together. Whatever complicated feelings I have about how he handled his brothers' return, this moment is human in a way that very little of the Bible so far has been.

And then one small detail I can't let go of: when his brothers leave for Canaan to bring Jacob back, Joseph loads ten male donkeys with the best things of Egypt, and female donkeys with grain and bread for the journey. Men carry the wealth. Women carry the food.

It's such a small thing. It probably reflects ordinary ancient practice more than any deliberate statement. But you see these things accumulating. The text didn't have to specify the donkeys' sex. It did.

Then there's the divination cup — it belongs here as a detail about Joseph that the text slides past: the cup he uses to divine. Divination. Joseph, favorite of God, interpreting dreams, second only to Pharaoh — is also practicing divination. Modern Christians consider this an occult practice. The text introduces it without comment, without condemnation. If Joseph found divine favor and still used a divination cup, that says something about later conceptions of what was and wasn't permissible.

Genesis 46–48: God's Long Game

This is the part that I can't get past.

God appears to Israel as he's about to travel down into Egypt. He tells him not to be afraid. He tells him that in Egypt, Israel's descendants will become a great nation.

But here's the thing: if we grant God omniscience — if we take seriously the idea that he knows the end from the beginning — then God is sending Israel to Egypt with full knowledge that his descendants will spend four hundred years there as slaves. He could have said something. He could have warned them. He could have steered things differently. Instead, he sends Israel south with a promise and without a word about what's coming. What is the point of a prophet if God doesn't say more than a few words to him?

I understand the theological framework that wants to resolve this. Providence. The long view. God's ways being higher than our ways. But I find I can't accept a framework where the only way an omnipotent God can accomplish his purposes is through four centuries of human bondage for his chosen people. That's not a plan. That's a setup.

The famine meanwhile does something interesting to the Egyptian economy. Pharaoh ends up owning all the land in Egypt because the people traded it for food. Joseph is the architect of this arrangement — he collects the silver, then the livestock, then the land itself, then the people's labor. It's a remarkable little story about how economic catastrophe can be used to consolidate power, and the text relates it almost as an aside. The hand of Providence again, presumably. It plays right along with Alinsky's Rules For Radicals: Never let a crisis go to waste.

Chapter 48 is another genealogy. I read it. I'm convinced these lists exist to test the reader's commitment to read the text.

Genesis 49–Exodus 1: Seventy People, A Nation

Jacob gathers his sons and delivers a series of poetic blessings and curses. Some are moving. Some feel like tribal propaganda dressed up as prophecy. Throughout, I kept wondering: does Israel ask Joseph what happened to him? When he learned that his beloved son had been alive this whole time — sold, imprisoned, elevated to power — did he ask how it happened? Was there no curiosity about those years? Was there no reckoning with what the brothers had done?

Joseph's brothers clearly expect one. After Jacob dies, they come to Joseph with a story: their father left instructions that Joseph should forgive them. There's no record of Israel leaving any such instructions. They invented it. It's a self-interested fabrication from men who spent years watching their brother forgive them publicly while privately wondering what was waiting for them.

Whether Joseph truly forgave them or simply chose not to act on his grief — the text doesn't let us inside far enough to know.

Then Exodus begins, and something in the narrative shifts.

The text says that the people who descended from Jacob who went into Egypt numbered seventy. Seventy. And then, in what feels like the span of a paragraph, the Israelites have filled the land of Goshen so completely that Pharaoh is worried about their military strength. Previous chapters were exhaustive about who lived how long and who begat whom. But here, the timeline goes deliberately vague, and seventy people become a multitude. It asks a lot.

Exodus 2–4: The Prince of Egypt, Sort Of

Pharaoh's daughter is one of the more interesting figures in the Bible so far. She sees a Hebrew infant — she knows he's Hebrew — and she takes him in anyway. She knows she's defying her father's order to kill the Hebrew male children. And then the text has them actually recruit Moses' biological mother to nurse him, which means the people who knew his origins were not exactly a secret society.

Why did she do it? The text doesn't explain. It's one of those moments where someone simply acts with compassion against the logic of their position, and the story moves on.

Moses grows up in the royal household. Then he goes out among his people, sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and kills the Egyptian. He thinks no one is watching. He's wrong — the news reaches his own kinsmen before it reaches Pharaoh. He flees to Midian.

I found myself sitting with the class implications of that sequence. Moses, raised in privilege, kills a man for brutalizing one of his people — but then, when he sees two Hebrews fighting each other, he doesn't kill anyone. He intervenes, gets called out for the murder, and runs. Was it justice that drove the first act, or something more complicated? Is it easier to punish those outside your circle than those within it? The text doesn't say, and I'm not sure Moses knew either.

The burning bush scene has always been visually striking, but reading it now I notice that Moses is afraid to look at God. Not because the text says looking would destroy him — it doesn't say that. He's simply afraid. It reads less like awe before the infinite and more like a man inventing a reason not to confront the thing in front of him. A post-hoc rationalization. He assumes the truth of the situation and works backwards from it.

God instructs Moses to approach Pharaoh. The plan is this: ask permission to take the Israelites three days into the wilderness to perform sacrifices. God already knows Pharaoh won't agree. He says so explicitly. He's going to harden Pharaoh's heart. The ruse is just a setup for what comes next.

This self-aggrandizement does not seem to me to be befitting a deity. A God who orchestrates a set of circumstances specifically so that he can display his power is not a God primarily interested in his people's welfare. He's interested in his own story.

Exodus 5–7: God Gets Theatrical

Moses and Aaron deliver God's request to Pharaoh, who calls the people lazy and increases their workload. Pharaoh uses a word that caught my attention: lazy. I found myself wondering whether Pharaoh saw through the ruse — whether he understood that "three days in the wilderness to offer sacrifices" was cover for an escape, and he named it as such. Maybe he wasn't wrong.

The Hebrew task masters, who were themselves enslaved, get beaten for the work shortfall. They appeal to Pharaoh, who shows no remorse. Moses then appeals to God, asking why his efforts have only made things worse. It's a very human moment — the first time we see Moses genuinely waver. He wanted to help his people and instead they're suffering more. That's not what he signed up for.

God doubles down. He invokes the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He says he will take Israel as his people and be their God. There is no if here. There is no choice offered. For a God whose defenders spend considerable energy arguing that human agency is central to his plan, the text is remarkably uninterested in whether Israel would like to opt out.

Then, in the middle of all this unfolding national drama, the text stops for a genealogy of the families of Israel. Right here. We're at the pivot point of the book that gives the Bible its name, and we pause for a list of fathers and sons, most of whom are living past 130 years.

In that genealogy, almost in passing: Amram married his father's sister, Jochebed. No note of condemnation. No divine response. Just the fact, stated plainly, and then the text moves on. Because from that union came Moses and Aaron.

Wrapping Things Up

What strikes me most, stepping back from this stretch of scripture, is how differently Exodus begins compared to Genesis.

Genesis was messy in a human way. Abraham lied. Isaac lied. Jacob deceived his blind father. Judah slept with his daughter-in-law thinking she was a prostitute. Joseph tormented his brothers before he forgave them, and maybe the forgiveness was never quite complete. These people were flawed in ways that felt recognizable. You could argue with them in your head.

Moses is different. He's being shaped into an instrument, and you can watch it happening. A man who killed someone, who ran, who married into a foreign people and was apparently content to stay there — suddenly he's standing in front of a burning bush being told that he is the one. He objects. God overrules him. He goes.

And then the first thing that happens is that it gets worse. Pharaoh increases the workload. The people Moses came to help are now suffering more than they were before he showed up. Moses turns back to God and essentially asks: what are you doing?

God's answer is not comforting. He doesn't explain. He reiterates the promises made to Abraham and says, essentially, trust the plan. The plan being: I'm going to harden Pharaoh's heart so that I can demonstrate my power through increasingly dramatic means. The people's suffering in the meantime is part of the setup.

I find it difficult to consider a God whose primary concern seems to be his own display. And I find Moses, standing between that God and those people, already exhausted in chapter five, to be the most sympathetic figure in the room.