May 26 – Exodus and Joshua

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My apologies for being slow to get these questions posted.

1. What do you think of Moses as a leader? Why does God choose him?

2. How do you read all those plagues in Egypt–what is the literary function of that part of the story do you think?

3. Exodus introduces us to a new kind of narrative in the biblical text, a narrative that merges conventional story with normative text, or the law. How would you describe that merging? What is the effect of all that law on the story? On the people? On God for that matter?

4. Okay, the tabernacle….think about what Alter says about repetition and try to make some sense of the function of all that repeated detail. How does it function in this story?

5. In what ways do the first chapters of Joshua repeat some of the motifs you’ve encountered already? What is the significance of those repetitions?

6. What is the Deuteronomist view of war and how does the conquest in Joshua fulfill and/or resist that view?

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