https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3mbZYgZfHo4
A few months ago, I went to Miami, invited by Jordan Peterson and Daily Wire to do a panel discussion on the book of Exodus. It was a really amazing experience. We got through half the book in a week, a lot of pretty intense discussions, all very positive and kind of building towards a common understanding. The series comes out now. It’s out on Daily Wire Plus for those who are interested. We will be doing the second part in January. I’ll be going back to Miami and we’re going to film the second part of the Exodus series starting at the Law and then moving towards the end. I thought that to kind of celebrate this and to add more to the discussion, I would do my own Exodus series. I will be going through the first part of the book of Exodus in the next few weeks doing my interpretation. These are just part of the interpretations that I brought to the forum in Miami. If you’re interested in more, of course, go there and you’ll see not only my interpretation but everybody coming together in discussion. You can see people react to what I’m saying and also Jordan and I exchange on our vision of what Exodus is about. We’re going to start now with the first and second chapter looking at Israel as slaves in Egypt. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Of course, in order to have a symbolic vision of what is happening in scripture, you always have to be comparing the images to other books, especially in Exodus to what happened in Genesis. We’ll see that there are many, many references in Exodus going back to Genesis. As Christians, we also want to be looking towards the future and looking towards the manner in which Exodus is prefiguring Christ and how the story of Christ kind of fills in some of the, brings together some of the elements of Exodus. Now, of course, in this whole series, I will be looking at the text itself, giving my own interpretation based on what I see there. But of course, this interpretation is always deeply steeped in especially the works of St. Gregory of Nyssa, the life of Moses. Some of my interpretations will, let’s say, push things further than his, but they’re rooted in the structure that he sees in the text and the manner and the types of identifications he makes, the analogies he makes. Most of the time when I push it further, I’m using his analogies and going deeper into the analogy that he does in his book because his book is a nice, slim, very efficient book. Here we’re going to add a little more detail to that. I’m also basing my work on the work of St. Ephraim the Syrian, who I mentioned many times, who wrote a wonderful book on the hymns on Paradise, a poem about the mountain. And so, of course, it’s not about Exodus, but his mountain of Paradise is also the mountain of Zion. It’s also the Mount Sinai. It’s all the mountains in scripture end up being contained in St. Ephraim’s vision of the mountain of Paradise. And because of that, his work really comes very neatly against the work of St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses. And so we will start the text. I’ll be reading through the text. Some parts I will go through quickly and other parts we will kind of stop at more. And so we start at the beginning. These are the names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family, Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah, Issachar, Zebulam and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. The descendants of Jacob numbered 70 in all. Joseph was already in Egypt. Now I think it’s important to understand right at the outset that there seems to be an attempt to create something like a microcosm of the world in the descendants of Jacob. The 70 nations are important. They’re named in when after the flood, God names the descendants of Noah and he separates them into these 70 nations. And this notion of the 70 nations is an important tradition because the law was kind of given to these 70 nations. And so here we see this 70 notion of 70 as Joseph, Jacob’s sons being a kind of microcosm within Egypt. It’s important to remember how they came to Egypt through Joseph because we’re going to see how it’s going to have some impact in the manner and in what happens to them while they’re in Egypt. And so now Joseph and all his brothers and all the generation died, but the Israelites were exceedingly fruitful. They multiplied greatly, increased in numbers and became so numerous that the land was filled with them. Then a new king to whom Joseph meant nothing came to power in Egypt. Look, he said to his people, the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them. They will become even more numerous. And if war breaks out, we’ll join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country. So what’s important to understand is the relationship to the stranger. This is really one of the keys to looking at the story in Exodus. The character of Egypt or Egypt as a figure appears in Genesis. It appears in the moment when Abraham goes to Egypt and his wife is taken from him for a certain amount of time. And then Abraham has to tell the Pharaoh that it’s his wife in order to kind of get her back. And this causes plagues in Egypt because the Pharaoh tries to take Abraham’s wife. Now you can see that this story, the story we’re going to see in Exodus, is a kind of an expansion on that theme, which is that the stranger, and we have to understand it not of course just in a strict ethnic way or a strict way, but understanding the notion of the stranger in general as a category of experience of that which is not you, that which does not fit within your identity, no matter how you, or that which you don’t recognize, that is not your friend, that is not you, that is not your friend, that is something that is outside of you. How that stranger, the relationship with that stranger has to be the proper one, because there’s a danger, which is that if you’re not careful in relationship with that which is the stranger, the stranger will take your potential from you. And this is of course, this is what war is, someone attacks another country, and they take their potential. And you could say all those, they can also reduce you to potential. And this is what we’re going to see happen in the story. Now of course this is the important of understanding the woman in this context, the wife, as the one who provides the children, the womb out of which the children of Abraham and also the children of Israel will come. And so there’s a relationship between the land, because the land is that out of which the fruits come, there’s a relationship between that and the woman, as the one out of which the children come to the increase of your identity, to the increase of the identity of the patriarch. And so this is the important to understand that. And so what we’re going to see now is that you can have a proper relationship with the stranger, but if the Pharaoh forgets you, because the Pharaoh has forgotten what Joseph has done for him, now the Israelites appear as a danger to him, because there’s no connection between the two. It’s like now they appear only as strangers, and strangers which have to be reduced to potential in order to serve the function of the Pharaoh. Now there’s a little trick in the text which is important to understand. The Bible is very complicated and it’s very subtle in what it proposes. Now of course the fact that the Pharaoh subjugates the Israelites in the story is seen as something which is bad, and seen as something which is bad for Israel, but we have to understand that Israel or Joseph played a role in bringing about this situation, something like a swing from extreme to extremes. We have to remember that in the book of Genesis, Joseph saved the Egyptians from famine, but the way in which he saved the Egyptians from famine meant that the Egyptians had to give up all their land to Pharaoh, and they had to give up one-fifth of all their production to Pharaoh. And so what Joseph did in saving Egypt is that he centralized the power of the state. And so in some ways Joseph was part of what created the tyrant, which would then, when he forgot Joseph, would then now turn around and act on the Israelites. And that’s really important to understand. It’s important to understand in terms of power in general. You can think about it, it’s a simple analogy in terms of what’s going on now in our culture, is that when we move towards centralization of power, because we have power at the time, and so we want to get power for ourselves into the system so that it serves our interests, we have to know that once power is centralized, that if it forgets you, then you will fall under the thumb of that power. And so that power will have a kind of will of its own, will have a reality of its own. And so this is what we see in the story of Joseph, is that Joseph, and it’s not a bad or good situation, it just describes the reality. In some ways Joseph did it in order to save Egypt and to also save Israel during the famine, but the side effect of that, which is something like Joseph’s sin, or Joseph’s, the dark aspect of Joseph, all the characters in the Old Testament have a dark aspect to them, if you look at the story carefully, the dark aspect of Joseph is that he centralizes the power of the pharaoh and then that becomes the tool by which his own people will then be subjugated later. So that’s important to understand as we move. But what we’re going to see is we’re going to understand that what the pharaoh is going to be doing is trying to reduce Israel to only potential, right? If you understand that, then you’ll notice why some of the analogies that are used are there. And so it says, so they put the Egyptians, put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Ramses as store cities for pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied in spread, so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and work them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar, and with all kinds of work in the fields, in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly. The king of the Egyptians said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Sifra and Pua, when you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him, but if it is a girl, let her live. The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do, they let the boys live. Then the kings of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live? The midwives answered Pharaoh, Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women, they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive. So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own. And so, let’s continue just a little bit. Then Pharaoh gave his order to all his people, every boy, every Hebrew boy that is born, you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live. And so, if you look at this, you will notice that the analogies that are brought together are really about something like reducing Israel to a feminine role in Egypt as just this potential. And you can see it in terms of the way in which Israel is, analogies that are described, it talks about making them work in the field, right, it talks about the idea of making their life bitter and relating them to the building part of the country. So it’s like bricks and mortar. This is also relating Egypt to Babel when it has this idea of bricks and mortar because that is the difference, that is how Babel was built. And so, it’s really trying to conjoin the idea of the Pharaoh with the tyrant, with the tyrant of Babel and the reduction of Israel to their feminine role. And this becomes very explicit in telling the midwives to kill the baby boys and let the girls live. Now, many people find that odd, that, you know, it’s like why would the Hebrew midwives ever do that? Why would the Hebrew midwives ever kill their own boys and let the Hebrew girls live? You have to notice what it is that’s going on. So there’s a lot of things crossing themselves, this idea of, let’s say, feminizing the Israelites in relationship to Egypt. And one is that there’s a relationship between, let’s say, you could say that the Pharaoh is wanting to empower the Israelite women to kill their men, to kill their males themselves. So it’s like the centralized power and the tyranny, the tyrannical power is wanting to give power to the women in order to kill the masculinity, right? To castrate their own nation in order to reduce Israel to things that Egypt only acts on, right? That they have no, that they don’t have their own, let’s say, will and their own identity, but rather they only become food and potential for the Egyptian nation. And so because the midwives refuse to do that, then the Israelites grow in number and they are in some ways, they refuse to participate with the tyrant in order to do that. And so they get families of their own and they participate in the, they ally themselves with Israel, they ally themselves with their people. Because it’s important to understand how these identities work, right? And so think about now, and there’s nothing wrong sometimes with a kind of assimilation. Now in this case, we don’t want the assimilation to happen, but you can understand that, for example, in Canada, we have people that are in the United States, you have people that come from Germany, that come from England, that come from Ireland, that come from Italy, and there’s a manner in which they accept to become only vehicles for the identity of America to a certain extent. And that can be okayed at a certain level. But of course, here you have a very extreme version of that in the story of Egypt and Israel, where you see it as not only being reduced to just labor basically and just potential for the Egyptian identity, but that is in some ways the way in which tyrannies work and tyrannies manifest themselves. So of course now the image becomes very explicit when it comes to the final image, which is that the pharaoh tells his people that to take all the Hebrew boys and throw them into the water. And so now you really have this final image of wanting to reduce the Israelite identity to water and throw it into the fluidity of potential. And so all the images kind of come together if you see them. And what you have now is, of course, a flood. And this is, we know that the Nile floods and that’s part of the story of how the Nile functions. But here we have to understand it also as the flood in Genesis. There’s the throwing the baby Israelites into the water becomes now an image of the end of a world or the end of a generation. Of course, it’s not the end of all the Israelites, but it’s kind of like the reduction of a generation. And the miracle is very similar to the story of Noah, which is that although it’s not explicitly said this way, you can imagine the entire generation gets of Israelite boys, gets eliminated and thrown into the Nile. And all of that gets reduced to one character that is saved from the catastrophe. And that is, of course, Moses. And so we have to be able to see these themes. So you can understand it as the end of the civilizational part in Genesis where the sons of Cain become very, very powerful and create these civilizations, create these cities, these great cities. And these cities are violent and dangerous towards the people. And then that leads to a catastrophe, which is the reduction of the generation back into potential and the survival of one person. Now, this is a mini version of that, but it follows the same story trope as what we see in Genesis just before the flood. And put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. When Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe and her attendants were walking along the riverbank, she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying and she felt sorry for him. This is one of the Hebrew babies, she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you? Yes, go, she answered. So the girl went and got his baby’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, take this baby and nurse him for me and I will pay you. So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, I drew him from the water. So I hope you noticed that when this happens, so you could say that everything is reduced to the feminine. And so when I said that, it sounded like I was saying it was just negative. But here we now see the positive aspect of that happening, almost like the side effect of that happening. Everything is reduced to the Nile, to the water, to the feminine in a desire to transform Israel into a potential for the Egyptian state. But now we see all of these women, notice how every character now in this part of the story is a woman except for Moses. So now we are in the watery world. We really are in the feminine world. And what we have is an image of Noah in the ark on the waters. And so the ark is, of course, a feminine image of a womb, a box, a container, which holds the world and protects the world and kind of carries the seed of the world into the next world. So this is where we are now. And we can understand that, of course, just in terms of a woman giving birth, the woman carries the seed of the man in her body and then she gives it body and transitions the seed into the new world as the child is born. So this is what we’re seeing happening. That is why the characters are all feminine. If you notice, even it says, it explicitly says that the Pharaoh’s daughter sends her female servant to get Moses out of the water. So you have this image of Moses in the ark, all the dead Hebrew babies at the bottom of the water. We really have this scene, which is reminiscent of the flood. And now you have the guardians of Moses during that time being his mother, his sister, and the Pharaoh’s daughter. And what we’re going to see is, of course, St. Gregory of Nyssa here really gives us a good understanding of the difference between what we could call the foreign wife or the foreign woman and then the woman of your own group and the woman of your own identity. And he talks about the foreign woman as being all the tools which are given us by the secular world. That is, all those things that are not directly sacred from the church, all the knowledge, all the wisdom, the sciences that come from the secular world. And it’s a good way to understand that. It’s a good way to understand it. It’s outer knowledge. It’s outer wisdom. But as St. Gregory says, it’s dangerous to us. You can see the man in which Egypt acts upon Moses, it’s dangerous to him, but it can also be a help in the right proportion or in the right relationship. And so this is an example of where the collaboration between Moses’ sister and the Pharaoh’s daughter, which is the inner part and the outer part, the notion of the… And Gregor of Nyssa talks about really like the church and then all the pagan philosophy and secular knowledge collaborating together in order to preserve Moses. And in Gregor of Nyssa, Moses is really something like the individual or something like the person that is any person. Now it’s not a man or a woman. Every person has these aspects in them. And it’s something like the free person that is capable of exercising their will within service to God and is acted upon by these different forces, the Pharaoh being this kind of foreign tyrant, and then of course these women playing the role of something like of true knowledge through true wisdom and then also secular knowledge and secular wisdom collaborating towards the survival of Moses. And so the idea, and it’s important to understand, and those of you who have listened to Matzir’s recent discussion, I mean, he really shone a light on it. If you saw what he talked about with Jordan Peterson in terms of the idea of that something he said something like the entire Bible is about finding someone who’s not you, you know, that is not hostile to you, like entering into a relationship at the right distance with the other. That is, let’s say, something like a wife which is not too close to you, but then is also, let’s say, not so far from you in terms of the stranger that she will take everything that she will take everything from you towards the stranger. So finding that relationship and you see that if you read Exodus that way, it makes so much sense and it can also help you understand some weird aspects of Exodus which we’ll see a little later, but I can mention right now, which is that, you know, when you read the genealogy of Moses, it turns out Moses is actually a child of incest, that his father married a woman who was his cousin or maybe his father’s sister. It’s not totally clear because I think there are different strains of the text, but no matter which strain of the text you find, in the Masoretic text, for example, she’s clearly his father’s sister, which would have been a total taboo. And so there’s a man in which this problem of too close and too far, which you see in the story of Abraham already in the relationship to the Pharaoh, which is that Abraham says to the Pharaoh that Sarah is his sister, which is weirdly kind of half true, and then it’s also his wife and so there’s this problem of too close. And you can see, like, the entire story is about finding this relationship. Who is the stranger who I can unite with and who will and who we can kind of collaborate in love towards something more rather than being a relationship that kind of reduces me to potential for their identity? So one day after Moses had grown up, he went out where his own people were and watched them in their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people, looking this way and that, seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hit him in the sand. The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew? The man said, who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian? Then Moses was afraid and thought, what I did must have become known. When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian where he sat down by a well. Here we have Moses within the bosom of the Egyptians, within the bosom of the stranger, remembering his identity, remembering who he is, what is his origin. In doing that, he decides to rid himself of the Egyptian. Gregor of Nyssa has a very powerful vision of this. He sees the Egyptian as the garment of skin. In his text, he talks about how he killed the uncircumcised Egyptian, this Egyptian which represents the outer part of our existence. You can understand the outer part of our existence as the secular knowledge, the way that I mentioned before, as also, let’s say, in some ways even our biological reality as this outer shell for our experience, but then also all our passions, all the things which draw us away from ourselves, all our desires that draw us away from ourselves, which can enslave us. All these images get mixed in together in St. Gregor of Nyssa’s text. If you understand the deep scriptural narrative, you’ll notice that these things are there in the text. You understand that the stranger just draws you out of yourself into the outer things. In the text, especially in Exodus, you’ll see the Egyptians have chariots. You’ll see that later. There’s this image of them also representing this kind of even technology, civilization, this outer aspect of reality, which can be useful if you’re in the right relationship, but can also draw you away from yourself and enslave you. That’s the basic structure that you see. Moses killing the Egyptian is the beginning of what St. Gregor of Nyssa will call the removal of the garments of skin. That is a kind of ascetic movement in which we remove these outer aspects. We kind of move into the heart, we could say, in order to gain what is essential, return to the identity, the Israel, return to the name that we have received from above, and shed the excessive accumulated things that come from the outside or accumulate themselves from the outside. We see that this is what Moses does now, but there’s a manner in which he is not ready for the consequence of that. He’s not in the proper position to do that. Although even St. Gregor, I think he sees this as a good thing, killing the Egyptians is part of the story, but in the text when you notice, you see what he does. He kind of looks left and right, he kills the Egyptian, he hides him, and then he realizes that he’s been discovered. You see that in some ways he’s not in the proper position. You could say that he isn’t in the position to become the leader of his people. Because of that, when he kills the Egyptian, it doesn’t connect him to his people. His people don’t trust him. He hasn’t gone up the mountain, you could say. He hasn’t reached into that place out of which he can receive authority from above. Killing the Egyptian leads him into conflict even with his own people. They’re saying, they started saying, are you going to kill us like you killed the Egyptian? Because they can’t discern him as being the leader. In some ways, he also isn’t ready for what he needs to do. He has to go through an entire process in order to reach that readiness. And so then, of course, Moses leaves Egypt and goes out into the world of the Midianites. And this is really important because if we understand the whole story as this negotiation between who is the right wife, you could say. What is the right potential we need to associate ourselves with? What is the right extension of ourselves into the world outside which won’t enslave us and won’t take over us? How many hours a day should you work at your job? How much time should you spend thinking about investing your money? Or how much time should you think about fixing your house? Whatever it is that is these external things that serve you in the sense that they can become extensions of you and give you potential in which to act in the world, but that always run the risk of enslaving you. And so here we’ll notice that Moses will now go out into the Midianites. And the Midianites are not Israelites. They are strangers. They are a different group. But he will find in them the right distance, you could say, the right distance in which he can unite himself with Midian without losing himself, without becoming a slave to Midian. And rather their collaboration will lead to more, to a better sense of Israel and also a good relationship with Midian. All right. So Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian where he sat down by a well. Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock. Some shepherds came along and drove them away. But Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock. When the girls returned to Rehuel, their father, he asked them, why have you returned so early today? They answered, an Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds, even drew water for us and watered the flock. And where is he, Rehuel asked his daughters, why did you leave him? Invite him to have something to eat. Moses agreed to stay with the man who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. Zipporah gave birth to a son and Moses named him Gershom, saying, I have become a foreigner in a foreign land. During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out. Their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. What’s going on here? Now, of course, this story is a little representation. It reprises the image of finding a wife and finding a wife in the same situation that Moses is. If you look at the patriarchs, they, Isaac and Jacob, they find their wives in a kind of like a little further out from themselves. In the House of Laban in Lebanon, you could say, they find their wives there. And they have a similar situation where they come to a well. And the well, of course, is this is in some ways the feminine itself. It’s this water from below and it’s this potential from below. And so this is the place where you you find your wife. Now, in this case, what’s interesting is that Moses comes to the well and he he basically chases away the these people that are hostile towards the daughter of the priest of Midian, of Reuel. And then he waters the flocks of Zipporah, of Reuel. He waters their flocks. And this is, of course, the he draws water out of the well. There are different versions of it. Like sometimes it’s the woman who draws the water and then waters the flocks of the man. And now here in this case, it’s Moses who draws the water and and waters the flocks of of the of Zipporah. But what it represents, it really is this capacity to join with the waters. It really is in some ways an image of the marriage itself. And, you know, this is where Moses finds the right foreigner, you could say, in for which to be able to join himself with. And so this leads him. It’s kind of like a little version of going out into the wilderness. If you look at how the the Israelites will leave Egypt and go out into the wilderness, moving towards the promised land. Now, Moses has a similar situation. He leaves Egypt, finds himself in this wilderness where he has to fight. He has to fight off the the strangers, which is what Israel will go through when they leave the when they leave Egypt as well. They’ll have to fight in order to move towards the mountain, the mountain of God. And so Moses has a similar situation. He leaves Egypt and now he has to fight and he finds the right potential. He finds water and water also means finding a wife, which is what will happen to Israel when they also leave Egypt. They will fight and try to find water until they reach the mountain of God. And so we will see that Moses will encounter God in the burning bush in the next sections. And this will be a microcosm. Remember that these stories, they really have this fractal structure. And if you if you start to see it that way, you’ll notice these little versions happening and then bigger versions happening as you as you move forward. And so the little story of Moses leaving, leaving, killing the Egyptian. Right. This is what’s going to happen, of course, in the plague. Killing the Egyptian firstborn, leaving Egypt, fighting off the strangers, finding water and then moving up the mountain. This is what Moses is happens at a little scale. So he’s becoming what he needs to become. He’s becoming Israel. He’s becoming the head of Israel by manifesting the pattern in the seed form. And then he will reproduce the pattern in rescuing and bringing Israel out of Egypt. And so I thought this could be a little beginning. So we’re going to stop here for today. And there is a lot more that I could obviously say about these these texts. It’s important to notice this idea of the reduction of the multiple into one when Moses, let’s say, becomes a little Noah and floats on the ark over the waters. This is something which will happen several times in scripture. And it’s something that we have to understand. It’s part of the stories that feed into the story of Christ, of course, because this is something that will happen to Christ as well. So once we see this image in the massacre of the children in Egypt, you can understand how Herod wanting to kill all the children, the boys that are born in Israel or in the area where Christ is born, is very similar to that. There’s this strange idea that in some ways, in the desire to eliminate the people, what happens is there’s a reduction into one. And that reduction into one becomes something like the seed for the next world. Because it’s like all the potential is gathered into this one place. And then that becomes the seed for a new world. And so this is not, you know, when I mentioned this in the Exodus seminar, a lot of people got really offended. And I understand because it’s not a moral question. I’m not presenting you a moral dilemma. I’m presenting really an image of reality. And you can understand that, you know, this is something that you do all the time in your own experience, which is that if you want to gather your energy, you have to eliminate everything. And if you want to gather energy in a way that you can act very efficiently or very strongly, you have to kind of eliminate all the little ones, all the little thoughts, all the little possibilities. And you have to kind of reduce things towards one. And that is something that you can do yourself. But sometimes it’s also something that happens to you in the sense that sometimes all your possibilities get taken away from you. And the only thing left is one point of light or one little door that appears in front of you. And if you if you understand that and you take that door and you take that one possibility, then that will become the seed for your new beginning. You know, I’ve had that experience when I started icon carving. That’s exactly what happened to me. You know, I came back from Africa after seven years of being a volunteer and I tried to find a job. I tried to find all these different things and nothing was working. Everything was falling apart. You know, I was running out of money. I was running out of possibilities. You know, everything was getting reduced. And at some point, as implausible as that might have seemed, the only thing I could do was carve icons. It was the only path in front of me. And in some ways, this is what had happened. All my possibilities got shriveled up and they got reduced into this one seed that now was going to be fruitful. And so I think it’s if we understand the structure, we can we can see why this image gets reproduced in the story of Noah, in the story of Moses, but not just in the story of Moses. It’s going to happen again in Exodus because when they get to the promised land, there’s only two people left from the original people when they get there. And so there’s this like reduction that happens. And we see the same, of course, like I said, in the in the story of Christ as the kind of ultimate version of that. And in the story of Christ, it’s interesting because there’s these like weird reversals that happen in that in the story of Jesus, because think about what happens in this story now. There’s this reduction to the one where the Egyptians killed the children. And now that causes Moses to appear, right? And not only Moses to appear, but like Moses to be saved by the Pharaoh and protected by the Pharaoh’s daughter, because it’s like he’s the only one left or something like that. He gets protected by the Pharaoh’s daughter and also by his mother and his sister. And then he becomes the he will become the leader of the Israelites and the seed of a new beginning. Now Christ goes in reverse, right? The king of Judea wants to kill him. And so because of that, he massacres all these children. And that, let’s say, makes Christ appear as this bright, bright, bright light that flees now from the promised land to Egypt. In order to protect themselves from the king of Judea. And so it’s a weird, interesting reversal where Christ goes to Egypt in order to be protected from the massacre. And it kind of condenses the story of the exile from the leaving Egypt in going to the promised land. And Joseph leaving his land going into Egypt to be protected. And so it’s like those two extremes, which is one Joseph going to Egypt and then the Israelites leaving Egypt to go out back to the promised land being condensed into one story. Now the story of Jesus does that all the time. But if you know well the Old Testament, you’re going to start to see it happen more and more. And just how crazy that story is. How it just smashes everything together in ways that are sometimes just hard to totally unpack. And so I hope that was a nice meditation on the first few chapters of Exodus. We will continue for the next chapters. Starting with the burning bush. And we’re going to look at the structure of the mountain. The beginning of that structure. And how Moses is going to in some ways establish the hierarchy needed for God having remembered Israel to now find its place. Because now God has remembered Israel. But there’s like distance between God and Israel you could say. So there’s this weird suggestion in some ways God had forgotten or the reality of Israel looks like God has forgotten Israel. Now God remembers Israel and God has to establish a hierarchy of being between God and Israel. In order to let’s say to be fully connected. And that’s what we’re going to see in the whole rest of the book of Exodus. So if you enjoy this, if you like this discussion, make sure to check out the Exodus seminar on Daily Wire. With Jordan Peterson and some wonderful people. That is Prager and many other very interesting thinkers that we were discussing with over a week. Kind of looking at all these questions together. So thanks everybody for your attention and I’ll talk to you very soon.