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Wednesday 8/19/26
Thru the Bible: Old Testament Review – Exodus Pt. 1
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Thru the Bible Old Testament Review – Exodus Pt. 1
We left off last week with the death of Joseph at 110 years old in 1805B.C. and the prediction of Moses’ birth 278 years later in 1527 B.C.
Our re-trek through Genesis was largely about dates, key time periods associated with major world events and foundational people.
Exodus–Deuteronomy will largely be about major and foundational truths which are first established in these books.
As you know Exodus, means “departure” making the primary focus of the book about Israel’s departure from Egypt, which begins with Moses in their generations, but which God spoke about to Abraham many years prior.
So Exodus begins with a listing of the tribes who came to Egypt with Jacob and then immediately goes into Egypt’s oppression of Israel.
This introduces our first big lesson which has a very universal impact on our understanding of scripture, God and His dealings with nations – including His Own people.
A proper understanding of what God says about this answers many questions and protects us from teachings and speculations which lead to false beliefs – some of which are truly dangerous to the people of God and some of which serve as distractions from the imperatives of the New Covenant.
Now this is important for two reasons…
- How long Israel was in bondage which is important for the integrity of the claim of scripture and for dating purposes.
- It addresses the ‘WHY” behind large national judgements which is carried through as relevant throughout scripture even in the New Testament. This directly addresses and answers SO MANY questions which otherwise have evoked all manner of harmful and misleading speculations regarding God and His actions over nations and the world at large.
Let’s read the passage in question:
This takes us all the way back to Genesis 15 and since the larger conversation was one God was having with Abraham regarding his covenant with him and since we did not read it while going through Genesis, I figured we’d just back up and read the entire event now for scope and context.
Genesis 15:1-21,
“(1) After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”
(2) But Abram said,
“O Lord GOD, what will You give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?”
(3) And Abram said,
“Behold, You have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.”
(4) And behold, the word of the LORD came to him:
“This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.”
(5) And he brought him outside and said,
“Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.”
Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
(6) And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.
(7) And he said to him,
“I am the LORD Who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.”
(8) But he said,
“O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?”
(9) He said to him,
“Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”
(10) And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. (11) And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
(12) As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. (13) Then the LORD said to Abram,
“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. (14) But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.
(15) As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. (16) And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
(17) When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.
(18) On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying,
“To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, (19) the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, (20) the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, (21) the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”
The key segment of this passage for the purposes of our two issues I mentioned earlier is verses 13-16.
“(13) Then the LORD said to Abram,
“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. (14) But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.
(15) As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. (16) And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
So as first business I’m going to cover the first question this addresses which was:
- How long Israel was in bondage, which is important for the integrity of the claim of scripture and for dating purposes.
Now I told you a few weeks ago that I ran into a problem with dating that didn’t make any sense. If the time from Joseph’s death to Moses’ birth was only 278 and Moses was 80 years old when Israel was released from their Egyptian captivity, that only adds up to 358 years – NOT 400 years! That is a problem.
Now, there are times when scripture will use more generalized time periods, and this is in fact, one of them. However, this does not allow for a lesser time, but a greater since the more specific time is mentioned in Exodus 12:40-42.
Let’s read it,
“(40) The time that the people of Israel LIVED IN EGYPT was 430 years.
(41) At the end of 430 years, ON THAT VERY DAY, all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.
(42) It was a night of watching by the LORD, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the LORD by all the people of Israel throughout their generations.” – Exodus 12:40-42.
So the actual time period was 430 years! That is helpful since it not only tells us more specifically how long the time was, but it also helps verify one of the things my study revealed about God’s words to Abram all those years prior in Genesis 15.
The passage where God spoke to Abram said,
“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.”
This wording has thrown off many over the years. I am FAR from the first person to see it and get sidelined by it initially. But it is a great lesson on the need to study scripture as well as being very instructional on HOW to study scripture.
Now there is MUCH here that I am going to summarize for you, but I will offer THIS PDF which goes over all of this in some detail. I believe it is important enough for your spiritual education to at least read it, but I will summarize here.
The wording in the Hebrew, its construction as well as the way grammar works all paints a clear picture which gets distorted sometimes in English.
A good comparison is between the KJV and the ESV neither of which are great, but the ESV is by far superior-
“And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;” – Genesis 15:13 KJV
The King James uses a semicolon which is used to separate two complete, closely related thoughts into a single sentence and acts as a stronger separator in complex lists.
It also separates complex list items acting like a type of super-comma.
This leads to a misunderstanding of the verse.
“Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.” – Genesis 15:13 ESV
The ESV uses commas which at least allows for the correct understanding, but does not clearly reveal the meaning. It still allows for some ambiguity.
The idea in the Hebrew is that ALL of these events contribute to the 400 years NOT just the years of affliction. I will explain as we continue.
Now, the word used for “sin” is not your typical word for a “sinful act”, but is rather a word used to indicate an accumulation of moral guilt. The idea is that the sin being judged is not a single act but a series of actions which seem to build one upon another in what appears to be a causal fashion. Meaning, one sin seems to inexorably lead to another.
Doing a rather comprehensive search, the sins boil down to a list which appears throughout scripture. This lends further proof to the causal fashion of these sins.
I will enumerate them and explain, but before I do, just know that grammatically the verse is a container-filling metaphor for corporate guilt. A measure is being filled, and at the time God was speaking to Abram, it was not yet full. The verse itself does not say what is going into the measure. That has to be traced elsewhere — and the text does trace repeatedly throughout scripture.
Pulling the explicit statements throughout scripture together, in the order of textual certainty:
- Idolatry / worship of false gods — the most repeatedly and explicitly named, and the one the text uses “Amorite” as a direct synonym for (Exodus 34:15-16; Joshua 24:15; 1 Kings 21:26; 2 Kings 21:2-11).
- Child sacrifice (“passing sons and daughters through the fire” to Molech) — named specifically and repeatedly (Leviticus 18:21; Deuteronomy 12:31; 18:10; 2 Kings 21:6).
- The sexual-conduct catalogue of Leviticus 18 (incest, adultery, homosexual acts, bestiality) — stated as the reason the land “vomited out” its prior inhabitants (Leviticus 18:24-30), with Sodom (Genesis 19) as an earlier regional instance of the same category.
- Occult practice — divination, sorcery, mediumship, necromancy — named as a distinct, explicit cause (Deuteronomy 18:9-14; 2 Kings 21:6).
- Violence/bloodshed.
So the measure Genesis 15:16 describes as “not yet full” is, on the text’s own testimony elsewhere, a measure being filled by these specific things — and the text considers the measure’s filling and God’s four-hundred-year patience toward it to be of a piece with the same principle it applies everywhere else guilt accumulates before judgment falls.
That is more important than I could possibly press upon you! It is a key to the way God deals in judgment over the nations – not just His Own people.
Now as to the second question this answers:
- It addresses the ‘WHY” behind large national judgements which is carried through as relevant throughout scripture even in the New Testament. This directly addresses and answers SO MANY questions which otherwise have evoked all manner of harmful and misleading speculations regarding God and His actions over nations and the world at large.
The last one I mentioned, being Violence/bloodshed is often artificially connected to the mention of giants in the lands referenced. While this is an understandable assumption if you already buy into the angel hypothesis of Genesis 6, but honestly, linguistically, grammatically there are literally ZERO connections being made between the judgement of these people and the fact that some of those people groups had giants in the land. [See Numbers 13:32-33; Deuteronomy 2-3; Amos 2:9]. They are mentioned but are NEVER stated by the text as a named cause of judgment.
Even if the text did include them as ‘A’ reason, they would still not be the only or even primary reason. But we can safely lay that to one side since the text does not allow for the existence of giants playing any role in the judgement here OR in Genesis 6.
So some important points regarding this is the use of the name Amorites. This is important on other grounds since it can cause all kinds of confusion if you do not know how this word is being used.
As a pre-example, let me remind you of how the southern kingdom of Israel was often called Judah. Yet, you know that in all reality this represented both the tribe of Judah AS WELL AS the tribe of Dan. They were both called collectively by one name – Judah!
What I am about to tell you is just like that!
The use of the name Amorite for a people group was established in Genesis 14:7, 13 — in reference to the Amorite clans (Mamre, Eshcol, Aner). They were already a named, localized people group in Abram’s day by then. In the very next chapter something happens which is important to note. The name “Amorites”, begins to be used as a “broad-stroke” term to refer to the entire population of Canaan prior to Israel being given the land by God and this association is in many ways tied to the specific sins mentioned in association with the Amorites.
This happened in Genesis 15:16 above. So that its use there was not specifically calling out the nation of the Amorites specifically but was capturing all of the peoples of Canaan by that term. These nations are specifically mentioned at the end of the chapter. Genesis 15:19-21 (Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Jebusites).
So within the narrative itself, this usage begins in the Abrahamic period, in the very speech that establishes the 400-year timeline we are examining.
Now this is important because many, through less than thorough exegesis of Genesis and other passages in the Pentateuch, link the Amorites as just (or primarily) the giants in Canaan and they artificially link them to the very Nephilim mentioned in Genesis 6 or even worse, to what they claim was yet another fall of angels from heaven which happened AFTER the flood.
Now it pains me that we have to waste so much time on this but I would not be a good pastor if I did not.
We have had to address and waste precious time on this hypothesis and the impact it has on the interpretation of many subsequent scriptures due to the current uprise in the superstitious belief in today’s world.
The primary reason, of which I am aware, that people who are of this particular persuasion use this reference is because they believe that it was due to the presence of human-angel half breeds that God had to eradicate the population of these nations so that they did not pollute the human genome.
While this is a fanciful interpretation which I admit, would carry weight if it were true, there simply is no support for it whatsoever. Now that would be an argument from silence, which while valid enough to shut it down as a positive assertion of scripture, we actually have God clearly defining the reason for their judgment and the existence of giants in not mentioned as a causal factor even once!
The sad truth is that even if it were true, if one is careful in their analysis of any given text, they would have to admit that the “angel interpretation” of Genesis 6 has zero bearing on the rest of scripture, the New Covenant or the gospel message with which the Church, God’s people, OUGHT to be occupied.
It is a useless diversion away from the only true message the New Covenant believer should be proclaiming which is Jesus focused – not man focused or even angel focused – MUCH LESS fallen angel focused!
In a completely separate conversation with the Massive Language Model Claude Sonnet 5 requiring extra effort in processing, the model brought this up and I pressed it on a few key (yet I honestly believe obvious points) at which point it retracted its conclusions and showed how nothing in the text of Genesis 6 or Genesis 15 link the two events in any way.
This is a summary statement it made…
“If it can stand at all, it does so only as an unrelated background regarding the land’s population, with no bearing on what Scripture identifies as the sin that had to reach its full measure.”
As to the real and clearly stated reasons for this accumulated judgement are the following as I stated earlier:
- The rest of the argument — idolatry (Exodus 34:15-16; Joshua 24:15; 1 Kings 21:26; 2 Kings 21:2-11)
- Child sacrifice (Leviticus 18:21; Deuteronomy 12:31; 18:10; 2 Kings 21:6),
- The Leviticus 18 sexual catalogue with its explicit “the land vomited them out” causal statement (18:24-30), and
- The occult practices of Deuteronomy 18:9-14 — is untouched by the presence of giants or the lack thereof.
Those are all supported by the text’s own explicit causal language, which the Genesis 6 material never had.
Now as to its importance as a standard by which all nations are judges is witnessed in the use of the precise same collective/representative usage of the blanket term “Amorites” recurring steadily afterward as applied to other specific people groups moving forward…
In Exodus 34:11 and comparable listing texts, Numbers 21:21-31 (Sihon’s kingdom), Deuteronomy 1:4, 7, 19-20, Joshua 24:15, Judges 6:10, 1 Samuel 7:14, 1 Kings 21:26, 2 Kings 21:11, and Amos 2:9-10 — spanning from the patriarchal narrative through the conquest, judges, monarchy, and into the writing prophets.
This connection between the word “Amorites” and this list of sins and other nations begins in Genesis 15:16.
Moving on to the New Testament so that you can see how cohesive this patter of sin is – that it is idolatry leading to all manner of sexual sin and is a cumulative sin which reaches a point at which it is “full” and thereby warrants judgment lets look at a few passages.
The Septuagint’s Greek for Genesis 15:16 — “not yet complete” — is the compound verb ἀναπληρόω (anaplēroō, “fill up fully“). That exact compound verb reappears in the New Testament exactly once, in a structurally identical statement:
“…to fill up (ἀναπληρῶσαι) their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost.” (1 Thessalonians 2:16)
Paul here is not quoting Genesis 15:16, but he reaches for the same rare compound verb to describe the same phenomenon: a generation’s accumulated guilt reaching a completed measure, at which point delayed wrath is finally released (“the wrath is come… to the uttermost,” εἰς τέλος).
Matthew 23:32 uses the related but simple form of the same root: “Fill ye up then (πληρώσατε) the measure of your fathers” so that again we see this same patter of a generational measure of guilt (τὸ μέτρον, “the measure“) reaching its limit, followed immediately by pronounced judgment (vv.33-36).
Three separate authors, two languages, three different subjects (the Amorites, the Jerusalem religious establishment of Jesus’ day, a group of first-century persecutors) — and the same underlying idiom every time: God’s judgment on a corporate body of sin operates by a fixed but hidden capacity that fills over time and is then poured out.
Genesis 15:16 is the first and clearest statement of the mechanism; it does not by itself supply the content for the Amorites specifically, which is why the content has to come from Leviticus 18/20, Deuteronomy 12/18/20, 1 Kings 21, and 2 Kings 21, as above.
The New Testament does not add new facts about the Amorites by name, but it does supply the text’s own theological account of why idolatry and sexual corruption travel together so consistently in the Old Testament catalogues we’ve already mentioned. This is very useful for understanding the logic of the list rather than just its items.
Paul, in Romans 1:21-27 traces a sequence which mirror what we read in the Old Testament:
Suppression of what is known of God leading to → idol-worship in place of the Creator which leads to → God “giving them up” to degrading passions, explicitly including the kind of unions named in Leviticus 18.
Paul is not writing about Canaan, but he is describing the same causal chain (idolatry generating sexual corruption) that Leviticus 18 simply reports as historical fact about “the nations” of the land about to be given as an inheritance to Israel but is also given as the reason why Israel must wait 400 years since the “full measure” of their cumulative sins have not yet reached their peak.
In an interesting connection with our message on Sunday regarding the church of Pergamum, 1 Corinthians 10:1-11 and Numbers 25 mention Balaam and Baal-Peor as showing the same pairing again — idol-feast participation and sexual immorality bound together. In a narrative Paul explicitly holds this up as a warning “type” for the church, confirming that Scripture itself treats this idolatry leading to sexual immorality combination as a recognizable, recurring pattern rather than an isolated feature of one people and one that, over time, builds to a pouring out of judgment which includes a land vomiting its inhabitant out.
Lastly, it is interesting to consider that we are at a point in American history where this is very likely about to be realized.
First idolatry – both in evolutionary atheism and materialism – giving way to unprecedented expressions of sexual immorality and sanctioned (even celebrated) child sacrifice leading to eventual judgment.
So, you can see why this is SO important a topic which is first laid down in Exodus but whose original forewarning was found in the words of God to Abram in Genesis 15.
