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Exodus 17

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1 And the children of Israel went on from the waste land of Sin, by stages as the Lord gave them orders, and put up their tents in Rephidim: and there was no drinking-water for the people.

2 So the people were angry with Moses, and said, Give us water for drinking. And Moses said, Why are you angry with me? and Why do you put God to the test?

3 And the people were in great need of water; and they made an outcry against Moses, and said, Why have you taken us out of Egypt to send death on us and our children and our cattle through need of water?

4 And Moses, crying out to the Lord, said, What am I to do to this people? they are almost ready to put me to death by stoning.

5 And the Lord said to Moses, Go on before the people, and take some of the chiefs of Israel with you, and take in your hand the rod which was stretched out over the Nile, and Go.

6 See, I will take my place before you on the rock in Horeb; and when you give the rock a blow, water will come out of it, and the people will have drink. And Moses did so before the eyes of the chiefs of Israel.

7 And he gave that place the name Massah and Meribah, because the children of Israel were angry, and because they put the Lord to the test, saying, Is the Lord with us or not?

8 Then Amalek came and made war on Israel in Rephidim.

9 And Moses said to Joshua, Get together a band of men for us and go out, make war on Amalek: tomorrow I will take my place on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand.

10 So Joshua did as Moses said to him, and went to war with Amalek: and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill.

11 Now while Moses' hand was lifted up, Israel was the stronger: but when he let his hand go down, Amalek became the stronger.

12 But Moses' hands became tired; so they put a stone under him and he took his seat on it, Aaron and Hur supporting his hands, one on one side and one on the other; so his hands were kept up without falling till the sun went down.

13 And Joshua overcame Amalek and his people with the sword.

14 And the Lord said to Moses, Make a record of this in a book, so that it may be kept in memory, and say it again in the ears of Joshua: that all memory of Amalek is to be completely uprooted from the earth.

15 Then Moses put up an altar and gave it the name of Yahweh-nissi:

16 For he said, The Lord has taken his oath that there will be war with Amalek from generation to generation.

   

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Moses

  

At the inmost level, the story of Moses -- like all of the Bible -- is about the Lord and his spiritual development during his human life as Jesus. Moses's role represents establishing forms of worship and to make the people obedient. As such, his primary representation is "the Law of God," the rules God gave the people of Israel to follow in order to represent spiritual things. This can be interpreted narrowly as the Ten Commandments, more broadly as the books of Moses, or most broadly as the entire Bible. Fittingly, his spiritual meaning is complex and important, and evolves throughout the course of his life. To understand it, it helps to understand the meaning of the events in which he was involved. At a more basic level, Moses's story deals with the establishment of the third church to serve as a container of knowledge of the Lord. The first such church -- the Most Ancient Church, represented by Adam and centered on love of the Lord -- had fallen prey to human pride and was destroyed. The second -- the Ancient Church, represented by Noah and the generations that followed him -- was centered on love of the neighbor, wisdom from the Lord and knowledge of the correspondences between natural and spiritual things. It fell prey to the pride of intelligence, however -- represented by the Tower of Babel -- and at the time of Moses was in scattered pockets that were sliding into idolatry. On an external level, of course, Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt through 40 years in the wilderness to the border of the homeland God had promised them. Along the way, he established and codified their religious system, and oversaw the creation of its most holy objects. Those rules and the forms of worship they created were given as containers for deeper ideas about the Lord, deeper truth, and at some points -- especially when he was first leading his people away from Egypt, a time before the rules had been written down -- Moses takes on the deeper representation of Divine Truth itself, truth from the Lord. At other times -- especially after Mount Sinai -- he has a less exalted meaning, representing the people of Israel themselves due to his position as their leader. Through Moses the Lord established a third church, one more external than its predecessors but one that could preserve knowledge of the Lord and could, through worship that represented spiritual things, make it possible for the Bible to be written and passed to future generations.