Exodus opens with four hundred years of silence. Joseph is dead, Pharaoh has forgotten him, and a new dynasty has put Israel under the lash. The narrator writes for a covenant people who need to know that the long quiet of Egypt was not abandonment. Moses (or the Mosaic tradition) frames the rescue not as a sudden whim but as the activation of a promise made centuries earlier to Abraham. For an audience tempted to read silence as absence, Exodus 2 insists that God was already moving before the bush ever burned.

From the writers we read together

Carmen Joy Imes

Old Testament scholar, author of Bearing God's Name and Being God's Image

Imes reads Exodus through the lens of Sinai — she argues the whole point of the rescue is to form a people who will bear the name of YHWH into the world. But before any of that can happen, God has to be the kind of God who keeps promises across generations. Exodus 2:24 is the verse where the covenant with Abraham, made in Genesis 15 and seemingly dormant ever since, comes back to the surface. Imes' insistence is that nothing in those four hundred years was wasted. The slavery, the silence, the cry — all of it was forming the people who would stand at Sinai and hear their name called.

What this does to your reading of your own life is uncomfortable in a good way. The years that feel like Egypt — the long stretches when God seems to have moved on to other matters — are not pauses in the story. They are the story. The covenant God made over you in baptism is not waiting for a more convenient moment; it is already at work in the parts of your life that look most like slavery. Imes would say: the question is not whether God remembers. The question is whether you can stand to wait while he does.