While our English versions of the Old Testament call the book “Exodus,” which means “leaving,” the Hebrew name is the first word of the text, shemoth, “names.” “These are the names,” and those names are the sons of Jacob who God renamed Israel. They and their families—a total of seventy people—escaped famine in the land of Canaan, finding a home with the long-lost son of Jacob, Joseph who, sold into slavery, became Pharaoh’s second-in-command.

Initially they lived well and over the decades those seventy became thousands. Then we read, “there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” and he and his people were afraid of these hoards of foreigners. So the king, Pharoah enslaved them. Dr. Kent Lasnoski has been reading Exodus with our Wyoming Catholic College freshmen and had this to say about the book.