History of a Nation

 

    The end of Genesis and Exodus are interesting because they are fundamentally about the development of Israel as a nation. For the first time, the children of Israel, aka Jacob, form a coherent group as they head into Egypt at the request of Joseph and invitation of Pharaoh. After living in Egypt for a few hundred years, Israel is no longer a family group or even a tribe of a father and his children with several "wives"; instead, it is a much larger collection of people bound by shared blood to Israel himself and a shared connection to God. Therefore, Genesis into Exodus is a rather important part of the Old Testament that explains how the nation of Israel itself was founded after God's promise to Abraham, Jacob's eventual birth, and a period of enslavement in Egypt.

    Interestingly enough, as I finished reading Exodus, JWST captured an image of Neptune that showed off the planet and surrounding satellites as never before. Particularly, the Webb image shows the rings of Neptune and several of its moons which are normally very dim in the visible spectrum, though in the above image are astoundingly clear and defined. Additionally, the great blue planet is no longer quite so blue in the image by Webb but instead seems to be shrouded in a bright aura due to it being imaged in the infrared spectrum. What I love most about this picture, however, is comparing it to previous images from Voyager 2 and Hubble as seen above. Voyager 2 was a deep space probe meant to explore the outer regions of the solar system, but what is particularly interesting about Voyager 2 is that Neptune had not been visited by any other probes before it and has not been visited by any probes since. This means that the classic image of Neptune that we all know and love is truly one of a kind. Even the Hubble Space Telescope has trouble getting as clear an image of Neptune because it is so much further away from Neptune than Voyager 2 was when it took its picture.

    I like to think about this in respect to the family of Israel that went into Egypt and the nation of Israel that developed in Egypt. The ironic thing about the family of Israel going into Egypt is that they were never meant to stay there. God explicitly promises Abraham and his descendants the land of Canaan and tasks Moses with "[bringing] them up out of [Egypt] unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:8). That plentiful land, once again, is the land of Canaan, but here the funny thing is that the family of Israel came out of Canaan into Egypt only to go back to Canaan after a long period of enslavement by the Egyptians. While this course of action seems counterintuitive, it was necessary for Israel to go from being a family tribe to being a nation. Thanks to Joseph, Egypt was highly prosperous and plentiful during a time when the rest of the world was afflicted by seven years of famine. Joseph bringing the people of Israel into Egypt during this time, then, was an extremely smart decision that would help the Israelites thrive, especially initially when they had the favor of Joseph, the pharaoh, and Egypt as a whole. Of course, the highly prosperous people of Israel would only serve to make new Pharaoh jealous once Joseph died and Egypt forgot his great deeds. However, the struggle of the Israelites in Egypt serves to bind them together once Moses is able to deliver them back unto Canaan, freed from slavery with the help of God. For instance, God's ten plagues against the Egyptians are not necessarily to punish the Egyptians for their mistreatment of the Israelites but rather to demonstrate God's awesome power to the Israelites themselves. After all, for each of the ten plagues except the last, "the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh", implying that God Himself did not want Pharaoh to let them go immediately and did not formulate his plagues accordingly (Exodus 9:12). Furthermore, God starts out with plagues, such as the summoning of frogs from the river, that have little major effect on Egypt and can even be replicated by Pharaoh's own magicians. Why would God wait to afflict the more impactful plagues, such as the killing of the Egyptian firstborns, until the end when it appears that it is only because of their severity that Pharaoh eventually hearkens unto Moses and lets the Israelites go? (Exodus 12:31) The only logical explanation appears to be that God wants to methodically demonstrate the unrivaled breadth and extent of his abilities to the Israelites, only a small percentage of which mere humans could ever hope to copy, and the Egyptians themselves are simply a means to this end. 

    Likewise, it seems initially very counterintuitive that in the picture comparison above, the picture by Voyager 2 is much clearer than the picture by Hubble despite it being thirty-two years older. However, it is important to consider that the launch of Hubble was not meant to help study objects in our solar system with increased precision, at least not immediately. Instead, Hubble was meant to study the universe as a whole with much unprecedented clarity, and its success in this endeavor is abundantly clear when one Googles Hubble images on the web. Like the multiplication of Israelites in Egypt, Hubble would serve to indirectly improve images of Neptune by serving as the inspiration and basis of future telescopes like the Webb that, among many other things, would be able to capture Neptune and its surrounding features in much more detail than ever before. Admittedly, Neptune itself appears blurrier in Webb's photo than Voyager 2's, but again, the orbiting rings and satellites are clearer than they have ever been in any other image taken of the planet. Likewise, the connection between the Israelites and Abraham may be more diluted after their stay in Egypt than before, though important details of the nation itself such as its numbers, strength, and organization, both in religion and government, are far improved after. 

    A few final observations I noticed in comparing these images with Exodus include how even the timelines align well between the two. Voyager 2 could only take pictures of Neptune for an extremely limited period of time, so for 32 years, Hubble's images were some of the best we had within the astronomy community. However, immediately after the Webb is launched, the quality of images is able to improve drastically. This is similar to the brief but clear picture we get of the Israelites as they are described at the end of Exodus before entering Egypt followed by hundreds of years of fuzzy detail of the soon-to-be nation as it loses its independence in Egypt. However, as soon as Moses is able to free the Israelites from Egyptian rule, they almost immediately set up laws and even the beginnings of a formal religion, taking back their identity as God's chosen people. Finally, while completely unrelated, Neptune in its latest image seems to almost be glowing due to it being in the infrared spectrum, and this simple fact being unique only to the Webb photo seems to me almost a symbol for the amazing potential that Israel has as a nation after the Exodus from Egypt that it never quite concretely had before.