better way to get at that meaning than to imitate the many
advocates and activists of deliverance who have gathered
their followers around them and read the biblical story.
Read and expounded and interpreted the story: for every
reading is also a construction, a reinvention of the past for
the sake of the present. But why is this story so endlessly
reinvented? That is what I have tried to explain.

Most of the reinventions have been the work of reli-
gious men and women who found in the text not only a
record of God's actions in the world but also a guide for
His people--which is to say, themselves. Perhaps they
were wrong, but that is not for me to argue. Within the
sacred history of the Exodus, they discovered a vivid and
realistic secular history that helped them to understand
their own political activity. I shall repeat that discovery.
I don't mean to disparage the sacred, only to explore the
secular: my subject is not what God has done but what
men and women have done, first with the biblical text
itself and then in the world, with the text in their hands.

I have worked almost entirely in English. I can make my
way through the Hebrew of the biblical books but not of
the Midrash or the medieval Jewish commentaries. Fortu-
nately, much of this latter material now exists in transla-
tion, including the entire Midrash Rabbah, the Mekilta De-
Rabbi Ishmael (a commentary on Exod. 12-23), Rashi's
notes on the biblical text, and the commentaries of Nach-
manides. In my use of untranslated material, I have relied
on Louis Ginzberg Legends of the Jews and Nehama Leibowitz's
excellent Studies in Exodus, Studies in Numbers, and
Studies in Deuteronomy. I am sure that I have missed a great
deal--not only in ancient and medieval books but also in
the work of contemporary Israeli scholars. But at some
point in any case I would have had to put aside other
people's interpretations and address the text and its polit-

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