Chapter 4 — Moses and the Israelites
Egypt to the Promised Land is the long pedagogical detour. It is the story of how a clan of slaves is slowly forged into a people capable of carrying providence forward — not a single deliverance but a forty-year tutorial in self-government, conscience and covenant. William Haines spent eight days on this series because, in his reading, almost everything we still mean by a free society first surfaces in this narrative: civil disobedience, the rule of law, distributive justice, the separation of powers, even the idea that a victim might lay down vengeance because Someone else is keeping the accounts. The Exodus, in his telling, is the political philosophy of the West in embryonic form.
The Exodus
The series opens not with Moses but with two women whose names most readers cannot recall: Shifra and Puah, the Hebrew midwives ordered by Pharaoh to drown the male infants at birth and who quietly refuse. William treats this as a hinge moment in moral history. It is, on his reading, the birth of civil disobedience — the first recorded instance of a private conscience saying no to an absolute state. The state commands; two women decline; and an entire theological tradition picks up the thread. From that small refusal the chapter expands outwards to Moses himself, the Egyptian-raised Hebrew who sees an injustice in the street and intervenes. Why him? Because he acts.
God does not intervene directly in history; instead, He acts through us. He seeks individuals willing to take initiative and responsibility, acting as sons rather than servants or slaves. Servants may have some initiative, but they often refrain from fixing problems, choosing instead to complain about the situation. A leader, on the other hand, acknowledges the reality they face and asks how they can improve it. Moses was distinctive because he took action; he did not accept the world as it was but sought to change it. People often question why God does not intervene in crises like the Holocaust or starvation. However, God desires individuals who are willing to take responsibility and work towards making the world a better place, even if it is just in their immediate surroundings.
This is the theological key that unlocks everything else in the series. Providence, William insists, is not a substitute for human courage; it is the search for human courage. Moses is the answer to a question God has been asking since Eden. And the midwives are the proof that the answer was already arriving before the deliverer himself was weaned.
When Moses returns from Midian and walks into Pharaoh's court, he does not arrive as a revolutionary firebrand. He arrives as a negotiator. William is careful to draw out the diplomacy of the encounter, which is more subtle than the Sunday-school summary suggests.
When Moses speaks to Pharaoh, he asserts that Israel is God's firstborn son, but he also implies that God loves the Egyptians as well, for they too are God's children. Moses does not tell Pharaoh that he intends to lead the people out of Egypt forever; instead, he asks to take them out for three days to worship God. Moses understands that Pharaoh is unlikely to allow his entire workforce to leave permanently, so he negotiates for a temporary reprieve.
The detail matters because it sets the tone for the law that is coming. Moses is not seeking the destruction of Egypt; he is seeking room for worship. He is not declaring Israelite supremacy; he is declaring that Egypt, too, is loved. The Hebrew Bible, William liked to repeat, is one of the very few ancient documents whose authors believed their God cared about the nations on the other side of the river. The plagues that follow are not nationalist triumphalism but a sustained argument with a tyrant who has been given many chances to relent.
The Sinai covenant
Out of Egypt and into the wilderness, the people arrive at Sinai not yet a nation. They are an emancipated mob: free, but undisciplined; delivered, but dependent. What happens at the mountain is the founding act of a body politic, and William insists that we read the Bible at this point as exactly what it is — a work of political philosophy.
The Bible is essentially a work of political philosophy, trying to work out how people can live together in peace. It explores the different ways that people attempt to coexist. The basic desire expressed in the Hebrew Bible is to create a peaceful world, to achieve unity while respecting diversity... A covenant is made when two or more people place themselves in loyalty to one another to achieve together what neither can achieve alone. A covenant is not solely about 'me'; it is about 'me' and 'you' who become 'us' together, creating a new identity. A traditional model for a covenant is marriage, which is why the prophets often compare the covenant between God and the people of Israel to a marriage.
Sinai is therefore a wedding, not a coronation. And the revolutionary content of the wedding contract — the Torah itself — is what William considered the Hebrew Bible's gift to political philosophy: one law for all, written in an alphabet anyone could learn, designed so that every shepherd and every kitchen-servant could read the Torah and become, in principle, a priest. The Egyptian and Mesopotamian elites kept literacy locked inside guilds of scribes; the Hebrew innovation was to break the lock. A people that can all read the law is a people that can all hold the king to it. Beyond Israel's own borders, the same instinct produced the Noahide Code — the seven universal laws that, in rabbinic thought, oblige every human society. Peace among nations, William argued, is not to be sought through empire, common creed or common tongue, but through a shared minimal rule of law. Imperialism flattens difference; covenant preserves it.
The covenant is sealed in blood, and for William this detail is not a piece of Bronze Age primitivism to be apologised away. It is a sacrament. Moses dashes blood from the altar onto the assembled people, and in that moment a tribe becomes a kingdom of priests. William read his own movement's holy wine ceremonies as a conscious echo of that Sinai gesture — a community being literally reconstituted, its lineage rewritten in the act of receiving the cup.
Father Haines does this repeatedly; it is evident in the blessing ceremony, similar to the registration blessing. Since our original blessing or marriage, Father has called upon us to participate as a community in holy wine ceremonies. What Father is doing is akin to the founding event of the Jewish community three and a half thousand years ago, binding us together in our relationship with God and with each other, fostering a sense of community and fellowship.
Yet the same lecture issues a warning. A covenant binds a people to a living relationship; an ideology binds a people to an abstraction. The latter, William argued, is what idolatry now looks like in modernity.
Idealism, then, is really a self-centred form of idolatry. Some people have an idea of how the world ought to be; they have a picture of an ideal society and think, 'This would be an ideal society.' They try to implement this ideal society, and the result is often disastrous. That's what happened in communist revolutions. Communists had brilliant ideas, worked them out intellectually and abstractly, and thought that in order to create this ideal society, they needed power. When they lost the election in Russia in 1917, they seized power in a coup d'état and tried to impose their ideals on society. But what do you do with all the people who don't want to live out your ideal? You imprison them or, eventually, may even put them to death because they refuse to conform to your expectations of how you think they ought to be.
Sinai is the antidote to the ideologue. Real covenant is messy, particular, embodied; it tolerates the slow ripening of an actual people. Ideology is impatient and therefore, in the end, murderous.
The wilderness years
The Israelites leave Sinai with a law and a tabernacle, and immediately begin to behave like the slaves they have just stopped being. They grumble, fall ill of nostalgia for Egyptian onions, fail their courage at the borders of Canaan, and find themselves sentenced to a generation of wandering. William read these forty years as the indispensable middle act — a school of habituation, in which a slave-people learns how to bear the weight of freedom.
The first lesson is that freedom requires economic justice as well as political justice. Mosaic Law, William stressed, is the first legal code to fuse both: retributive justice (the courts, the cities of refuge, the careful proportionality of "an eye for an eye") and distributive justice (the gleaning laws, the sabbath rest, and above all the Jubilee in which every fiftieth year debts were forgiven and ancestral land returned). The Jubilee is the genius of the system because it builds the cure for inequality into the constitution itself. Without it, William said, the natural drift of any society — even a free one — is towards a small caste of perpetual creditors and a large class of perpetual debtors, at which point the freedom is only nominal.
Charity is an act of love, a way of giving something to someone in need. Justice, on the other hand, is something you have by right; it is fair and just. This connection between doing the right thing and social justice highlights a moral obligation to share one's wealth with those who are less fortunate. It is not merely a choice but a responsibility to contribute to the community. In historical Jewish society, this moral obligation could even be legally enforced, making it more than just an act of charity. It raises an interesting idea about social justice; it is not fair for some individuals to be phenomenally rich while others are poor and homeless. Wealthy individuals have a moral obligation to use their resources for the benefit of others.
The second wilderness lesson is psychological. Slaves are takers; free people must learn to give. The constant complaining of the people in Numbers is the symptom of a population that has not yet completed the inward exodus.
The biblical principle of dual legitimacy emerges, where authority comes from both God and the people. Up until this point, the people had been complaining, as they were in a state of dependency, relying on God for everything. When something went wrong, they expected God to intervene. However, this principle illustrates that it is not what God does for us that transforms us, but what we do for God. God was giving them an opportunity to change, moving from being mere recipients of His grace and blessings to being able to give back. This transition from being recipients to creators is crucial. God, the creator of the universe, is creating space for people to give something back, allowing them to become co-creators.
And it is here, too, that William introduced one of his favourite outside voices: the Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, whose argument is that belief in a God of final justice is precisely what allows ordinary human beings to lay down the sword. Without a divine reckoning, the victim has no choice but to retaliate, and the wheel of revenge becomes the only available engine of justice. The Mosaic insistence that vengeance belongs to God is therefore not a piece of pious resignation but the precondition of any non-violent civic life. To trust the courts, one must first trust the Court above the courts.
The third lesson is about the architecture of power itself. Long before Montesquieu, William argued, the Hebrew Bible insists on a separation of powers. The king of Israel is forbidden to be his own priest; the priest is forbidden to be his own judge; the prophet, accountable to no human authority, is free to speak truth to all three. Isaiah and Jeremiah are not chaplains to the regime — they are its conscience. The modern equivalent of the prophet, William suggested, ought to be the free press, though he was under no illusion that it has lived up to the role. And the maturation of an Israelite is the maturation of a citizen capable of playing each part responsibly, including the hardest: the loyal critic.
When someone does something hurtful, it is crucial to communicate that to them. If you remain silent and allow resentment to fester, you are the one who suffers. Often, the person who hurt you may not even realise their actions were wrong. By addressing the issue directly, you give them a chance to apologise and restore the relationship. If you do not speak up, the relationship may remain broken indefinitely. Moses emphasised that we should not seek revenge or hold grudges, as this only damages ourselves and our relationships... Following one's conscience is paramount, even if it means risking one's safety or position. It takes courage to speak truth to power and to stand up against wrongdoing.
The Joshua handover
The final day of the series is also the saddest, because Moses does not enter the land. William rejected the standard catechetical explanation — that Moses struck the rock once too often — as too thin to bear the weight of so great a refusal. He read the deeper cause as grief. Miriam dies; Aaron dies; Moses, who has carried this people for forty years, is suddenly the last of his generation, and something in him breaks. He still leads, he still legislates, but he no longer has the elastic patience the final crossing will demand. The work must pass to Joshua, who was born in the wilderness and is therefore free in a way Moses, born under the lash, never could be.
What endures is the method. William drew particular attention to the rabbinic memory of Hillel and Shammai, the two schools whose disagreements fill the Talmud and whose contest models the kind of argument a free people must learn to have.
The Hillel/Shammai precedent: the views of Shamai and the views of Hillel are both the words of the living God, even though they contradict each other. However, the law is in accordance with the school of Hillel. The reason God said that the law is in accord with the school of Hillel is that whenever the school of Hillel presented the law, they would always first present the view of Shamai with respect and accuracy. Then they would present their own view, allowing everyone listening to understand both sides of the argument and come to their own conclusion. It is this approach that God favoured. It was not a question of which one was right; it was about how they argued.
This, William thought, is the inner shape of a Promised Land worth entering — a polity capable of disagreement without violence, of dissent without cancellation. He pressed the point with a final, uncomfortable observation about our own moment.
Cultural dementia is a term that describes how the West has lost its history and risks losing everything else. Many young people today do not believe in freedom of speech, viewing it as a right-wing idea. Instead, they embrace cancel culture, silencing those with whom they disagree. They forget what it was like under fascism or communism and why people fought for freedom of speech and religion. This cultural dementia is shocking. The biblical view is that memory is the basis for ethics... The Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, emphasises the importance of memory as the guardian of conscience. In Israel, the injunction to remember is felt as a religious imperative.
The Joshua generation enters Canaan because it remembers Egypt. The forty years were not punishment but mnemonics — a slow, hard inscription of the slave-house on the collective body, so that the free people would never reproduce it. William ended the series with a note that surprised many of his listeners: the nearest living approximation to the Mosaic polity, he suggested, is not any of the spiritual communities we have managed to build, but the decentralised direct democracy of Switzerland, with its cantons, its referenda, and its stubborn refusal to let any single power centre swallow the rest. It was a humbling closing thought. The work of Moses is not finished. The wilderness is still where most of us are walking. And the question the chapter leaves us with is the same one Sinai first put: are we yet a people who can be trusted with our own freedom?