Exodus & Eccentricity

Rituals of Exit...

“Now John wore clothing of camels hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey…”

Exit narratives tend to carry an eccentric character; that is, literally, an out-of-centre kind of feeling. They appear as a jolt to the norm, an oddity, a shocking and unusual occurrence. They are peculiar events, by definition. But by who's definition? They appear as an exception to the rule: extraneous to the norm, or the nomos, which is Greek for “law.” They are outlaw terrain. And so, it is from the place of rule that exit narratives appear as something peculiar; from the chambers of the powers that be. Power tends to see itself as normative, and as a coherent whole from which there is no outside to go to. 

On the other hand, exodus stories are not so peculiar to the imagination of the vanquished and the subjected, who experience normal life as a kind of exile. Even if the event itself is rare, the story haunts ordinary time, in art, culture, ritual and shared memory. For some, the dream of that open beyond the reach of the powers is a necessary madness, to sustain the life of the soul and the resilience to survive the realities of subjection.

The Hebrew Bible is that peculiar and eccentric thing: a history written by the vanquished. Its exit narratives are not just odd moments in the plot arc, they are the central tales which echo through the whole thing, from beginning to end. 

Abram and Sarai are called to leave the archaic civilisation of their forebears in Ur of the Chaldees. They depart from power and safety to become nomadic tent-dwelling people, far from the walled cities. They are ahead of the curve of decline, moving on before power begins to digest itself. They are gifted land to live in, but not to own. They move and they move again, keeping livestock but not growing crops, being unfixed to any place in that starlit open.

After some generations their ancestors are absorbed back into the embrace of civilisation. They find themselves an enslaved underclass building monuments to Pharoah's grandeur in Egypt. Then comes the event: the world convulses in apocalyptic chaos, and the enthralled are liberated from Pharaoh’s domain. They pass through the sea, which parts for the liberated slaves and then collapses on the pursuing slave-masters. They meet God by a mountain in the wilderness and become tent-dwelling nomads again. Even the God they meet is worshipped in a tent, since the Deity preferred not to live in temples. “Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me?” 

After their own failures in the economy of kingdoms and walled cities—after “many defeats and many fruitless victories,” as Elrond puts it—they are subjected once again, under the violent rule of the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks, and then the Romans. Colonisation and occupation become the norm. Tales of the exodus remain the common memory of hope, retold in festivals, liturgies and rituals, painfully distant and achingly near.

There are also plenty of entrance narratives, of course, which exist in balance and conversation with the exits. But even so, in the weave of the Hebrew Bible there is an ongoing dialectic between captivity and exodus, colonisation and liberation, subjection and uncivilisation. 

When the messianic movement took up John's baptism as a ritual of exit from the reach of the powers, they naturally understood it in continuity with this tradition of exodus tales. 

Here is Paul, interrupting himself in a letter. He is suddenly caught up in some poesis, as though he heard distant voices on the wind. He begins to write in a trance:

Our ancestors were all under the cloud,

And all passed through the sea,

And all were baptised into Moses,

In the cloud and in the sea

And all ate the same numinous food

And all drank the same numinous drink

For they drank from the numinous rock that followed them

And the rock was the messiah

It was precisely their eccentricity and their peculiarity that made them who they were. It was their jolting common story which took them outward and off the map of the normative power relations, a story they re-told every year at the passover feast. Exodus from the nomos was the norm.

The meaning of baptism, as a ritual of exit, naturally developed over the years after John’s wilderness cult disbanded. The death of the Messiah figure, whom John had endorsed, somehow transfigured it. He brought it into relief, in ways that we will think about soon, but not today. For now it is enough to note that, just as Paul understands the immersion ritual in a long ancestral tradition of the oppressed, he also read the Messianic event—of death and resurrection—back into the archaic exodus tradition. There was the Messiah, an age ago, in the open with Moses and the liberated slaves. Linear history collapses. To some, exodus is everything and everytime, however peculiar, tangential and piecemeal it may appear to the powers that be. Every performance of peculiarity is a crack in the wall of the nomos, and a new rumour of the fabled open beyond it.