Egypt, Pharaoh, and the Story Still Unfolding

Reading Beyond History

One of the most important things to understand when we read the Old Testament is that the people we encounter there are not just historical figures—they are literary characters. Yes, there may be a high degree of overlap between the actual person who lived and the character we meet in the text, but ultimately, these are archetypes. Symbols. Figures shaped to speak beyond their moment in time and into something deeper about the human condition.

This is especially true of the Exodus story. Egypt and Pharaoh are not only historical realities; they represent something much larger—forces in the world that resist God’s justice. Once we see that, the Exodus becomes a story we can enter ourselves, a lens for critiquing the powers and systems around us today.

The Characters We Have

I remember in my first year of seminary, a professor made the point that while debates about the historical Abraham or the historical Moses can be fascinating—and even important—our certainty will always be limited. What we have in biblical studies is the Abraham of the text, the Moses of the story. Archaeologists may explore other evidence, but for us, these are literary characters.

Walter Brueggemann takes this a step further. He suggests that Egypt should be read not only as an empire that once was, but as a character—an archetype for every system that resists God’s justice. The Pharaoh of the Bible is not just a single ruler; he is the amalgamation of all who presume to sit at the pinnacle of human history. And that isn’t a way of making the Bible relevant—it’s how the Bible was written.

Notice that the Exodus text gives us no identifying details about which historical Pharaoh it might be. That’s not a mistake. It’s intentional. The storyteller’s aim is to speak about the phenomenon of Pharaoh—the enduring idea of power, not simply one man’s reign.

A Prophetic Tradition

This tradition carries forward. In Revelation, when the text moves between Rome, Babylon, and images of Egypt, it’s not jumping around in time. It’s naming recurring patterns of human power. The Hebrew prophets did this too—dislocating their critique from a single moment so it could speak to every moment.

Prophetic imagination is not about predicting the future or just retelling the past. It’s about naming the mistakes we keep making. Which means Egypt, Babylon, Rome, Britain, America, China—any empire—can find itself under the Bible’s prophetic lens.

Brueggemann warns us: “The key pathology of our time which seduces us all is the reduction of our imagination so that we become too numb, too satiated, too co-opted to do the serious imaginative work of reading the Bible. It’s good stories read with prophetic creativity that wakes us up from what is now toward what is possible.”

Egypt’s Royal Consciousness

Brueggemann names three characteristics embedded in Egypt’s archetypal role:

Affluence – Egypt’s wealth was built on the backs of the oppressed. The Jewish slaves made the bricks that kept the economy moving.

Amnesia – Empires forget the lessons of the past. Exodus 1:8 opens with, “Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt.” Memory lasts only as long as it serves the present.

Numbness – Egypt silences grief and dissent, not only from the oppressed but even from its own people. This inability to feel and to lament prevents the empire from truly learning.

Affluence, amnesia, numbness—these are not ancient problems alone. They are alive in the world around us.

The Exodus is worth studying in its historical context. But it is equally, perhaps more, important to read it as it was crafted—to see how it still speaks, still critiques, still invites us into a more just and human way of living.