Hebrews 11:27

27. Forsook Egypt Not only declined the royal adoption and preferred his kindred, but fully and finally left the land of Pharaoh. A large majority of commentators, including Delitzsch, Lunemann, and Alford, refer this forsook to Moses’ flight from Egypt to Midian, (Exodus 2:11-15,) when menaced by Pharaoh for killing an Egyptian. By that rendering the great fact of Moses’s life is left unmentioned, and an act of fear and flight, rather than heroic faith, is selected. Pharaoh, we are told, “Sought to slay Moses, but Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh.” He remained long years concealed in Midian, until, at last, Jehovah there gave him his call to his great mission. To say of this event that it was divine “faith,” “not fearing the wrath of the king,” contradicts the face and the substance of the sacred narrative, which presents it as a long process of fear, flight, concealment, and inaction, the dim and faithless period of Moses’s life. For that interpretation, however, Lunemann argues:

1. To make forsook designate the exodus of Israel from Egypt violates the chronological order of the series of events, for that exodus really came after the passover. Hebrews 11:28.

2. The word forsook ( κατελιπεν , left) is too slight to express so great a movement as the Exodus 3:0. That the exodus after Exodus 12:31 was commanded by Pharaoh, and did not admit “fearing the wrath of the king.”

To the first we reply, that the exodus, as designated by forsook, is the great fact, under which the passover and the passage of the sea are subordinate parts, and so are, with propriety, later mentioned. To the second, that refused, Hebrews 11:24, and forsook, are co-ordinate. The whole statement in regard to Moses is a series of rejections and overthrows of Egypt, which our author designs to be paralleled by his Hebrews’ rejection and overthrow of Jerusalem and Judaism. Moses refused his sonship to Pharaoh’s daughter; he abandoned Egypt; he established the passover under which Egypt’s firstborn were slain; he passed the sea in which Egypt’s royalty and power were submerged. To the third we answer, that this forsook includes the whole movement from Exodus 3:0 to the complete clearance from Egypt at end of Exodus 15:0. Pharaoh’s order in Exodus 12:31 was but an incident in the great wrath of the king which Moses long braved in accomplishing the exodus. How typical is this whole picture of the exodus of the Christian Hebrews going out from the temple worship at Jerusalem, and abandoning ritual, city, and state to their approaching overthrow!

Him who is invisible A higher king than Pharaoh.

Seeing… invisible Expresses the fact of faith as above sight.