In Reading Exodus Beth Kissileff draws together academics, experts and practitioners from different and varied fields to examine the text of Exodus through a series of new lenses. A singer/songwriter comments on the Song at the Sea in Exodus 15, an architect on the process of building a tabernacle, a video game specialist and designer on rules. Readers will enjoy Oliver Sacks on the Sabbath, political scientist Michael Walzer on how Exodus contributed to revolutionary thought and David Brion Davis on how American slaves viewed the Exodus.

The chapters cover the diversity of Exodus, offering specialist views from outside biblical studies on topics such as midwives, iconography, the immigrant experience. Here, alongside work from biblical scholars is writing by anthropologists, computer scientists, poets, lawyers, novelists and artists. Each writer offers a different prism through which to see a core aspect of this ancient text, displaying the wide variety of possibilities that the biblical text can yield in diverse hands. As with Kissileff’s previous collection Reading Genesis (“an anthology that breathes the sense of Genesis being a text that matters and speaks to the human condition at a fundamental level” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament) the purpose of this volume is to draw meaning out of the text, to encourage participants to focus on questioning, on learning, and on intellectual engagement with the biblical story.