Exodus

Four hundred years after one family walked into Egypt to escape a famine, their descendants are a nation of slaves. A new king who has never heard of Joseph puts them to work making bricks, and when they keep growing anyway he gives an order: drown every Hebrew boy at birth. One mother hides her son three months, then sets him afloat on the river in a basket of reeds. The king's own daughter pulls him out and names him Moses.

Raised as an Egyptian, Moses kills an overseer beating a Hebrew, and runs. Forty years later he is a shepherd in a foreign desert when a bush catches fire and does not burn up, and a voice tells him to go back and demand a nation's freedom from the most powerful man alive. Moses argues, loses the argument, and goes.

What follows is a duel. Pharaoh says he does not know this God and will not obey him, and Egypt pays for that answer ten times over — a river turned to blood, frogs, lice, flies, dead cattle, boils, hail, locusts, three days of darkness that can be felt, and at last a night when every firstborn son in the country dies and every house marked with lamb's blood is passed over. Egypt pushes them out before dawn. When the chariots come after them, the sea opens and closes.

Freedom turns out to be harder than escape. Thirsty, hungry and frightened, the people shout at Moses in the desert and are fed with bread that falls at dawn. At a smoking mountain God offers them a covenant and they accept it out loud. Then Moses goes up for forty days, and while he is gone they melt their earrings into a golden calf.

The book ends with what happens after forgiveness: the same people, giving gold from the same night, building a tent for God to live in — and a cloud coming down to fill it.