"The world's a stage, where G-d's omnipotence/ His justice, knowledge, love, and providence/ do act the parts." Guillaume de Salluste's metaphor seems an apt summary of the Torah's account of the Exodus. In Genesis 15:13-14, G-d tells Abraham "Know definitively that your descendants will be aliens in a land not their own, whose inhabitants will enslave and afflict them - for four hundred years. I will also judge the nation for which they will slave, after which they will leave with great wealth". Unsurprisingly, G-d's predictions come true; viewed through the lens of Genesis, the Jews and Egyptians of Exodus seem to be reading their lines off a comprehensive Divine script.
This reading of biblical history, however, is psychologically and theologically bittersweet. Every extension of G-d's control limits human freedom - if G-d wills a specific version of history, man's experience of choice is illusory. G-d's detailed foretelling of the Jews' Egyptian experience magnifies His glory, but at the expense of His people's dignity.
Variations of this paradox have occupied Jewish thinkers in every age. In Mishnah Avot 3:15, for example, Rabbi Akiva states that "All is foreseen, yet freedom is granted", clearly recognizing that he affirms a contradiction. Similarly, In Laws of Repentance 5:5, Maimonides writes "And should you say "But G-d knows what will be, and thus must know in advance whether someone will be righteous or wicked. For if G-d knows that he will be righteous, and there remains a possibility that he will be wicked, G-d's knowledge is uncertain. Know that the answer to this question is longer than the earth and wider than the sea . . . but you must understand that G-d's knowledge, unlike human knowledge, is His essence . . . Accordingly, to understand His knowledge would be to understand Him, which is impossible, as it is written "for a person shall not see Me and live" . . . Accordingly, we do not have the ability to understand how G-d knows all our activities but we know without doubt that Man's actions are in our own hands and G-d does not influence us or compel us".
Maimonides' thesis that G-d's knowledge is qualitatively unique and therefore non-determinative became, despite cogent and biting criticism from Gersonides, the standard Jewish approach. Whatever its philosophic merit, however, it cannot resolve the difficulties posed by the biblical account of history. In Genesis, G-d conveys His foreknowledge of Exodus to Avraham, thus transforming Divine into human knowledge. The certainty of Avraham's human foreknowledge should have precluded free human choice.
Other elements of Exodus hint at a different view of history, one in which the human actors are given great freedom to interpret and even write material. At the start of Parashat Bo, for example, G-d tells Moshe "Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and those of his court". Moshe complies and tells Pharaoh that should he not release the Jews, locusts will decimate Egyptian agriculture. But G-d never mentioned locusts! Midrashim suggest that Moshe derived hints from other prophetic works, from abbreviations written on the sacred staff he carried, et al. The medieval commentator Chizkuni, however, basing himself on Isaiah 44:26's description of G-d as "upholder of the word of his servants", explains that G-d gave Moshe the right to announce any plague he thought appropriate. Midrashim similarly cite this verse in Isaiah in relation to Moshe's breaking the first Tablets, separating from his wife, adding an extra day of communal preparation for Revelation, and stating to Pharaoh before the ons et of the plague of Darkness that they would no longer meet.
And on rereading, even the apparently most fixed elements of the play seem flexible. The Jews actually spent considerably less than four hundred years in Egypt, and only part of that time as slaves. Midrashim accordingly explain that the four hundred years of Genesis 15:13 referred to the time they would spend as aliens, not as slaves, and included Yitzchak's stay in Gerar. Surely this would not have been Avraham's understanding of his own prophecy.
This flexibility extends to Egyptians as well as Jews. In Exodus 4:22, before the plagues begin, G-d commands Moshe to tell Pharaoh that refusal to release the Jews will cause the death of his first-born son. The actual Plague of the First-Born kills every first-born in Egypt, including those of servants and animals. Why the change? The medieval commentator R. Ovadiah Seforno argues compellingly that the plagues were intended to educate the Egyptians to worship G-d. Had they succeeded, perhaps only Pharaoh's first-born would have died. Indeed, in Genesis 15:14 G-d promised only to judge the enslaving nation, leaving ambiguous the outcome of that judgment.
Try and picture this revised, almost bloodless Exodus. What would Judaism be like, what would the world be like, if the Jewish nation had been born out of Egyptian religious recognition rather than plagues, if our formative historical experience had been one of aliyah rather than escape?
But if history is really contingent and mutable, what's the point of prophecy? Why make predictions whose meaning becomes clear only in retrospect?
Perhaps because prophecy, like providence, is a double-edged sword. Knowing that G-d has a rigid plan provides comfort and security, but at the same time removes responsibility. If things will work out anyway, if world redemption is inevitable, why should we exert ourselves to bring it?
Ambiguous prophecy, however, imposes responsiblilty. By showing us the potential consequences of our actions, it obligates us to strive to realize the best interpretations.
In this light, the message of the biblical account of Exodus is twofold. Certainly it demonstrates that G-d acts in history, that He relates to and cares about the world and Jews in particular. At the same time, by hinting at alternate possible Exodi it stresses the human responsibility for history.