The Master Storyteller

If you’re reading the Bible in one year, you’ve likely started Exodus this week. As I was pondering it struck me, not for the first time, how incredibly smart God is. OK, it shouldn’t surprise me, but it always does. Would you bear with as we go on a little Biblical detour? There’s a point to this, I promise…

Here are some of the interesting things I picked up:

1) Joseph enslaves the starving Egyptians at the end of Genesis (Gen 47:20-24). Hmmm… not sure how I feel about this one. He saved their lives, but was this really good, or bad? Then at the beginning of Exodus, the Israelites are enslaved. 

2) As Pharaoh commands all baby boys thrown into the river, Moses’ mama obeys – sort of. She “throws” him in, she just throws him in safely, in a basket. Then he is drawn out by none other than Pharaoh’s daughter - directly disobeying Papa.

3) The plagues: perhaps the trickiest bit of the Exodus narrative. Why did God plague all of Egypt? Well, had it not been for God, Egypt would have suffered much of this under the famine in Joseph’s time. Because this Pharaoh refuses to acknowledge him, God revisits the famine through the plagues, inflicting on Egypt what they would have been through had Joseph (i.e. God) not delivered them. Added to which, the number 10 signifies a fullness of judgement. We’re meant to view this as divine justice against the worst oppressor, redeeming the people and defeating the gods of Egypt.

Yup, that’s right – The plagues were cleverly designed to show Yahweh’s absolute power over and above the gods of the Egyptians.

For e.g. The first plague. The Nile water turns to Blood - defeating Hapi the Egyptian God of the Nile. Next, Heket, the Egyptian goddess of fertility who had the head of a frog, is shown up by a bunch of frogs swarming the land from, yup, the Nile. 

Want some more? The Egyptian god Geb was god over the dust of the earth, but Moses turns the dust to lice. 

Isis was goddess of medicine - so God sends boils and sores that could not be cured.

Nut the goddess of the sky and Seti, god of storms, are shown up by Yahweh’s hail storms and locusts unleashed from the sky.

I could go on, there's one for each. Most famous perhaps is Ra the sun god – shown powerless by Egypt being cast into darkness for 3 days.

In short, Pharaoh says, Who is the Lord? (Ex 5:2) to which God responds, Ahem, Here I Am! (Ex 3:14)

Finally, the firstborn. Directed against Pharaoh himself, who thought he was a god with authority to take life from the Hebrews, the firstborn boys of Egypt die in payment for the boys Pharaoh threw in the river...

4) ...which is all tied up with the entry of a sacrificial lamb – a picture pointing to the covenant about to be established at Sinai, that won’t be fully realised until the ultimate, final lamb of God comes.

5) The Mountain – God speaks from the burning bush and says the proof of God’s plan will be Moses getting back to that mountain with the people and worshipping God there.  

Phew. What a lot of clevery cleverness. Could you have come up with such a story? I don’t think I could. Yet, we get the privilege of trying, don’t we? For part of the way God created humans in his image was our creativity. We are storytellers, artists, musicians… this is what differentiates us from the beasts. 

One of the great privileges of writing Biblical fiction is getting to fill in some of these details. For God didn’t just give us an incredible story in the Bible – he also left lots of blanks. Lots of space for us to imagine. The original fireside tales wouldn’t have been told the way they were later wrote down. I expect they’d have been acted, sung and yes, embellished! Oral traditions passed down in other ancient cultures (including the Egyptians) attest to that. Compare the Sumerian flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh to Noah’s ark if you fancy it – it’s fascinating! 

The biblical writers crafted the narrative we have today with the breath of God assisting them, I wholeheartedly believe that. The Holy Spirit guided them about what to record and what to leave out from those many stories and tribal variations. Yet he also left space. Not so we could add to the word of God – I never claim my work has any kind of authority – but so that we could enter into the world of the master storyteller himself, using our creativity to imagine 'what might have been' with the Lord of the Universe.

We can do this whether or not we write Biblical fiction. If you’re a planner, you expect you revel in making clever connections, like those in Exodus, between your plotlines and characters, perhaps on a great big sheet of paper with arrows all over it and colour coding. If you’re a pantser, it may come as a surprise to you when, in your final chapter, all the Is get dotted and Ts get crossed. Thank goodness for that! 

I’m a plantster myself – starting with an outline but letting each scene write itself without much forethought. I’m always amazed when it all comes together, which usually takes quite a bit of the Holy Spirit’s help, if I’m honest. Many an I hasn’t been dotted until I’ve crash landed on my knees.

How do you write? And what's your favourite type of story? I'd love to know.

Natasha Woodcraft lives in Lincolnshire in a house full of boys and animals. She believes stories have power to communicate deep truth and transform lives. Her published novels, The Wanderer Scorned & The Wanderer Reborn, explore God’s redemptive purposes for messy people by reimagining the tale of Cain & Abel. Also a songwriter, Natasha peppers her emotional prose with poetry and song.