Exodus 2:15 · World English Bible
Exodus 2:15 Meaning Now When Pharaoh Heard This Thing
Now when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and lived in the land of Midian, and he sat down by a well.
What does Exodus 2:15 mean?
A man who has acted and drawn the wrath of power runs, and the running is not his ending but his making. Moses flees Pharaoh into a wilderness where he is no one, and there, stripped of his borrowed status, he is finally prepared for what he is for.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
Exodus 2:15 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Clinical Psychology
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Clinical Psychology
A man who has acted and drawn the wrath of power runs, and the running is not his ending but his making. Moses flees Pharaoh into a wilderness where he is no one, and there, stripped of his borrowed status, he is finally prepared for what he is for. Maturity begins when a person can no longer lean on the house that raised him and must find his footing in the open.
He sits down by a well. The image is quiet and exact, a man at the source of water in a dry land, at rest at last. The tyrant meant to kill him and instead drove him toward the ground where his life would begin in earnest. Dependence must shift from the palace to something higher before a man can carry weight. Exile, borne rightly, is the doorway to what he was born to do.
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Clinical Psychology lens
Live Exodus 2:15 today
- If you have lost something that used to tell you who you were, a job, a title, a role, sit with the quieter version of yourself for ten minutes without reaching for your phone. Ask what is still here that nothing took.
- Reach out to one person who is in an in-between season right now, between jobs, after a breakup, newly alone in a city. Do not try to fix the season, just stay in it with them for an afternoon.
- When today knocks something out from under you, the deal falls through, the plan collapses, resist the urge to immediately rebuild the old thing. Let yourself sit by the well for a day before you decide anything.
What have I been leaning on that I would be stronger without?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 8
Water seeks the lowest place and from there gives life to everything. Being brought low is not the opposite of being useful, it is the condition for it.
Taoism · Zhuangzi
The gnarled, useless tree is left standing while the straight ones are cut for timber. Being passed over by power is sometimes what lets a thing grow to its full size.
Sufism · Rumi
Rumi wrote that the wound is the place where light enters. What strips you of your position is often what prepares you to carry something real.
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