Author and theologian Chuck DeGroat shows how our wilderness journey helps us face our fears, receive our new identity, experience transformation, and live into our newfound freedom.

This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life--Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.

The Hebrew Scriptures consider the exodus from Egypt to be Israel’s formative and foundational event. Indeed, the Bible offers no other explanation for Israel’s origin as a people. It is also true that no contemporary record regarding a man named Moses or the Israelites generally, either living in or leaving Egypt has been found. Hence, many biblical scholars and archaeologists take a skeptical attitude, dismissing the exodus from the realm of history. However, the contributors to this volume are convinced that there is an alternative, more positive approach. Using textual and archaeological materials from the ancient Near East in a comparative way, in conjunction with the Torah’s narratives and with other biblical texts, the contributors to this volume (specialists in ancient Egypt, ancient Near Eastern culture and history, and biblical studies) maintain that the reports in the Hebrew Bible should not be cavalierly dismissed for ideological reasons but, rather, should be deemed to contain authentic memories.

Coming Out of Egypt is an exodus out of idolatry--the idolatry of ancient Egypt and the idolatry that permeates the church today. Its goal is to make the exodus come alive for the reader--not to just read about the exodus but to experience the exodus, not to just read about the Passover but to experience the Passover, to catapult the reader back through time like a time traveler entering a time portal. The goal of Coming Out of Egypt is to experience redemption, not just to read about redemption, to experience redemption from Pharaoh at the Reed Sea, and witness Yeshua's resurrection.

Leaving Egypt takes place during the nineteen fifties in Cambridge, Boston and New York City, but behind its events lies the Bible's story of the ancient enslavement of the Jews in Egypt and their exodus to freedom. More than fifteen years since the end of World War II and the revelations of the horrors of the death camps and the crematoria, no one wants to think about the Holocaust. Bruce, a Jewish student at Harvard, decides that being a Jew has no meaning for him. He falls in love with Anne, a Radcliffe girl who seems to be almost his mirror image. But she looks critically at him, sees his evasions of reality and rejects the life he has chosen. She leaves him behind as she begins a voyage of self-discovery and learning. On the way she meets Daniel, a medical student connected to his Jewish identity. When she descends into the depths of Widener Library where the history of the Holocaust lies hidden in dusty, neglected books, one poignant photograph dramatically and shockingly connects her sorrow for the lost Jews to her love for Daniel.