Shemot

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Shemot ('Names', Exodus 1:1-6:1) opens the book of Exodus with the Israelites enslaved in Egypt, the birth and rescue of Moses, his flight to Midian, and his call at the burning bush where God reveals the name by which He will deliver the people.

The Egyptian midwives Shiphrah and Puah, who defy Pharaoh's order to kill Hebrew newborn boys and are rewarded by God with households of their own (Exodus 1:15-21), are read by rabbinic commentary, following a tradition preserved in the Talmud, as themselves Israelite women, Yocheved and Miriam, though the plain sense of the text leaves their identity genuinely ambiguous, and either reading is cited by commentators as an early Torah example of civil disobedience against an unjust decree. The revelation of the divine name at the burning bush, 'Ehyeh asher Ehyeh,' commonly rendered 'I will be what I will be' (Exodus 3:14), is treated across Jewish philosophical commentary, notably by Maimonides, as pointing to God's necessary, self-caused existence rather than offering a name in the ordinary sense, distinguishing the philosophical reading from the more relational uses the name carries elsewhere in the narrative.

Shemot begins the central narrative of the Hebrew Bible, the deliverance from Egypt that becomes the paradigm of redemption in Jewish memory, retold every Passover. The revelation of the divine name at the burning bush (Exodus 3) is a key theological moment, and Moses' reluctance and self-doubt before his commission have made the portion a touchstone for reflections on prophetic vocation and human inadequacy before a divine call.

Moses' fivefold objection to his commission, that the people will not believe him, that he is slow of speech, that he does not know God's name, culminating in his direct request that God send someone else (Exodus 3:11-4:13), is read by rabbinic commentary as an unusually candid model of reluctant prophecy, and Rashi notes God's anger kindling only at this final refusal, read as marking a line between legitimate hesitation and outright evasion of a genuine call. The plagues Moses is warned Pharaoh will resist even after signs are given (Exodus 4:21) introduce the Torah's difficult theology of divine hardening of Pharaoh's heart, a theme classical commentators including Ramban address by distinguishing the early plagues, where Pharaoh hardens his own heart, from the later ones, where the text says God hardens it, read as removing Pharaoh's capacity for repentance only once his own persistent choice had already been made.