The Egyptians were the greatest propagandists the ancient world had ever seen. Walk through any temple in Luxor or Karnak and you cannot miss it: wall after wall of towering inscriptions, every one of them broadcasting the same message. Pharaoh defeated his enemies with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Pharaoh received tribute with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Pharaoh picked up a stone from the ground — yes, this is a real inscription — with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Hundreds of times, in temple after temple, the phrase hammers home a single theological claim: Pharaoh is the one with power. The gods chose him. He alone acts in history with divine force. Everyone else just watches.
So why does God use exactly that phrase to describe the Exodus?
And throughout the Torah, that liberation is described in one recurring formula: God took Israel out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. The same words. The same royal cadence. Taken directly from the most powerful empire on earth and applied — with devastating precision — to the God of a nation of slaves.
This is not coincidence. It is not borrowing for lack of better vocabulary. Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman, professor of Bible at Bar-Ilan University and author of the stunning new Haggadah Echoes of Egypt, calls it exactly what it is: cultural warfare. The Israelites who left Egypt had spent generations absorbing Egyptian imagery, Egyptian theology, Egyptian propaganda. They knew what those words meant. Every time they heard mighty hand and outstretched arm, they pictured Pharaoh — colossal, divine, unchallengeable. So when God describes His own act of salvation using Pharaoh’s signature phrase, the message to the Israelites is unmistakable: the power you were taught to worship in Pharaoh? That belongs to Me. And I used it for you.
What makes this even sharper is the target of that power. In Egypt, the mighty hand and outstretched arm was always the Pharaoh’s hand reaching toward gods, toward enemies, toward conquest. The imagery was vertical — upward, elite, exclusive. The divine bond was between Pharaoh and the deity, sealed in those intimate temple carvings where god and king stand nose to nose, arms intertwined, the hieroglyphs whispering: you are the chosen one, my beloved. Ordinary people did not enter that picture. They built the storehouses. They harvested the grain that filled fifteen football fields of temple granaries. They existed to sustain the system that glorified him.
The Torah dismantles this architecture completely. Moses stands before Israel at Sinai and says — in Deuteronomy 5:4 — “face to face, the LORD spoke with you at the mountain.” Face to face. The very imagery Egypt reserved for the Pharaoh alone is here extended to an entire people. Not to a king. Not to a priest. To the freed slaves standing at the foot of the mountain with their sandals still dusty from the desert road. God looked at them the way Egyptian gods looked at Pharaoh: directly, personally, covenantally.
This is the revolution the Exodus actually accomplished — and it did not stop at the borders of Sinai. Shabbat, the seventh day of rest, is another piece of the same rebellion. Egypt did not have a week. No ancient civilization did. The day, the month, the year — these are all anchored in astronomical events. The week is artificial, arbitrary, invented. And what it invented was radical: one day in seven when economic identity is suspended. When the slave and the master, the wealthy merchant and the day laborer, all stop and are simply people together before God. Egypt ran on perpetual labor — that is what the Exodus was escaping. The Israelites were commanded to build a different kind of time, where productivity is not the measure of a person’s worth.
Strip away the academic language and here is the point: the Torah looked at the most powerful propaganda machine in the ancient world, took its most recognizable phrases, and turned them against it. God is not threatened by Pharaoh’s vocabulary. He takes it, repoints it at the people Pharaoh enslaved, and says: this is who I am. This is what I do. And it is for you.
That is a message that does not expire.
The interview with Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman that inspired this essay is available on Bible Plus, Israel365’s online Hebrew Bible video platform, as part of a new series Beyond the Verse. Rabbi Tuly Weisz sits down with leading Bible scholars to bring the world of academic biblical research to life — and this conversation on Egypt, archaeology, and the Passover story is not one to miss. Watch this series and more on Bible Plus. Subscribe at https://www.bible-plus.com/ or as low as $5/month.
