Claim. God conducted the dispensation to start the first national course by having Moses strike and kill an Egyptian taskmaster, which would have restored the eldest-son position to God’s side, severed Israelite ties to Egypt, and demonstrated Moses’ patriotic love — but the Israelites’ distrust of Moses aborted this course before it began.
Elaboration. Moses’s act in Exod 2:11-12 was, in DP’s reading, not a personal lapse but the very dispensation by which God meant to launch the national course (dp-2-the-providence-of-restoration-under-the-leadership-of-moses §2.2.1). DP names three purposes for the killing:
- Restoring the eldest-son position. The archangel induced Adam’s family to fall, Cain killed Abel, and Satan thereby seized the elder-son position in history. Before God could begin restoration of Canaan, someone on God’s side had to prevail over a Satan-side eldest-son figure — Moses striking the Egyptian fulfilled this condition (cf. dp-cain-removes-fallen-nature-via-fourfold-reversal-of-archangels-acts for the family-level parallel).
- Cutting Moses’s last attachment to Pharaoh’s palace.
- Inducing Israelite trust by demonstrating Moses’s love for his people.
Had the Israelites been moved by Moses’s act, they would have followed him directly to Canaan via the land of the Philistines in twenty-one days — restoring Jacob’s twenty-one years in Haran — with no need to cross the Red Sea, wander the wilderness, or receive tablets, Ark, or Tabernacle. Instead, the Hebrews questioned him: “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?” (Exod 2:14). Moses fled to Midian. The first national course collapsed at its inception. The course-failure pattern set by Israelite distrust would repeat in the second and third courses.