## "Go from your country"
The first words spoken to the first Jew are not a law. They are an order to leave: "Go from your country, from your birthplace, from your father's house, to the land that I will show you." Abraham is seventy-five. He goes.
Tradition places that departure around 1750 before the common era. Archaeology neither confirms nor refutes the patriarchs. The first trace of the name Israel outside the Bible comes later: an Egyptian stele from the reign of Merneptah, around 1208, naming a group settled in Canaan.
What this family brings comes down to three things. One God, invisible, who speaks: no statue, no mountain, no river. A covenant, meaning a contract with obligations on both sides. And a land, named in the text before anyone settled it: Shechem, Bethel, Hebron.
## Seventy people, then a nation
Seventy go down to Egypt, says Genesis. Exodus counts four hundred and thirty years. Four centuries later, what comes out is no longer a family.
## "We will do, and we will hear"
At the foot of the mountain, the people answer in four words: *na'aseh venishma*. First act, then understand. The Talmud is still puzzled by it.
At the foot of the mountain, the people answer in four words: *na'aseh venishma*.
What comes off that mountain had never been written: one day of rest a week for the master and for the slave, a written law binding on the king as much as on the poorest man. Three thousand three hundred years ago, that is unheard of.
Five parts, from the promise to the return. Next: the kingdom, and the two destructions.
