Read the Introduction
Genesis closed with a coffin in Egypt and a charge about bones, and Exodus opens with the visitation that charge had promised. The book before this one taught the anatomy of a trust: the grant, the steward, the covenant cut, the field purchased, and the seed held in trust against a day. This one begins the administration of that estate inside a hostile jurisdiction, and it carries the record from the brick pits of Egypt to the foot of the mountain where the Grantor speaks for Himself.
Volume I of Exodus runs from the first chapter through the eighteenth, and its argument is the going out. A new king who knew not Joseph opens the account, and the fear of a swelling people produces the first law of the book, an order to the midwives that conscience refused. Out of the basket in the reeds comes the man who will stand before the throne, and out of the burning bush comes the Name that answers every jurisdictional question the record will ever raise. The plagues follow as strokes upon the gods of Egypt, each one a judgment entered against a rival claim, and the division drawn between Goshen and the land of judgment shows whose people are being distinguished. The Passover then sets the lamb, the blood and the memorial as the seal of the instrument. The sea divides for a people told to stand still and see the salvation of the LORD, and on the far shore come the song, the manna, the water from the rock, the war with Amalek, and at last the counsel of Jethro, which is where this volume closes.
That close is deliberate, because the nineteenth chapter is the hinge of the whole book. Chapter eighteen ends with the advice of Jethro and the appointment of able men to judge the people: rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens, a delegation of judgment with a numbered span and a qualified delegate. That chapter is the last act of the going out. The next begins with a people arriving at the mountain in the third month and hearing the terms of the constitution under which they are to live. The division this volume keeps is therefore the division the record itself keeps: the first half is the deliverance, and the second is the coming under the law of the One who delivered. Volume I shows the Grantor reaching into a foreign jurisdiction and bringing out His own possession. Volume II shows Him giving that possession its own venue, its own words written by His own hand, and its own dwelling built to the pattern shown in the mount.
The doctrine carried through these chapters is the law of sovereignty itself, and it is not a theory laid over the text. The decoupling of a people from a jurisdiction that held them is the first act, and it is accomplished by a claim of the Name rather than by any negotiation with the crown. The demand delivered to Pharaoh is a demand for the release of the Grantor's people, which is a property claim stated to a throne. The plagues are judgments entered against the gods of Egypt in the order the record gives them, so that the heavens themselves are the docket. The blood on the lintel marks a household as a protected estate, and the feast of remembrance keeps the instrument in memory from generation to generation. Jethro then builds the first judiciary in the record, and it is built from the three elements the later law never stops using: authority delegated, a span of responsibility that is numbered, and men qualified by the fear of God, men of truth who hate covetousness.
What makes this volume worth a book of its own is that the deliverance is the precondition of everything that follows. A statute given to a people still held by another power would be a statute with no jurisdiction behind it. The going out is the making of the jurisdiction, and the mount is where that jurisdiction is written down. Read the two volumes as one argument and the order is exact: first the release, then the law. Read them as the record gives them, and the counsel of Jethro stands where it stood, the last counsel of a free people before the terms are delivered.
And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the LORD: And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.
Exodus 6:2-3
Nothing in this volume asks to be taken on trust. The scripture is quoted whole, the doctrine is named as doctrine wherever it goes beyond the text, and the weighing belongs to whoever holds the book.