There is no biblical drama quite so breathless as the Exodus from Egypt, the plague-weary Pharaoh finally telling the hated foreigners to leave, even though he was losing his entire building trade. He would regret it, of course, but for the moment let us be part of that midnight flight from the land of slavery.

You can sense what has gone on in every household. Portable baggage is readied; families have gathered to eat their last meal in a "strange land," a meal that would be repeated annually for the rest of time; and then the order is given: "Go."

But Pharaoh soon changes his mind and sends his armies in pursuit, down dark roads lit only by the full moon, to the edge of that body of water we call the Red Sea, a swampy morass that the Israelites crossed at ebb tide with Moses praying with outstretched arm as the panting families hurried by. The scene is incredibly vivid and real. Just add the pursuing Egyptians with their narrow-wheeled chariots stuck in the mud as the tide turns, and you have deliverance.

So many women in the Bible are nameless, either someone's wife or someone else's mother, or just "a woman." But this is not true of the two who appear in Exodus 1:8.

The days of the ascendancy of foreigners in Egypt has come to an end. A new pharaoh rules and he is manifestly uneasy about the Hebrew population living on the eastern border of his country. They must be eliminated.

His first attempt is to kill them by hard work. He does not succeed since they seem to thrive on forced labor. So Pharaoh summons the midwives and gives orders that they are to kill all baby boys at birth. (With erroneous biblical biology that persisted down through the Middle Ages, men were the sole generators of human life. A pregnant woman was just a walking incubator.)

I have often said that when the Hollywood writers run out of material, they can go to Genesis where there is enough plot material to keep a good writer busy for years. One of the longest and loveliest of the stories centers around Joseph and his brothers.

We all remember something of his saga from our school days:

• loved child of a mother who dies giving birth to his little brother
• hated by his ten other brothers
• sold by them into Egyptian slavery
• blessed with the gift of dream interpretation
• savior of the whole of Egypt from famine
• marvelously reunited with those same miserable brothers when their hunger drives them to the plenty of Egypt.

The story is wonderfully emotional and human.

I will be on the road a good part of the summer, giving workshops and retreats, but I would hate to lose touch with those of you who have been "Monday readers." So, I would like to introduce a summer series that I am calling Biblical Sidebars. It is not that I think these incidents are unimportant. They are not. They are little rays of light into an often much larger story, footnotes to history, and so humanly appealing.

I have collected all of them for just that latter reason. The great light I had in my early biblical studies in Rome was that, in the Bible, there are human beings, living in another time and culture, but so like me with their problems and choices. I resolved then that, if ever I got the chance to teach the Bible, it would be the humanity of its people I would want to underline.

Perhaps the first sidebar will best illustrate the direction of my thinking.

I love to read! I find it hard to have an unread book in my possession and I am equally excited when I find a new author. I will read almost anything, cereal boxes, toothpaste tubes, manufacturers' warnings, but books, of course, are my best of all.

As a small child my unfulfilled dream was to be accidentally locked in my local public library where no one could tell me: "It's time to put out the light and go to bed."

And I love to recommend a new author to someone who might also enjoy finding a new friend. Stephan Prothero is my newest discovery, and I warmly recommend his Religious Literacy. It is a most readable approach to a vexing problem. In a world where the unspeakable is done in the name of Allah and where religion is involved in so many facets of our daily lives, the vast majority of United States citizens lack the most basic sense of what the Bible actually says or event what it says at all.

Remember the sign in your public library when you were little? The librarian's frown certainly reinforced it—she was always older than the sign—but to me the public library had a hush that made reading even more a sacred occupation.

Now that libraries have become media centers, with an interactive bustle, I wonder what they have done with the signs. I would love to have a few to house in appropriate places.

I would like one to end the din from the "drum" bangers on the subway platforms. I don't mean the real musicians but the fellows who have no drums, only empty plastic buckets which produce a racket more than sufficient to rouse the dead. I admire their energy, but not the accompanying timpani.

Books so often raise questions that can fill the empty spaces in a day. One novel that I have just finished and that has left me with much to ponder is Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky.

It is a book that almost did not see the light of day. The author, a Russian Jew who fled the Bolsheviks and who had long lived in France, was caught up in the trauma of the Nazi occupation of France. Her reputation as a successful author did not save her from being arrested and sent to Auschwitz where she died in 1942. Her very young children remembered her writing in tiny handwriting in a large notebook. They saved that notebook, thinking it was her memoirs. Some fifty years later they began to decipher it, only to discover it was a novel dealing with World War II.

Did you catch the news item about two women's softball teams working as one in an incredible act of sportsmanship? I saw it in the NY Times of April 30, and it has warmed by heart every time I think of it.

It took place during a college softball game between Western Oregon and Central Washington. Sara Tucholsky, a tiny Oregon player, hit what was certainly a three-run homer, over the fence and out of sight. As she trotted to first base, her right knee buckled and she crumpled to the ground, crying with pain as she crawled to touch the base. The Western Oregon coach made certain no teammate touched her, since that would have nullified any further action. What to do now?

It was a brilliant springtime on the island of Rhodes as we headed for Lindos and our third acropolis in five days. I was becoming fond of the challenges from those ancients who loved the heights of their rocky lands. As we passed the olive groves, watched the little roadside goats raise their inquisitive heads at our tour bus and then halted above the tiny seaside town, nothing prepared me for what was to follow.

Our path wound up from a small village up and up until we came to the beginning of the ascent to the mountain top. It was here that the psychology of the ancient builders some 25 centuries ago came into play. To reach the shrine at the top one had to ascend three staircases. The first was extremely narrow (parts of the original still exist, tortuously carved out of the rocky hillside.) It ended in a resting area with nothing to view except the sky above.

Taking a deeper breath we went for the second stairway. This one was wider and it too ended in a large flat resting area with no view. It was so different from both Athens and Patmos where the paths to the top offer stunning views of the world below as one climbs and climbs.

It was the little beach that I found so endearing. A tiny, sandy half-circle was most of what was visible of ancient Cenchreae. However, it took only a little imagination to see Paul coming ashore here.

One of the joys of our church trip to Greece was putting biblical names and bits of geography together. Here we were on the day after our exploration of Athens—where Paul's message fell on seemingly deaf ears—now tracing his next steps. If he had sailed from Athens to Corinth, this was his landing place. If he had taken the highway, he still at some point came ashore here because this community was special to him.

No, there is no extant letter to the Church in Cenchreae, but tradition says Paul composed the lengthy letter to the Romans while he lived among the Christians of this seaport. Why? Because, he put that letter into the hands of Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae, and asked the Romans to receive both her and what she bore.