slave should insistently say, ‘I really love my master, my wife and my sons, I do not want to go out as one set free,’ then his master must bring him near to the true God and must bring him up against the door or the doorpost; and his master must pierce his ear through with an awl, and he must be his slave to time indefinite.” (Ex. 21:2, 5, 6) Paul speaks to non-Jews in the Thessalonian congregation about the voluntary shift of devotion, when they became Christians, from slavery to idols “to slave for a living and true God.”—1 Thess. 1:9.

JESUS’ EXCLUSIVE DEVOTION TO GOD

Jesus appreciated the exclusive position of his Father and rendered him exclusive devotion, both when he was in heaven and when he was on earth, as shown in Philippians 2:5-8. He pointed out that the most important commandment in the Law demanded wholehearted love of God. (Matt. 22:37) Moreover, Jesus manifested exclusive devotion to Jehovah’s name and emphasized the fact that his disciples should have the same attitude. In the prayer he taught his disciples, he started off with the words, “Our Father in the heavens, let your name be sanctified.” (Matt. 6:9) This devotion in Jesus was coupled with burning zeal, as manifested at his cleansing of the temple, where he fulfilled the prophecy, “The zeal for your house will eat me up.” (John 2:17; Ps. 69:9) Nowhere is Jesus’ exclusive devotion toward his Father exemplified more than in what is written of him at 1 Corinthians 15:24-28, where it says that, after his heavenly kingdom rule puts down all authority, power and all enemies, he turns over the kingdom to the Father and subjects himself to Him so that “God may be all things to everyone.”

EXECRATION

A severe or even violent denunciation of that which is viewed as detestable and worthy of cursing. In Hebrew the word qa·vavʹ conveys this idea. It literally means “to cut into,” but in a figurative sense means “to malign or speak with cutting words,” and hence “to execrate.” This word appears only in the account of King Balak’s futile efforts to get the prophet Balaam to execrate the nation of Israel and thus present that nation before God as worthy of his curse.—Num. 22:11, 17; 23:11, 13, 25, 27; 24:10.

The word na·qavʹ also appears in this same account, as well as in many other texts. Literally, it means “to pierce” or “perforate” (2 Ki. 18:21; Hab. 3:14), but it is used in a figurative sense to mean “to speak abusively of” or “to execrate.” (Lev. 24:11, 16; Job 3:8; 5:3; Prov. 11:26; 24:24) An imprecation, that is, an invocation of evil from a divine source, is not always stated but may be implied.—See CURSE; MALEDICTION.

EXECUTION, EXECUTIONER

For laws, commandments and commissions to have vitality and worth, they must be legally enforced. Execution usually has to do with enforcing the penalties, especially the death penalty, imposed for violation of laws. Supreme Law not only has a Lawgiver, it also has a Law Enforcer: “Jehovah is our Judge, Jehovah is our Statute-giver, Jehovah is our King.” “One there is that is lawgiver and judge.” (Isa. 33:22; Jas. 4:12) So Jehovah himself is an executioner of judgment and vengeance upon violators of His law.—Ex. 12:12; Deut. 10:17, 18; Ezek. 25:11-17; 2 Thess. 1:6-9; Jude 14, 15.

Jehovah also delegated certain power of execution to others. For example: “Your blood of your souls shall I ask back. . . . From the hand of each one who is his brother, shall I ask back the soul of man. Anyone shedding man’s blood, by man will his own blood be shed, for in God’s image he made man.” (Gen. 9:5, 6) In this regard certain responsibilities as executioner fell upon the “avenger of blood.” (Num. 35:19) (See AVENGER OF BLOOD.) Depending upon the circumstances, the authority as executioner was sometimes invested in the priests of Israel (Num. 5:15-31), or in the entire congregation, with the eyewitnesses taking the lead in executing an offender. (Lev. 24:14-16; Deut. 17:2-7) The power of execution was also in the hands of the judges and kings, or someone whom they appointed.—Judg. 8:20, 21; 2 Sam. 1:15; 1 Chron. 14:16; 2 Ki. 9:6-9; 10:24-28; Jer. 21:12; 22:3.

Ancient rulers were surrounded by trusted bodyguards to whom execution of their master’s edicts could be entrusted. Potiphar was one who held this position. (Gen. 37:36; 41:12) It was one of Herod’s body guardsmen who beheaded John the Baptist.—Mark 6:27.

Execution of the death penalty in Israel was either by stoning or by the sword. (Lev. 20:2; 2 Sam. 1:15) Jehovah’s Messianic King, the Lord Jesus Christ, and other loyal heavenly associates of his are legal executioners, authorized as such by “the Judge of all the earth.”—Gen. 18:25; Ps. 149:6-9; Rev. 12:7-9; 19:11-16; 20:1-3.

EXILE

Expulsion from one’s own native land or home by authoritative decree. Cain, who killed his brother Abel, was cursed in banishment from the ground to become a wanderer and a fugitive in the earth. He had been a farmer, but the ground thereafter would not respond to his cultivation.—Gen. 4:2, 3, 11-14.

Israel was told that Jehovah would lead the nation away into exile if they became unfaithful to the covenant he made with them through Moses. (Deut. 28:36, 37, 64; 29:28) So God was really the Authority who decreed the exile of his people in several instances, although he allowed the armies of other nations to be his instruments. These occasions are: (1) Israel’s exile by the hand of the Assyrians (2 Ki. 15:29; 18:9-12); (2) Judah’s exile in Babylon (2 Ki. 25:8-11, 21); (3) the Jewish exile at the hands of the Romans.—Luke 21:20-24.

ISRAEL

Tiglath-pileser III took inhabitants of Naphtali into exile in Assyria before Israelite King Pekah’s rule ended in 758 B.C.E. Reubenites, Gadites and those from the eastern half tribe of Manasseh were also carried off by the king of Assyria, apparently at the same time. (1 Chron. 5:4-6, 26) Shalmaneser V later besieged Samaria, and after three years, in 740 B.C.E., either he or his successor, Sargon II, deported great numbers of the inhabitants and “brought people from Babylon and Cuthah and Avva and Hamath and Sepharvaim and had them dwell in the cities of Samaria instead of the sons of Israel.”—2 Ki. 17:5, 6, 24.

JUDAH

In 617 B.C.E., King Nebuchadnezzar took the royal court and the foremost men of Judah into exile at Babylon. (2 Ki. 24:11-16) About ten years later, in 607 B.C.E., at the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, Nebuzar-adan, the chief of the Babylonian bodyguard, took most of the remaining ones and deserters of the Jews with him to Babylon, from which exile only a mere remnant returned seventy years later.—2 Ki. 25:11; Jer. 39:9; Isa. 10:21, 22; see CAPTIVITY.

After the fall of Babylon many Jews did not return to their homeland, and the dispersion therefore continued. In the time of Ahasuerus (Xerxes I, king of Persia who ruled from India to Ethiopia, over 127 jurisdictional districts), Haman, in making an indictment of them, said: “There is one certain people scattered and separated among the peoples in all the jurisdictional districts of your realm.”—Esther 1:1; 3:8.

IN THE FIRST CENTURY C.E.

In the first century C.E. there were settlements of Jews in Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome and Babylon, as well as other cities. (Acts 17:1, 16, 17; 18:1, 4, 19) Many Jews lived in Babylon, where Peter preached. (1 Pet. 5:13) Josephus records that “great numbers” of Jews were in Babylonia in the first century B.C.E. (Antiquities of the Jews, Book XV, chap. II, par. 2) Early in 50 C.E. the Roman Emperor Claudius banished all the Jews from Rome. This also affected Jews who had become Christians, among them Aquila and Priscilla (Prisca), whom Paul met in Corinth about 50 C.E., shortly after the edict by Claudius. (Acts 18:2) They accompanied Paul to Ephesus, and at the time he wrote the letter to the Romans (c. 56 C.E.) they were evidently back in Rome, for Claudius had died and Nero was then ruling. Many of the other Jews had also moved back to Rome.—Acts 18:18, 19; Rom. 16:3, 7, 11.

In fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy at Luke 21:24, the Roman army under Titus, in 70 C.E., surrounded Jerusalem, crowded with Jews from many lands assembled for the Festival of Unfermented Cakes. The Romans besieged and finally destroyed the city; 1,100,000 Jews perished and 97,000 were taken captive, to be scattered among the nations.

EXODUS

The deliverance of the nation of Israel from bondage to Egypt. Jehovah spoke to Abraham (before 1933 B.C.E.), after promising that Abraham’s seed would inherit the land, and said: “You may know for sure that your seed will become an alien resident in a land not theirs, and they will have to serve them, and these will certainly afflict them for four hundred years. But the nation that they will serve I am judging, and after that they will go out with many goods. . . . But in the fourth generation they will return here, because the error of the Amorites has not yet come to completion.”—Gen. 15:13-16.

It is clear that the beginning of the four-hundred-year period of affliction had to await the appearance of the promised “seed.” While Abraham had earlier visited Egypt during a time of famine in Canaan and had experienced some difficulties with the Pharaoh there, he was then childless. (Gen. 12:10-20) Not long after God’s statement about the four hundred years of affliction, when Abraham was eighty-six years old (in the year 1932 B.C.E.), his Egyptian slave girl and concubine bore him a son, Ishmael. But it was fourteen years later (1918 B.C.E.) that Abraham’s free wife Sarah bore him a son, Isaac, and God designated this son as the one by means of whom the promised seed would result. Still, God’s time had not yet arrived for giving Abraham or his seed the Land of Canaan, and so they were, as foretold, ‘alien residents in a land not theirs.’—Gen. 16:15, 16; 21:2-5; Heb. 11:13.

TIME OF THE EXODUS

When, therefore, did the four hundred years of affliction begin? Jewish tradition reckons the count from Isaac’s birth. But the actual evidence of affliction first came on the day that Isaac was weaned. Evidence points to 1913 B.C.E., when Isaac was about five years old and Ishmael about nineteen, as the date of the start of affliction. It was then that Ishmael “the one born in the manner of flesh began persecuting the one born in the manner of spirit.” (Gal. 4:29) Ishmael, who was part Egyptian, in jealousy and hatred, began “poking fun” at Isaac, the very young child, this amounting to much more than a mere children’s quarrel. (Gen. 21:9) Other translations describe Ishmael’s action as “mocking” (Yg; Ro, ftn.) The affliction of Abraham’s seed continued on during Isaac’s life. While Jehovah blessed Isaac as a grown man, he was nevertheless persecuted by the inhabitants of Canaan and forced to move from place to place because of the difficulties they brought against him. (Gen. 26:19-24, 27) Eventually, during the later years of the life of Isaac’s son Jacob, the foretold “seed” came into Egypt to reside. In time they came into a state of slavery.

The four-hundred-year period of affliction thus ran from 1913 B.C.E. until 1513 B.C.E. It was also a “period of grace” or of divine toleration allowed the Canaanites, a principal tribe of whom were Amorites. By this latter date their error would come to completion; they would clearly merit complete ejection from the land. As the preliminary step toward such ejection, God would turn his attention to his people in Egypt, setting them free from bondage and starting them on the way back to the Promised Land.

The 430-year period

Another line of calculation is provided in the statement at Exodus 12:40, 41: “And the dwelling of the sons of Israel, who had dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. And it came about at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, it even came about on this very day that all the armies of Jehovah went out of the land of Egypt.” The footnote on Exodus 12:40 (NW, 1953 ed.) says regarding the expression “who had dwelt”: “The verb here is in the plural number, and the relative pronoun (a·sherʹ) before it in Hebrew can apply to the ‘sons of Israel,’ rather than to the ‘dwelling.’” The Septuagint Version renders verse 40: “But the dwelling of the sons of Israel which they dwelt in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan [was] four hundred and thirty years long.” The Samaritan Pentateuch reads: “In the land of Canaan and in the land of Egypt.” All these renderings indicate that the four-hundred-and-thirty-year period covers a longer period of time than the dwelling of the Israelites in Egypt.

The apostle Paul shows that this four-hundred-and-thirty-year period (at Exodus 12:40) began at the time of the validation of the Abrahamic covenant and ended with the Exodus. Paul says: “Further, I say this: As to the [Abrahamic] covenant previously validated by God, the Law that has come into being four hundred and thirty years later [in the same year as the Exodus] does not invalidate it, so as to abolish the promise. . . . whereas God has kindly given it to Abraham through a promise.”—Gal. 3:16-18.

How long was it, then, from the validation of the Abrahamic covenant until the Israelites moved into Egypt? At Genesis 12:4, 5 we find that Abraham was seventy-five years old when he moved into Canaan, and the Abrahamic covenant, the promise previously made to him in Ur of the Chaldeans, took effect. Then, from the genealogical references at Genesis 12:4; 21:5; 25:26 and Jacob’s statement at Genesis 47:9, it can be seen that 215 years elapsed between the validation of the Abrahamic covenant and the move of Jacob with his family into Egypt. This would show that the Israelites actually lived in Egypt 215 years (1728-1513 B.C.E.). The figure harmonizes with other chronological data.

From Exodus to temple building

Two other chronological statements harmonize with and substantiate this viewpoint. Solomon began the building of the temple in his fourth year of kingship (1034 B.C.E.) and this is stated at 1 Kings 6:1 to be the “four hundred and eightieth year” from the time of the Exodus (1513 B.C.E.).

“About 450 years”

Then there is Paul’s speech to an audience in Antioch of Pisidia recorded at Acts 13:17-20 in which he refers to a period of “about four hundred and fifty years.” His discussion of Israelite history begins with the time God “chose our forefathers,” that is, from the time that Isaac was actually born to be the seed of promise (1918 B.C.E.). (Isaac’s birth definitely settled the question as to whom God would recognize as the seed, this having been in doubt due to Sarah’s barrenness.) From this starting point Paul then goes on to recount God’s acts in behalf of his chosen nation down to the time when God “gave them judges until Samuel the prophet.” The period of “about four hundred and fifty years,” therefore,