Was Moses correct in killing the Egyptian in Exodus chapter 2?

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In Exodus 2:12, Moses kills an Egyptian that he saw was beating a Hebrew. No one else was around to help the Hebrew. Was Moses righteous in killing him?
 
Haydock’s commentary on Exodus 2:12 says, in part:
Ver. 12. He slew the Egyptian. This he did by a particular inspiration of God; as a prelude to his delivering the people from their oppression and bondage. He thought, says St. Stephen, (Acts vii. 25,) that his brethren understood that God by his hand would save them. But such particular and extraordinary examples are not to be imitated. (Challoner) — He was inspired, on this occasion, to stand up in defence of the innocent. (Menochius) (St. Thomas Aquinas, ii. 2, q. 60.)
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The Aquinas reference seems to be to his Summa Theologiae, Part 2 of Part 2, Question 60, especially Article 6, Reply to Objection 2.
 
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Ok. I was using Haydock’s commentary while reading Exodus again and I just wanted to see what other people thought about it.
 
“Was he correct…”
Morality always takes place in the real, not in hypothetical hindsight.

Moral evaluation takes into account:
the object chosen;
the end in view or the intention;
the circumstances of the action.

We can’t possibly know these in certitude for “correctness”, cause we weren’t there and we don’t know Moses’ intentions especially.

Just war theory is informative though, for our own considerations.
 
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Freud takes this incident as his starting point in his last book, Moses and Monotheism, in which he sets out the case against the Biblical account of the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt followed by their escape and return to the land of their origin. Freud’s primary thesis is that thousands of slaves, of many different nationalities, escaped from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, an Egyptian officer who was about to be arrested and probably executed for the murder of a brother officer. The fugitives spent many years searching for a safe place to settle until they finally crossed the Jordan into the land then known as Canaan. In the course of their long march, the escaping slaves and their descendants merged into a single nationality, calling themselves the Israelites or, later, Judahites (Jews). According to Freud, this was a wholly new national identity: prior to the Exodus there had been no Jews or Israelites.

 
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pmitch72402 said:
Was Moses righteous in killing him?
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It is licit, and perhaps obligatory, to use lethal force in defense of another who is in imminant danger of being killed or of suffering grave bodily harm at the hands of an unjust agressor.
 
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Frankly, it strikes me as sheer fantasy. Freud said he got the idea from a colleague at the University of Vienna, Ernst Sellin, a professor at the Evangelical Faculty of Theology. Whether Sellin really believed it was true, I don’t know, but his idea evidently held a strong appeal for Freud.

Judging by the number of times his name appears in the footnotes in other authors’ books, Sellin was a specialist in ancestry and genealogy in Biblical times.The title of his book which is always cited on this subject is Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes, Teil II, published in 1932. I don’t know whether it was ever translated into English.
 
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There are certainly one or two historians still around who make that claim, but I suspect they’re not making due allowance for the broader background of Egypt’s relations with its neighbors in Southwest Asia in antiquity. Over and over again, crop failures in Canaan impelled Semites to flee from famine and seek bread in the Nile valley, regardless of the danger. There must have been many “exoduses,” over the centuries, when they returned to their countries of origin .
 
I may be wrong, but I think historians currently incline to the view that the Exodus happened on a much smaller, less grander scale than is described in the Biblical account, rather than not at all. This seems to be a general theme in many articles I’ve read; that the ancients tended to embellish the Biblical accounts and that the actual event was smaller and not as grand.
 
But that would paint the Bike narrative as unhistorical due to the details being wrong. The DNA tests are the most interesting for me.
 
It’s just something I read somewhere. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar enough with the topic to discuss it well.

Can you elaborate further on the DNA tests you mentioned?
 
I read somewhere, I forget where, that the DNA of the Hebrew people matches that of those descended from the Canaanites. And there’s no archaeological evidence of a widespread invasion from an outside people which seems to show the Israelites arising from within Canaanite culture.
 
StudentMI said:
forget where, that the DNA of the Hebrew people matches that of those descended from the Canaanites.
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Oh yes, that’s sorta common knowledge where I’m from. It’s very well known that we Lebanese and other Middle-Eastern peoples are closely related to the Jews. The Palestinians sarcastically refer to Jews as “awlad ‘amna”, which means “our cousins”.
 
Yes. I read that the Palestinians are most likely the Jews who never left the land of Israel.
 
Maybe…or they may be the descendants of the numerous peoples who settled and intermarried in the area.

Have you ever heard of Tsvi Misinai, the scholar who proposed the idea that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Hebrews?

 
I’ll have to check him out. I have a book on the Palestinian people I’ve been meaning to read. I know Shlomo Sand is controversial but he touched on the subject if I remember right.
 
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