What Does Exodus 17:4 Mean?

So Moses cried to the LORD, "What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me." Moses' prayer at Rephidim is the wilderness period's most desperate cry: "what shall I do?" and the physical threat: "they are almost ready to stone me." The quarrel (riv) of verse 2 has reached the point of near-violence: the community is at the edge of stoning their leader. Moses' cry to YHWH is not a theological reflection but an urgent survival petition: both for the community's water need and for his own physical safety.

"They are almost ready to stone me": stoning is the community's ultimate sanction for covenant violation: the person guilty of the most serious offenses is stoned by the community (Leviticus 20:2, 24:14-16; Deuteronomy 13:10; 17:5). Moses' fear that the community will stone him for the water-failure inverts the stoning logic: the leader who successfully brought them out of Egypt is being treated as a covenant criminal for a provision failure that is actually YHWH's domain. The quarrel has become physically dangerous for Moses.

Moses' prayer form: "what shall I do?" directed to YHWH: is the correct covenant leader's response to leadership crisis: not self-assertion, not defensive authority, not counter-threatening the complainers, but prayer that passes the leadership question back to YHWH. "What shall I do with this people?" is the prayer that invites YHWH to solve the crisis his prophet cannot solve alone. The prayer acknowledges Moses' genuine incapacity while trusting YHWH's sufficiency: the leadership theology the manna narrative established (Moses: "what are we?") is enacted in the Rephidim prayer.