What Does Exodus 3:22 Mean?

Each woman shall ask of her neighbor and any woman who lives in her house, for silver and gold jewelry and for clothing. You shall put them on your sons and on your daughters. So you shall plunder the Egyptians. The specificity of verse 22 is remarkable: silver jewelry, gold jewelry, clothing, placed on sons and daughters.

The departing Israelites will not carry these goods in boxes or sacks; they will wear them. The adornment of Israel's children with Egypt's wealth at the moment of departure is the visual statement of the reversal: the children of slaves, condemned to be drowned in the Nile, leave wearing the jewelry of the empire that enslaved their parents.

The word "plunder" (Hebrew: nitsaltem) uses the same root as Moses' action at the well in chapter 2 (hitsil, "he delivered them") and God's declaration in verse 8 ("I have come down to deliver them"). What began as the language of rescue and salvation arrives here at the economic transfer: the plundering of Egypt is the final form taken by the deliverance of Israel. The God who came down to deliver his people arranges that the deliverance includes the reversal of economic exploitation. The people who built Egypt's store cities leave carrying Egypt's movable wealth.

Paul uses the language of "plundering" metaphorically in Colossians 2:15: "He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him." The cross, in Paul's theology, is the ultimate plundering of spiritual powers: what appeared to be a defeat was a stripping of their authority. The pattern of the Exodus, where what looked like defeat (slavery, the infanticide decree, Pharaoh's intransigence) became the occasion for a complete reversal including material transfer, runs forward into the theology of the cross. The empty-handed cry in Egypt becomes the new-creation exodus from death in resurrection.