Composition
Israel in Egypt (HWV 54, 1739) is Handel's most direct and ambitious engagement with a single Old Testament narrative - the Exodus. The oratorio sets the texts of Exodus 1-15 and Psalms 105-106 in two parts: "The Plagues of Egypt" (depicting the ten plagues of Exodus 7-12) and "Moses' Song of Triumph" (setting the Song of Moses from Exodus 15). The choral writing reaches its greatest complexity and power in this work: double-chorus movements depicting swarms of locusts and hailstones require eight independent vocal lines; the final choruses celebrate God's deliverance with a sustained brilliance that makes them among Handel's most exhilarating choral pages.
Biblical Text
The libretto is drawn almost entirely from the King James Bible, with the narration of the plagues (Exodus 7:19-12:29) rendered in close paraphrase and Psalm 105 providing a retrospective recollection of the Exodus events. The theological frame is typological: the Exodus is presented not merely as historical narrative but as a prototype of Christian salvation. Israel's deliverance from Egypt through water (the Red Sea crossing of Exodus 14-15) was understood by the New Testament and the Church Fathers as a type of Christian baptism (1 Corinthians 10:1-2: "our ancestors were all under the cloud and... all passed through the sea... They were all baptized into Moses").
The Song of Moses (Exodus 15:1-21) - one of the oldest poems in the Hebrew Bible - culminates the oratorio: "I will sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea." The final chorus on Exodus 15:18 ("The LORD shall reign for ever and ever") became one of Handel's most frequently excerpted choruses after the Hallelujah Chorus from the Messiah.
Creator
Handel composed Israel in Egypt in the autumn of 1738, completing it with exceptional speed. The work had a mixed initial reception - contemporary critics found it too choral, too relentlessly Old Testament, lacking the dramatic character development of his earlier oratorios. With the benefit of historical distance, these features are now understood as the work's strengths: Handel used the massed choral forces to represent the collective experience of an entire nation before God, an approach without precedent in the oratorio tradition.
Legacy
Israel in Egypt influenced the tradition of large-scale choral narrative that runs through Haydn's The Creation, Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ, and Elgar's oratorios. Its treatment of the Exodus as choral subject - the people speaking together as the protagonist of the narrative - anticipates the oratorio tradition's consistent identification of the chorus with the people of God.