When taking up any study of the Bible, it is good to consider the types of God’s plan for our salvation that we see throughout the Old Testament. Typology, the “study of types,” is defined as: “an approach to the interpretation of the Scriptures found in the New Testament itself, and in the writings of the Church Fathers, which sees certain people and events in the Old Testament (Types) as foreshadowing things fulfilled in the New Testament (Antitypes).” You might think of types as a non-verbal, material kind of prophecy! 

Goshen, Migdol, Midian, Moab…these names may be familiar to you, but could you find them on a map? This month, as we study the Book of Exodus and its context, we’ll be looking at geography–specifically the Israelites’ route through their desert wanderings.

In this lesson, we will be considering what was happening around the rest of the world at the time when the Israelites fled Egypt and wandered through the desert. Of course, exact dates are not known, but we generally think it was sometime in the early 1200s (13th century) B.C. By simply reading the Bible, we can learn some things about some other civilizations that existed at this point in time: the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites are all mentioned several times in Exodus! 

The Antiochian Archdiocese theme for 2025-2026 youth activities is The Book of Exodus. We’ve developed a series of lesson plans that explores that theme through a different discipline. In this lesson, we will be looking at various visual depictions of Moses, both in the setting of a sacred space and outside of the church building.