It seems like a minor detail, but as we learn in Shemot Rabbah, it's anything but.

Rabbi Ḥanina offers a beautiful explanation. He says that God's choice of words reflects a profound sense of respect and a commitment to upholding the law, even for Himself! He connects this to the Torah's instruction in Deuteronomy 24:11: "You shall stand outside." This refers to a debt collector who must remain outside a debtor's home, unable to barge in and seize property. Rabbi Ḥanina explains that God, in a similar way, chose to speak to Moses and Aaron "in the land of Egypt," meaning within its borders, but not in Egypt’s population centers. It was a way of maintaining distance, a divine adherence to the principle of respecting boundaries.

Think about that for a moment. Even in the act of liberating His people, God is mindful of boundaries, of a certain kind of divine etiquette. It's a powerful image.

But there's more. Rabbi Shimon offers another layer of understanding. He points out how extraordinary it was for God to reveal Himself in a place so steeped in idol worship, a place of spiritual impurity. Egypt, at that time, was hardly a beacon of holiness. So why there?

Rabbi Shimon uses a striking analogy. Imagine a priest whose terumah – that's the sacred offering set aside for the priests – falls into a cemetery. A terrible situation! He can’t just leave it there, but entering the cemetery would make him ritually impure. What’s he to do? The solution, Rabbi Shimon suggests, is that he should choose the lesser of two evils: become impure once, retrieve the terumah, and then purify himself. He can’t let the sacred offering be lost.

In the same way, Rabbi Shimon says, the Israelites were like God's terumah. As it says in Jeremiah 2:3, "Israel is holy to the Lord, the first of His crop." But they were surrounded by spiritual "graves," mired in the impurity of Egypt. Remember the description in Exodus 12:30: "As there was no house in which there were none dead"? And Numbers 33:4 adds that "Egypt was burying [those whom the Lord had smitten]". God couldn't abandon His "offering," His chosen people. So, as Exodus 3:8 says, He "came down to deliver them from the hand of Egypt."

God willingly descended into the muck and mire to redeem His people. He chose to enter the "cemetery," so to speak, to rescue what was sacred to Him.

And the story doesn't end there. According to Shemot Rabbah, after God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, He summoned Aaron to purify Him. This is connected to the verse in Leviticus 16:33, "He shall atone for the Holy of Holies [mikdash hakodesh]" and Leviticus 16:16, "He shall atone for the Sanctuary [hakodesh]". Here, hakodesh, usually translated as "holy" or "sanctuary," is understood homiletically – that is, interpretively – to refer to the very Source of sanctity, God Himself. In a sense, by entering Egypt, God had to be "atoned" for, or purified, after this act of immersing Himself in the world.

So, what does it all mean? This passage from Shemot Rabbah invites us to consider the lengths to which God will go for His people. It speaks of divine respect, even for the boundaries of a land steeped in impurity, and of a profound love that compels God to "descend" and redeem. It's a story of choosing the lesser of two evils to preserve what is truly sacred. And ultimately, it’s a story about the enduring, unbreakable bond between God and Israel, a bond so strong that it requires even the Divine to undergo a process of purification after coming into contact with the world's impurities. It makes you wonder: what are we willing to do for the things we hold sacred?