As they fled their Egyptian taskmasters under the half-truth of worshipping YHWH in the trackless Sinai, the Hebrew slaves displayed a capacity for extraordinary myopia. ‘Were there no graves in Egypt?’, they taunted Moses. ‘Is that why you brought us out here to die?’
Yet bearing along the palpable promise of Joseph’s bones—caught between negotiated servitude and audacious freedom—the complaining ‘sons of Israel’ deserve a bit of empathy. Slavery, a known quantity, is at the least survivable. Freedom is potentially lethal.
One easily dies free. A captor is obliged to feed his slave if only to squeeze another day’s sweat out of him. To opt for freedom requires some hard-headed calculus. Its benefits come clouded by danger.
Over against this conundrum, the text places YHWH’s constant accompaniment:
The LORD went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.
YHWH’s nearness breaks the mathematics of desperation or at least injects a variable that, potentially, multiplies options and de-mechanizes the determinism of least-bad choices.
Refugees no longer travel blindly. YHWH’s cloud pillar leads them.
Slaves toying with liberation possibilities have more than one option when darkness falls upon their company. They can still leverage the night, it is true, for some needed rest. But they can choose to travel onward, if they wish.
Suddenly, ‘Hebrews’ does not mean ‘people defined and determined by those who use them.’
YHWH’s presence opens up the dangerous possibility of decision. His proximity is neither fleeting or ephemeral, the text tells us through its tale of complaining slaves on their way to a new identity.
Day or night, it never leaves. So does the book of Exodus begin to define ‘freedom’.
Canter Bridge 
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