Israel's first call to holiness was full of the awe of Sinai, that dread meeting with God on the mountain:

I am the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that I might be your God.

You shall be holy, because I am holy. (Lev. xi, 45-46.)

So far from being ‘a serious call to a devout life', this shattering contact with the ‘wholly other’ is the very source of their life as a people. They live constantly in the memory of this encounter; they respond to its claims with a fanatical insistence on their separateness. The Red Sea divides them now from a profane world; they have been brought out of Egypt to be shattered and remoulded around this experience. God has spoken to them out of the thunders and lightnings of the holy mountain, and in that moment of history they have been set apart; still trembling in the grip of that fearful revelation Israel grows to nationhood as a chosen people.