Out of Egypt · c. 1526–1486 BC
Chapter 1
Slaves in Egypt
God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.God saw the children of Israel, and God understood.
For parents
Pharaoh orders the Hebrew midwives to kill every baby boy they deliver, and then orders his people to throw every newborn boy into the river (Exodus 1:16, 22). Moses kills an Egyptian he sees beating a Hebrew and hides the body in the sand (2:12). It is told plainly, without detail.
When came to , his sons came with him, and each one brought his whole household. Their names were , , and , , and , and , and . In all there were seventy of Jacob’s descendants. was already in Egypt.
Before Joseph died, he had said to his brothers, “I am dying. But God will surely come for you. He will bring you up out of this country to the land he swore to , and Jacob that he would give them.” He made them swear to carry his bones up from Egypt when that day came. Then Joseph died. He was a hundred and ten years old. They his body and laid it in a coffin in Egypt. In time all his brothers died too, and so did everyone else of their generation.
But the people of had many children. Their numbers grew and grew, and they became very strong, until the land was full of them.
Then a new king came to power over Egypt, a king who didn’t know Joseph.
“See how many of these Israelites there are,” he said to his people. “There are more of them than of us, and they are more powerful. We must find a clever way to handle them, or they will keep multiplying. Then, if war comes, they will side with our enemies, fight against us, and get away from this land.”
So the Egyptians set slave drivers over them, to make them suffer under heavy loads. The Israelites built the cities of and for , as the king of Egypt was called. They were cities for storing his supplies.
But the worse the Egyptians treated them, the more the Israelites multiplied and spread out. The Egyptians began to dread them.
The Egyptians were ruthless in the work they forced on the Israelites. They made their lives bitter with hard work. The Israelites worked with bricks and with mortar, the mud that holds bricks together, and they did every sort of job in the fields. All the work they forced on them was cruel.
The king of Egypt spoke to the , two women named and . “When you help the Hebrew women give birth and see them on the birth stool,” he said, “if it’s a son, kill him; if it’s a daughter, she may live.” A birth stool was a low seat a woman sat on to give birth.
But the midwives . They didn’t do what the king of Egypt had commanded. They kept the baby boys alive.
The king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this? Why did you save the boys’ lives?”
“Because Hebrew women aren’t like Egyptian women,” the midwives told Pharaoh. “They are strong, and their babies are born before the midwife even gets there.”
God was good to the midwives, and the people grew in number and became very mighty. Because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.
Then Pharaoh gave a command to all his people: every son that was born was to be thrown into the river, the Nile, and every daughter kept alive.
A man from Levi’s family married a woman who was also from Levi’s family. She became pregnant and had a son. She saw that he was a fine child, and she kept him hidden for three months.
When she couldn’t hide him any longer, she took a basket woven from papyrus, the tall reeds that grow beside the Nile. She coated it with tar and pitch, laid the baby in it, and set it among the reeds at the edge of the river.
His sister stood a long way off, watching to see what would happen to him.
Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the river to bathe, while the young women who served her walked along the bank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant to bring it to her.
She opened it and saw the child, and the baby was crying. Her heart went out to him. “This is one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said.
Then his sister came up to Pharaoh’s daughter. “Do you want me to go and call one of the Hebrew women to be his nurse?” she asked. In those days a nurse was a woman who fed someone else’s baby with her own milk.
“Go,” Pharaoh’s daughter said, and the girl went and called the child’s mother.
“Take this child and nurse him for me,” Pharaoh’s daughter told her, “and I will pay you.” So the child’s own mother took him and nursed him.
The child grew. Then his mother brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him , a name that sounds like the Hebrew for “draw out”. “I drew him out of the water,” she said.
In those days, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his fellow Hebrews and saw the heavy loads they had to carry. He saw an Egyptian striking one of them, a Hebrew like himself.
Moses looked this way and that. When he saw that no one was there, he killed the Egyptian, then hid his body in the sand.
The next day he went out again, and there were two Hebrew men fighting each other. Moses said to the one who was doing wrong, “Why are you hitting a man of your own people?”
“Who made you a ruler and a judge over us?” the man answered. “Are you planning to kill me the way you killed the Egyptian?”
Then Moses was afraid. “People must know what I did,” he said.
When the news reached Pharaoh, he looked for a way to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and made his home in the land of . There he sat down by a well.
Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters. The girls came to the well to draw water and fill the drinking troughs for their father’s flock.
Then some shepherds came and drove them away. But Moses stood up and helped the girls, and he watered their flock.
When they came home to their father, , he asked them, “Why are you back so early today?”
“An Egyptian saved us from the shepherds,” they said. “And what’s more, he drew water for us and gave the flock a drink.”
“Where is he?” Reuel said to his daughters. “Why did you leave him out there? Go and ask him in to eat with us.”
Moses was willing to live there with Reuel, and Reuel gave him his daughter to marry.
Zipporah had a son, and Moses named him , a name that sounds like the Hebrew for “a foreigner there”. “I have lived as a foreigner in a foreign land,” he said.
Many years went by, and the king of Egypt died. The Israelites sighed under their slavery and cried out. Their cry rose up to God because of their slavery.
Long before, when Abraham was still called , God had told him what would happen: “Know for sure that your descendants will live as foreigners in a land that isn’t theirs. They will serve its people, and those people will treat them harshly for four hundred years. But I will judge the nation they serve. After that, they will come out with great wealth.”
God heard their groaning, and God remembered his with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the Israelites, and God understood.