Exodus 1 · The Lantern

The Israelites Multiply in Egypt

And these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob; each man came with his household:

Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah;

Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin;

Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher.

And all the souls who came out of Jacob’s body were seventy souls; and Joseph was already in Egypt.

And Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation.

And the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew mighty — exceedingly so — and the land was filled with them.

Oppression by a New King

And a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.

And he said to his people, “Look, the people of the sons of Israel are more numerous and mightier than we.

Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will multiply, and when war breaks out, they too will join our enemies and fight against us, and go up out of the land.”

And they set taskmasters over them, to afflict them with their burdens. And they built storage cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Rameses.

But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread — and they dreaded the sons of Israel.

And Egypt made the sons of Israel serve with crushing harshness,

and they made their lives bitter with hard labor — with mortar and with bricks and with every kind of labor in the field — all their labor with which they made them serve, with crushing harshness.

According to these things, therefore, God is perhaps said also to have hardened the heart of Pharaoh, namely because the material of his heart was such that it received the presence of the Sun of justice not on that side by which it illumines, but on that by which it burns and hardens: on this account, without doubt, that he too was afflicting the life of the Hebrews in hard wo…

I have already lived through many paschs, which was the fruit of a long life. But now I desire a purer pasch: to depart from this Egypt, the heavy and dark Egypt of this life, and to be freed from the clay and bricks that held us in bondage and to pass over to the land of promise.

We have been led out of Egypt where we were serving the devil as a pharaoh, where we were doing works of clay amid earthly desires, and we were laboring much in them.

And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives — the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the second was Puah —

and he said, “When you help the Hebrew women give birth, look at the birthstool: if it is a son, put him to death; and if it is a daughter, she shall live.”

But the midwives feared God, and they did not do as the king of Egypt had spoken to them — they let the boys live.

And the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, and let the boys live?”

And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous — before the midwife comes to them, they have given birth.”

And God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and grew very mighty.

And it happened, because the midwives feared God, that he made households for them.

But what does Scripture say? "The midwives feared God," it says, "and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them." Certain men before us have said that these midwives hold the pattern of rational learning. For midwives are, as it were, in the middle, and tend both the males and the females at their birth.

And that you may learn this—Pharaoh commanded the infants to be cast into the river. Unless the infants had been cast forth, Moses would not have been saved, he would not have been brought up in the palace. When he was safe, he was not in honor; when he was exposed, then he was in honor. But God did this, to show His riches of resource and contrivance.

As for its being written that God dealt well with the Hebrew midwives and with Rahab the harlot of Jericho, he did not deal well with them because they lied but because they were merciful to the men of God. And so it was not their deception that was rewarded but their benevolence; the benignity of their intention, not the iniquity of their invention.

And Pharaoh commanded all his people: “Every son who is born you shall throw into the Nile — but every daughter you shall let live.”

Exodus1

The Israelites Multiply in Egypt

Oppression by a New King