Reading: Exodus 1-3, Psalm 17

When we last saw the family of Israel, it was seventy or so people living in the land of Goshen in Egypt. They were protected by Joseph, who was the ruler of all of Egypt. But eventually Joseph dies, and as time goes on the family of Israel becomes extremely numerous. We aren’t told the exact circumstance, but eventually they become so numerous that the current Pharaoh gets nervous and decides they should be enslaved and subject to forced labor. At the end of Genesis we saw that Joseph had made slaves of all the Egyptians and set up a sharecropping system that would allow them to survive the famine. This slavery is different. When the people of Israel are enslaved they are put to work on Pharaoh’s vanity projects: cities and monuments.

Pharaoh’s oppressive enslavement backfires, though. The Israelite population booms, and now they are unfavorably disposed towards Pharaoh. He realizes if this keeps up they will quickly become a real revolt threat. So he institutes state mandated abortions on boys, apparently hoping to breed away the threat. When the Egyptian midwives balk at carrying out his horrific edict, he tells all Egypt to throw all male Israelite babies into the river. So I guess you might say Pharaoh is being set up at the bad guy. With the possible exception of the men of Sodom, Pharaoh is the worst guy we’ve met in the Bible so far. He enslaves and oppresses, and then mandates his people murder the unborn and infants- and all to protect his position and power. Pharaoh is worried about maintaining the state set up at the end of Genesis. He is an absolutely independent ruler, subject to no one.

In this environment a baby is born in the tribe of Levi. He parents try to keep him hidden, but at some point he is too old. So his mother obeys the letter of the law while defying it’s spirit. She puts her son in the river, but in a basket. The daughter of Pharaoh spies him floating down the river and takes him for her own, calling him Moses, drawn from water.

A side note about water in the Old Testament. Several ancient cultures viewed water with deep suspicion, and Israel is among them. The Egyptian culture respected the power of water and at times worshiped the Nile river as a god. The name Moses, as one drawn out of water, holds varying significance depending on which culture he belongs to.

In a clever move, Moses’ sister Miriam, having followed to see what happened to her brother, steps in and volunteers to have their mother nurse the baby Moses. So Moses not only survives, but he is raised in his early years by his own people and then sent to live in privilege and power as a part of the family of Pharaoh.

But it doesn’t last. Moses, grown now and apparently quite conscious of the divide between Egypt and Israel, goes out and sees one of his people being oppressed, and he kills the oppressor. He is embodying Pharaoh’s greatest fear- that the people of Israel will rise up and destroy him. The next incident reveals that the people of Israel are by no means united in their circumstances, as Moses finds them mistreating each other. His act of defiance and deliverance has done nothing. It is at least implied that his own people reported him, and Pharaoh attempts to have him killed.

So Moses, like his ancestor Jacob, flees for his life, having offended his family such that they want to kill him. Like Jacob he finds refuge with relatives (Midian was a son of Abraham), marries one of them, and has children. It appears he settles down with no intention of returning to Egypt.

But Moses is of the people of Israel. He will struggle with God and man. So God does not leave him alone. In what is one of the most famous scenes in the Bible, Moses encounters God in a burning bush in the wilderness on Mount Sinai. God declares his identity as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He charges Moses to return to Egypt to deliver his people from their oppression- by demanding Pharaoh let them go three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to him. Wait, what? Not to let them go from their bondage? No. God doesn’t have Moses demand Pharaoh let the people go free, only to let them go and worship God. He predicts this will not happen, and in the end the people will go free, and plunder Egypt in the process. But the request Moses is to present is far smaller than this.

God is setting up Pharaoh, Moses, and the people of Israel to receive the same message: You are not who you think you are. Pharaoh believes he is independent and supreme. God begs to differ. As to what Moses and the people of Israel believe, we’ll start to see that tomorrow.