Exodus 1:11

The opening verses of Exodus name the sons of Jacob who came down into Egypt and tell how their family grew there (Exodus 1:1–7). Verse 8 turns the story. It joins the family history of Genesis to the history of a nation in bondage, and the slavery, the call of Moses and the great deliverance all follow from it.

The ruler is called melek, king, and he is left unnamed, so our eyes rest on his office and on the power he holds over a whole people. He is châdâsh, new, a word for what has recently come and for what differs from what came before. He is the next king on the throne and, for Israel, a different kind of king. “Arose up” is qûwm, the common verb for rising, used here of a ruler coming to power.

“Which knew not Joseph” explains all that follows. The verb yâdaʻ, to know, often carries the sense of acknowledging and regarding someone, and here it describes a king who gave Joseph’s name no weight. Joseph’s wisdom had carried Egypt through the famine (Genesis 41:37–57), and an earlier Pharaoh had settled his family in the land of Goshen (Genesis 47:6). Whether this king had never learned of Joseph or chose to set his memory aside, Egypt’s debt to him was gone, and his family, who had come as welcome guests, were now looked on as a foreign danger. Anyone who has read Genesis feels the irony, since the nation Joseph saved now turns on Joseph’s own kin. Stephen retells this moment to the council in Jerusalem as part of Israel’s history (Acts 7:17–19), and a psalm recalls how Israel prospered in Egypt before God turned the Egyptians’ “heart to hate his people, to deal subtilly with his servants” (Psalm 105:23–25).

Over against a king who forgot stands a God who remembers. When Israel groans under its slavery, God hears, remembers his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and looks upon them (Exodus 2:23–25). Human favour can end with a change of ruler, while God’s faithfulness to his word carries on through every change.

“And he said unto his people”. The verb ʼâmar is the everyday word for saying, and it also covers telling and commanding. The king addresses his ʻam, a people as one gathered body, and he speaks in public to rally Egypt behind what he is about to do. “Behold” (hinneh) calls for attention, and then comes his claim that “the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we”. “More” is rab, many, and “mightier” is ʻâtsûwm, which means mighty, strong or numerous. Pharaoh is speaking of Israel’s numbers and of the strength that numbers bring.

Their growth was God’s own doing. He had promised to make Abraham a great nation (Genesis 12:2) and to give him descendants as many as the stars (Genesis 15:5), and when Jacob went down to Egypt God told him that he would make of him a great nation there (Genesis 46:3). Exodus has just said that the children of Israel “were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). The blessing God gave is the very thing Pharaoh names as a danger. His words were probably an overstatement meant to alarm his people, and his fear rested on what Israel might do one day, since they had raised no hand against Egypt.

“Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens.” The word behind taskmasters is maç, forced labour or tribute, and a taskmaster was a chief of forced labour (sar maç), an officer who enforced the work the state demanded. Israel’s slavery was organised and official, and their work became unpaid service to Pharaoh. Egypt often drew on great numbers of labourers, foreign captives among them, for its building, and forced service for the state was common there.

The taskmasters’ purpose was “to afflict them”. The verb ʻânâh means to press down, humble or deal harshly with someone, and the “burdens” (sivlot) are the heavy loads and hard tasks laid on them. Pharaoh meant the work to wear Israel down and check their growth.

The fruit of their labour was “treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses”. Miçkᵉnâh means a storehouse, and ʻîyr is the ordinary word for a city or town, so these were store cities, where grain, supplies and military equipment were kept for the king. They served Egypt’s government and army in the eastern Delta, a border region on the road to Asia. They were built “for Pharaoh”, so Israel’s labour made stronger the very power that oppressed them.

Israel remembered this. Their confession of faith in Deuteronomy recalls how the Egyptians afflicted them and how the LORD brought them out in a mighty deliverance (Deuteronomy 26:6–8), and God himself tells Moses that he has seen the affliction of his people and heard their cry (Exodus 3:7). Long before, God had told Abraham that his descendants would be strangers in a foreign land and would be afflicted there (Genesis 15:13), so even this dark turn came as he had said.

“But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.” Here, early in Exodus, God’s hand is first seen turning Pharaoh’s plan back on itself. The verb for afflicting is ʻânâh, the same verb as in verse 11. “The more … the more” is an idiom built on kên, which means “thus” or “so”: as they afflicted them, so Israel multiplied. Râbâh is to increase or become many, and “grew” is pârats, to break out or spread. Pharaoh’s plan produced the opposite of what he intended, because God was keeping his promise.

The Egyptians “were grieved because of the children of Israel”. Qûwts means to be disgusted or anxious, and it covers loathing, dread and vexation. Egypt felt dread mixed with loathing as it watched the people it had tried to crush keep growing. That dread led to harsher measures still, first the rigour of verses 13 and 14 and then the king’s command to kill the Hebrew boys (Exodus 1:16). The struggle between God and Pharaoh that begins here goes on until God brings Israel through the Red Sea (Exodus 14).

God often works this way. He takes what is meant for harm and makes it serve his purpose for his people, so that all things work together for good to them that love him (Romans 8:28). The early church grew in the same way under persecution, for “the word of God grew and multiplied” (Acts 12:24), as Jesus had said of his church, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). At the end John sees a great multitude from every nation, kindred, people and tongue standing before the throne (Revelation 7:9).

Verses 13 and 14 describe the service itself. “The Egyptians” is Mitsrayim, the name of Egypt, a dual form that names Upper and Lower Egypt together. “Made … to serve” is ʻâbad, to work, serve or till, in a causative form, so the Egyptians forced Israel into service. “With rigour” is perek, from a root meaning to break apart, and it means severity and cruelty. The same word closes verse 14, so both verses end on the harshness of the work. When the first measures failed, the Egyptians pressed harder.

Verse 14 says “they made their lives bitter with hard bondage”. Mârar properly means to trickle, and it is used to mean to be or make bitter, from mar, bitter. Chay is life, and here it speaks of their lives as a whole, so the misery reached every day they lived as well as their aching bodies. “Bondage” is ʻăbôdâh, work, labour or service, and the same noun returns through the verse in “all manner of service” and “all their service”, so the word for their work keeps sounding like the work itself.

The verse names the work. “Morter” (chômer) and “brick” (lᵉbênâh) are the hard labour of preparing building materials and building with them, likely for the store cities of verse 11. “All manner of service in the field” is farm work in the fertile land along the Nile. Their labour reached into every part of Egypt’s economy, and the verse closes with the summary that “all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour”.

Exodus 1 leaves the reason unstated, and the rest of the story shows what God was doing. The suffering drove Israel to cry out to him, and their cry led to the Exodus (Exodus 2:23–25). Shared hardship bound the tribes of Jacob together into one people, ready to receive God’s covenant at Sinai, where he takes them as his own (Exodus 19:5–6). It showed God’s power over the mightiest ruler of the day and revealed him to Israel as their Deliverer. And it taught them to depend on him alone. Through all of it God saw their affliction, heard their groaning and was moved by compassion to act.

The bondage of Exodus 1 pictures the deeper bondage of every person to sin and death. Jesus said, “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin,” and “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:34–36). God raised up Moses to bring Israel out from under Pharaoh, and he sent his Son as the greater Deliverer to free us from the one Jesus called “the prince of this world” (John 12:31). Christ came by death to deliver those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage (Hebrews 2:14–15), and on the cross he triumphed over the powers set against God’s people (Colossians 2:13–15). The Father “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13–14), and he has called us out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9). The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2).

The new king knew not Joseph and broke faith with Joseph’s family. Christ, the true King, keeps every promise of God, for he is God’s faithfulness in person. He entered the bitterness of human suffering himself, as the man of sorrows who was wounded for our transgressions (Isaiah 53:3–5), and in his blood he made the new covenant God had promised through Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31–34, Luke 22:20).

Exodus 1 shows us a God whose promises hold under the hardest of rulers. Pharaoh had a throne, taskmasters and cities of store, and Israel had God’s word to Abraham, and God’s word carried the day. When the Egyptians pressed hardest, Israel grew. Paul asks, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31), and the story of Israel in Egypt is a long answer to that question.

These verses also show us that God sees what his people suffer. The bitter lives of verse 14 were known to him, and in his time he heard their groaning and came down to deliver them. The God who saw Israel’s affliction in the brick fields of Egypt sees his children still. And the king who knew not Joseph stands as a warning about forgetting, set beside a God who remembers his covenant through every generation.