Exodus 2:24

“In process of time” covers a long stretch of years. The phrase is built on yôwm, the word for a day or for a span of time, and here it marks the years Moses spent in Midian after he fled from Egypt and settled there with a family (Exodus 2:1–22). Moses was forty when he fled and eighty when he returned, so about forty years passed while Israel went on suffering.

The story of that suffering fills Exodus 1. Israel had multiplied in Egypt, and a new king arose “which knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). He feared that this growing people would join Egypt’s enemies (Exodus 1:9–10), so he set taskmasters over them and made them build the store cities Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11). When they kept on multiplying, he ordered every Hebrew baby boy to be killed (Exodus 1:15–22).

The death of a king was a great event in Egypt, and it often brought unrest or a change of policy. For Israel it changed nothing. The oppression ran deeper than one man’s decree, and a new king simply took over the slavery along with the throne, together with Egypt’s profit from their labour and its fear of their numbers. Verse 23 puts the two facts side by side: the king died, and the children of Israel sighed. The relief they needed would have to come from God himself.

The children of Israel “sighed by reason of the bondage.” The verb ʼânach means to sigh or groan deeply, the sound of people worn down by long and heavy suffering. Then “they cried.” This verb, zâʻaq, means to cry out, to shriek from anguish or danger, and especially to call for help in hardship, and it can also mean to call people together. The groaning that had been held inside now became a loud cry for help.

“And their cry came up unto God.” The verb ʻâlâh is the plain word for going up or rising. Their cry rose out of Egypt and reached God, and the next two verses show that he received it. The same verb appears a few verses later in God’s promise to bring Israel up out of Egypt into a good land (Exodus 3:8), so the cry that went up from Israel is answered by a God who will bring Israel up.

“By reason of the bondage” comes twice in the verse, once with the sighing and once with the cry. Both had the same cause, and the repeated phrase presses home how heavy and how long the bondage was. A psalm describes the same pattern: “The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles” (Psalm 34:17).

Verse 24 turns from Israel to God. The verb shâmaʻ means to hear with understanding, and it often carries the sense of paying attention and of obeying. When God hears his people’s groaning, he takes in their distress fully and is ready to act on it. Their groaning, nᵉʼâqâh, is the sound of anguish and helplessness under oppression. Scripture speaks of God in human terms here, hearing and later looking, so that we can grasp how closely he attends to his people.

At the burning bush God tells Moses what he had heard: “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7).

Across verses 24 and 25 God is named four times in a row: God heard, God remembered, God looked, and God had respect. The word is ʼĕlôhîym, plural in form, which when it names the true God is a plural of majesty, and its verbs are usually singular. The repetition puts the whole weight of the turning point on God. Israel’s rescue begins with his initiative, before any human merit or plan.

The word for covenant, bᵉrîyth, means a covenant, alliance, treaty or league, a solemn and binding agreement. Strong’s explains it as a compact made by passing between pieces of flesh, which recalls the night God made his covenant with Abraham and passed between the pieces of the animals Abraham had laid out (Genesis 15:9–18). The word’s origin is uncertain, but its meaning is plain, and in that same chapter God foretold the very bondage Israel was now suffering.

The covenant goes back to God’s call of Abraham, when he promised to make of him a great nation, to bless him, and to bless all the families of the earth in him (Genesis 12:1–3). Those promises included land, many descendants and a special bond between God and his people. The great increase of Israel in Egypt was already that promise coming true. The verse names the three fathers who received it: ʼAbrâhâm, Yitschâq (Isaac, a name meaning “laughter”), and Yaʻăqôb, or Jacob. God gave the promise to Abraham and renewed it to his son and grandson.

Israel had lived in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years (Exodus 12:40), and the promise had stood unchanged through all of it. Their deliverance rests on promises God made freely to the fathers, and none of it was earned by them. It stands on who God is and on his word.

Verse 25 adds two more things God did. “God looked upon the children of Israel” uses râʼâh, the usual verb for seeing, and here it describes a full and attentive look that takes in the whole of their bondage and pain. Nothing of his people’s distress escaped his notice.

“And God had respect unto them” translates the verb yâdaʻ, “to know”, which is why the ESV reads “God knew.” This knowing is personal. God recognised the children of Israel as his own covenant people, valued their lives and cared about what they were suffering. Scripture speaks of the same kind of knowing when God tells Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee” (Jeremiah 1:5), and when Paul writes, “The Lord knoweth them that are his” (2 Timothy 2:19). The verse ends there, with God’s knowing, and the next chapter shows what he does with it.

God’s seeing and knowing go before his action elsewhere too. Before he judged Sodom and Gomorrah he said, “I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it” (Genesis 18:20–21). A psalm says, “The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry” (Psalm 34:15). Isaiah goes further and says that God shared his people’s pain: “In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them” (Isaiah 63:9).

God heard Israel’s groaning and sent Moses to bring them out of slavery. In Christ he has answered a deeper groaning, the bondage of the whole world to sin and death. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), and Jesus came as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), because “God so loved the world” (John 3:16).

God looked upon Israel and knew them. In Christ he came down and lived among us as Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). He “took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men,” and became “obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:7–8). So we have a high priest who is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15).

The covenant God remembered in Exodus finds its fulfilment in Christ as well. Paul says that the seed promised to Abraham is Christ (Galatians 3:16), and that all who belong to Christ are “Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). By his own blood Christ obtained eternal redemption for us (Hebrews 9:12), and he is the mediator of a better covenant, established upon better promises (Hebrews 8:6). Israel went out of Egypt toward a land of promise, and those who are in Christ are delivered from “the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

These verses show us God at the moment his people had nothing left but a cry. Kings came and went in Egypt, and the years in Midian went by, while the promise to Abraham stood. When the cry came up, God heard it, called his covenant to mind, looked upon his people and knew them, and from there the whole story of the exodus unfolds.

That is who God still is. Our sighs and cries come up to the same God, and he hears them. His remembering rests on his own promises, which in Christ are sealed by a better covenant. And he knows his people by name in their trouble, as he knew Israel in the brickfields of Egypt. Like Israel’s, our deliverance comes from him, in his time, because he has bound himself by his word.