Exodus 3:9

These words follow straight on from the burning bush, where the LORD has revealed himself to Moses as the God of his father, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exodus 3:1–6). The chapter before, Exodus 2, tells of Moses’ birth, his rescue and his flight from Egypt, and it ends with the children of Israel crying out under their bondage while God hears them, remembers his covenant and takes notice of them (Exodus 2:23–25). In verse 7 God puts that notice into his own words. The speaker is the LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, the self-existent and eternal God, so what he says about his people is true and has all his power behind it.

Israel had lived in Egypt for centuries. They came as welcome guests, and then under a new king “which knew not Joseph” they were made slaves. They were forced to build the store cities of Pithom and Raamses, and Pharaoh ordered their baby boys to be killed (Exodus 1:8–22). Pharaoh was regarded as a god, and Egypt’s kings put foreign peoples to work on their great building projects.

“I have surely seen” is emphatic in Hebrew. The verb râʼâh, the usual word for seeing, is repeated in the form ra’oh ra’iti, an infinitive set before the finite verb, and the KJV carries its force with “surely”. God has looked fully at what his people suffer, and he is certain of what he has seen. He calls it their affliction, ʻŏnîy, a word for misery and trouble that comes from a root meaning to depress.

He calls the slaves “my people”. The word ʻam means a people, a body of people joined together, and the “my” claims them as his own while they are still in bondage. They belong to him by the covenant he made with their fathers. Egypt in Hebrew is Mitsrayim, a dual form naming the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt.

God has also “heard their cry”. The verb shâmaʻ means to hear with attention and understanding, and it often carries the sense of responding to what is heard. Their cry, tsaʻăqâh, is an outcry, a shriek of distress, the appeal of people crushed by injustice. It rises “by reason of their taskmasters”. These were the overseers, nōgēś in Hebrew, a word from nâgas, to drive, to tax, to harass or tyrannize. They drove the labourers hard to meet their quotas, often with violence. “By reason of” renders pânîym, the word for face or presence, a noun plural in form that is always used as a singular. Here it names the cause of the cry, which was the taskmasters themselves.

“For I know their sorrows” gives the reason for everything that follows. The verb yâdaʻ is used for knowing by understanding and also for knowing by experience and close acquaintance. The sorrows, makʼôb, are anguish, grief and pain. God knows his people’s pain as one who is near them and cares for them, and that knowledge moves him to act, as the next verse shows.

The verse moves from seeing to hearing to knowing, from what God observes, to his attention to their cry, to his intimate knowledge of their pain. Israel later confessed this in their own words: they cried to the LORD, he heard them, and he brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand (Deuteronomy 26:7–8). Scripture says the same of God toward his people in every age. The righteous cry, and the LORD hears and delivers them (Psalm 34:17), and God sees trouble and sorrow (Psalm 10:14).

Verse 8 tells what God will do about all he has seen. “I am come down” translates yâradti, from yârad, the ordinary verb for going or coming down. God, who is everywhere, uses it to say that he has come in person to act for his people. He will send Moses, and the rescue is still God’s own work.

He comes “to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians”. The verb nâtsal means to snatch away, rescue or save. The people are the ones delivered, and “out of the hand of” marks what they are taken from. The hand stands for Egypt’s power and control over them, and God means to break it. He gives Moses the same promise again in Exodus 6:6.

Then he will “bring them up out of that land”, from slavery in Egypt to a better place. The land is “good”, fertile and pleasant, and “large”, with room for a growing nation, the opposite of the cramped and bound life of slaves.

“Now therefore, behold” turns from the people’s pain to what God will do about it. “Now therefore” marks the decisive moment, and “behold”, hinneh, calls Moses to pay close attention to what follows.

Verse 9 says again what verse 7 said, in new words. The cry is the same word, tsaʻăqâh, a loud and desperate outcry from people in deep distress, and now it “is come unto me”. Their cry has reached God’s own presence. “I have also seen” uses the same verb as verse 7, râʼâh, and God’s seeing here is an active and knowing look at the injustice done to them.

The last words press the point: “the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppress them”. The noun lachats and the verb lâchats come from the same root, to press or crush, and the noun names distress and heavy pressure. Naming the oppression with both noun and verb underlines how heavy and how deliberate the cruelty was. The God who hears this cry is the God who calls for the poor and fatherless to be defended (Psalm 82:3–4), and Isaiah says of the LORD and his people, “In all their affliction he was afflicted” (Isaiah 63:9).

“Come now therefore” is a summons. “Come” is from yâlak, to walk or go, and here it is a command. The “therefore” ties it to all God has said: because he has seen, heard and come down, he now sends.

“I will send thee unto Pharaoh” uses shâlach, to send, and also to stretch out, especially the hand. God is the sender and Moses is his messenger, so Moses goes with God’s authority and God’s backing. Scripture speaks of prophets and apostles in the same way, as men whom God sends. Pharaoh was a ruler regarded as divine, with absolute authority over the strongest empire of the day. Moses had fled from him forty years before, after killing an Egyptian (Exodus 2:11–15), and was now a shepherd in Midian. Sending this man to demand the release of a whole nation of slaves sets God’s rule against the greatest power on earth.

“That thou mayest bring forth my people” uses yâtsâʼ, to go or come out, and in this form to bring out. God has said, “I am come down to deliver them”, and now he says that Moses will bring them forth, so God works his deliverance through the man he sends. “My people” comes back from verse 7, and with it the reminder that Israel belongs to God. The exodus moves them toward the land God had promised to Abraham’s descendants as an everlasting possession (Genesis 17:8), and it became the great act of salvation that Israel looked back to.

Moses answers at once by protesting that he is unequal to the task (Exodus 3:11), and he raises more objections in the next chapter, which God meets one by one (Exodus 4:1–17). Israel’s psalms remember that God sent Moses his servant, with Aaron, to show his signs in Egypt (Psalm 105:26–27), and Stephen recalls the same sending of Moses (Acts 7:35).

God’s coming down in verse 8 reaches its fullest meaning in Jesus. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), and he was named Jesus because “he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). He is Emmanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23).

The God who knew Israel’s sorrows came to bear sorrow himself. Isaiah calls him a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3), and he was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).

As Moses was sent to Pharaoh, God sent his Son into the world to save it (John 3:17), and Hebrews sets Jesus above Moses (Hebrews 3:1–6). He leads a greater exodus, freeing his people from bondage to sin and from the fear of death (Hebrews 2:14–15). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and the mediator of the new covenant (Hebrews 9:15). God has delivered us from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13–14), and Christ has set us free (Galatians 5:1).

The good and large land points ahead as well. A rest remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9–10), and Scripture closes with God dwelling with his people in a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21:1–4). To people worn down under hard labour, Jesus says, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden” (Matthew 11:28–30).

These four verses show God turned toward his suffering people. He sees their affliction in full, he hears the cry that rises from under the taskmasters, and he knows their sorrows as one who is near. He keeps promises made centuries before, and he comes down to deliver in person. Then he sends a servant, and the rescue he has promised reaches his people through the one he sends.

Israel’s cry reached God in the worst years of their bondage, and verse 7 stands as his own word that he knew their sorrows all along. He is the same God now. The cry of his people still comes up to him, and the name he spoke over slaves in Egypt, “my people”, is the name he gives to all who belong to him through the Son he sent.