A Journey Through the Bible: Exodus 1 and 2

Exodus 1:8—“Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” This is probably the most famous Pharaoh in history and we don’t even know his name. I’m not going to bother speculating, most of us would never have heard of him anyway. But he was a shrewd Pharaoh, and also one who had no conscience. Verse 7 says “the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them,” so much so that they apparently outnumbered the Egyptians (v. 9). Thus, Pharaoh enslaved them (v. 10), and then started killing the male babies (or ordered such, v. 16). Some have wondered why, if the Israelites had the greater population, they did not revolt. The main reason was the Egyptians had the weapons and the Israelites did not. There were places in the Old South where the Negro slaves greatly outnumbered the whites, but there were only one or two major slave revolts all during the time of American slavery. In Egypt’s case, slavery didn’t help—“the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew” (v. 12). Israel was getting into the position God wanted them—with sufficient numbers to conquer the land of Canaan. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Which is no surprise; God’s plans will not be defeated by puny humans.

Exodus 2:11-12—“Now it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out to his brethren and looked at their burdens. And he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren. So he looked this way and that way, and when he saw no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” We’ve already seen that some of God’s greatest men could act in decidedly ungodly ways—Abraham lying and committing adultery, Isaac lying about Rebecca being his wife, Jacob being a deceptive sneak if there ever was one, his sons had their hands full of debauchery, wickedness, and blood, even the saintly Joseph worked a magnificent dishonesty upon his brothers. And now here’s Moses murdering an Egyptian. In his defense, he came to the aid of one of his Hebrew brethren. But his use of force was certainly excessive and uncalled for. Keep in mind, Moses was the grandson of Pharaoh; could he not have used some of that influence to stop the Egyptian from mistreating the Hebrew? Was killing the fellow absolutely necessary? It is highly doubtful that the Egyptian would have resisted the authority of a kinsmen of Pharaoh. Why such barbarism on the part of Moses? We must always remember, in these early books of the Bible, that we are dealing with a very primitive people, men and women who had no written law from God and who lived in difficult, dangerous, and uncultured times. Survival was not easy, and this produced hard, calloused men who did what they thought necessary to ensure that survival. As we shall see, God was often very harsh in His handling of these people; it’s the language they knew and understood because it was the kind of world they lived in. Too many today want to judge ancient peoples by our standards, and that is a gross, egregious error. It was a dog-eat-dog world, often kill or be killed, and we’ve seen some of these rough edges already. Go back to perhaps the best example of this—Genesis 34. Simeon and Levi killed a whole city-full of men because one of them had raped their sister. And their father Jacob did not castigate them for murder—he was worried about his own hide: “You have troubled me by making me obnoxious among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites; and since I am few in number, they will gather themselves together against me and kill me” (Genesis 34:30). So what that two of his sons had murdered a huge contingent of men and enslaved the women and children. “Just don’t trouble me.” This doesn’t excuse what Moses did in Exodus 2, but it does help us to understand how an otherwise godly man could act in such a vile manner.