Exodus 1:11-14

Hey, everybody.
Thanks for joining us again as we continue through the book of Exodus.
We are partway through the first chapter today.
And just a quick recap of yesterday,
the Pharaoh recognized the growth and the multiplication of the people of Israel
and takes it as a threat.
The Pharaoh,
who we’re told didn’t know or didn’t remember Joseph,
now looks at this clan of people that are growing,
and he sees them as dangerous.
And so,
he endeavors to deal shrewdly,
really to exert some control over them.
So,
we pick up the story in verse 11.
I’ll read these verses for you,
and then we can try to unpack some of them.
“Therefore, they, the Egyptians,
set taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor.
They built supply cities,
pithom and ramses, for Pharaoh.
But the more they were
oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread.
So the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.
The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites
and made their lives bitter,
with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor.
They were ruthless in all the tasks
that they imposed on them.”
So,
this is really kind of the first shot in the war.
The Pharaoh has seen them as a threat,
but now they act on it, and they essentially
begin to force labor on them.
They begin to enslave them.
There’s not really a sense that pre this text,
the people thought of themselves or were thought of as slaves,
but however that happens, the Pharaoh now
commandeers the people of Israel,
forcing them to hard labor.
And there are some important words here.
The word “ruthless” shows up twice.
That’s essentially “without mercy.”
They were merciless in imposing tasks.
They ground them down.
They made their lives bitter.
Interestingly,
the word “bitter” is going to show up occasionally throughout the Book of Exodus,
and it is what you think it is.
It means hard.
It means sorrowful.
They enforced
and created bitterness for and upon the people.
Yeah, let me stop there,
Michael.
I do think there’s a little bit more to unpack.
I think there is an important footnote in this story,
but essentially we begin today to see the situation that is going to evolve for the Israelites in that
they become enslaved and that their life is made hard through the ruthless acts of their oppressors.
Yeah, I think it’s easy to read through narrative like this and to just see names of places and
narrative elements and just take it as story.
But there’s a lot more happening here than that,
and I want to make sure that we point that out.
Because here, even already in verse 11,
we see that the taskmasters put over the Israelites forced them to build supply cities.
And here we have Pithom and Ramses.
You might not know that Pithom means the city of the sun god.
So a city that has in its name a god other than the god of Jacob and of Abraham and all of the
patriarchs.
And then Ramses we know as being a particular ruler,
a particular authority, once again, other than God.
And we see in these details a reminder that the people are not just
made subject to an opposing power.
They’re made subject to that power who both forgets or works
against Joseph and is now very clearly set against the god of Joseph.
And it’s that setup that’s so
important.
The people and the servitude and the task that they’re put to is all really in the
opposite direction of what it would mean to bring honor and glory to God to humbly submit to the
higher authority.
And here,
the thing that is interesting,
and a real kind of shout back almost
to the Laban story,
is the more and more the Egyptians are ruthless to the Israelites.
I mean, it says here that the more and more that this happened,
the more and more that they’re
multiplied.
This is in verse 12.
And there’s this amazing kind of divine blessing happening amidst
this suffering.
And so that goes narratively to do a few things.
One,
it tells us that God is indeed
with the people.
They wouldn’t have this blessing if it wasn’t for their God who’s being faithful
to be with them in this moment.
It’s a subversive way of seeing that even in the midst of captivity,
even in the midst of what the Israelites surely would have seen as the story going down as a negative.
Here,
God is still working to fulfill that promise.
On the flip side,
it also shows us
and sets up for us the kind of ire and ultimately rage,
anger that Pharaoh will have against the
people of God.
We see in the very beginning here already,
the word that we have in our Bible under
verse 12 is dread.
This idea that the people have something inherent in them and in their life and
in their divine blessing that is antithetical to what Egypt is and to the power that Egypt is
asserting.
And so there’s a lot of authority dynamics happening here,
Clint. This is not just a telling of how the people are being put to work.
It’s really ultimately setting up Pharaoh
as the one who set himself against God and the people who are inheriting God’s divine favor and
blessing, even in the midst of that growing dread,
to use the word.
Yeah, I think one of the things
you don’t want to miss in this passage is in verse 12.
In fact, I think there are two things there,
but the first is that when the people are squeezed,
they are still resilient.
When they’re oppressed,
they continue.
In fact, they increase in that task of multiplication,
that calling to go
and be fruitful and multiply,
that though the Egyptians make their life hard,
make their life bitter,
the response is more of what they were set out or called upon to do by God.
So again, we have the picture,
and I would say in some ways,
this is the last time we will see this picture of
Israel, at least in the book of Exodus,
of Israel as resilient,
as tough,
as unbeatable.
That may be too strong of a word,
but they are here characterized with this sense of strength.
And we’ll see on Monday that Pharaoh’s next actions really strike at the heart of that
strength and essentially gut the people.
But in order to understand that contrast,
I do think you
need to hear this word,
that the more they were oppressed,
the more they multiplied and spread.
And then, as you said, Michael, this word, the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.
And hatred backed by fear.
It is based in fear,
this prejudice that is going to develop,
this sense that they are unworthy,
that they are beneath,
that they have to be controlled.
When we enslave a people,
it is this combination of
fear and judgment and hatred.
And so, this is a very active word.
They don’t simply fear them.
It’s telling us more than that.
And again,
not to continue to prolong this,
or to put this off till Monday,
we’re going to see, ultimately,
the horrific place that leads the people of Egypt as they go down this road
when we look at the following text on Monday.
This takes them to dark, dark places,
but it starts here in belittling and making less of the Egyptians,
or of the Israelites,
which for the Egyptians is both despising and fearing.
You know, one thing that is sometimes hard in the Old Testament,
Clint, is to see how
different threads get woven in between different books,
because these were not written in isolation.
In other words, as people are reading Genesis,
they then come into Exodus,
and we see themes
from Genesis that reappear.
But we are also going to see in later books in the Old Testament,
themes here in Exodus that are going to appear.
And my study Bible rightly points out,
and I think this is a helpful thing to remember,
is that even this early in the Exodus text,
we’re already setting precedent for some of the deepest-held beliefs that the people of Israel will follow.
And we have recorded here in verse 14 the ruthlessness of the Egyptians.
So I’ve got that
on my left-hand side here.
Verse 14, “They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed
on the Israelites.” You probably can’t see very well on my right side.
I have Leviticus 25.
This is verse 42,
where it says, “For they are my servants who I brought out of the land of Egypt.
They are not to be sold as slaves or sold.
You shall not rule over them with harshness,
but shall fear your God.” In other words,
later on, as you go further into the Old Testament,
you’re going to see that the people remember the harshness of their treatment.
They remember how they as slaves were treated with a particular form of guile,
and they are going to put in their
really governing sort of document,
the statement about what it means to be a person who follows
the one true God,
and to say that it is “become it upon you to not treat others the same way
that our forebearers were treated in Egypt.” So it’s more than just a statement of condition.
It later becomes the source of a particular ethic for the people,
that this should be the
antonym of a person’s life,
that this is the wrong way to behave,
as illustrated by the Egyptians,
and later the people are going to take that as a lesson or opportunity to live the opposite way.
Pete I think this will be more clear,
again, as we move into some of the more troubling texts,
Michael, but I think we see the precursor of it here.
Hanging over the end of this text
is the question,
who has power over Israel?
Who rules Israel?
And we already know,
through the covenant promise to Abraham,
that God has made a claim on the people,
and yet here Pharaoh makes a counterclaim.
Pharaoh imposes his own will upon the people,
and he does so ruthlessly,
without mercy, whereas God rules with mercy,
judges with kindness.
And there are some troubling things that are going to happen in the book of Exodus where we see God act ruthlessly.
And again, I think it’s perhaps more clear in other passages,
but I do think we see the genesis of it here,
the root of it here.
God is answering
what Pharaoh’s done with the way that Pharaoh’s done it.
In other words,
Pharaoh attacks the people without mercy, ruthlessly imposing his will on them,
and God will do the same to Egypt.
And I think as the story is told,
no surprise, but the bias clearly is that Pharaoh has started it.
God is going to enter into it,
but God did not start it.
There was no mention of a problem
with Egypt or even with the Pharaoh, interestingly enough,
until the Pharaoh steps in and presumes
upon the people the role that God has already spoken for and claimed for himself.
And it’s at that point that Pharaoh and Egypt and God and Israel are really on a collision course.
And I think you see the first instance of that here.
I do hope you can join us Monday because it will
be made crystal clear in the text that follows this one,
but it starts here.
Yeah, I think it’s worth noting, Clint,
and maybe it’s hard to remember that the people of Israel
are not inconvenienced in this telling of the story.
This is not just a light affliction
that has come upon them.
They’re not just paying taxes for the privilege of living in a secure,
advanced society.
This is the people of Israel.
God’s chosen family,
as it continues to grow and multiply,
are being bitterly put to difficult service.
They are the living definition
of slave, and it’s only getting worse for them because as they continue to succeed,
Pharaoh
becomes even more and more threatened in the telling of this story.
So the collision course,
I think, is the exact right metaphor that what we see happening right now is like a roller coaster
getting up to speed.
It’s very quickly being launched out of the station,
and we begin to
see this momentum is going to take us somewhere.
And if we didn’t go through this territory,
I think that you’re right to point out, Clint,
that some of God’s action related to Egypt may seem
out of balance.
It may not seem like a fair response,
a just response, but the text is
making it clear as best as it can that the people of Israel are being treated completely unfairly,
that they are the underdog who’s being abused in this situation.
They’re the ones without power
being made subject to power.
And so we’re going to see the story of deliverance through many
different channels and with ups and downs and fits and starts.
But it is worth noting here
that the predicament of the people continues to get worse,
but while it does so,
God’s hand of blessing and providence, a reminder that God remains with them and will be faithful to that
promise, simply goes with them.
Yeah.
And again,
not to continue to talk about the next thing,
but next Monday, we will be looking at a pivotal passage.
Monday and Tuesday probably take us a
couple days to unpack it,
but it really in some ways is the story on which the rest of the story
turns.
And so hope you can be with us and thanks for being here today.
Thanks so much, everybody.
We will see you next week.