Scripture Daily

Context No. 813 of 4322 · Exodus

Context · Reflection

Exodus 1:8-14: in context

8Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who didn’t know Joseph. 9He said to his people, “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. 10Come, let’s deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it happen that when any war breaks out, they also join themselves to our enemies and fight against us, and escape out of the land.” 11Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with their burdens. They built storage cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses. 12But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread out. They started to dread the children of Israel. 13The Egyptians ruthlessly made the children of Israel serve, 14and they made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and in brick, and in all kinds of service in the field, all their service, in which they ruthlessly made them serve.

Generations after Joseph saved Egypt from famine, a new king comes to the throne who, the text says pointedly, did not know Joseph. The debt is forgotten, and the Hebrews who had been welcomed are now seen only as a threat: they have grown numerous, and the king fears that in a war they might side with an enemy. So he settles on a strategy that seems shrewd: crush them with forced labor before they can grow strong. Taskmasters are set over them, and they are worked ruthlessly, building the store-cities of Pithom and Rameses, their lives made bitter with mortar and brick and every kind of hard service.

But the plan does not work. The more they were oppressed, the text says, the more they multiplied and spread out, until the Egyptians came to dread them. The oppression aimed at shrinking them did the opposite; it seemed to fertilize the very growth it meant to prevent. There is a blessing on this people, spoken long before to Abraham, and no amount of Egyptian brick-making can grind it out of them. This is a pattern that shows up again and again in scripture and after it: the affliction designed to reduce God's people becomes the pressure under which they expand. What Pharaoh intended to diminish, God used to multiply. The suffering was real and cruel, and it was also the strange soil in which a nation grew.

The harder Egypt pressed Israel, the more it grew, against every intention. Where am I assuming that opposition or hardship will only shrink me, when it may be the very pressure under which something is meant to grow?

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