Study Desk

‘Say this to Joseph: Please forgive your brothers’ transgression and their sin—the suffering they caused you.’ Therefore, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when their message came to him.

Joseph died at the age of 110. They embalmed him and placed him in a coffin in Egypt.

Come, let’s deal shrewdly with them; otherwise they will multiply further, and when war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.”

So the Egyptians assigned taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor. They built Pithom and Rameses as supply cities for Pharaoh.

But the more they oppressed them, the more they multiplied and spread so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.

and made their lives bitter with difficult labor in brick and mortar and in all kinds of fieldwork. They ruthlessly imposed all this work on them.

The midwives, however, feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live.

The midwives said to Pharaoh, “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife can get to them.”

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock.

They answered, “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock.”

After a long time, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned because of their difficult labor; and they cried out; and their cry for help because of the difficult labor ascended to God.

Then Moses asked God, “If I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what should I tell them?”

They will listen to what you say. Then you, along with the elders of Israel, must go to the king of Egypt and say to him: The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. Now please let us go on a three-day trip into the wilderness so that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.

Moses answered, “What if they won’t believe me and will not obey me but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’?”

“This will take place,” he continued, “so that they will believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.”

“If they will not believe you and will not respond to the evidence of the first sign, they may believe the evidence of the second sign.

And if they don’t believe even these two signs or listen to what you say, take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground. The water you take from the Nile will become blood on the ground.”

Then Moses went back to his father-in-law Jethro and said to him, “Please let me return to my relatives in Egypt and see if they are still living.”

The people believed, and when they heard that the Lord had paid attention to them and that he had seen their misery, they knelt low and worshiped.

Later, Moses and Aaron went in and said to Pharaoh, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival for me in the wilderness.”