Study Desk

Then his brothers also came and threw themselves down before him; they said, "Here we are; we are your slaves."

Come, let's deal wisely with them. Otherwise they will continue to multiply, and if a war breaks out, they will ally themselves with our enemies and fight against us and leave the country."

So they put foremen over the Israelites to oppress them with hard labor. As a result they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.

But the more the Egyptians oppressed them, the more they multiplied and spread. As a result the Egyptians loathed the Israelites,

and they made the Israelites serve rigorously.

They made their lives bitter by hard service with mortar and bricks and by all kinds of service in the fields. Every kind of service the Israelites were required to give was rigorous.

But the midwives feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live.

Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and began to draw water and fill the troughs in order to water their father's flock.

They said, "An Egyptian man rescued us from the shepherds, and he actually drew water for us and watered the flock!"

During that long period of time the king of Egypt died, and the Israelites groaned because of the slave labor. They cried out, and their desperate cry because of their slave labor went up to God.

He replied, "Surely I will be with you, and this will be the sign to you that I have sent you: When you bring the people out of Egypt, you and they will serve God on this mountain."

Moses said to God, "If I go to the Israelites and tell them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, ‘What is his name?'—what should I say to them?"

Moses answered again, "And if they do not believe me or pay attention to me, but say, ‘The Lord has not appeared to you'?"

"that they may 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."

And if they do not believe even these two signs or listen to you, then take some water from the Nile and pour it out on the dry ground. The water you take out of the Nile will become blood on the dry ground."

So Moses went back to his father-in-law Jethro and said to him, "Let me go, so that I may return to my relatives in Egypt and see if they are still alive." Jethro said to Moses, "Go in peace."

Now on the way, at a place where they stopped for the night, the Lord met Moses and sought to kill him.

and the people believed. When they heard that the Lord had attended to the Israelites and that he had seen their affliction, they bowed down close to the ground.

Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, "Thus says the Lord , the God of Israel, ‘Release my people so that they may hold a pilgrim feast to me in the desert.'"

And they said, "The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Let us go a three-day journey into the desert so that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, so that he does not strike us with plague or the sword."