Exodus 1 — The More They Were Oppressed

Today’s Passage: Exodus 1

Open this new book and you will find that it does not begin as though nothing had come before. It opens by turning back to look at where Genesis left off, naming again the sons of Israel who went down into Egypt with their father Jacob, a single household of seventy souls small enough to seat around a few tables. But between the last verse of the old book and the first chapter of this one, generations have passed. Joseph has died, and all his brothers, and all that generation with them, and where there had been a family there is now a people, fruitful and increasing and filling the land. Then the story turns, and a shadow falls across it. A new king rises who never knew Joseph, and he looks at this growing foreign people and sees not a blessing but a threat, and he sets out to break them with fear and forced labor and, at the last, with a command too dark to say plainly. Yet the strange wonder of this chapter is that the harder Egypt pressed, the more Israel multiplied, and that in the very furnace of the oppression God raised up two ordinary women who feared Him more than they feared Pharaoh, and would not lift their hands against the children. Read it slowly, and watch how God keeps His ancient promise to Abraham even here, under the whip, in the dark.

As you read, hold this: God grew His people under the very hand that meant to crush them, and honored two midwives who feared Him more than they feared a king.

Exodus 1:1-5 (BSB)

¹ These are the names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family: ² Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; ³ Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; ⁴ Dan and Naphtali; Gad and Asher. ⁵ The descendants of Jacob numbered seventy in all, including Joseph, who was already in Egypt.

Notice how gently this new book takes us by the hand and walks us back to the old one before it goes forward. These are the names, it says, the very names we read at the close of Genesis, the sons of Israel who went down to Egypt with their father, each one carrying his own household with him. The story does not leap ahead; it pauses to number the family one more time, and lands again on that small and precious total, seventy souls in all, with Joseph already there ahead of them in the land. Hold that number in your mind as you begin, because everything that follows is measured against it. Seventy is a family, not a nation. It is a company small enough to name in four short verses. And the whole promise of God to Abraham, that his offspring would become a great people through whom all the earth would be blessed, is at this moment resting inside those seventy names like a seed still in the ground.

Exodus 1:6-7 (BSB)

⁶ Now Joseph and all his brothers and all that generation died, ⁷ but the Israelites were fruitful and increased rapidly; they multiplied and became exceedingly numerous, so that the land was filled with them.

Here time moves swiftly and quietly, the way it does in life. Joseph dies, and all his brothers, and all that generation, the men who remembered the famine and the wagons and the reunion in Goshen, until the last of them is gone and a new age has begun in which no one living had seen those things with their own eyes. And yet, even as one generation is laid to rest, the next is rising in numbers that no one could have imagined. Look at how the verse piles up its words, as if the writer cannot say it strongly enough: they were fruitful (פָּרָה) parah, pronounced paw-RAW. Strong's H6509, to bear fruit, be fruitful. This is the same verb God spoke at the very beginning when He blessed the living things and said, be fruitful and multiply, and spoke again to Noah when the ark opened, and again to Abraham with the promise of a countless offspring. So when the Bible says the Israelites were fruitful, it is not reaching for a new word; it is reaching all the way back to the oldest blessing God ever gave, and setting it down here in the land of their exile. Do you see what that means? The blessing of creation and the promise to the patriarchs did not stay behind in Canaan. It followed the seventy down into Egypt and kept working there, silently, through ordinary births in ordinary years, under a sky that belonged to Pharaoh. And when the oppression came, the blessing did not stop. That is the wonder folded into this small word. The same God who made the world fruitful was making His people fruitful, and no throne on earth could reach high enough to cancel a blessing that old. , they increased rapidly, they multiplied, they became exceedingly numerous, until the land was filled with them. This is not mere population; this is promise coming true. The very words God spoke over creation, be fruitful and multiply, and the words He spoke to Abraham about descendants beyond counting, are being fulfilled before our eyes in a foreign land, in the quiet years when it seemed nothing was happening. God had not forgotten the seventy. He was making them a multitude.

Exodus 1:8-10 (BSB)

⁸ Then a new king, who did not know Joseph, came to power in Egypt. ⁹ “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become too numerous and too powerful for us. ¹⁰ Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase even more; and if a war breaks out, they may join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.”

Now the shadow falls. A new king comes to power who did not know Joseph, and in that little phrase lies a whole world of forgetting. The man who had saved Egypt from famine, whose wisdom had filled the storehouses and kept a nation alive, is now a name that means nothing to the one who sits on the throne. Gratitude has a short memory in the halls of the powerful, and when the memory of Joseph faded, so did any sense that these Hebrews were friends. The new king looks at them and sees only their number and their strength, and he speaks the language every tyrant learns, the language of fear dressed up as prudence. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, he says, and listen to how he reasons, that they might grow too strong, that in a war they might side with an enemy, that they might slip out of Egypt’s hand. There is no evidence the Hebrews had done anything but work and grow and mind their flocks. Their only crime was that God was blessing them. But fear does not wait for a reason; it invents one, and then it reaches for a whip. Watch how a whole campaign of cruelty is born here out of nothing but a frightened man counting a people he has decided to hate.

Exodus 1:11-14 (BSB)

¹¹ So the Egyptians appointed taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor. As a result, they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. ¹² But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and flourished; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. ¹³ They worked the Israelites ruthlessly ¹⁴ and made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar, and with all kinds of work in the fields. Every service they imposed was harsh.

So the plan is set in motion, and the whip comes down. Taskmasters are appointed over the people, cruel overseers whose whole work is to break the spirit of those beneath them, and the Hebrews are set to building the store cities of Pharaoh, Pithom and Rameses, hauling and shaping brick under the Egyptian sun. Feel how the words grow heavier as the labor grows harder, oppression, ruthless work, lives made bitter, brick and mortar, harsh service in the fields, every task designed to grind a people down until they had no strength left to grow. This is the beginning of the long slavery that the rest of the book will remember, the bitterness that God Himself will one day say He has surely seen. And yet, right in the middle of that account of cruelty, the Bible sets a sentence that no taskmaster could have written: the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and flourished. There it is again, that quiet defiance of God’s blessing against the plans of men. Pharaoh meant the labor to thin them out, and instead they grew, until the Egyptians who had set out to master them began to dread them. The hand that meant to crush the seed only pressed it deeper into the ground, where it grew all the stronger.

Exodus 1:15-16 (BSB)

¹⁵ Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, ¹⁶ “When you help the Hebrew women give birth, observe them on the birthstools. If the child is a son, kill him; but if it is a daughter, let her live.”

When the forced labor failed to stop the growth, Pharaoh reached lower still, past the fields and the brick-pits, all the way down to the birthstool itself, to the very moment a child first enters the world. He calls in the Hebrew midwives, and the Bible pauses to give us their names, Shiphrah and Puah, two women whose names it has kept for us across thousands of years while the name of the mighty king who summoned them is not recorded here at all. Remember that when you weigh who matters in the eyes of God. And then Pharaoh gives the darkest order in the chapter, that when they attend the Hebrew women, they are to watch, and if the child is a boy, to kill him, but to let the girls live. It is a command we can hardly bear to read, and we should not dress it up or dwell on its horror for its own sake; it is enough to see it plainly for what it was, a king turning the very hands that were meant to bring life into instruments of death, striking at a people by striking at their newborn sons. This is the deep pit into which Israel had fallen. And it is exactly here, at the bottom, that God had already placed two women who would not go along.

Exodus 1:17 (BSB)

¹⁷ The midwives, however, feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had instructed; they let the boys live.

Read that verse again, slowly, because it is one of the quietest and bravest sentences in all of Scripture. The most powerful man in the world had given a direct command, backed by every threat a throne can make, and two ordinary women simply did not do it. Why? The Bible gives us the whole reason in three words: they feared God. They stood before a choice that many have faced since, between the fear of a king who could reach their bodies and the fear of a God who holds their souls, and they chose the higher fear, and it made them free. Notice that their courage did not announce itself with speeches or defiance in the palace. It showed itself in a plain refusal to do harm, in quietly letting the boys live, in doing their good work as they had always done it and declining to turn it to death. That is often what the fear of God looks like when it is real, not loud, but immovable, a hidden reverence that will bend the knee to God and therefore cannot be made to bow to cruelty. Two women feared God (יָרֵא) yare, pronounced yah-RAY. Strong's H3372, to fear, revere, stand in awe. This is the same word that names the fright a man feels at the edge of something greater than himself, and it stands at the very center of this whole chapter. It appears when the midwives refuse Pharaoh, “the midwives, however, feared God,” and it appears again at the close when God rewards them, “because the midwives feared God, He gave them families of their own.” So the hinge of the story turns on a single question: whom will these women fear? There were two fears pulling at them, the fear of a king who could destroy them, and the fear of God who made them, and the whole of their courage lay in choosing the greater fear over the lesser. To fear God, in the Bible’s sense, is not to cower before Him but to hold Him in such awe that nothing else can command you against Him. It is the beginning of wisdom, and here it is the beginning of a rescue. Pharaoh ruled by making people afraid of him; Shiphrah and Puah broke his whole design by being more afraid of Someone higher. And the God they feared did not forget it. The same reverence that would not raise a hand against a child, God met with kindness, and built them households of their own. The fear of the LORD, it turns out, is the safest place a soul can stand. , and because they did, children lived.

Exodus 1:18-19 (BSB)

¹⁸ So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?” ¹⁹ The midwives answered Pharaoh, “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before a midwife arrives.”

Word reaches the palace that the boys are living, and Pharaoh calls the midwives back to demand an answer. Why have you done this, he asks, why have you let the boys live? Here is the moment their disobedience is dragged into the light, and they stand before the very throne that could order their deaths. And they give an answer that turns the king’s own contempt for the Hebrews back upon him. The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, they say; they are vigorous, and give birth before a midwife can even arrive. It is a shrewd reply, and the Scripture does not pause here to weigh every layer of it, but sets it down as part of the account of two women caught between an evil command and the God they feared. What the passage does make unmistakably plain is where God stood. He did not side with the king who demanded truth in the service of murder; He blessed the women who feared Him and spared the children. Their whole aim was to protect life, and it is that reverence for God and refusal to shed innocent blood that the next verses honor.

Exodus 1:20-21 (BSB)

²⁰ So God was good to the midwives, and the people multiplied and became even more numerous. ²¹ And because the midwives feared God, He gave them families of their own.

Now the Bible tells us what Heaven thought of all this, and it is a thing to treasure. So God was good to the midwives, it says, plainly and warmly, and He kept on multiplying the people until they were more numerous still, so that Pharaoh’s whole second scheme failed as completely as his first. But do not hurry past the personal tenderness of what God did for these two women in particular. Because they feared Him, He gave them families of their own, households of their very own children. There is a quiet and beautiful justice in it. Two women had guarded the households of others, refusing to let the little ones be taken, and God answered by building households for them. The very blessing they had protected in the Hebrew mothers, God poured out upon them. This is how God remembers those who fear Him. Their courage was hidden, done in a birthing room where no historian would have thought to look, and yet God saw every moment of it and repaid it with the dearest gift He gives, life and children and a home. Nothing done in the fear of God is ever lost on Him.

Exodus 1:22 (BSB)

²² Then Pharaoh commanded all his people: “Every son born to the Hebrews you must throw into the Nile, but every daughter you may allow to live.”

The chapter ends on its darkest note, and we must not soften it, though we handle it soberly. Twice thwarted, Pharaoh throws off all pretense and makes his cruelty public and total. No longer a secret word to two midwives, but a command to all his people: every Hebrew son is to be cast into the Nile. The river that gave Egypt its life is to be made a grave for the children of Israel. This is the depth of the pit into which God’s people have fallen by the last line of the first chapter, a whole nation under a death sentence for its sons, no earthly power left to appeal to, the throne itself turned against the cradle. And yet, remember what you have just watched all through this chapter. Every time Pharaoh reached out his hand to destroy, God had already been at work to preserve. The harder he pressed, the more they grew. The command to kill was met by two women who feared God. And now, as the river is turned into a place of death, the reader who knows the story leans in, because it is precisely onto that river, in the very next chapter, that a mother will set a basket bearing a child God has chosen to be the deliverer. The night is at its darkest here. But the God who has kept His promise under the whip is not finished, and the morning He is preparing will come out of the very waters Pharaoh meant for a grave.