I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 1-3.

When this passage recounts why the Pharaoh wanted to limit the growth of the Israelite population there is a phrase which is often overlooked.  The Pharaoh says, “If we do not do this, they will escape from the country.”  This implies that the Israelites were not free to leave Egypt even before the changes the Pharaoh implemented.  If they were not free to leave, they were already slaves.  So, what this Pharaoh did was try to reduce their numbers of men.  His first attempt was to instruct the midwives to abort baby boys born to Hebrew women just before their birth.  When the midwives proved unwilling to abort the boys, he ordered outright infanticide.  The passage gives us no idea how long this policy was in place, but the evidence suggests that it had been abandoned at least 20 years before the Exodus actually happened.

Another interesting thing is the reaction of Pharaoh’s daughter in discovering the baby, Moses, in the Nile.  She immediately realizes that Moses is a Hebrew child.  When Moses’ sister conveniently appears and offers to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby, Pharaoh’s daughter has to have suspected what was going on.  Technically, the Pharaoh’s order had been complied with, Moses had been thrown into the Nile River.  So, while Moses was raised as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, he was also taught that he was a Hebrew.  His mother had believed that he was a special baby from his moment of birth (of course, don’t most mothers believe that about at least one of their children.  How else to explain why they let them live to grow up?).  So, she would have certainly taught him the stories which had been passed down through the generations, the stories which had been passed down from Noah through Abraham.

When Moses became a man, he sought to relieve some of the oppression which his people were suffering.  I think that Moses was deeply hurt when his fellow Hebrew failed to immediately understand his call for fraternal loyalty when Moses intervened in the dispute.  That hurt played as much of a role in his flight to Midian as his fear of it being found out that he had killed an Egyptian.  When God finally called Moses to lead His people out of Egypt, Moses wanted no parts of it.  He had tried to be a leader to them and they rejected him.  As so often happens in these cases, God’s response was, “That was before I had called you to this task.  Now will be different, because this is My time.”   There is more to it than that.  When Moses tried to exercise leadership of the Israelites before he fled to Midian, he had not yet received the training which God wanted for him.  He needed those years in the desert to learn things which God wanted him to know.  Among other things, Moses’ father-in-law was a Midianites.  Midianites were descendants of Abraham from his wife Keturah.  Perhaps, Moses learned more of the stories passed down from Noah from his father-in-law.  Whatever it was that Moses learned while in the desert, it was important to his later leadership of the Israelites.