Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
A New King Who Didn't Know Joseph
Exodus 1:1-14
1 Now these are the names of the sons of Israel, who came into Egypt (every man and his household came with Jacob): · WEB
Seventy people become a nation, and the same fertility that fulfills the promise is what makes them worth enslaving.
Now these are the names of the sons of Israel, who came into Egypt (every man and his household came with Jacob) Exodus 1:1.
The book opens with a conjunction and a list, and both are deliberate. The conjunction ties it to the closing chapters of Genesis 46, where the same names were counted in the same order; the list insists that a nation began as a household small enough to name. All the souls who came out of Jacob's body were seventy souls Exodus 1:5.
Joseph died, as did all his brothers, and all that generation Exodus 1:6.
One verse disposes of four centuries. The silence is proportion rather than carelessness, because what the book needs from those years is stated in the next sentence. The children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them Exodus 1:7. Five verbs of increase in a line, and every one of them was spoken over the human race at creation and again after the flood Genesis 1:28 Genesis 9:1. The promise of descendants beyond counting Genesis 15:5 is being kept quietly, in a foreign country, while nobody watches.
Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who didn't know Joseph Exodus 1:8.
Not could not have known; did not know. A dynasty had changed, and with it the memory of the man whose administration had saved the country from famine. A people who hold their position on a favor granted two centuries earlier hold it on nothing.
The king's speech is the oldest argument in politics and has not needed revision since. Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we Exodus 1:9 — a minority described as a majority. Lest they multiply, and it happen that when any war breaks out, they also join themselves to our enemies Exodus 1:10 — a crime not committed, projected forward and punished in advance. Come, let's deal wisely with them — cruelty presented as prudence. Nothing is alleged against Israel except that there are many of them.
The policy is forced labor on the storage cities of Pithom and its neighbor in the eastern delta, and it fails in the one direction the planners had not considered. The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread out Exodus 1:12. Pressure applied to a promise is a poor instrument.
They started to dread the children of Israel Exodus 1:12. The word marks the turn from calculation to fear, and fear produces the next two paragraphs. A state that begins by managing a population and ends by drowning its infants did not change its principles along the way; it discovered that the earlier measures were not working. The escalation is reported without comment, in the vocabulary of hard labor repeated until it becomes unbearable to read: 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 Exodus 1:14.
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