In Genesis we were reading about one person at a time, generally, as Noah, Abraham, Joseph, but we shall find Exodus to be about a people, about their trials in Egypt, how God set them free, and brought them partway to their Promised Land, Canaan. This people was the children of Jacob, here called the children of Israel, and sometimes the Hebrews.
They had gone, you remember, to Egypt because of the fearful famine that left thousands of people without food, and there they had been taken care of by Joseph, their brother, who was next to Pharaoh himself, the king of Egypt. But now Joseph was dead, and all those we read of in the closing chapter of Genesis.
After the children of Israel came to live in Egypt, they grew in number very fast. More and more babies were born, until the country began to be full of these strangers from Palestine, and the Egyptians were not pleased. A new king was over the land of Egypt, and what Joseph had done for the country was perhaps forgotten now. The king saw that Joseph’s people were soon going to be more in number than the Egyptians, and he thought that if there should be a war between Egypt and some other nation, the children of Israel would very likely help their enemies, so he said to his people, “Let us deal wisely with them,” and they set men over them to make them work hard, building two cities at least. Perhaps you will like to know that explorers discovered one of these cities, Pithom, about thirty-five years ago, it was in the land of Goshen, the part of Egypt in which the people of Israel lived.
But the more severely the taskmasters treated the poor slaves (for that is what the children of Israel were made by the Egyptians) the more they increased in number. The Egyptians made the lives of the Israelites bitter, so hard did they have to work, and not that only, but the king said that all the boy babies that were born to the slaves must be killed. The nurses feared God., and would not kill the babies, and God gave the poor women homes of their own. Never a thing is done for God that He does not remember.
Still, with all the king’s orders to make the children of Israel work as hard as possible, (and no doubt his taskmasters were very cruel) so that many of them almost wished to die, God took care of them, and more and more babies were given to them. Pharaoh now told his own people, since the Hebrew nurses did not kill the new born babies, that they must throw the boy babies into the river. Perhaps the mothers were able to hide their babies so that the cruel Egyptians could not find them. We hope none of the little boys were drowned, or eaten by the crocodiles.