Exodus 1:1-7
The children of Israel were fruitful
The seventy names are listed and then the generation dies. The land is filled with them, which in the next verse is the problem rather than the blessing.
Places of the Bible
Egypt
The refuge that became the furnace, and the country Scripture never stops using as a measurement.
Egypt enters the story as rescue. It has grain when Canaan has none, and a family of seventy settles there under the protection of a man who runs the place. Exodus opens by listing those seventy names and then turns the page on them in one sentence: there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. Everything after that is arithmetic performed on people. They are set taskmasters, their lives are made bitter with hard bondage, and when the work fails to slow the growth the order moves to the midwives.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Egypt
- 01
- 02
Exodus 1:8-14
A new king which knew not Joseph
Forgetting is the mechanism. The policy that follows is stated as prudence, lest they join our enemies, and executed as rigour.
- 03
Exodus 1:15-22
The midwives feared God
When the labour does not work the order becomes murder, and two women named Shiphrah and Puah refuse it and lie about why.
- 04
Exodus 12:29-36
There was not a house where there was not one dead
The last plague empties the palace and the prison alike, and the people who had been kept are urged out in haste.
- 05
Exodus 12:40-42
Four hundred and thirty years
The account gives the length to the day, and calls the night itself a night to be much observed unto the LORD.
Why it matters
What the place becomes is a unit of measure. Israel is told again and again to remember that you were a bondman in Egypt, and it is given as the reason for laws about strangers, wages, gleaning and rest. The prophets use it as a warning against going back, and going down to Egypt for help becomes shorthand for trusting the wrong strength. And the return is written into the gospel: out of Egypt have I called my son is a line about the exodus that Matthew puts over a child carried there for safety.
5 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
