A People Under Oppression

Exodus begins where Genesis ended: seventy people of Jacob's household in Egypt. Joseph dies, and that whole generation. But "the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied… and the land was filled with them." The words echo the blessing of creation: be fruitful and multiply.

"Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph." He sees a threat: "the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we." If war comes, they might join Egypt's enemies and leave. So he sets taskmasters over them "to afflict them with their burdens," and they build the store cities Pithom and Raamses.

The oppression backfires: "the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew." The Egyptians make their lives bitter "with hard bondage, in morter, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field."

So Pharaoh turns to murder. He orders the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill every boy at birth. "But the midwives feared God." When Pharaoh demands an explanation, they answer that Hebrew women are "lively" and give birth before the midwife arrives. Genesis named no Pharaoh; Exodus names no Pharaoh either. But it remembers the names of two midwives.

God deals well with the midwives and gives them families of their own. Pharaoh's final command is to all his people: "Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river."

Semitic people living and working in Egypt

Egyptian records leave no doubt that people from Canaan and Syria lived in Egypt, many as servants or forced laborers. The Brooklyn Papyrus (about 1740 BC) lists ninety-five servants of one household, dozens of them described as Asiatics ("Aamu"), many given new Egyptian names. Among the Semitic names is a woman called Shiphrah, the same name as the Hebrew midwife: not the same woman, but proof the name was in use among Semites in Egypt.

Bricks, straw and taskmasters

The tomb of Rekhmire, vizier under Thutmose III (about 1450 BC), shows workers fetching water, mixing mud, molding bricks in wooden frames, and carrying them to a building site, under overseers with rods. Some workers are drawn as foreigners. The caption has a taskmaster say, "The rod is in my hand; be not idle." It is not a picture of Israel, but it is a picture of exactly the labor Exodus describes.

Pithom and Raamses

Raamses is almost certainly Pi-Ramesse ("House of Ramesses"), the great Delta capital built by Ramesses II in the 13th century BC at Qantir, right beside the older Levantine city of Avaris. Pithom is Per-Atum, "House of the god Atum," in the Wadi Tumilat; it is identified either with Tell el-Retaba or Tell el-Maskhuta. These real names anchor Exodus in the geography of the eastern Delta, the region where Genesis placed Jacob's family.

Silence in Egyptian records

No Egyptian text mentions Israel's slavery or departure. That silence is real, and it should not be overstated: Egyptian monuments celebrated victories and rarely recorded embarrassments; most papyri from the Delta, a wet region, have rotted; and a labor force of foreign workers would not usually appear in royal inscriptions. Absence of a record is a limitation of the evidence, not proof that nothing happened. Nor do the surrounding records prove that it did.