Joseph is dead, and so is the gratitude. A new dynasty looks at the growing Hebrew population and decides to break it with forced labour, then with infanticide. Two midwives quietly refuse. One mother hides her son three months and then floats him down the Nile in a basket, where Pharaoh’s own daughter lifts him out and hands him back to his mother to nurse. Forty years later that son kills an Egyptian, is found out, and runs for his life into the desert — and there, at last, God hears His people groan.
A study in Exodus 1-2 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 9 min read
There Arose Up A New King
“And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation… Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.”
Exodus 1:6, 8
Genesis ended with Joseph in a coffin in Egypt and a promise attached to it (Genesis 50:24-25). Exodus opens by counting the family — seventy souls — and then jumping several centuries in a single verse. The man who saved Egypt from famine is forgotten, and with him the reason his people were welcome. “Knew not Joseph” is not amnesia; it is a decision.
“‘There arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.’ Not that he was ignorant of Joseph’s services to the nation, but he wished to make no recognition of them, and, so far as possible, to bury them in oblivion.”
Ellen G. White · Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 241
The More They Afflicted Them
“Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens… But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were grieved because of the children of Israel.”
Exodus 1:11-12
Pharaoh’s policy is meant to shrink Israel and it does the reverse. This is the pattern that runs through the whole book — and through Scripture: the harder the world presses on the people of God, the more they grow. The promise to Jacob at Beersheba, “I will there make of thee a great nation” (Genesis 46:3), is being kept in a brickyard.
The Midwives Feared God
“But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive… Therefore God dealt well with the midwives… and it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses.”
Exodus 1:17, 20-21
The most powerful man in the world gives a direct order to two working women, and they simply do not carry it out. Scripture names them — Shiphrah and Puah — and does not name the Pharaoh. The fear of God outranks the fear of the king, and God builds them households for it. Behind the king’s decree stands an older enemy.
“Satan was the mover in this matter. He knew that a deliverer was to be raised up among the Israelites; and by leading the king to destroy their children he hoped to defeat the divine purpose. But the women feared God, and dared not execute the cruel mandate.”
Ellen G. White · Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 242
An Ark Of Bulrushes
“And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive.”
Exodus 1:22
“And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.”
Exodus 2:3
The word for the little basket is the same word used for Noah’s ark — a vessel daubed with pitch that carries a life safely through the water that is meant to kill it. Pharaoh commanded that the boys be thrown into the Nile; Jochebed obeys the letter of it and defies the whole intent, putting her son into the river in a box built to float.
“The mother’s earnest prayers had committed her child to the care of God; and angels, unseen, hovered above his lowly resting place.”
Ellen G. White · Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 243
She Called His Name Moses
“And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.”
Exodus 2:9-10
The daughter of the man who ordered the boys drowned pulls one out of the water, pays his own mother to raise him, and adopts him into the palace. Jochebed gets her son back for his childhood years — long enough, and it proves to be enough. His name means “drawn out”; the same verb will be used of Israel drawn out of the sea.
“How far-reaching in its results was the influence of that one Hebrew woman, and she an exile and a slave!”
Ellen G. White · Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 244
He Went Out Unto His Brethren
“And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.”
Exodus 2:11-12
Moses knows whose son he really is, and at forty he acts on it — but he acts alone, with a look this way and that way, and buries the evidence. The next day a Hebrew throws it back at him: “Who made thee a prince and a judge over us?” He runs. He was right that God meant to use him to deliver Israel; he was forty years and a whole change of character too early.
“In slaying the Egyptian, Moses had fallen into the same error so often committed by his fathers, of taking into their own hands the work that God had promised to do.”
Ellen G. White · Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 247
A Stranger In A Strange Land
“And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”
Exodus 2:21-22
The prince of Egypt ends up doing what Jacob’s servant and Jacob himself did: he meets his wife at a well, in a foreign country, having lost everything he had. Forty years pass here — keeping another man’s sheep, learning the desert he will one day cross with a nation. It looks like a wasted life. It is the training.
God Remembered His Covenant
“And the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect unto them.”
Exodus 2:23-25
Four verbs, and the chapter turns on them: God heard, remembered, looked, had respect. God had not forgotten the covenant — “remembered” here means He moved to act on it. The oath sworn to Abraham, that his seed would be strangers and afflicted four hundred years and then come out (Genesis 15:13-14), has come due. The deliverer is already in the desert, keeping sheep, and does not yet know it.
“The time for Israel’s deliverance had come. But God’s purpose was to be accomplished in a manner to pour contempt on human pride. The deliverer was to go forth as a humble shepherd, with only a rod in his hand; but God would make that rod the symbol of His power.”
Ellen G. White · Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 251
