After naming the sons of Israel who came to Egypt, the narrator delivers a single sentence of theological weight:
"But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them."
— Exodus 1:7 (ESV)
The language deliberately echoes Genesis 1:28 and the creation mandate — "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." Even in a foreign land, inside an empire that knows nothing of the covenant, the promises God made to Abraham are visibly advancing. Israel's fruitfulness is not incidental background; it is covenant fulfillment happening inside Pharaoh's own borders.
Then a new king arises over Egypt who does not know Joseph. This is not merely a change of personality at the top — it is a seismic political shift. Egypt's history involved multiple dynasties and major transitions in power. Whatever the precise historical alignment, the text's point is clear: the memory of Joseph's service has been completely erased. The man who saved Egypt from famine is forgotten. Israel, once honored guests in Goshen, are now seen only as a potential threat.
Pharaoh addresses his people with a calculated fear: "Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." — Exodus 1:9–10 (ESV). The word translated "shrewdly" uses the same Hebrew root as the serpent's cunning in Genesis 3. Nahum Sarna, in his JPS Torah Commentary on Exodus, highlights this as one of the text's darker ironies: Pharaoh's cunning is serpentine. His plan is to impose forced labor on Israel — conscripting them to build the store cities of Pithom and Raamses, and subjecting them to hard service in the fields. This is not merely economic exploitation; it is an attempt to break a people before they become dangerous.
But the plan fails in its own terms: "But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad." — Exodus 1:12 (ESV). The Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. Their dread leads to harsher measures. The harsher measures accomplish nothing except to document, for anyone paying attention, that what God has promised cannot be undone by human power.
We keep coming back to this — the sheer futility of Pharaoh's project. He throws every resource of the most powerful empire in the ancient world at suppressing a people, and they multiply anyway. It is not subtle. The text almost seems to be smiling at the absurdity of it. God made a promise, and one earthly king is trying to undo it with bricks.
The Midwives and the Fear of God
When slave labor fails to suppress Israel's growth, Pharaoh escalates to genocide. He summons two Hebrew midwives — Shiphrah and Puah, named here with a specificity that treats them as significant — and issues a direct order: when you attend a Hebrew woman in labor, if the child is a son, kill him; if a daughter, let her live. This is a covert policy delivered to women whose work puts them alone with mothers and newborns. Pharaoh is counting on quiet compliance from people with no power to refuse him.
This is worth pausing on, because most characters in these early chapters go unnamed. Pharaoh himself is never named in the text. Moses' mother is not named here. But Shiphrah and Puah are named. In an ancient world where power determined who got remembered, two vulnerable women with a midwife's trade are given names in God's own record. The empire keeps no monument to them. The text does.
Shiphrah and Puah do not comply. The text records their motivation plainly:
"But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live."
— Exodus 1:17 (ESV)
Their fear of God overrides their fear of Pharaoh. Brevard Childs, in his landmark Exodus commentary (1974), observes that the fear of God is the primary category of faithful obedience throughout this book — not heroic strength, not political ideology, but reverence for a God who sees what kings cannot see and who will hold accountable what kings choose to ignore. These women are not public heroes. They have no armies behind them and no legal protection. They are vulnerable professionals who face a king's direct command and quietly choose to disobey it because they know of a higher authority.
When Pharaoh summons them to account, they offer an answer that is at minimum shrewd and at most truthful: the Hebrew women, they say, are vigorous — they give birth before the midwife arrives. The text does not pause to adjudicate the deception question. It simply notes that God dealt well with the midwives and gave them families of their own. Their faithfulness is honored in concrete, domestic terms. The women who resist Pharaoh are not celebrated in monuments; they are simply given lives.
Pharaoh's response to their failure is to move from covert order to public policy: he commands all his people to throw every Hebrew son born into the Nile. The river that gives Egypt its life is turned into an instrument of death.
A Child in the River
A Levite man marries a Levite woman, and she conceives a son. When she sees that he is a fine child, she hides him for three months. When hiding is no longer possible, she does not simply abandon him. She prepares a basket of papyrus reeds, waterproofed with bitumen and pitch — the Hebrew word for the basket, teva, is the same word used for Noah's ark — and sets it among the reeds at the bank of the Nile. His sister stations herself nearby to see what will happen.
We find it significant that the text connects this basket to Noah's ark through that one Hebrew word. Both are vessels for preserving life when destruction surrounds it. Both are placed in water by someone who trusts that God can do what no human plan can secure. Moses' mother is not named in this passage — only later do we learn she is Jochebed — but she acts with a faith that does not require a name to be recognized. She takes the very river Pharaoh designated for murder and turns it into a hiding place.
Pharaoh's daughter comes to the Nile to bathe, accompanied by her attendants walking along the river bank. She sees the basket among the reeds and sends a servant to fetch it. She opens it, and the child is there, weeping. The text says she had compassion. This is a word the Old Testament uses elsewhere for the mercy of God — a maternal, gut-level tenderness. The daughter of the man who issued the death sentence for Israel's sons becomes the woman who rescues Israel's future deliverer. She knows immediately what she is looking at: "This is one of the Hebrews' children." — Exodus 2:6 (ESV). And she chooses to keep him anyway.
Moses' sister appears at precisely the right moment and offers to find a Hebrew nurse. Pharaoh's daughter agrees. The sister goes and brings the child's own mother. Pharaoh's daughter says: "Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages." — Exodus 2:9 (ESV). Moses' own mother is paid by Pharaoh's household to raise the son she was supposed to have drowned. The irony is staggering: the empire that issued the death warrant is now subsidizing the deliverer's childhood. Matthew Henry remarks that Providence here works through layers of reversal that no human planner could have arranged.
When the child is old enough, his mother brings him back to Pharaoh's daughter, who formally adopts him and names him Moses — a name connecting to the Egyptian word for "son" and to the Hebrew mashah, "to draw out." He was drawn from the water; he will one day draw Israel out of Egypt. The naming is proleptic: the whole story is already embedded in the child's name.
From Palace to Wilderness: A Man Without a Country
Moses grows up in Pharaoh's household. He receives an Egyptian education, lives among the empire's elite, and has a protected place in a powerful household. But he does not forget who he is. Exodus 2:11 records simply that "when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens." They are still his people.
He sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. He looks this way and that. He kills the Egyptian and hides the body in the sand.
This detail does not get softened in the text, and we do not want to soften it here either. Moses commits murder. He does not act from political calculation — he acts from the visceral recognition that what he is seeing is wrong, and then he crosses a line. It matters for everything that follows. Moses is not a pristine instrument God selects because he is the most qualified person available. He is a man with blood on his hands, a fugitive, someone who acted out of his own power and paid the consequences. The God who calls him at the burning bush knows this already. That is the point.
The next day he tries to intervene between two Hebrews who are fighting. The one in the wrong turns on him: "Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" — Exodus 2:14 (ESV). The act has become known. Moses is afraid. Pharaoh hears of it and seeks to kill him.
Moses flees to Midian — a region to the east of the Sinai peninsula, associated with the descendants of Abraham through Keturah. There he sits down by a well. The daughters of a priest named Reuel (also called Jethro) come to water their father's flock, and aggressive shepherds drive them away. Moses rises and defends them and waters the flock himself. They bring him home. He is welcomed, and in time he marries Zipporah, one of Reuel's daughters. She bears him a son whom Moses names Gershom — "I have been a sojourner in a foreign land." The man raised in a palace is now a shepherd in the wilderness, tending someone else's flock, in a land that is not his own. He names his son after his condition.
What strikes us here is the shape of Moses' preparation. He spends his first forty years learning how an empire operates from the inside. Then he spends the next forty years stripped of all that status, learning what it means to be a nobody in a foreign place, dependent on a father-in-law's hospitality, moving flocks through desert terrain. Neither education is wasted. But the desert years seem to matter most for what comes next — not because Moses becomes more capable there, but perhaps because he becomes less confident in his own capability.
Four Verbs That Change Everything
The chapter closes by shifting from Moses in Midian to God's perspective over Egypt. Israel's king dies. A new era in Egyptian politics begins. And the people of Israel groan:
"And the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew."
— Exodus 2:23–25 (ESV)
Four verbs in rapid succession: heard, remembered, saw, knew. Douglas Stuart, in his Exodus commentary in the New American Commentary series, notes that each is a covenant term. To say God "heard" is not to say He received new information — it is to say He attended to the cry with the weight of relationship. To say He "remembered" His covenant is not to imply He had forgotten it — in the Old Testament, God's remembering is what moves settled promise into active motion. To say He "saw" is to speak of recognition and care, not merely observation. And "knew" uses the same Hebrew word for intimate, covenant relationship — the word used for the closest human bonds.
The deliverance is not yet visible. Moses is still tending sheep in Midian, not leading armies or confronting kings. But the basis of deliverance has already been established in God's own character. Israel has not been abandoned in the years of oppression. The silence was not absence. Exodus insists from its opening pages that salvation begins in God before it ever becomes visible in history.
We keep coming back to those four verbs — heard, remembered, saw, knew — because they are some of the most comforting words in the entire Bible. After four hundred years of apparent silence, the text does not say God began to care. It says God acted on a care that had never stopped. The groaning of slaves reached the ears of the God who had already decided to move. Nothing in the silence meant what the suffering felt like it meant. That is the kind of God Exodus introduces in its opening pages — and everything that follows is the outworking of what those four quiet verbs set in motion.
Last updated: March 3, 2026.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.