A second book that begins with "and." Exodus opens mid-sentence — ve-elleh, "and these are the names" — because it is not a new story but the next scroll of one story; the Hebrew title is its first real word, Shemot, "Names." It reaches back across the seam to Genesis: the twelve sons, "seventy souls" (nefesh, the whole living person — the count of Jacob's house that went down to Egypt), Joseph already there, and then the hinge that turns a family into a nation: "Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation." One verse buries the whole book of Genesis.

The creation blessing, fulfilled in a foreign land. Then verse 7 stacks up five verbs of increase, and they are not random — they are the language of Eden: the sons of Israel "were fruitful, and swarmed, and multiplied, and grew mighty — exceedingly, exceedingly; and the land was filled with them." "Be fruitful and multiply and fill" was the blessing on all life (Genesis 1:28), and sharats, "to swarm, teem," is the creation-word for the waters teeming with life (Genesis 1:20) — KJV here flattens it to "increased abundantly," but this translation keeps the swarm, because the point is startling: God's first blessing keeps working, at full volume, on a slave people in someone else's country. The blessing is what triggers the terror of the next verse.

"A new king who did not know Joseph." The most ominous sentence in the book, and the whole pivot of the story: a Pharaoh to whom Israel is not a rescued blessing (Joseph had once saved Egypt) but a demographic threat. On the reading this translation follows — the early date (1 Kings 6:1 sets the Exodus at 1446 BC), argued in our own age most carefully by Joel Kramer of Expedition Bible — this oppressing pharaoh is Thutmose III, Egypt's great empire-builder, whose relentless campaigns into Canaan created exactly the demand for the store-cities the Israelites are set to build (the pharaoh of the Exodus itself, a generation on, would then be his son Amenhotep II; see the encyclopedia entry, with Kramer's film). His scheme is a dark pun on the wisdom-vocabulary: "come, let us outwit them" — nitchakkmah, "let us be wise against them," from chokhmah, wisdom itself, bent to cunning — and it backfires with the chapter's grim refrain: "the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and spread" (v12). The blessing outruns the whip.

The store-cities, and an honest anachronism. They build Pithom and Raamses "with crushing harshness" — perekh (KJV "with rigour"; NWT "under tyranny"), a word of pitiless, breaking labor — "in mortar and bricks," the two words that will become the Passover's own bitter memory. About that name Raamses: it is the great argument of those who date the Exodus late (to Ramesses II, 13th century), since Pi-Ramesses was his city. But it is very likely an updated place-name — the region's later, familiar designation stamped onto an older text — exactly the kind of editorial modernizing this site has already met at "Dan" (14:14, a name the town didn't carry until Judges) and "Ur of the Chaldeans." Named for the reader, not the writer; the early date takes it so.

The first civil disobedience in the Bible — and it is two women. Pharaoh, whose name the story never gives, is answered by two women whose names it carefully keeps: Shiphrah ("beauty") and Puah ("splendor," or "one who cries out"). Told to kill the boys "on the two stones" (ovnayim — the birthing-stones a woman crouched on; KJV "upon the stools"), "the midwives feared God" (yare Elohim) — and refused. That phrase is the spine of scripture's ethics, and this site has watched it before: it is what the angel found in Abraham at the altar (22:12), and what Proverbs calls "the beginning of knowledge" (1:7). Here it means a plain thing: when the king and God command opposite, you disobey the king. Their answer to Pharaoh is either a nimble half-truth or dry fact — the Hebrew women are chayot, "vigorous" (the word is close to "animals," lively and quick; KJV "lively"), delivered before the midwife arrives — and the narrator does not pause to scold them for it; "God dealt well with the midwives."

"He made them households." Their reward is a Hebrew idiom worth keeping: God "made them houses" (battim) — that is, households, families, lineages of their own (KJV "he made them houses"; NWT "he gave them families"): the women who protected Israel's children are given children — houses — of their own, the same "house" the promise keeps building. And then Pharaoh, foiled by two midwives, drops all pretense and turns the whole nation into his executioners: "every son that is born, throw into the Nile" (ye'or, Egypt's own word for its river; KJV "the river"). It is a death sentence — and, unwittingly, a stage direction: the river the babies are thrown into is the river a certain basket will float on, and the water Egypt makes a grave will become, at the sea, Egypt's own.