God Sends a Deliverer

The story of the Exodus has its roots in Genesis. Four hundred years earlier, Jacob and his sons had settled in the land of Goshen because of the famine in Canaan. There they prospered, thanks in large part to Joseph (Genesis 46:2847:27). Eventually, Joseph died, as did the Pharaoh whom he served. That is when life began to change for the Israelites. We pick up the story in Exodus 1. The population of the Israelites had grown to such proportions that they posed a perceived threat to the new Pharaoh (Exodus 1:910). To deal with this growing problem, Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites and forced them to build his great cities. When that proved ineffective, Pharaoh took more drastic measures, ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill all the male babies at birth.

When the midwives refused to obey the Pharaoh, he issued another edict to his people: throw all the Hebrew male babies into the Nile River. Yet, God overturned the Egyptian’s final scheme in a most unusual way, through the birth and divine deliverance of a particular Hebrew boy, Moses (Exodus 2:110). The story of Moses is a familiar one. The Pharaoh’s own daughter discovered Moses floating in a basket in the Nile River and, having compassion on the baby, adopted him as her own. Moses grew up with all the privileges of an Egyptian prince, yet apparently never forgot his Hebrew roots.

When he was 40, Moses killed an Egyptian for his brutal treatment of a Hebrew slave. When Moses discovered that there were witnesses to his crime, he fled the country to Midian. Our study picks up when Moses is a shepherd, tending his flocks.