Soon thereafter Moses and his brother Aaron went boldly to the palace of the Pharaoh and declared to him that Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews, had commanded that the Hebrews be allowed to hold a religious festival in the desert to offer sacrifices unto him as their God.  The plan no doubt was that the people should escape once they were outside the boundaries of Egypt; Moses evidently considered any method justifiable in the effort to outwit the oppressor.  But the Pharaoh answered, “Who is Jehovah that I should hearken to his voice to let Israel go?” The request was sharply refused.  It is surprising that Moses himself was not arrested and imprisoned on the spot.  Perhaps he still had friends in the Egyptian court.  Or perhaps the Egyptians had a certain reverence for him as a messenger from a god, even though they did not grant his demands.

=Bricks without straw.=—­At first it seemed that Moses had failed.  For instead of the longed-for freedom, the toiling Hebrews found that a still heavier burden of work was laid upon them.  In the manufacture of sun-dried brick it is necessary to mix straw with the clay in the molds, the fibers giving a tougher quality to the product.  Previously the straw for this purpose had been furnished by the Egyptians.  But now the order was, “Go yourselves, get straw where you can find it.”  So they had to go and hunt through the surrounding fields for old refuse straw, in rotting ricks and compost heaps.  Yet the same number of bricks was required as before, with a whipping in case of failure.

The granaries in Pa-Tum and Rameses were excavated many years ago from beneath the sands of Egypt, and their ruined walls may still be seen by tourists.  It is noticeable that the upper tiers in the walls are made of bricks of a very poor quality as compared to those in the lower tiers.  Evidently, the Hebrews got through the work somehow each day, putting very little straw in the clay, or sometimes none at all.

But they wished they had never heard of Moses, and they reproached him for “making them hateful in the eyes of Pharaoh.”  In the first round of the fight Moses and freedom had lost; Pharaoh and slavery had won.  But the end was not yet.

STUDY TOPICS

1.  Look up in any good Bible dictionary, the article on Egypt; or read the summary of Egyptian history in some recent general history.

2.  Draw a map of Egypt, locating approximately the place where the Hebrews worked.

3.  In what special ways was Moses well trained to be an emancipator for his people?

4.  Are there workers to-day who are in any form of slavery which may be compared to that of the Hebrews in Egypt?

5.  Are there any Pharaohs to-day?  Any Moseses?

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] See Chapter I, and Genesis 46 and 47.

[2] Exodus I. 1-11, or Pa-Tum in Egyptian; the other Rameses, after the king himself.  It was decided to compel the Hebrews to do the work of brickmaking for these new cities.