Chapter 5
God had told Moses to go to Pharaoh and to take the Elders with them. But It seems the elders all dropped out one by one and two by two, as they grew more and more fearful of appearing before the Pharaoh, ‘the god-king’.
Pharaoh, after all, was not expected to take kindly to Moses’s demands. So by the time Moses and Aaron reached Pharaoh none of the elders remained with them.
Those elders by virtue of their status were probably the older men in the community. If we think about it we realize young people are the most likely to undertake endangering situations. Old people are more fearful and more cautious. You can get caution, wisdom and strategic thinking from an older person. But if you want courage and risk taking you had better look for younger men. And for this mission physical courage was very necessary. Or maybe it wasn’t that they did not have enough courage. Maybe they disappeared along the way because they just didn’t have enough faith.
Sure, Moses had faith. After all God had shown him miracles, but the elders did not have any miracles to fall back on. And even then, when Moses and Aaron appeared before pharaoh they did not follow God’s orders. They were to tell Pharaoh that the Lord God of the Hebrews wanted them to make this journey but evidently the two brother forgot. Maybe they were nervous.
It may sound trivial, but Moses told them the ‘God of Israel’ instructed them rather than the ‘Lord God of the Hebrews’. Then to add insult to injury God told Moses to politely ask Pharaoh for permission to leave Egypt for a brief period. Moses was even supposed to ask please. But what did Moses do? He said “Let my people go that they may celebrate a festival for me in the wilderness. Details are important to God but not yet important to Moses.
Pharaoh had a quick answer, maybe even one that absolutely any person who is ignorant of God would ask. Who is the Lord that I should heed him? I do not know this Lord, nor will I let Israel go.
Then finally Moses and Arron got it right. They said the Lord is the God of the Hebrews who manifested himself to them. And then the next question they part they said correctly, “let us go a distance of three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord our God lest he strike us with petulance of sword”.
Then Pharaoh basically asks, “Why aren’t you working? And “Why are you being distracting to everyone?”
In Pharaoh’s anger or for retribution Pharaoh tells the taskmasters to stop supplying the slaves the straw to make the bricks, but to make them go get it themselves and then they are to make as many bricks as they had been making when the straw was provided to them.
These were impossible quotas they had to meet. Pharaoh had every intention of bringing division between the slaves and Moses and Aaron. And it worked. The system in Egypt was that the bottom rung were Jewish workers. In Hebrew the same word is used for slaves and workers. Next up the ladder were the foremen who were also Jews. And then above them were the Egyptian taskmasters who followed Pharaohs orders precisely.
When the foreman, who were Jews, came upon Moses and Arron standing in their path, they said to them, “May the Lord look upon you and punish you for making us loathsome to Pharaoh and his courtiers-putting a sword in their hands to slay us.”
Can’t you just imagine that we would have agreed with the slaves and wished that Moses and Aaron never went before Pharaoh, when all they have done to this point is to make matters worse for the slaves?
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