Introduction
Last Sunday, while preaching from John chapter eight, Pastor Dave helped us to see the freedom that Jesus, the Son of God, offers freely to all. This freedom is not a worldly kind of freedom but freedom from the slavery of sin. As Pastor Dave said last week, “True freedom isn’t the ability to make our own choice, unhindered by anything outside of us. True freedom, rather, is the God-given ability to rightly choose that which is best.” This is something the Jews that Jesus was teaching did not understand. They had failed to rightly reckon with their history as God’s covenant people. Without any self-awareness, they told Jesus, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free?’” (John 8:33)
Though they were ethnically part of the people of God, they were children of the devil, and instead covenanted with him (John 8:44). Jesus tells them that, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did…” (John 8:39) As much of the New Testament teaches, faith is not biological, it is not ethnic, it is spiritual. That is to say, those who love, obey, and follow Jesus Christ are children of Abraham, and as the prologue to John’s Gospel says so clearly, “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (John 1:12)
I had planned to preach from Exodus 1 long ago, but this portion of John’s Gospel is a providentially good time to reflect upon the book of Exodus. The Jews of Jesus’s day had misunderstood their own history. They failed to understand the significance of their exodus from Egypt and what the Old Testament was about. They failed to see that all of creation, not to mention all men, were subjected to the curse because of the sin of their father Adam. “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope, that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Rom. 8:20-21) And as Jesus taught in John 8:34, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.”
As the saying goes, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” As adopted sons of God, we are to recognize that the history of Israel is our history and receive instruction from it. The lessons they learned are lessons we need to learn ourselves, lest we too, like the Jews of Jesus’s day, fail to see that apart from the freedom Christ has won for us, we too, would still be enslaved to sin.
God had made a covenant with Abraham, not because of anything he had done, but because God graciously chose him as the father of a multitude that would one day be a blessing to all nations. God promised to make Abraham “exceedingly fruitful” and to give his “offspring after [him] in the land of [his] sojournings.” (Genesis 17:5-8) To human eyes, this promise began small, with the birth of a single son, Isaac, in Abraham’s old age. Isaac seemed to be off to a better start than his father, having two sons, Esau and Jacob. But even then, the two brothers could scarcely live together, and Jacob fled his family when his brother Esau sought to kill him over the covenant blessing Jacob had sovereignly received, but through trickery.
But God continued to bless the seed of Abraham, even while in a foreign land. Jacob had twelve sons—a six-fold multiplication of his father’s two-fold blessing. God’s blessing was there, at least physically, for Abraham’s seed was multiplying. But at every turn, these sons fell into sin and were still nomadic, without a land of their own. They were often threatened by famine and war.
With Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, God’s covenant promises seemed to finally be bearing the kind of fruit that one might expect from the blessing of the Creator of the universe. His story begins well, with Joseph finding the favor of his father, but this led to the displeasure of his brothers, who at first want to kill him. But he is instead sold into slavery in Egypt, where after obediently persevering through great trials, he is exalted to the right hand of the most powerful man in the world of his time. Jacob brought his entire family into Egypt, protected from the famine that ravaged the whole region.
At the end of Genesis, Joseph prophesies to his people, “I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” And he added, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.” (Gen. 50:24-25)
At the end of Genesis, we see the beginning of God’s covenant promises being fulfilled. In Genesis 46:27, we’re told “All the persons of the house of Jacob who came into Egypt were seventy.” This number, seventy, is a highly symbolic number in the Bible. In Genesis 10, there are seventy nations named in what is often referred to as “the Table of Nations.”
The number seventy is symbolically connected with nationhood. It indicates that God is about to create a new nation out of this family of seventy. But they were far from being a nation of their own numerically or geographically, for they were sojourners in Egypt. But God’s covenant purposes were still being worked out—their sojourning in Egypt had not thwarted them; in fact, at the end of Genesis, we see that their sojourning in fact saved them. (Gen. 50:20)
That brings us to the book of Exodus, with the people of Israel still in Egypt. There are three main sections to this chapter. First, in verses 1-7 we see the people of Israel beginning to fulfill God’s creation mandate to take dominion—to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it…” Second, in verses 8-14, there is a new king that opposes and enslaves Israel. And finally, in verses 15-22 we see the confrontation between the king of Egypt and two midwives.
Exercising Dominion 1-7
Now let’s turn to our text this morning, the first chapter of Exodus. It begins with an introduction as a reminder of the humble origins of the people of Israel. For while the people of Israel were a vast multitude at this point, it had not always been so. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that they were only numbered 70, when they had entered the land of Egypt. The number 70 is repeated again here, to foreshadow that God had promised to make Israel a nation, as 70 nations were named in Genesis 10.
The language of verse seven echoes the dominion mandate that God had given to Adam and Eve and again to Noah. In Genesis 1:28, “God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion…’” God later tells Noah something very similar: “And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.” (Gen. 9:7) And he promises these things to Abraham as well. The people of Israel were beginning to fulfill what God had commanded after he created them and what he had promised to Abraham.
Studying the chronology of Genesis and Exodus leads us to believe that the book of Exodus begins between 80 to 144 years after Joseph died1. The sons of Jacob had sons in Egypt, and their grandsons would have children of their own as well. A brief discussion of the chronology of the sojourn in Egypt is necessary, particularly at this point, because it is easy to misunderstand what Exodus 12:40 means when it says, “The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years.”
The ESV translation, like most modern translations, is slightly misleading here. The King James version reads, “Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.” The difference between the two may seem slight, but the King James Version separates the length of time from the land where the people dwelt. This is important because, in Genesis 15:16, God told Abraham that his offspring would return to Canaan “in the fourth generation”—which is shown to be fulfilled in Exodus 6:16-20 and Numbers 3:17-19. Additionally, in Galatians 3:16-17, Paul states that “the law…came 430 years” after God made his promises to Abraham. This means the timer for 430 years began with God’s covenant with Abraham.
Israel sojourned for 430 years but was not enslaved under Pharaoh for all those years. They were “afflicted,” as Genesis 15:13 states, but not as Pharaoh’s slaves for all those years. Recall how Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were all consigned to sojourn in a foreign land, how famine and war threatened them. Jacob’s told Pharaoh in Genesis 47:9, “Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life…” The patriarchs had been afflicted, even amidst much blessing. The time of enslavement was approximately 215 years. Sorting out these details is important because we must be able to let Scripture interpret Scripture and not allow seeming contradictions to take root and undermine the doctrine of Scripture.
The math of these generations is fascinating. If each of these seventy persons had twelve children as Jacob had, on through the fifth generation, there would have been over 1.4 million descendants of Jacob! In Exodus 12:37, we’re told that more than 600,000 men left in the Exodus.
When the text tells us, “the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them,” it is not hyperbole—it is no exaggeration. It is not like the proverbial “fish tale,” where every time you tell the story, the fish gets a little bigger. This kind of blessing could only come through God’s covenant blessing.
This extraordinary population growth stood out to the Egyptians. It was this that made them fear the Israelites. Isn’t it interesting to consider how our culture today also fears large, fruitful families? Children are a blessing, and marital fruitfulness is something to desire and pursue. Yet it is perceived as a threat to the worldly order—and this should be a good lesson for us. Covenantal fruitfulness is one of the means God has ordained to take dominion over his created world. We should not be surprised when the world recognizes the threatening nature of God’s weapons. But notice, this is a weapon they are not interested in using themselves. Quite the opposite. To the world, death is the greatest of weapons. We see evidence of that in the response of the king of Egypt.
In addition to the seventy children of the twelve patriarchs, there would have likely been many servants and attendants that had traveled into Egypt with Jacob and his family. Abraham had 318 fighting men in Genesis 14. Jacob and his sons would have almost certainly had similar retinues with them.
Additionally, there were almost certainly converts and those that had married into the people of Israel. Joseph had married an Egyptian (Gen. 41:45). To leave Egypt with 600,000 adult men, Egyptian converts likely factored into the total as well. But the text doesn’t tell us these things because this was a work of God; we should be awed by God’s fulfillment of his promise by the incredible fruitfulness of the people of Israel in Egypt. God is not stingy and begrudging in fulfillment of his Word!
600,000 is mentioned, as I said in Exodus 12, but no number is given here in Exodus 1. Rather, the text emphasizes, “the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.” This is creational language—the people were fulfilling the creation mandate.
This connection to the creation of man sets the stage for a re-enactment of the scene in the garden, where the serpent sought to overthrow man, wherein the serpent, the woman, and the man were all cursed. And this is exactly what we see in Exodus.
Opposition & Enslavement 8-13
This brings us to the second main section of chapter one. Immediately after the people of Israel begin to fulfill the dominion mandate through covenant blessing, they face satanic opposition. Remember the curse God put upon the serpent in Genesis 3? God said to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Gen. 3:15) And to the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” And to the man he said, “…cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground…” (Gen. 3:17b-19a)
In Exodus chapter 1 we see the rise of the King of Egypt, playing the role of the offspring of the Serpent, subjugating men, and furthering the pain women suffer in childbirth by killing the offspring of the woman. God’s children are again bearing the curse, this time under the rule of the Seed of the Serpent. The Serpent has aspired to god-like authority and is waging war upon God by attacking his children.
This “new king” that “arose over Egypt… did not know Joseph.” As I said earlier, this is probably 80-144 years after Joseph died. Though he probably never met Joseph, he surely had heard stories of Joseph and was familiar with how he’d saved Egypt from famine and enriched the Pharaoh through it. What Moses seems to mean here is that the new king had no loyalty to Joseph’s memory, no honor for what Joseph had done. Instead, he saw the people of Israel as rivals—outsiders who would not remain loyal to Egypt in time of war.
The Israelites had originally settled in the land of Goshen, and the text points to their remaining together, forming a rival ethnic power within the nation of Egypt. This new king of Egypt recognized that the people of Israel had been greatly blessed. He saw with his eyes that they were “too many and too mighty.” But rather than inquire as to why and how they had been so blessed, rather than inquire of the people what could account for the blessing they were experiencing, he chose to view them as potential rivals.
Rather than see the potential for mutual blessing, he sought to harness and suppress that blessing for his own purposes. Something similar happened in Israelite history when Laban abused Jacob. Laban acknowledged that he had been blessed by the LORD because of his son-in-law Jacob. But rather than deal justly with him, like Pharaoh, he dealt shrewdly and tricked him many ways into staying under his service, rather than returning to Canaan with his own wealth. (Gen. 30:27, 35) God had set this example down for the enslaved Israelites to be encouraged and trust that God would vindicate them.
Moses’ account of their enslavement leaves some questions for the modern-day reader. How could this vast multitude, presumably living together in one region, be enslaved so easily by a nation fearing their size? In Psalm 105:24, we learn that “the LORD made his people very fruitful and made them stronger than their foes.” Did they resist this enslavement? Was the enslavement accomplished through the slow encroachment upon their liberties, as we say today—slowly boiling a frog?
The text is silent regarding these questions, though the memory of their enslavement would have surely been passed down through oral tradition. The point is that they were enslaved. The Egyptians “set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens.” (v. 11) Their enslavement was accomplished. “They built for Pharaoh store cities…” The seed of the Serpent was exercising his authority to enslave and subjugate the sons of God under the curse that God had pronounced upon them.
Yet, what the king of Egypt “meant evil against [them]… God meant it for good.” (Gen. 50:20) What we must recognize is that God was at work to build and enrich the people of Israel and prepare them for nationhood. He was using means—oppression, slavery, and tribulation to accomplish his purposes. This is not the formula that any of us would use for this goal, but God’s ways are not our ways. God was preparing his children for the responsibility of nationhood and independence while teaching them to trust his providence.
God is preparing us today for much more than nationhood and political independence. Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 6, “Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!” (1 Cor. 6:2a, 3) God is calling us to a much more difficult and weighty calling. We have been entrusted with “all authority in heaven and on earth.” We are commanded to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to observe all Jesus has commanded. We are God’s plan to subdue his creation—empowered by the Spirit of God to do his kingdom work. We are the plan! We cannot be silent. We must speak God’s Word! We must proclaim the gospel of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. We are God’s witnesses to the world that he reigns and that all must bend their knees to King Jesus! We must not shy away from this command, or leave the task to missionaries in foreign countries. Our own nation, our own state, desperately needs the gospel.
Something remarkable happens through the Egyptian’s oppression of the Israelites—“the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.” God was accomplishing his purposes through the oppression of his people. It was not in spite of the oppression but because of it.
We see this kind of response to oppression in the book of Acts. In Acts 6:7, we see “the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.” Immediately after this, Stephen becomes the first Christian martyr, launching “a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem” in Acts 8. The church responds by scattering and “preaching the word.” The disciples of Jesus then began their mission outside of Jerusalem, and the world has not been the same since, with the gospel going forth into all the world.
The Egyptians, who had enslaved the Israelites because of their fear of them, fell into greater fear as they multiplied all the more. They were then “in dread of the people of Israel.” But instead of recognizing that they’d made matters worse, they doubled down in the hardness of their hearts. “They ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service.” Moses emphasizes this by adding, “In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.” Is this not a perfect picture of the nature of man? When the results of our sinful actions do not result in our desired outcome, rather than turning from our sin, we sin harder. When you are angry at those closest to you, how many of you make matters worse by losing your temper: shouting, scolding, or nagging rather than humbly seeking peaceful reconciliation?
Confrontation 15-22
In this final section of chapter one, we see the confrontation between the king of Egypt and two Hebrew midwives. This is an example of what God had said in Genesis 3, when he said that He would put enmity between the serpent and the woman, between his offspring and hers . The serpent-king is seeking to destroy the seed of the woman. This theme is throughout Scripture. Cain had allied himself with the Serpent by killing the godly seed—his brother Abel. God hated Esau, again, the seed of the Serpent, who had sought to kill his godly brother Jacob. This theme culminates with King Herod, who is explicitly connected with Egypt in Matthew 2:15. When Herod recognizes the political threat that Jesus would be to his own power, he sought to destroy Him and, later, the Pharisees whom Jesus calls sons of the devil (John 8:44), succeeded in crucifying Jesus.
The king of Egypt, as the serpent in the garden had done, approaches women to overthrow his enemy. The king of Egypt enlisted the Hebrew midwives into his murderous scheme to kill the sons of Israelite women. It is here that we find two unlikely heroes. Two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who “feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live.” They feared God more than the serpent-king who was seeking the destruction of God’s covenant people.
You may be thinking, why kill only the sons and not the daughters? Recall that the king’s primary fear mentioned in verse 10 concerns war. In his judgment, it is the sons that would be a military threat to Egypt. The king of Egypt feared the strength of Israelite men. And in a sense, he was right to fear the sons. Later in Exodus, we will see how Moses became that threat. But that isn’t really the point of this chapter. One commentator rightly notes the irony that Pharaoh is worried about the males, but it is the women that are the real threat2.
Unlike Eve, in the Garden of Eden, the two midwives rejected the word of the serpent-king because they feared God. They were not deceived by the serpent as Eve had been (1 Tim. 2:14), but rather they deceived the serpent!
When God cursed the serpent, he said that the seed of the woman would bruise his head, while the serpent would bruise the heel of the woman’s seed. This meant that the serpent would be defeated, while the seed of the woman would only be wounded. The serpent could not accomplish his desire to destroy the seed of the woman. He would battle in futility. God is the Creator, and this is his world. His purposes cannot be thwarted. He is the one who spoke into the darkness, “’Let there be light,’ and there was light.” (Gen 1:1) As John writes in his Gospel (1:5), “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” God rules this world; despite all that Satan does and will do, he will always be defeated.
Now this is not to say that the Israelites were not suffering. They absolutely were. They were “afflicted…with heavy burdens.” (Ex. 1:11) “They were oppressed.” (Ex. 1:12) They were forced to “work as slaves.” (Ex 1:13) “Their lives were [made] bitter with hard service…and in all kinds of work in the field.” They were treated “ruthlessly”. (Ex. 1:14) They were threatened with the murder of their sons (Ex. 1:16) This is a crucible of suffering—unrelenting suffering and fear all the days of their lives.
The king of Egypt did call the two midwives to account, having realized they’d not done what he had instructed them to do. The text does not give us a timeline here, but this is presumably a year or two later when the Israelites could not hide baby boys running around throughout the land of Goshen.
These two midwives, when challenged by Pharaoh, offer an answer that though Pharaoh accepted, seems a bit disingenuous—that is to say, not entirely sincere or entirely truthful. Much has been written of their answer to Pharaoh, as with Rahab’s deception of the king of Jericho, concerning the spies she protected. Again, in that story, a woman protects the godly seed from the serpent-king of Jericho.
Nowhere does the Bible condemn the midwives or Rahab for deceiving serpent-kings. Rather, both are commended for fearing the LORD. (Ex. 1:21, Heb. 11:31) And that is what we must focus upon. The two midwives feared God more than the earthly serpent-king who sought to murder the godly seed.
We, too, must fear the LORD more than any earthly authority. As Peter and the apostles said in Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men.” This is not to say we should be casual about speaking the truth. Far from it! God hates “a lying tongue.” (Prov. 6:17) We are also commanded to “not bear false witness against [our] neighbor.” (Ex. 20:16) But it does mean that we must prioritize the fear of the LORD and not neglect “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness.” (Mat. 23:23) I commend to you Micah 6:8, “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Do that and, like the midwives, work to protect innocent life with a clear conscience.
God blesses the faithful midwives because they feared God and acted like it. In fact, he gave them the very thing that Pharaoh had sought to prevent—“he gave them families.” This word, translated as “families,” is much more than simply a husband, wife, and children. It is the same word translated elsewhere as “house.” In this way, “house” is meant to speak of a family lineage as the “house of Israel,” “house of Levi,” or “house of David.” It is genealogical, not merely an immediate family.
Family, a house—a legacy is one of God’s great gifts to men. He bestowed this great blessing on these two Hebrew midwives “because [they] feared God.” I encourage you to think this way because it is how God thinks. God promised to make a house for David, with the very Son of God being the fulfillment of that promise. Before God created the world, he prepared an inheritance that he one day bestowed upon his own Son. Not only this but there is a spiritual heritage that we can pass on as well, as God gives his Spirit and life not according to the flesh but according to His good pleasure. Paul addresses Timothy as “my true child in the faith” in 1 Timothy 1:2. And Deborah was called “a mother in Israel” in Judges (5:7)
I urge you to give thought to the legacy you will leave behind after your death. What will you leave behind? A legacy is not something we can build on our own or leave on our terms. The only good that will continue past our lives is that which receives God’s blessing. As we see from these midwives, it is the fear of God and walking in obedience before Him that will result in a godly legacy.
The obedient midwives not only received their own reward, but their obedience also spared many Israelite boys from death. “And the people multiplied and grew very strong.” (Ex. 1:21) Pharaoh’s edict then became ever more grotesque. He commanded, “all his people, ‘Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”
The Egyptians were given legal license by their king to throw Hebrew boys into the river to drown. Rulers throughout history have sought to give legal sanction—legal protection to wickedness. In our own nation, we see this kind of thing everywhere. As abortion centers in neighboring states were closing due to legal restrictions after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, they moved their operations to Minnesota, where they may commit their vile acts of murder under the protection of law. Much evil was sanctioned and protected by our state government in this last legislative session.
In Psalm 94:20, God names rulers who “frame injustice by statute” as “wicked rulers.” As Christians, we must recognize this fact, for God says, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness…” (Is. 5:20) This does not change the fact that they are still our rulers, but we must call evil, evil. We must, like the midwives, fear God and not men.
Conclusion
This chapter concludes with this awful command from the serpent king. Most of us know well what is next. But the Israelites at the time did not have the fortune of knowing what would come. They had to walk by faith and not sight. They had to recognize how God was at work by blessing and multiplying the seed of Abraham, even in the face of powerful opposition. They had to recognize how God had protected and blessed the midwives for fearing God and not the king of Egypt. They had to remember the promises that God had made to Abraham. God had told him, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:2-3) They had to look back to their family stories meant to remind them that God makes promises and keeps them.
We have far more today. We have the full Scriptures in which God has fulfilled all his promises. We see how Jesus, the Anointed Son of God, was born of a virgin, a child of the house of David, lived a sinless life, fulfilling all that Israel had failed to do, died upon a Roman cross at the insistence of his own religious leaders, rose from the grave on the third day, was witnessed by hundreds in his resurrection body, and then ascended to the right hand of the Father on high. He now sits at the right hand of God, where he awaits “that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet.” (Heb. 10:13) Yet we, too, look back to our family stories meant to remind us that God makes promises and keeps them.
The seed of the serpent still wars against the seed of the woman. The offspring of the serpent seeks to groom us and our offspring into their own perverse idolatry, offering what they call freedom, but what God calls slavery. They seek the destruction of the godly seed, claiming God’s children for their own. We are in a spiritual war, as the children of God have always been and as the Israelites in Egypt were.
God’s call upon us is still the same today as it was then. Fear God and walk in his ways. Live by faith, knowing that one day we will walk by sight. The victory has already been won, for that is the meaning of the resurrection. God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:30-31)
Grace Church, let’s be a people that remember God’s redemptive history, seeing our own place in it. We worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We have been grafted into their family tree. Their history is our history. The Jews of Jesus’s day, as we’ve been learning in the Gospel of John, were broken off the family tree because they had forgotten their own history and rejected the Son of God, who had come to offer freedom they believed they already possessed. (Rom. 11:17)
God is preparing a new people for more than nationhood by perfecting us by his love (1 John 4:12), sanctifying us by his Spirit (Rom. 15:16), instructing us in wisdom which “God decreed before the ages for our glory”(1 Cor. 2:7) that we may be “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” (Rev. 21:2) We are being prepared for immortality with the King of kings! (2 Cor. 5:4-5) So do not “faint in the day of adversity” but “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.” (Proverbs 24:10)
May God hasten the day of his return, but until then, may he preserve his saints, and His “Kingdom come, [His] will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Matt. 6:10)
1The Chronology of the Old Testament, Nolen-Jones, Floyd Master Books Green Forest, AR, 2018 p. 55
2The Schocken Bible: Volume I, The Five Books of Moses, Fox, Everett, Shocken Books, New York, 1995 p. 256