The Hebrews in Egypt – Moses Part I

Apparently Hebrews are a lot like rabbits.

After Joseph of the Technicolor Dream Coat relocated his extended family to Egypt they were super rich and multiplied like crazy. However, as the centuries came and went they lost their ties to the royal family and their protected status. Then they were just numerous, prosperous, and not Egyptian. After the Hebrews started to outnumber the Egyptians, Pharaoh decided he was concerned the Hebrews would side with an invading enemy and things would go poorly for Egypt. To solve this, all the Hebrews were pressed into government service and assigned taskmasters. Now, I’m obviously missing something here because I’m not sure how forced labor was going to keep the Hebrews from fighting against the government. Apparently nobody in Egypt watched the 1960 film Spartacus. If they had, I’m sure they would have realized that maintaining a slave class to perform all the manual labor leads accomplished gladiators named Kirk Douglas to lead slave uprisings.



Kirk Douglas as Spartacus

Pressing the Hebrews into slavery didn’t help Pharaoh feel any better. He noticed that the worse the Hebrews were treated, the more babies they had. I don’t know why he was surprised. If you take all electronic devices and reading material away and force people to stay indoors after dark; suddenly there is nothing to do in the evenings but have sex.

To solve the population growth problem, Pharaoh told all the Hebrew midwives to kill the baby boys right as they were being born. This was a really, really stupid idea for a couple of reasons. First: in a society that practices polygamy the men aren’t the limiting factor for population growth, the women are. I’m sure there were plenty of Hebrew men who were really excited by the prospect of surplus young women. Second: the Hebrew midwives didn’t want to kill the Hebrew babies. It didn’t take long for Pharaoh to notice the number of baby boys didn’t decrease, so he called in the Hebrew midwives and demanded to know why the babies weren’t being killed. The midwives were clever and came up with a clever lie. They said, “Well, the Hebrew women deliver really fast. By the time someone manages to summon a midwife, the baby has already been born.”

Finally Pharaoh came up with a sound plan to kill the babies. He charged all the citizens of Egypt with the responsibility of throwing baby Hebrew boys into the river. That worked a little better than birth canal abortions and represented significant progress toward achieving Pharaoh’s dream of seeing fewer Hebrew boys.

Moral: Pharaoh didn’t understand how babies are made.

Ref: Exodus 1

Note: wouldn’t it be nifty if there was any physical evidence that Egypt ever had a huge workforce made up of slaves?