Gathering Straw
Gathering Straw
Belief
Moses and Aaron gathered all the Israelite elders. Aaron told them everything Yahweh said to Moses, and he performed the signs in the sight of the people. The people believed. When the Israelites heard Yahweh had come to them and had seen their affliction, they bowed down and worshiped.
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When Moses and Aaron arrived in Egypt, they gathered the elders as Yahweh had commanded Moses. Aaron embraced his role as Moses’s prophet.1 Moses had told him what Yahweh said at Mount Sinai, and Aaron in turn told the elders. It seems Aaron also performed the signs, though “he performed” could mean Moses. Either way, the Israelites believed, as Yahweh promised.2
Hundreds of years had passed since Joseph promised the Israelites God would come to them and lead them out from Egypt.3 Instead of inheriting Canaan, they had suffered harsh forced labor and seen their sons slaughtered in Egypt. But Moses and Aaron brought the news that their God had finally come. They said he cared about the Israelites’ suffering and would hold the Egyptians accountable.4 The Israelites responded to this ray of hope by bowing down in worship.
Knowing Yahweh
Afterward, Moses and Aaron went to speak to the pharaoh. “This is what Yahweh, the God of Israel, says: ‘Send my people away so they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness.’”
But the pharaoh replied, “Who is Yahweh that I need to obey him by sending Israel away? I don’t know Yahweh, and I won’t send Israel away.”
“The God of the Hebrews met with us. Please, we must go a three-day distance into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to Yahweh, our God. If not, he may strike us with a disease or with the sword.”
Image by Quin Benson from Pixabay
Emboldened by the positive response of the Israelite elders, Moses and Aaron confidently approached the pharaoh. But they did so the wrong way. God commanded Moses to take the elders with him to politely request permission to leave.5 Instead, without the elders, Moses and Aaron told the pharaoh Yahweh demanded he release the Israelites. Though their message had the same essential meaning, it completely lacked tact and diplomacy.
The pharaoh’s response reflects the theme of the book of Exodus: “Who is Yahweh that I need to obey him?” The pharaoh may or may not have known the name of Israel’s God. But even if he knew Yahweh’s name, he didn’t know Yahweh. He knew Horus, Osiris, Hathor, Isis, and Anubis. He considered himself a son of Re, the creator of all other gods. He didn’t know why he needed to obey the God of a rabble of slaves. Who was this Yahweh to command the son of Re?
Moses and Aaron had no answer for the pharaoh’s challenge. They still had a lot to learn about their God as well. Cowed, they repeated their request, but this time politely. Yet they added a threat of harm against the Israelites that Yahweh never made. Yahweh would punish the Egyptians, not the Israelites, for the pharaoh’s disobedience. The pharaoh would soon find out who Yahweh is—and so would Israel and the rest of the world.6
Quelling Rebellion
“Moses and Aaron!” the king of Egypt said. “Why are you distracting the people from their tasks? Get back to work! Now the people of the land are many, yet you stop them from working.”
That day, the pharaoh commanded the taskmasters and supervisors, “Don’t give the people any more straw for making bricks, as you did before. Make them go gather their own straw, but require the same quota of bricks they made before. Don’t decrease it! They’re slacking off, which is why they cry out, ‘We must go sacrifice to our God.’ Make their service harder so they work instead of paying attention to lies.”
Yahweh warned Moses that the pharaoh would refuse to free the Israelites.7 Yet Moses and Aaron’s confidence crumbled the moment the pharaoh showed the slightest resistance to Yahweh’s commands. Yahweh had given them signs that proved his authority, but they performed none of them. Their lack of determination gave the pharaoh no reason to believe any deity lay behind their words. He quickly set about reaffirming his own authority. And he did so masterfully.
First, the pharaoh rebuked Moses and Aaron for stopping “the people of the land” from working. Normally, that phrase means native inhabitants, in this case the Egyptians. But the pharaoh applied it to the Israelites to legitimize his authority over them. They had lived in Egypt for over four hundred years, and he considered them his rightful subjects. He also pointed out how numerous they had become, a not-so-subtle reminder of his predecessor’s extreme measures to control the population and prevent the Israelites from leaving Egypt.8
Moses and Aaron left defeated. The pharaoh then immediately summoned the taskmasters and supervisors who oversaw the Israelites’ work. He commanded them to stop giving the Israelites straw for making bricks. Straw, the stalk left over after grain is harvested, served as a binding agent to prevent the dried bricks from falling apart. The Israelites couldn’t make usable bricks with it. But they could gather straw only a few times a year, after a harvest. The pharaoh’s command didn’t make their work harder. It made their work impossible.9
Searching for Straw
Then the taskmasters and supervisors went out and told the people, “This is what the pharaoh says: ‘I will not give you any more straw. Go get your own straw wherever you can find it because your service will not be decreased at all.’”
So the people scattered throughout all the land of Egypt to gather chaff to use instead of straw. The taskmasters urged them, “Complete each day’s workload just as when you had straw!”
Then the Israelite supervisors the pharaoh’s taskmasters had appointed were beaten. “Why haven’t you completed your quota of bricks, neither yesterday nor today, as you did before?”
The taskmasters and the supervisors told the people about the pharaoh’s decree. They used the same messenger formula that Moses and Aaron had used in verse 1. “This is what the pharaoh says” mimics “this is what Yahweh, the God of Israel, says.” Yahweh said to go hold a festival. The pharaoh said to go work. The battle of wills had begun, and the pharaoh seemed to hold every advantage.
As the pharaoh planned, many of the Israelites scattered to search for any remnants of straw they could find in the fields. They couldn’t conspire to leave Egypt while spread throughout the countryside. To supplement the lack of straw, they swept up chaff from the threshing floors. The reduced number of workers who remained at the worksites making bricks couldn’t make enough. In addition, the lower-quality chaff likely caused more bricks to crumble while they dried. Yet the taskmasters insisted they continue to meet the same daily quota.
When the Israelites failed to meet the pharaoh’s impossible demands, the Egyptian taskmasters beat the Israelite supervisors they had set over the rest of the people. The supervisors had authority over other Israelites, but they also had responsibility for ensuring the others met the quota. So they bore the punishment for the lack of bricks. But if they tried to force the Israelites to work even harder, their own people would turn against them. They found themselves caught in the middle.
Slackers
So the Israelite supervisors went and cried out to the pharaoh, “Why are you treating your servants this way? Your servants aren’t given any straw, yet they tell us to make bricks! Look! Your servants are beaten, but it’s your own people who are guilty.”
“Slackers! You’re slackers! That’s why you say, ‘We must go sacrifice to Yahweh.’ Now go work! You will not be given any straw, but you must provide the quota of bricks.”
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Desperate, the Israelite supervisors sought an audience with the pharaoh to beg for relief. They blamed the Egyptians for trying to make them do the impossible. Normally, the pharaoh wouldn’t likely grant an audience to such low-level servants, but he had a rebellion to quell. He used the meeting to redirect their anger by blaming the Israelites themselves for their plight.
The pharaoh accused the Israelites of wanting to go sacrifice to Yahweh not out of piety but out of laziness. They simply didn’t want to work. If they had time to plan holidays, they had time to gather straw. The pharaoh refused to provide any relief. The supervisors could blame those who had presumptuously demanded he let them go—Moses and Aaron. Instead of making Moses and Aaron heroes by punishing them directly, the pharaoh ingeniously made them villains and turned the people they tried to save against them.
Confrontation
The Israelite supervisors realized their predicament when they were told they could not decrease the daily quota of bricks. When they left the pharaoh, they encountered Moses and Aaron waiting to meet them. The supervisors said, “May Yahweh examine you and judge you for making the pharaoh and his servants consider us a noxious odor. You’ve put a sword in their hands to kill us!”
Image by Azmi Talib from Pixabay
The supervisors left the meeting with the pharaoh out of options. They hadn’t asked to leave Egypt, yet they would bear the brunt of the punishment. Moses and Aaron knew about the meeting and waited outside to hear the result. Frightened and angry, the supervisors confronted them.
Though Moses and Aaron had neglected to perform Yahweh’s signs before the pharaoh, they had performed them before the Israelites. And the Israelites had believed.10 But the pharaoh’s oppressive tactics had quickly destroyed the goodwill created between Yahweh’s people and his chosen representatives. The supervisors assumed Moses and Aaron had deceived them, so they called on Yahweh to judge Moses and Aaron for inciting the pharaoh and his taskmasters against the Israelites.
The pharaoh had created a rift between the Israelites and the two ringleaders of the rebellion. Or so he thought. Had Moses and Aaron acted independently, the pharaoh’s countermeasures would certainly have succeeded. But the command to send the Israelites away came from Yahweh. The pharaoh’s actions unwittingly advanced Yahweh’s purposes.
- See Moses’s Prophet.
- See Israel’s Response.
- Genesis 50:24.
- Exodus 3:16.
- Exodus 3:18.
- See Obstinate.
- See Egypt’s Response.
- See Forced Labor; Infanticide.
- Robert Littman, Marta Lorenzon, Jay Silverstein, “With & Without Straw: How Israelite Slaves Made Bricks,” Biblical Archaeology Review 40, no. 2 (March/April 2014): https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/with-without-straw-how-israelite-slaves-made-bricks/.
- Exodus 4:30–31.