1. In order to appreciate the audacity of the demand made by Moses and Aaron, we must remember the unbridled power and authority which were claimed by the Egyptian monarchs. Each Pharaoh was the child of the sun. He is depicted as fondled by the greatest gods, and sitting with them in the recesses of their temples to receive worship equal to their own. “By the life of Pharaoh” was the supreme oath. Without Pharaoh could no man lift up his hand or foot in all the land of Egypt. For him great Egypt existed. For him all other men lived, suffered, and died. For him the mighty Nile flowed from its unexplored fountains to fructify the soil. For him vast armies of priests, and magicians and courtiers, wrought and ministered. From his superb throne he looked down on the wretched crowds of subject peoples, careless of their miseries. What were their tears and groans, and the wail of their bondage, but a fitting sacrifice to be offered to his exalted majesty. In addition, the present monarch had recently, through his generals, achieved certain great victories; and these successes had greatly enhanced his arrogant pride, so that it was in a paroxysm of supercilious scorn that he answered the Divine demand: “Who is the Lord that I should obey his voice, to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go.”
2. Then Moses and Aaron demanded more precisely (and almost in the words spoken by God in Midian) that Pharaoh would allow the Hebrews to go “three days' journey” into the wilderness. Here two questions have to be asked.
(1) What is meant by “three days' journey”? It is probably a current expression for a considerable distance (Gen_30:36): they ask to be allowed to worship their national God, with such rites as He may enjoin (Exo_8:27), at some distant spot in the wilderness where they could give no offence to the Egyptians (Exo_8:26) The “wilderness” would be the broad and arid limestone plateau, now called et-Tih, extending from the E. border of Egypt to the S. of Palestine, and bounded on the S. by the mountains of the Sinaitic Peninsula.
The repeated request to be allowed to go three days' journey into the wilderness in order to sacrifice is apparently unmeaning to one who does not know Sinai (Exo_3:18; Exo_8:27). But the waterless journey of three days to Wady Gharandel impresses itself on any one who has to arrange for travelling. It is so essential a feature of the road that this may well have been known as the “three days in the wilderness,” in contrast to the road to 'Aqabah, which is six or seven days in the wilderness. To desire to go the “three days' journey in the wilderness” was probably really an expression for going down to Sinai.1 [Note: W. M. F. Petrie, Researches in Sinai, 203.]
(2) In what sense is the request meant? If, says Driver, as has been supposed, it was intended merely as an excuse for getting a good start for their subsequent flight, then it was clearly a case of deception: the Israelites would in this case have sought to obtain from Pharaoh by a ruse what, if he had known their entire purpose, he would not have granted. It is not however said that, if the request had been acceded to, they would not have returned when the three days' festival was over; so it may have been intended merely to test the feeling of Pharaoh towards the Israelites; to serve their God in their own way was in itself “the smallest request that subjects could make of their ruler”; and if this request had been viewed favourably by Pharaoh, the door might have been opened for further negotiations, and the people might eventually have been allowed to depart altogether; the request was not granted, and so it resolved itself in the end into a demand for the unconditional release of the people and their actual departure.
3. Turning sharply on the two brethren, Pharaoh accused them of hindering their people's toils, and bade them begone to their own share in the clay-pit, or the brick-kiln: “Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works? Get you unto your burdens.” What a bitter taunt there was in that last sentence! How the royal lip curled as it was uttered! Already the heart had begun to harden! And so the audience ended, and the brothers came down the crowded corridors amid the titter of the court. A very different scene was to be enacted a few months later, as the news came there of the overthrow of the Egyptians in the Red Sea-the last stage of the conflict between Pharaoh and the God of the Hebrews, whose name he heard that day for the first time.
That same day a new order was issued from the palace, emanating from Pharaoh himself, to the taskmasters of the people. And probably, ere the evening fell, the ominous words had passed from the taskmasters to the head-men who were set over their fellow-Hebrews, and were, therefore, responsible for the daily delivery of a certain tale of bricks, that they must expect no more straw, though the daily returns must be maintained. “Thus saith Pharaoh, I will not give you straw. Go ye, get you straw where ye can find it: yet not ought of your work shall be diminished.”
Our God's not like to Pharaoh; to require
His tale of bricke, and give no straw for fire:
His workmen wanted straw, and yet were lasht
For not performance: We have straw unthrasht,
Yet we are idle, and we winch, and kicke:
Against our burthens, and returne no bricke;
We spend our straw, for litter in the stable,
And then we cry; Alas, we are not able;
Think not on Israel's suff'rings, in that day,
When Thy offended Justice shall repay
Our labours; Lord, when Thou upheav'st Thy rod,
Think, Pharaoh was a tyrant; Thou, a God.1 [Note: Francis Quarles, Divine Fancies, i. 81.]
Force settles nothing. When Pharaoh said, “I know not Jehovah, neither will I let Israel go”; and when again, in answer to the plea of conscience, he smote the earth with the hoof of power, saying, “Get to your burdens, let heavier work be laid on the men, and let them not regard lying words. Go, get yourselves straw, and none of your work shall be diminished,” he was trying to solve a question of right with the mace of power. And though that brute force was imperial, so constituted is this universe that it was compelled to bow before the right championed by a herd of slaves. Force settles nothing. And this is as true when the force is in the hands of an enormous multitude, paralysing industry in a strike, as when it is lodged in a monarch playing his dynastic schemes, with a million men, on the chessboard of war. There may be a plea for force at times, as being necessary to arouse attention to wrong, though even within that limited sphere the incidental evils are so great as to justify it only as a last resource. But worth or use beyond, force has absolutely none.1 [Note: John Smith, The Permanent Message of the Exodus, 95.]
They might be driven to march on to London, Cromwell told his officers, but an understanding was the most desirable way, and the other a way of necessity, and not to be done but in a way of necessity. What was obtained by an understanding would be firm and durable. “Things obtained by force, though never so good in themselves, would be both less to their honour and less likely to last.” “Really, really, have what you will have; that you have by force, I look upon as nothing.” “I could wish,” he said earlier, “that we might remember this always, that what we gain in a free way, it is better than twice as much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterity's.” It is one of the harshest ironies of history that the name of this famous man, who started on the severest stage of his journey with this broad and far-reaching principle, should have become the favourite symbol of the shallow faith that force is the only remedy.2 [Note: John Morley, Oliver Cromwell, bk. iii., chap. 3.]
