Exodus 1 — The names of the sons of Israel in Egypt

Meaning

The second book of the Torah opens under the sign of continuity: ve-èlleh shemòt, «and these are the names». The initial vav binds Exodus to Genesis: the story of the family of Yaaqòv does not begin anew, it continues. From its first word the book receives its Hebrew title — Sefer Shemòt, the Book of Names — while the LXX titles it Éxodos, «departure»: Hebrew names the book from its persons, Greek from its event. The difference is not merely bibliographic: the whole chapter is built on the tension between memory and oblivion. The sons of Israel are enumerated by name (vv. 1-4), the two midwives are remembered by name — Shifrà and Pu'àh (v. 15) — while Pharaoh, holder of absolute power, remains anonymous throughout the entire narrative. The memory of names is already, structurally, resistance to the power that erases.

Verse 7 is the theological center of the first narrative unit. Four verbs accumulate in rapid succession: «were fruitful» (paràh), «swarmed» (sharàtz), «multiplied» and «grew mighty beyond all measure» (atzèm bim'òd me'òd, a superlative construction with reduplication; atzèm from the root of «bone», skeletal strength). The verb sharàtz is the densest: it is the verb of the aquatic teeming of Gen 1:20 and of the fauna after the flood (Gen 8:17). Its reuse here is a deliberate intertext with creation: the sons of Israel in Mitzràyim realize the primordial blessing of Gen 1:28 — «be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth» — precisely in the place of oppression. The berakhàh of creation is not revoked by exile; it is fulfilled under Pharaoh's heel.

This fruitfulness becomes, at v. 10, the matter of political terror. The «new» king (chadàsh) who «did not know» (lo' yadà') Yosèf — the negation of the verb of relationship, which can indicate involuntary ignorance or deliberate refusal — proposes: havàh nitkhakkemàh, «come, let us deal shrewdly». The root is ḥokhmàh, the same as wisdom: intellect bent to the machination of State. And the decree already contains the fear of the exodus: «lest they... go up from the land» (ve-alàh min ha-àretz). Imperial power intuits its own end before it begins.

Verse 17 introduces the ethical axis of the chapter: the midwives «feared ha-Elohìm» (yir'àt Elohìm) and disobeyed the king. The divine response is concrete: «he made them houses» (battìm, v. 21) — lineage, descendance, future: the reward belongs to the same logic of the life they preserved. The final decree (v. 22) — every male son cast into the Nile — inverts the symbolism of v. 7: the waters that teemed with life become an instrument of death. But it is the same river in which the mother of Moshèh will set the basket (Ex 2:3): every measure of Pharaoh prepares, without knowing it, the conditions of the liberation he fears.

Why it differs from current translations

At v. 5 the MT counts «seventy nèfesh who came out of the loin (yèrekh) of Yaaqòv». Current translations render nèfesh as «persons»: an acceptable but reductive rendering, because nèfesh is the living person in its entirety, not a spiritual component separated from the body; and yèrekh is literally the thigh, the anatomical seat of male descendance (cf. Gen 46:26) — Hebrew genealogy is not abstraction but flesh. The LXX reads «seventy-five» (pénte kaì hebdomḗkonta), including five descendants of Yosèf born in Egypt according to the Alexandrian tradition (cf. Gen 46:27 LXX): it is the figure that resurfaces in the speech of Stephen (Acts 7:14), a sign that Greek-speaking Judaism read Scripture in the Alexandrian recension.

At v. 8 the MT has melekh chadàsh, «a new king», and «arose» (qàm); the LXX specifies héteros, «another king», and renders anéstē. At v. 11 the MT has arè miskenòt, «storage cities» (supply warehouses), where the LXX reads póleis ochyrás, «fortified cities», and adds a third city absent from the Hebrew: «On, which is the City of the Sun» (Heliopolis). At v. 13 befàrekh, «with harshness», is a technical term of brutal slavery: it recurs in Lev 25:43,46,53, where the Torah forbids Israel to subject its own brother befàrekh — the lexicon of oppression suffered becomes the lexicon of the prohibition; the LXX flattens it into bía, «with violence». Finally, many versions render sharàtz (v. 7) with a generic «they multiplied», erasing the intertext with Gen 1:20 that is the theological key of the verse.

Layered receptions

The rabbinic reception of the chapter is concentrated in a chain of baraitot preserved in the tractate Sotah. On «a new king arose» (v. 8) b.Sotah 11a records the dispute of Rav and Shmuel: one teaches that he was truly a new king (chadàsh mammàsh), the other that his decrees were renewed — the same sovereign who redefines the memory of State; and «did not know Yosèf» means that he «made himself as one who did not know»: oblivion as a political choice, not as an accident. On the pair of v. 15, b.Sotah 11b identifies the midwives with Yokhèved and Miryàm: «Shifrà, because she revives (meshappèret) the newborn; Pu'àh, because she whispers (po'àh) to the newborn» — and reads the «houses» of v. 21 as houses of priesthood, of Levitism, and of royalty. On the same page is preserved the principle: by the merit of the righteous women of that generation Israel was redeemed from Egypt — redemption begins with the women who choose life.

The Christian reception reads the chapter as matrix, not as a superseded relic. Stephen takes up its plot: the king «who did not know Joseph» and who «mistreated our fathers, forcing them to expose their newborns» (Acts 7:18-19, with the Alexandrian figure of seventy-five souls in Acts 7:14). Heb 11:23 inscribes the parents of Moshèh in the gallery of faith: they did not fear «the king's edict». Mt 2:16 models the slaughter of Bethlehem on Pharaoh's decree: the child persecuted by power and saved through Egypt is a figure that the gospel recognizes as fulfilled, not abolished — fulfillment (Mt 5:17), not substitution: whoever reads Exodus 1 in the church does not appropriate the history of Israel, but is grafted into it.

Historical reconstruction (aggadah)

On the historical-cultural level the chapter reflects documented Egyptian institutions. The sarè missìm (v. 11) are the officials of the corvée (mas), the forced labor imposed by the State for great works: the New Kingdom knew the use of foreign labor in the royal building sites. The arè miskenòt are storage cities: Pitòm («house of Atum») and Ra'amsès (the residence of the Ramessides in the Delta) locate the memory of servitude in the eastern Delta. The production of bricks (leveniìm) with clay (chòmer) and straw, with daily quotas recorded by scribes, is documented in the papyri and in Egyptian tomb paintings. The dating of the oppression oscillates in scholarship between the high chronology (15th century, the era of Amenhotep II according to the traditional reckoning) and the Ramesside one (13th century); source criticism has distinguished narrative and priestly strands in the Pentateuch, but the chapter presents itself as a unitary literary architecture, built on the irony of power that produces what it fears.

The aggadah amplifies. b.Sotah 11a transmits the baraita of Pharaoh's three counselors: three took part in that council — Bil'àm, Iyòv, and Yitrò. Bil'àm, who counseled, was killed; Iyòv, who kept silent, was condemned to sufferings; Yitrò, who fled, merited that his disciples sit in the Sanhedrin: silence before the genocidal decree is already guilt. On the word befàrekh (v. 13) the tradition plays: be-fèh rakh, «with a soft mouth» — the enslavement began with persuasion and wages, and became a chain (b.Sotah 11b). Targum Onkelos renders befàrekh with «harshness» (be-qashyù), confirming the technical sense of the term. And on v. 12 — «the more they oppressed them, the more they spread» — the verb yifròtz, from the root of Pèretz (Gen 38:29), lets glimpse in the unstoppable growth the line from which tradition awaits the Davidic kingship.

Practical observance

The pericope is narrative, but the Jewish tradition has distilled from it a precise praxis, entirely played out on memory. Verse 14 — vayemarrerù et chayyehèm, «they made their life bitter» — is the scriptural root of the maròr: the Mishnah prescribes that on the night of Pesach whoever has not pronounced three words has not fulfilled his obligation — pèsach, matzàh, and maròr — and explains: «maròr, because the Egyptians made bitter the life of our fathers in Egypt» (m.Pesachim 10:5). Concretely: at the Seder one eats the bitter herb, and the same mishnah teaches that «in every generation a person is bound to see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt». The memory of oppression is not abstract commemoration: it is taste, gesture, annual obligation. Alongside the annual rite stands the daily remembrance: the mention of the going out from Egypt «all the days of your life», including the nights (m.Berakhot 1:5).

The second practical axis is the conduct of the midwives: the yir'àt Elohìm that refuses the murderous order of the king (v. 17). From it derives the principle that obedience to human authority ceases where the command to destroy life begins — a principle that finds documented continuity in the NT: «we must obey God rather than men» (Acts 5:29). In the categories of the New Testament command this praxis connects to Courage and Fortitude and to Uprightness and Justice: one acts by not cooperating — even at personal cost — with provisions that demand injustice, and by actively protecting the life of the most exposed, like Shifrà and Pu'àh who «let the children live». As for the ritual memory of the exodus, it finds its connection in the Things to Remember: the concrete discipline of making memory, in prayer and in rite, of God's liberating acts — according to the logic that from the taste of the maròr reaches all the way to the memorial instituted at a paschal supper.

Textual notes

• v. 1 — ve-èlleh shemòt: the copulative vav ties the book to Genesis; shemòt (plural of shèm) gives the book its Hebrew title.
• v. 5 — nèfesh: collective singular, the person in its vital entirety; yèrekh: the «loin», seat of descendance (cf. Gen 46:26); MT shiv'ìm («seventy») against LXX «seventy-five».
• v. 7 — paràh «to be fruitful»; sharàtz «to swarm, to teem» (Gen 1:20; 8:17); atzèm bim'òd me'òd: superlative with reduplication, from the root of «bone».
• v. 8 — qàm «arose» (LXX anéstē); chadàsh «new» (LXX héteros); lo' yadà': negation of the relation-verb yadà'.
• v. 10 — havàh nitkhakkemàh: cohortative hitpa'el of the root of ḥokhmàh; ve-alàh min ha-àretz: the fear of the exodus inscribed in the decree.
• v. 11 — sarè missìm: «chiefs of the corvée»; arè miskenòt: «storage cities» (LXX «fortified cities», with the plus «On, the City of the Sun»).
• v. 12 — yifròtz: from paràtz, «to break through banks» (cf. Pèretz, Gen 38:29); vayaqùtzu: the physical loathing (LXX ebdelýssonto).
• vv. 13-14 — befàrekh: technical term (Lev 25:43,46,53), twice in the chapter; vayemarrerù: pi'el from màr, «bitter» — the maròr of the Seder carries its taste; chòmer and leveniìm: clay and bricks.
• v. 15 — meyallèdot: causative pi'el participle of yalàd, «those who bring to birth»; Shifrà from shapàr, «to beautify, to tend the newborn»; Pu'àh from the whisper that soothes.
• v. 17 — the fear of ha-Elohìm (yir'àt Elohìm) as the motive of the civil disobedience of the midwives.
• v. 21 — battìm: «houses» as lineage and descendance, reward in the logic of preserved life.
• v. 22 — ha-ye'òr: the Nile (Egyptian loanword); the water of life transformed into an instrument of death by decree.