8. Then a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt.
9. "Look," he said to his people, "the Israelites have become much too numerous for us.
10. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country."
11. So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.
12. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites
13. and worked them ruthlessly.
14. They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly.
15. The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah,
16. "When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live."
17. The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live.
1. What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?
2. You want something but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.
3. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
8. Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.
9. The commandments, "Do not commit adultery," "Do not murder," "Do not steal," "Do not covet," and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself."
10. Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
Return