1. Thus said the LORD. This is the so-called messenger formula, the conventional form for introducing the text, oral or written, of a message. The conveyor of the message may be divine, as here and repeatedly in the Prophets, or human, as in verse 10, where the message comes from Pharaoh. The phrase was regularly used at the beginning of letters.

Send off. The Hebrew verb shileaḥ has a range of meanings: “to let go or dismiss,” “to divorce,” “to send guests decorously on their way,” “to grant manumission to a slave.” There is probably some ironic tension in this narrative between the positive and the negative senses of the verb, and since it is repeatedly played off against God’s “sending” out His hand or sending ministers of destruction, this translation represents the reiterated request to Pharaoh as “send off.”

The abruptness of Moses and Aaron’s address to the king of Egypt is noteworthy. They use none of the deferential forms of speech, none of the third-person bowing and scraping, which are conventional in biblical Hebrew for addressing a monarch. Instead, they immediately announce, “Thus said the LORD,” and proceed to the text of the message, which begins with an imperative verb, without the polite particle of entreaty, naʾ. William H. C. Propp observes that in doing this, Moses is not following God’s orders: he was to have spoken together with the elders, who appear to be absent; he was to have performed his two portents; he was to have threatened Pharaoh’s firstborn in God’s name. As to the absence of the elders, Rashi, following the Midrash, suggests that they slipped away in fear one by one as Moses and Aaron approached the palace.

2. Who is the LORD, that I should heed His voice. The very name, YHWH, of this Semitic deity may be news to Pharaoh, and even if he grants that there is such a god, there is no reason that he, as an Egyptian polytheist and as a figure thought to have divine status himself, should recognize the authority of this Hebrew deity. (“I do not know the LORD” has the sense of “I refuse to recognize his divine authority.”) Pharaoh speaks here in quasipoetic parallel clauses, and D. N. Friedman has proposed that this may be coded as an aristocratic style of speech, a token of his regal stature.

3. Let us go, pray, a three days’ journey into the wilderness. Speaking in God’s name, they had made the request unconditionally, without stipulation of time limits. Now answering Pharaoh’s indignation in their own voice, they use the cohortative verb form (“let us go”) with the particle of entreaty (“pray”) and mention the three days, which they presumably should have done at the outset.

lest He hit us with pestilence or sword. The proposal of some scholars that “us” be emended to “you” (because of the impending plagues) should be resisted. It was a perfectly understandable religious concept for peoples of the ancient Near East that a national deity might need to be propitiated through sacrifice. By couching their request for a furlough for the slaves in these terms, Moses and Aaron are saying to Pharaoh that the cultic expedition into the wilderness is no mere whim but a necessary means to avert the punishing wrath of the god of the Hebrews. In this fashion, they are pitching their argument to Pharaoh’s self-interest, for dead slaves would be of no use to him.

5. the people of the land are now many. This phrase remains a little obscure. Because of the end of the sentence, it has to refer to the Hebrews. The most likely sense is that the Hebrew workforce has become vast (compare all the references to their proliferation in chapter 1), and so the Egyptian economy has come to depend on this multitude of slave laborers and can scarcely afford an interruption of their work.

6. taskmasters . . . overseers. As becomes clear in what follows (e.g., verse 14), the taskmasters are Egyptian slave drivers, the overseers are Hebrew foremen. The former term, noges, derives from a root that means “to oppress” the latter term, shoter, is associated with a root meaning to “record in writing.”

7. as in time past. The literal meaning of this common Hebrew idiom is “as yesterday [or] the day before.” At the end of verse 14, these two components of the idiom are broken out from the fixed formula, each being prefaced by the emphatic gam (“even,” “also”).

scrabble for straw. The verb qosheshu is linked with its usual cognate-accusative object qash, “stubble” (see verse 12). “Straw” (teven) and “stubble” (qash) appear to be the same substance, with the latter in the condition of not having been picked from the ground. Crushed straw was used to give cohesiveness to the bricks before baking.

8. for they are idlers. The contemptuous term invoked here by Egypt’s head slave owner, nirpim, is derived from a verbal root that means “to relax,” “to loosen one’s grip,” “to let go.” It is the very verb that is used in 4:26, when the threatening deity of the Bridegroom of Blood episode “let him go.”

12. And the people spread out through all the land of Egypt to scrabble for stubble. Even in this measure of aggravated oppression, the language of the story picks up the initial imagery of animal-like proliferation, which in turn harks back to the injunction in the Creation story to fill the land/earth.

14. the overseers of the Israelites . . . were beaten. The Egyptians have instituted an effective chain of command for forced labor. It would not be feasible to beat all the teeming thousands of Hebrew slaves, so when they fail to produce their daily quota, the Israelite overseers are made personally responsible and are beaten by the Egyptian slave drivers. The overseers then turn in protest to Pharaoh, “crying out” (or “screaming”), which is the predictable reaction to a beating.

16. Straw is not given . . . bricks they tell us, make, and, look, your servants are beaten. There is a colloquial immediacy in the language with which the overseers express their outrage to Pharaoh, positioning “straw” and “bricks” at the beginning of the first and second clauses.

the fault is your people’s. Presumably, the fault for the failure to fulfill the quota of bricks is the Egyptians’ because they are not providing the straw.

17. Idlers, you are idlers! Therefore you say, “Let us go sacrifice to the LORD.” In keeping with a common procedure of Hebrew narrative, phrases of previous dialogue are pointedly recycled. Pharaoh sarcastically quotes the phrase from Moses and Aaron’s request about sacrificing to the LORD, and in a kind of incremental repetition, he picks up his own term, “idlers,” and expands it to “Idlers, you are idlers!” These repetitions nicely convey a sense of inflexibly opposed sides in the conflict.

18. no straw will be given . . . but the quota of bricks you will give. By this point, “give” (natan) has emerged as a thematic key word of the episode. Pharaoh had announced in his message brought by the taskmasters, “I give you no straw.” The Hebrew overseers then complained, “Straw is not given,” and Pharaoh, picking up their very words, lashes back at them, “no straw will be given,” again stipulating that the slaves have the same obligation as before to “give” their quota of bricks.

19. saw themselves coming to harm. This is the understanding of the somewhat cryptic Hebrew wayirʾu . . . ʾotam beraʿ proposed by Abraham ibn Ezra and many other commentators. Still smarting from their recent whipping, they are acutely aware that they will be the first to suffer for the inability of the Hebrew slaves to maintain their usual quota of bricks.

20. And they encountered Moses and Aaron poised to meet them. Moses and Aaron, who previously had acted as bold spokesmen, now wait awkwardly, perhaps nervously, outside the palace while the delegation of overseers brings its petition before Pharaoh. The verb for “encounter,” pagaʿ, has both a neutral and a violent meaning. It indicates the meeting of persons or substances—including the “meeting” of forged iron with flesh, when it has the sense of “stab” or “hit,” as at the end of verse 3, above.

21. made us repugnant. The literal meaning of this common Hebrew idiom is “made our odor stink,” but the fact that the idiom is twice linked here with “eyes” suggests that the writer is not much thinking of its olfactory force.

putting a sword in their hand to kill us. Moses and Aaron, we should recall, had expressed the fear to Pharaoh that, without due sacrifice, the LORD would hit the people with pestilence or sword.

22. why have you sent me? Moses’s initial hesitancy to accept the mission imposed on him at Horeb seems to him perfectly confirmed now by the events. God has only made things worse for the Hebrew slaves (Moses, as it were, passes the buck he has received from the accusing overseers), and the whole plan of liberation shows no sign of implementation.

6:1. And the LORD said. Although the conventional division puts this verse at the beginning of a new chapter, it actually sums up the preceding speech, whereas 6.2 marks the beginning of a new speech in which God offers a quasihistorical summary of His relationship with Israel and His future intentions toward Israel.

through a strong hand will he send them off and through a strong hand will he drive them from his land. The “strong hand”—that is, violent force—becomes a refrain in the story, here repeated in quasipoetic parallelism. The phrase refers to the violent coercion that God will need to exert on Pharaoh. It is noteworthy that the semantically double-edged “send” (to send away ceremoniously, to release, to banish) is here paired with the unambiguous “drive them from his land.” In the event, God’s strong hand will compel Pharaoh to expel the Hebrews precipitously, so that “let my people go” is reinterpreted as something like “banish my people.” The Exodus, in other words, extorted from a recalcitrant Egyptian monarch by an overpowering God, will prove to be a continuation of hostility, a fearful and angry expulsion of the slaves rather than a conciliatory act of liberation.