They made their lives bitter with back-breaking work in mortar and bricks and every kind of work in the fields. All the jobs the Egyptians gave them were brutally hard.
Didn’t we tell you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone! Let us go on serving the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”
After a long time passed, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites still groaned because they were slaves. So they cried out, and their cries for help went up to God.
So they said, “May the Lord see what you have done and judge you! You have made Pharaoh and his officials hate us. You have given them an excuse to kill us.”