Then the Lord said to Abram, “You can be sure that your descendants will be strangers and travel in a land they don’t own. The people there will make them slaves and be cruel to them for four hundred years.
On the seventh day the baby died. David’s servants were afraid to tell him that the baby was dead. They said, “Look, we tried to talk to David while the baby was alive, but he refused to listen to us. If we tell him the baby is dead, he may do something awful.”
So the king commanded all his people, “Every time a boy is born to the Hebrews, you must throw him into the Nile River, but let all the girl babies live.”
The king’s slave masters had made the Israelite foremen responsible for the work the people did. The Egyptian slave masters beat these men and asked them, “Why aren’t you making as many bricks as you made in the past?”
From Kadesh, Moses sent messengers to the king of Edom. He said, “Your brothers, the Israelites, say to you: You know about all the troubles we have had,
but when we cried out to the Lord, he heard us and sent us an angel to bring us out of Egypt. “Now we are here at Kadesh, a town on the edge of your land.