The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Even as Moses is in the presence of God receiving the Ten Commandments, the people down below are already breaking the first of them.
Moses has brought the Israelites out of servitude in Egypt into the hard wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. God has given them manna to eat and water from dry stone, but their hearts fail them when Moses goes up into the quaking, cloud-capped, lightning-crowned Mount Sinai, and does not return for over a month.
A reluctant Moses is sent back to Egypt on a delicate diplomatic mission.
A Hebrew boy has been adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter Bithiah, and brought up to be an Egyptian prince named Moses. But to save the life of one of his own Israelite people, he has committed murder, and has been forced to flee the country with Bithiah.
Moses asks Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, but every wonder God performs only makes Pharaoh more obstructive.
Moses has returned to Egypt, which he fled forty years before, to ask Pharaoh to let the enslaved Israelites leave as a free people. But everything God says and does through Moses serves only to make Pharaoh more determined to refuse.
Pharaoh dismisses Moses’s embassy for the last time, and Moses prepares the Israelites for a hasty departure.
With every miracle shown to him, Pharaoh’s heart has become harder towards the Israelites, and now he tells Moses that his embassy to Egypt’s court is at an end. Moses accepts the decree, knowing that more much is to come.
Pharaoh has the Israelites trapped on the shore of the Red Sea, but God has yet another surprise for him.
Moses has failed to persuade Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt, so he has taken matters into his own hands and brought them out anyway. Pharaoh quickly puts aside grief for his firstborn son, taken by God’s angel of death, and rides after the escaped slaves with vengeance in his heart.
Jochebed hides her baby son from Pharaoh’s soldiers, only for him to be discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter.
The story of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt begins long ago, perhaps as long ago as the 13th century BC. The children of Jacob have come with Pharaoh’s blessing to Egypt to join their respected brother Joseph, but their descendants have multiplied, and later Pharaohs see them as a burden, even a threat.