Context & Key Themes
Exodus 5 is the chapter where everything gets worse before it gets better. Moses and Aaron go before Pharaoh with God’s demand and Pharaoh responds with contempt, increasing the Israelites’ burden immediately. The people turn on Moses and Aaron. Moses turns to God with a raw and honest complaint. The themes are the cost of obedience that makes things harder before it makes them better, the gap between the promise and its fulfillment, and the prayer that dares to ask God what He is doing.
Key Verses
“But Pharaoh said, ‘Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go.'” — Exodus 5:2
“Then Moses turned to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me?'” — Exodus 5:22
Summary
Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh and say: thus says the Lord, the God of Israel — let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness. Pharaoh answers: who is the Lord that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go. They push further: the God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or sword. Pharaoh says they are idle and distracting the people from their labor. He will not let them go.
That same day Pharaoh commands the taskmasters and foremen: no longer give the people straw to make bricks as before. Let them go and gather straw for themselves. But require the same quota of bricks. They are idle — that is why they cry out to let us go and sacrifice. Make the work heavier so they keep at it and pay no attention to lying words.
The taskmasters scatter throughout Egypt driving the people to gather stubble for straw. The foremen are beaten because the quota is not met. They go to Pharaoh and plead: why do you treat your servants this way? No straw is given to your servants yet we are told to make bricks. Your servants are beaten but the fault is with your own people. Pharaoh says: you are idle. That is why you say let us go and sacrifice. Go now and work. No straw will be given you, but you must still deliver the same number of bricks.
The Israelite foremen see they are in trouble. Coming out from Pharaoh they meet Moses and Aaron and say: the Lord look on you and judge, because you have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants, and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.
Moses turns to the Lord: O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? Since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all.
Reflection
Pharaoh’s question — who is the Lord that I should obey his voice? — is the question the entire book of Exodus is designed to answer. He does not know. By the time the ten plagues have run their course and the sea has closed over his army, all of Egypt and all the surrounding nations will know. The question asked in contempt will be answered in catastrophe. But that answer takes time, and in the meantime the people suffer more than they did before Moses arrived.
The increase in suffering immediately following Moses’s obedience is a theological problem the text does not resolve quickly. The people are right that things got worse. The foremen are right that Moses and Aaron have made them a stench. Moses’s prayer to God is not polished or diplomatic — why have you done evil to this people? Why did you send me? You have not delivered your people at all. That is a man at the end of his confidence, praying not a prayer of faith but a prayer of confusion and complaint.
And God does not rebuke him for it. The answer comes in chapter 6 — but the prayer stands in the text exactly as Moses prayed it. This is what honest prayer looks like when the gap between promise and reality has become too wide to simply trust without speaking. Moses does not walk away from God. He walks toward God with his confusion and anger fully on display. That is more faith than silence would have been.