Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox

priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

When we get started, we're going to be picking up at the beginning of Exodus chapter 3.

We don't have to do a ton of recap because it's only two chapters.

But those two chapters, as we mentioned, covered roughly 80 years of Moses' life.

So, and everything from here until the end of the book of Deuteronomy is going to cover the last 40 years of his life.

So it's not exactly a portioned narrative. But, um, so last time we talked

about chapters one and two, we talked about there being this time lapse of indeterminate length

because I hate arguing about the date of the Exodus. So it's indeterminate, between the death of Joseph and the beginning of the book of Exodus.

But the key thing being that the Pharaoh at that time, Joseph, what Joseph had done for Egypt, his family, who they were, why that would be at all relevant.

This is gone from the mind, the ruling strategy, the thought, right, of the current Pharaoh.

And we talked about how the Pharaoh at that point saw the prosperity of the descendants of Jacob, Israel in the Nile Delta region as a threat.

We talked about how people of that, what we would call ethnicity,

but people from that part of the world had invaded and conquered Egypt within their historical memory.

They had gone to war relatively recently, again, without getting into the dates, with

military forces from that part of the world, and now they have cousins of those enemies growing,

flourishing, having lots of children in their midst.

Pharaoh sees this as a security threat, decides to resort to various population control measures.

First, through slave labor, when that didn't work, through ordering midwives to abort male babies, when that

didn't work, just making an open season on male Israel-like children to kill them and the

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