God Hears Israel's Groaning

^23 (A)During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel ^(B)groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. ^(C)Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God.

⁴ Behold, ^(A)the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and ^(B)the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of ^(C)the Lord of hosts.

²⁰ Then the Lord said, “Because ^(A)the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, ^21 (B)I will go down to see whether they have done altogether^[a] according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, ^(C)I will know.”

⁶ And ^(A)the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. ⁷ Then ^(B)we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.

⁷ Then the Lord said, ^(A)“I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their ^(B)taskmasters. I know their sufferings, ⁸ and ^(C)I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and ^(D)to bring them up out of that land to a ^(E)good and broad land, a land ^(F)flowing with milk and honey, to the place of ^(G)the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. ⁹ And now, behold, ^(H)the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the ^(I)oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them.

³⁰ “Now when forty years had passed, ^(A)an angel appeared to him ^(B)in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush.

^9 (A)“And you saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt and heard ^(B)their cry at the Red Sea,