Psalm 81

A Call to Obedience

For the choir director: on the Gittith. Of Asaph.^(A)

⁸ A new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt. ⁹ He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and powerful than we are.^{(A) 10} Come, let’s deal shrewdly with them; otherwise they will multiply further, and when war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.”^{(B) 11} So the Egyptians assigned taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor.^(C) They built Pithom and Rameses as supply cities^(D) for Pharaoh. ¹² But the more they oppressed them, the more they multiplied and spread so that the Egyptians came to dread^[a] the Israelites. ¹³ They worked the Israelites ruthlessly^{(E) 14} and made their lives bitter with difficult labor in brick and mortar and in all kinds of fieldwork. They ruthlessly imposed all this work on them.^(F)

¹⁵ The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives—the first, whose name was Shiphrah, and the second, whose name was Puah— ¹⁶ “When you help the Hebrew women give birth, observe them as they deliver. If the child is a son, kill him, but if it’s a daughter, she may live.” ¹⁷ The midwives, however, feared God^(G) and did not do as the king of Egypt had told them;^(H) they let the boys live. ¹⁸ So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this and let the boys live?”

¹⁹ The midwives said to Pharaoh, “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife can get to them.”^(I)

²⁰ So God was good to the midwives,^(J) and the people multiplied and became very numerous. ²¹ Since the midwives feared God, he gave them families.^{(K) 22} Pharaoh then commanded all his people, “You must throw every son born to the Hebrews into the Nile, but let every daughter live.”^(L)

Moses’s Birth and Adoption

2 Now a man from the family of Levi married a Levite woman.^{(M) 2} The woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son; when she saw that he was beautiful,^[b] she hid him for three months.^{(N) 3} But when she could no longer hide him, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with asphalt and pitch. She placed the child in it and set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile. ⁴ Then his sister^(O) stood at a distance in order to see what would happen to him.

⁵ Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe at the Nile while her servant girls walked along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds, sent her slave girl, took it, ⁶ opened it, and saw him, the child—and there he was, a little boy, crying. She felt sorry for him and said, “This is one of the Hebrew boys.”

⁷ Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Should I go and call a Hebrew woman who is nursing to nurse the boy for you?”

⁸ “Go,” Pharaoh’s daughter told her. So the girl went and called the boy’s mother. ⁹ Then Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will pay your wages.” So the woman took the boy and nursed him. ¹⁰ When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses,^[c] “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”