Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁵⁸ If you don’t carefully obey every word of this law that’s written in this book, if you don’t fear your God’s glorious and awesome name, “Eternal One,” ⁵⁹ then He will strike you and your descendants with extraordinary plagues that will be widespread and long-lasting, with serious, persistent illnesses. ⁶⁰ He’ll bring back all the Egyptian diseases you were so afraid of when you lived there, and you’ll suffer from them continuously. ⁶¹ He will even afflict you with diseases and plagues that aren’t written about in this book of the law until you’re destroyed. ⁶² Only a few of you will be left, even though there used to be as many of you as there were stars in the sky, because you wouldn’t listen to the voice of the Eternal your God. ⁶³ Even though it used to give the Eternal great pleasure to do good things for you and to increase your numbers, He’ll delight in killing and destroying you completely. You’ll be torn from the land you’re going to possess, ⁶⁴ and He will scatter you among all the nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you’ll worship other gods, made of wood and stone, that you and your ancestors have never worshiped before. ⁶⁵ Among those nations you’ll never be at rest, and you’ll never be able to settle down. He will make your hearts tremble, your eyes fail from crying, and your soul languish from despair. ⁶⁶ Your life will hang by a thread; you’ll be terrified day and night, knowing you could die any minute. ⁶⁷ You’ll be so terrified, and you’ll see such awful things, that in the morning you’ll say, “If only evening would come, and this day would be over!” And in the evening you’ll say, “If only morning would come, and this night would be over!” ⁶⁸ The Eternal will bring you back to Egypt in ships, even though I told you you’d never go back there again. You’ll offer yourselves to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.

¹⁷ Still God’s promise to Abraham had not yet been fulfilled, but the time for that fulfillment was drawing very near. In the meantime, our ancestors living in Egypt rapidly multiplied. ¹⁸ Eventually a new king came to power—one who had not known Joseph when he was the most powerful man in Egypt. ¹⁹ This new leader feared the growing population of our ancestors and manipulated them for his own benefit, eventually seeking to control their population by forcing them to abandon their infants so they would die. ²⁰ Into this horrible situation our ancestor Moses was born, and he was a beautiful child in God’s eyes. He was raised for three months in his father’s home, ²¹ and then he was abandoned as the brutal regime required. However, Pharaoh’s daughter found, adopted, and raised him as her own son. ²² So Moses learned the culture and wisdom of the Egyptians and became a powerful man—both as an intellectual and as a leader. ²³ When he reached the age of 40, his heart drew him to visit his kinfolk, our ancestors, the Israelites. ²⁴ During his visit, he saw one of our people being wronged, and he took sides with our people by killing an Egyptian. ²⁵ He thought his kinfolk would recognize him as their God-given liberator, but they didn’t realize who he was and what he represented.

²⁶ The next day Moses was walking among the Israelites again when he observed a fight—but this time, it was between two Israelites. He intervened and tried to reconcile the men. “You two are brothers,” he said. “Why do you attack each other?” ²⁷ But the aggressor pushed Moses away and responded with contempt: “Who made you our prince and judge? ²⁸ Are you going to slay me and hide my body as you did with the Egyptian yesterday?”^{[a] 29} Realizing this murder had not gone unnoticed, he quickly escaped Egypt and lived as a refugee in the land of Midian. He married there and had two sons.