Exodus 1:10–22

¹⁰If we don’t make plans against them, the number of their people will grow even more. Then if there is a war, they might join our enemies and fight us and escape from the country!”

¹¹So the Egyptians made life hard for the Israelites. They put slave masters over them, who forced the Israelites to build the cities Pithom and Rameses as supply centers for the king. ¹²But the harder the Egyptians forced the Israelites to work, the more the Israelites grew in number and spread out. So the Egyptians became very afraid of them ¹³and demanded even more of them. ¹⁴They made their lives bitter. They forced the Israelites to work hard to make bricks and mortar and to do all kinds of work in the fields. The Egyptians were not merciful to them in all their painful work.

¹⁵Two Hebrew nurses, named Shiphrah and Puah, helped the Israelite women give birth to their babies. The king of Egypt said to the nurses, ¹⁶“When you are helping the Hebrew women give birth to their babies, watch! If the baby is a girl, let her live, but if it is a boy, kill him!” ¹⁷But the nurses feared God, so they did not do as the king told them; they let all the boy babies live. ¹⁸Then the king of Egypt sent for the nurses and said, “Why did you do this? Why did you let the boys live?”

¹⁹The nurses said to him, “The Hebrew women are much stronger than the Egyptian women. They give birth to their babies before we can get there.” ²⁰God was good to the nurses. And the Hebrew people continued to grow in number, so they became even stronger. ²¹Because the nurses feared God, he gave them families of their own.

²²So the king commanded all his people, “Every time a boy is born to the Hebrews, you must throw him into the Nile River, but let all the girl babies live.”