promise that God would win in the end and the people would be set free to leave Egypt. Chapter 11 has repeated that promise, but even that chapter has ended with pharaoh as hard as ever and the people no more liberated than after Moses’s first failed attempt forty years ago in chapter 2. No wonder Moses is flaming angry (11:8)! We long for this story to get to its climax and get these people out! But our narrator has other plans. He wants to set the event he is about to describe in its fullest context.