IAnd these are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt. With Jacob, each and his household had come: 2Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, 3Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, 4Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. 5And all the persons coming out from Jacob’s thigh were seventy persons. And Joseph had been in Egypt.
6And Joseph and all of his brothers and all of that generation died. 7And the children of Israel were fruitful and teemed and multiplied and became very, very powerful, and the land was filled with them.
8And a new king rose over Egypt—who did not know Joseph. 9And he said to his people, “Here, the people of the children of Israel is more numerous and powerful than we. 10Come on, let’s be wise toward it or else it will increase; and it will be, when war will happen, that it, too, will be added to our enemies and will war against us and go up from the land.”
11And they set commanders of work-companies* over it in order to degrade it with their burdens. And they built storage cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Rameses. 12And the more they degraded it, the more it increased, and the more it expanded; and they felt a disgust at the children of Israel. 13And Egypt made the children of Israel serve with harshness; 14and they made their lives bitter with hard work, with mortar and with bricks and with all work in the field—all their work that they did for them—with harshness.
15And the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives—of whom the name of one was Shiphrah and the name of the second was Puah— l6and he said, “When you deliver the Hebrew women, and you look at the two stones, if it’s a boy then kill him, and if it’s a girl then she’ll live.” 17And the midwives feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had spoken to them, and they kept the children alive. l8And the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing and kept the children alive?”
19And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrews aren’t like the Egyptian women, because they’re animals! Before the midwife comes to them, they’ve given birth!”
20And God was good to the midwives. And the people increased, and they became very powerful, 21and it was because the midwives feared God, and He made them households.
22And Pharaoh commanded all of his people, saying, “Every son who is born: you shall throw him into the Nile. And every daughter you shall keep alive.”