In Parshat Shemot (פרשת שמות), we read that after the death of Joseph and his generation, “the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). As Bible translator Robert Alter notes, these terms (including the Hebrew word for land, ארץ, which also means earth) allude to the Creation story. In a fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise that Abraham will become “a great and mighty nation” (Genesis 18:18), Alter writes, “the Hebrews now exhibit the teeming fecundity of the natural world.”
It is precisely this teeming fecundity that so alarms Pharaoh:
And a new king arose over Egypt who knew not Joseph. And he said to his people, “Look, the people of the sons of Israel is more numerous and vaster than we. Come, let us be shrewd with them lest they multiply and then, should war occur, they will actually join our enemies and fight against us and go up from the land.”
(Exodus 1:8-10)
There is some debate about whether the words רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ should be translated as more numerous and stronger than us, as Alter does, or too many and too strong for us, as Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, the 1917 JPS translation of the Bible, and Nehama Leibowitz do. The difference, it seems to me, is immaterial. Regardless of how we understand this phrase, Pharaoh’s antagonism toward the Jews clearly stems from a perceived demographic threat and from a perception of Jewish power.
Pharaoh’s paranoid fears find contemporary echoes in the slogan “Jews Will Not Replace Us” that far-right extremists chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. As the Anti-Defamation League explains: “The slogan is a reference to the popular white supremacist belief that the white race is in danger of extinction by a rising tide of non-whites who are controlled and manipulated by Jews.” This extremist “replacement theory” has fueled murderous acts of hatred around the world, including mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand in 2019.
Motivated by a similar conspiratorial belief, Pharaoh implemented a three-stage policy: first, he imposed a special tax on the Jews in the form of a corvée (forced labor); second, he directed the Jewish midwives Shifrah and Puah to kill all Jewish boys at birth; and third, when the midwives courageously foil his plan, “Pharaoh charged his whole people, saying, ‘Every boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile, and every girl you shall let live’” (Exodus 1:22).
Why does Pharaoh need to “be shrewd”? He was the most powerful ruler in the ancient world. Why not declare open war on the Jews from the outset and destroy them immediately? Summarizing Nachmanides, Leibowitz suggests three reasons: first, Pharaoh needed a pretext to ruthlessly exterminate an entire people, especially one that came to Egypt at the bidding of his predecessor; second, his own subjects would not agree; and third, it would have meant risking an unnecessary confrontation with a strong people. For these reasons, Nachmanides argued, Pharaoh shrewdly formulated his three-stage policy.
Leibowitz writes: “The originality of Ramban’s interpretation lies in his explanation of this command [to kill every male Jewish child]. The text states that Pharaoh commanded ‘all his people’ rather than ‘his princes and servants.’ This was not therefore an official royal edict, but behind-the-scenes provocation. The government gave no order but merely closed its eyes whilst the Egyptian masses ‘spontaneously’ vented their indignation on the foreigners.” Today, too, powerful leaders close their eyes to nativism and xenophobia. But there is a problem with Leibowitz’s interpretation. How do we square it with her earlier suggestion that Pharaoh’s own subjects would not agree to genocide? “He could not suddenly order the indiscriminate slaughter of persons,” she writes, “who had been good neighbors for so long.” (Leibowitz is probably thinking here of Exodus 3:22.)
So what was the provocation that induced Pharaoh’s people to become his willing executioners—so willing that (according to Nachmanides) they searched Jewish homes to take children from there, and things eventually got so out of hand that Pharaoh had to suspend the decree? Perhaps it was Pharaoh’s propaganda depicting them as lazy idlers (Exodus 5:17), but that hardly seems sufficient. Nor can it be the resistance of Shifrah and Puah because Pharaoh arranges things so that he cannot be implicated in the actions he commands them to do. (“Who,” Leibowitz asks, “would be able or dare to point an accusing finger at Pharaoh?”) The answer, I suspect, lies in Joseph’s actions in Parshat Vayigash (Genesis 44:18 - 47:27). In that portion, Egypt’s peasants offered their land and themselves for some of the grain that Joseph had the foresight to stockpile. Joseph accepts, and they consequently become a class of landless, enslaved sharecroppers for Pharaoh. The peasants, we read there, are grateful to be kept alive. But, as I have written elsewhere, it seems likely that their gratitude would eventually turn to resentment, directed not at Pharaoh but at Joseph and his people. A new king in Egypt could easily exploit such resentment.
