BRAGADAYJAH 176

Once Moses and Aaron got to the people and they agreed to hearken to them, Moses and Aaron went into Pharaoh and delivered the message, “The Lord our God has sent us to tell you, let his people go so that they may go into the wilderness to worship him there.” The message of the two Hebrew boys must have been as strange to the Pharaoh, if not as comical, as if a little 5 year old boy and gone into a bank with a toy gun and said, “O K this is a hold up.” The Pharaoh’s reply tends to bear this out that he treated the request with utter contempt for he said, “Who is your God the Lord that I should obey his voice to let Israel go?” “I know not the Lord neither will I let Israel go.” By his reply, the Pharaoh was not saying that he had never heard of the God of the Hebrews, but rather, that he did not feel inclined to take orders from any one not even a God, whom he neither respects nor fears. After all, he had his own gods and they listen to him, not he to them. Moses and Aaron were well briefed and prepared for the Pharaoh’s reply so they said. “The God of the Hebrews has met with us; let us go we pray thee three days journey into the desert and sacrifice unto the Lord our God, lest he falls upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” The Pharaoh was not going to be intimidated by two scrawny looking Hebrew men, not even if they spoke in the name of some distant God; so he said, “Why do you two come to waste my time and stop the Hebrews from their daily tasks? Get out and get to work. As for the people they are many and since you have come and put these foolish ideas in their heads, they are not working as hard as they used to. Therefore since the people have so much leisure time it would seem they need more work to occupy them so that I am now instructing their task masters to increase their work. And whereas before they were provided with straw from which to make bricks from henceforth they will be required to make the same number of bricks as before; but they would have to also gather straw for themselves; for it would seem the people had too much free time on their hands. That is why they thought to beseech me to give them time off from their work to go sacrifice to their God.” More