Denied - Exodus 5:6-23

5:6-23 - Immediately after declining M&A's proposal to "let my people go," Pharaoh doubled down telling the taskmasters of the people, "Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for themselves." It's important to note here that Pharaoh did NOT decrease their daily brick quota, so now not only do they have to make the same number of bricks as before, but now they have to gather a large portion of the buildling materials themselves as well. TB notes that this is an example of a leader totally screwing himself by being stubborn and cruel, noting that because the Hebrews had to now spend so much of their time finding and procuring the straw, they couldn't make hardly any bricks, grinding Egyptian constuction to a halt. Of course the solution to this decrease in end product wasn't to re-evaluate his position, but instead to increase the violence against the workers and it quickly became a "blood from a stone" situation where you can increase the violence all you want but at the end of the day, there just isn't enough time and/or man power to complete the task. TB also notes that some archeological finds from this era has shown buildings that had been made using bricks with traditional straw on the bottom layers but the middle layers of bricks used straw that had been pulled up by the roots and finally, the top layers of bricks had no straw at all.

The Hebrews did not understand why the working conditions had changed so they went to Pharaoh and asked what happened and he answered, "Ye are idle, ye are idle: therefore ye say, Let us go and do sacrifice to the Lord." He promptly and completely throws Moses under the bus here, blaming the whole thing on his request for time to worship God in the desert. Anyone who has any critical thinking skills at all will recognize that as slaves, their entire working situation is wrong and arbitrarily managed by a crazy person, so to blame Moses for this new set of requirements is like a man telling his wife after he beats her "you made me do this," or a corporation taking away your favorite products because of "covid," when it's obvious that they are just doing it to save money and needed an excuse to get rid of these things anyway.

Obviously, this increase in work load didn't go over well with the people and they accepted Pharaoh's reasoning of blaming Moses and went to him and Aaron and said, "Ye have made our savour to be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh," basically saying, "this is your fault." Interestingly, no one thought to themselves, "all of this is Pharaoh's fault, we are slaves," but that perspective must have escaped them. This is Moses' worst nightmare. He told God multiple times that he was not effective enough as a person or speaker to complete this task, but he was convinced to do it anyway, and now that he had done it, not only did Pharaoh not let the people go, but the Hebrew people themselves hate him for it. He prays, "Lord wherefore hast thou so evil entreated this people? why is it thou hast sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he hath done evil to this people; neither hast thou delivered thy people at all."

Maybe it's the gift of hindsight, but I hadn't considered that Moses accepted the job thinking that this was going to be a "one and done" type of situation, maybe because we know how it all plays out and everything that this whole "deliverance" process takes. Moses barely agreed to the task thinking that he was going to have to have one single conversation with Pharaoh, so the fact that not only didn't it work but that it had negative consequences for the people must have been a huge blow to his faith and what little confidence he had. And I don't think that it's so much an ego blow to Moses because honestly he had very little to begin with, but I think this is more of feeling like he personally screwed up the task and felt guilt because the people were now suffering even more. He thought "go talk to Pharaoh and the people will be let free," but because it didn't play out that way he thought that surely it was his fault, so I feel for Moses a little bit.

Incidently, both the IM and TB note the speed with which the Hebrews changed their faith, having gone from praising God for deliverance but then hating Moses when it didn't work out the very first second.