10. We have to outsmart them, or they’ll increase in number. Then, if war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.”
11. So the Egyptians put slave drivers in charge of them in order to oppress them through forced labor. They built Pithom and Rameses as supply cities for Pharaoh.
12. But the more the Israelites were oppressed, the more they increased in number and spread out. The Egyptians couldn’t stand them ⌊any longer⌋.
13. So they forced the Israelites to work hard as slaves.
14. They made their lives bitter with back-breaking work in mortar and bricks and every kind of work in the fields. All the jobs the Egyptians gave them were brutally hard.
15. Then the king of Egypt told the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah,
16. “When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth, look at the child when you deliver it. If it’s a boy, kill it, but if it’s a girl, let it live.”
17. However, the midwives feared God and didn’t obey the king of Egypt’s orders. They let the boys live.