Exodus 3

Exodus 3:8

So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite.

I honestly never really understood the imagery of a land flowing with milk and honey. Maybe the cultural background for an American is too far separated from the time, but I just don't see someplace with huge abundances of milk and honey to be a good spot to live. Milk would be okay, except for it to be flowing means a huge overabundance of livestock taking up all the nice places to live. And flowing with honey would be fine, except that means having a huge number of bees around, which I hate.

Also, this verse caught my attention because of the description of the land's current inhabitants. Normally, when we hear of the Promised Land, we hear it described as the land of Canaan. Maybe it's because I just finished a Sunday School class on Joshua, but it's passages like this that really show the significance and size of the land they're going to take. Here you're talking about 1 nation (Israel) taking over the land that's held by at least six nations. In the time of city-states and tight clan relationships, one nation isn't normally very big. But when you start listing off the peoples you're going to remove, you get a feeling of how big a place this will be, and also the huge power that you will have to have to defeat them. After all, it's not likely they'll just decide to sell out to you and move elsewhere. So God's setting Moses up with a not-insignificant task here.

Exodus 2

Exodus 2:23

Now it came about in the course of those many days that the king of Egypt died. And the sons of Israel sighed because of the bondage, and they cried out; and their cry for help because of their bondage rose up to God.

The chronology of this verse interests me. It appears to say that the Israelites did not seem to despair of their enslavement until after the king had died. What happened at this point to make them suddenly cry out? Did the new pharaoh make their work harder? Was this the first king's death since they'd been enslaved, and they were hoping his heir would be kinder to them? Something had to have been different with the new ruler, and I wonder what it was.

Also, why did their cries only now rise to God? Had they not been praying for deliverance before this? Had they forgotten about God altogether, and been subsumed by the Egyptian culture? Or was he just seen as one among the many Gods of the Egyptians, and they finally rotated through asking the rest until they got to him? They appear to remember Joseph, for they later would take his bones with them, but how much of what he did or God's power had been lost to the centuries? These people may have forgotten all about what God had done for Abraham and his descendants, and now they were going to receive new evidence that they were His people.