Commentaria in Exodum
They are tempted. Whence? Cassian also, Conf. 21, chap. 27, relates that the elder Fathers in the desert observed by experience that in the heavy days of Lent, in which men are wont to be converted to better things, and monks to more perfect ones, then the monks are more grievously and sharply than usual assailed by demons, and are urged to go out from the monasteries and desert solitude.
Note secondly: God wills that in the benefits promised by Himself we be ready for temptations; therefore when He gives anyone great hope, He soon tempts him by things that seem to bring despair, and seem to wish to pull down the hope He gave, or to make it doubtful and uncertain. So God promised Abraham most numerous offspring through Isaac, and soon bade Isaac be sacrificed to Him. So He bade the Hebrews fight with the Benjamites, and soon permitted them to be beaten by them a second time, Judges chap. 20. So here He promised Moses and the Hebrews deliverance from Pharao, and soon permitted them to be more heavily afflicted by the same.
20. AND THEY MET MOSES AND AARON, WHO STOOD.—“Going out” is to be referred not to Moses and Aaron, but to the overseers returning; Moses was waiting at a certain place, eager to know what answer they had brought. Our Interpreter also sufficiently intimates this, when he says that Moses and Aaron stood; for to stand while going out is strictly impossible. The sense, then, is: the overseers of the Hebrews, after their complaint, going out from Pharao, met Moses and Aaron, who stood opposite, that they might see and learn the whole matter.
21. THE LORD SEE AND JUDGE.—In Hebrew is added: Upon you, that is, let Him take vengeance on you. So the Chaldee. For the Hebrews often by metonymy take judgment for the end and term of judgment, so that to judge is the same as to avenge, and judgment the same as vengeance. Behold the weak and ungrateful faith of the people: Moses and Aaron, whom a little before they had believed to be deliverers, they now slander as murderers.
YOU HAVE MADE OUR ODOUR TO STINK BEFORE PHARAO—you have made us hateful and abominable to Pharao: it is a metaphor. The same phrase is found in the Apostle, 2 Cor. 2: “We are the good odour of Christ,” because we spread the good fame of Christ and of Christianity, that men may think well of us and of Christ and speak accordingly. “For morals have their colours, and have their odours; the colour in conscience, the odour in fame,” says St. Bernard, serm. 71 on the Canticles.
You have given him occasion to crush us with burdens, when you stirred him up to rage against us. Note: In Scripture “sword” is called whatever pierces, strikes, torments or crucifies, says St. Jerome on Isaias 66. Hence Amos 9:10, where it is said: “All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword.” And Psalm 7, verse 13: “Unless you will be converted, he will brandish his sword.”
Learn from this chapter how hard was the servitude of the Hebrews in Egypt, and consequently how great a benefit God conferred on them when He led them out from thence; which is therefore everywhere impressed upon them, that they may be grateful to God, and love and worship Him: “I,” He says, “am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of the Egyptians, that you should not serve them, and who broke the chains of your necks, that you might walk upright,” Leviticus 26:13. For servitude is a kind of death, namely the loss of civil life, that is, of liberty: hence the nations fight for it, and would rather die than serve. King Philip, breaking into the Spartan country, said to a certain Spartan: What will you do now, Lacedaemonians? He answered him: “What else but die bravely? For we alone of the Greeks have learned to be free and not to obey others.”
After the defeat suffered under their leader Agis, when Antipater demanded fifty boys as hostages, Eteocles the Ephor said he would not give them, lest they be badly brought up, and, falling away from the institutions of their country, become a trouble to the state; but he offered, if he wished, twice the number of old men or women. And when Antipater threatened dreadful things unless they were given, he answered in the name of the public: “If you command things harder than death, it will be easier for us to die.” Hence a Laconian, being asked what he knew, said: “I know how to be free”: so Plutarch in his Laconian Sayings.
22. AND MOSES RETURNED TO THE LORD.—The Septuagint renders it, was turned to the Lord; for since Moses saw the overseers of the Hebrews harshly received by Pharao, afflicted and agitated by excessive passion, and therefore incapable of correction, he was silent, withdrew into his own secret place, and, as his custom was, turned in prayer to God, the one refuge in distress. Hence St. Basil wisely, in his sermon On Giving Thanks to God, prescribes the manner of consoling the afflicted, saying: “Let him whom you wish to console first complain for a little. Then, when his grief is a little allayed by tears and lamentation, you will gently and kindly rebuke him, and so by degrees recall him to patience and tranquillity of mind. For even the tamers of horses, when the horses do not at all obey the bit, do not straightway restrain them with the reins, or drive them with spurs: for so the riders learn to be shaken and thrown; but by yielding to them at first, and not resisting at all, when they see the anger and impetuosity gradually spent and failing, then by a certain art, obeying them, they make them docile in all things.”
Again, see here how the patience and invincible constancy of Moses overcame the murmurs of the Hebrews, and made them obedient to him. Let the faithful hear the admonition of St. Augustine, sermon 18 on the Words of the Lord: “When any Christian,” he says, “begins to live well, to be fervent in good works, and to despise the world, in the very newness of his works he suffers reprovers and opponents in cold Christians. But if he persevere and overcome them by enduring, and fall not away from good works, the very same who before forbade will yield obedience to us.”
LORD, WHY HAST THOU AFFLICTED THIS PEOPLE?—Why hast Thou given occasion of their affliction by sending me to Pharao, and yet not delivering the people by him, but rather permitting them to be more heavily burdened?
WHY HAST THOU SENT ME?—Calvin here severely blames Moses, as though he had fallen away from his duty, and in bitter weariness asked for his mission to be ended and to be released from his office. A harsh critic indeed; a milder judge is St. Augustine, Quest. 14, when he says: “These are not words of contumacy or indignation, but of inquiry and prayer.” And that this is so is plain from the Lord’s answer, who does not charge Moses with unbelief, but instructs him what he ought to do. Moses knew, having been taught before by God, that Pharao would harden his heart and not let the people go; yet of this affliction of the people he had learned nothing from God, and hoped that Pharao, once warned, though he would not let the people go, would yet deal more mildly with them; but seeing that the contrary had now happened, he piously expostulates with God.