Commentaria in Exodum
PHITHOM AND RAMESSES.—These cities were on the boundaries of the kingdom. For from Ramesse the Hebrews are narrated to have gone out to Socoth, chap. 12:37. Ramesses was perhaps so called from Ramesses, a land in Gessen, which Pharao gave the Hebrews to dwell in, Gen. 47:11. So St. Jerome (or whoever the author is: for in Smyrna St. Jerome himself is cited) in the Hebrew Places; or certainly, as Abulensis will have it, from this city Ramesse the whole region was called Ramesses: as in Gen. 47:11 the land is called Ramesse by prolepsis, which was afterwards called Ramesses from this city: this city Abulensis and others will have it was afterwards called the City of the Heroes.
Whence Genes. 46:28 and 29, where Joseph is said to have met his father Jacob in Gessen, or Ramesse, the Septuagint have, at the city of the Heroes. The same they then hold to have been called the district of the Arsenoites, and finally Thebes and the Thebaid, famed for the dwelling of so many Monks and for its monasteries; although Adrichomius distinguishes all these and sets down three different cities, namely Ramesses, Thebes and the city of the Heroes. Wrongly does the Jerusalem Targum render, for Phithom and Ramesses, Tanis and Pelusium. The Hebrews relate that the Jews laboured so sluggishly in these cities that they passed into a proverb; for of a lazy man they say: “This is Phithom and Ramesses.”
The Septuagint add that the Hebrews built Heliopolis. This is suspected by St. Jerome in the Places, because Heliopolis had been built before, as is plain Gen. 41:45. But it may be answered that this was another Heliopolis: or, if it was the same, that it was overthrown by some accident and rebuilt by the Hebrews, or so enlarged that it seemed a new city.
Tropologically, Phithom in Hebrew is the same as “failing mouth” or “mouth of the abyss.” Ramesse is commotion or trampling. Pharao, that is, the demon, bids these be built, that the sinner at death may hear with Lucifer that word of Isaias 14:11: “Under thee shall the moth be strewed, and worms shall be thy covering.” See Origen and Rupert. Whence also St. Bernard in the Sentences: “Threefold,” he says, “is the refuge of the wicked: the teaching of deceitful fallacy, which is Phithom; the fortification of worldly power, which is Ramesse; the figure of feigned justice, which is the city of the Sun. These Pharao bids be built.”
12. THE MORE THEY OPPRESSED THEM, THE MORE THEY WERE MULTIPLIED.—St. Augustine notes, book 18 On the City of God, chap. 7, that this happened not naturally but by divine power; for nature, dried up, straitened and suppressed by excessive labour and anguish, could not supply moisture and vital spirit for begetting so many offspring: so the greater the work and trouble with which both body and soul were oppressed, the less fit it was for generation. Here God redeems the faith he gave to Abraham, even if the order of things once fixed must be changed, that all the Israelites may learn to place their firmest hope in his most high providence. Again, see how virtue grows when stirred by adversities, which in prosperity languishes and withers. The Hebrew signifies this more clearly, which for “were multiplied” has jiphrots, that is, they burst forth. For as water, or a river, the more it is confined and shut in, struggles out with the greater force and abundance, breaks through embankments and barriers and bursts forth: so here also the children of Israel, pressed by the Egyptians, struggled out and burst forth with greater force and abundance.
Morally, learn here that servitude does not harm the pious and faithful but benefits them; and that those who serve God freely and are dear to him, though they be slaves, are nevertheless free. So Bion said, “Good slaves are free, but the wicked, though freedmen, serve many desires”; and Sophocles: “Though the body be a slave, yet the mind is free.” Diogenes, sold into slavery, being asked what he knew, answered: “I know how to rule free men.” And that man freed him, and handing his sons over to him said: “Take my children, whom you may rule.” A. Gellius is witness, book 2; whence Seneca, epist. 28: “He who has despised servitude,” he says, “is free in any crowd of masters.” Terence was a slave, and learned with no slavish mind, and wrote comedies in no slavish style, whereby he merited both freedom and a place among the leaders of the poets. Plato, carried into slavery because he was a philosopher, was greater than the man who bought him. The mind is greater than any fortune, and in a servile body a free mind dwells. The senate-house rejects a slave, but virtue, industry and fidelity do not. Tiro was Cicero’s slave, but by these arts he gained freedom and left to posterity an elegant book on his patron’s jests. Among the faithful, the hermit Serapion was noble, who sold himself for a small price, that being made a slave he might by his virtue and wisdom convert his master and lead him, freed from the slavery of sin, to true liberty. Nobler was St. Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, who gave himself into slavery to the Vandals for the widow’s son, and by his virtue and prophecy obtained from the king freedom for all his fellow-citizens. That Malchus whose life St. Jerome wrote was a slave, whose chastity in marriage was vindicated by a lion and asserted into freedom: for the lion killed his master as he pursued Malchus in flight, and so Malchus escaped free. Finally, there was that saying of Cato, whom Cicero celebrates: “The wise man alone is free.”
13. AND THE EGYPTIANS HATED THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL.—As if he said: Hence, or for this reason, they hated them, because they saw them increase so; the Hebrew is jakutsu, that is, they were pricked (for kots signifies a thorn, because it pricks), namely with grief, envy, anguish, sadness, disgust and hatred; and, as the Chaldee has it, they were troubled and distressed because of the children of Israel. Hence it is plain that the Egyptians envied the Hebrews’ increase and prosperity; and that their hatred arose not only from fear but also from envy. Josephus expressly teaches this, and David too.
AND AFFLICTED THEM, MOCKING THEM.—The Hebrew is, and they made the children of Israel serve in hardness, or cruelty, that is, they treated and used them tyrannically as slaves: for it is the height of tyranny and cruelty to mock him whom you oppress; rightly therefore our version has, mocking them.
14. AND WITH ALL KIND OF SERVICE, WHEREWITH THEY WERE OVERLAID IN THE WORKS OF THE EARTH.—The Hebrew is, in all the work of the field, that is in all rustic work; their servitude was hard and cruel, pitiless and tyrannical. Hence it seems that Pharao distributed the Hebrews through the whole of Egypt, so that in fields and farms everywhere, as rustics and slaves, they did all the rustic works, and he imposed the heaviest on them, and forced them to labour like asses.
15. AND THE KING OF EGYPT SPOKE TO THE MIDWIVES OF THE HEBREWS.—This is the second tyranny and tyrannical cunning, greater than the former servitude, labour and oppression, by which Pharao tries to extinguish the offspring of the Hebrew nation, and that by the work of midwives, by whose art the life of offspring is wont to be preserved, says Origen here, hom. 9. The Hebrews suppose these midwives were Hebrews, and so does St. Augustine, book Against Lying, chap. 15. But it seems truer that they were Egyptians. So Josephus, Hugh of St. Victor, Abulensis, Oleaster and others. For the tyrant would not have believed that Hebrew women could so easily be persuaded to rage against their own nation. Again, they themselves sufficiently indicate that they served the Egyptian women in childbirth, and were Egyptians, when they say: “The Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women: before we come to them (the Hebrews, namely), they are delivered”; hence their piety was the more laudable.
ONE WAS CALLED SEPHORA, THE OTHER PHUA.—These two were the more famous, and as it were chiefs of the others, through whom Pharao took care that this his command should be made known to the rest. The Jews relate, and Lyranus among them, that these two were Jochabed and her daughter Mary, namely the sister of Moses; and that therefore God built them two houses, namely the priestly and the royal: for of Jochabed were born priests, namely Moses and Aaron; but of Mary were born kings, because Mary married Caleb, prince of the house of Juda, in which was the sceptre and the royal family. But these are fables and inventions of the Jews: for, to pass over other things, Mary was then only a little girl of six or seven years at most: how then could she be a midwife?
16. AND THE TIME OF DELIVERY IS COME.—The Hebrew is, when you see upon obnaim. Obnaim is either the chair of the woman in labour, as the Hebrews commonly explain; or rather, since it is dual and derives from the root bana, that is, to build, it signifies the two hinges of the womb, in which first the embryo is formed, as an earthen vessel is formed on the potter’s wheel, which is thence called by a kindred word ophnaim. Secondly, by which as by doors the infant comes forth and proceeds into the light: for the womb is as it were the edifice or house of the embryo. The sense is: when you see the infant upon obnaim, that is upon the doors of the womb, that is, when you see a male infant coming forth from the mother’s womb. Whence the Septuagint render, “when you shall be midwives to the Hebrews, and they are at the birth”; and Vatablus clearly, when you see them in travail bringing forth a son. Hence it is plain that these midwives were commanded to kill the males of the Hebrews not after the birth but in the very birth: secretly suffocating, pressing or strangling them, that so they might conceal the matter from the mothers, as though they had borne them dead or dying, a cunning counsel indeed, lest the mothers should perceive the plot and be able to guard against it. So Abulensis and Lipomanus.