What Does Exodus 1:10 Mean?

"Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." Pharaoh's political strategy begins with the word "shrewdly" (Hebrew: nithchakemah, from chakhám, to be wise). The irony is thick: Pharaoh uses wisdom language to describe a plan that will: destroy Egypt while leaving Israel intact. Every strategy Pharaoh employs to prevent Israel's escape will accelerate the conditions that make the Exodus necessary and inevitable. The "shrewd" plan of verse 10 is the beginning of a disastrously unwise series of escalations.

The fear that animates Pharaoh's strategy is that Israel might "escape from the land." This is the word alah, meaning to go up or out. It is the same root used throughout Exodus for the Exodus itself: "bring up my people out of Egypt." What Pharaoh fears in verse 10 is exactly what God will accomplish in chapter 14. The thing Pharaoh schemes to prevent is the thing God is already planning to do. Every verse of Pharaoh's suppression strategy is written under the shadow of a divine plan that Pharaoh cannot see and cannot stop.

Paul describes God's purposes in Romans 9:17: "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth." He is quoting Exodus 9:16, where God addresses Pharaoh directly. The king whose first words in Exodus are "let us deal shrewdly" will become, against his own intentions, the instrument through which God's name is proclaimed across the ancient world. The wisdom that opposes the covenant becomes the means of the covenant's greatest declaration.