What Does Exodus 2:23 Mean?

During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. The transition from Moses' Midianite family life to the Exodus begins with two simultaneous events: the death of the Pharaoh who had sought Moses' life, and the groaning of Israel under their slavery.

The phrase "during those many days" marks the long passage of time in which Moses was in Midian while Israel remained in Egypt. The suffering did not pause during Moses' formation. Two separate stories, Moses' preparation and Israel's bondage, have been running in parallel, and verse 23 brings them into the same frame.

The groaning (Hebrew: vayeanchu) and the crying out (vayizaaku) are two different registers of distress: groaning is involuntary, the sound the body makes under unbearable weight; crying out is intentional, a deliberate appeal directed somewhere. Israel's slavery has moved from productive suffering (the suffering that was endured in silence) to the moment of articulated appeal. The cry goes "to God": the text does not specify a formal prayer or a theological confession. The slaves cry out from the weight of their condition, and the direction of the cry is received by God as addressed to him.

The sending upward of the cry to God is the structural moment toward which all of chapter 1 has been building: the oppression accumulates to a point where it becomes a cry, and the cry reaches God. This is the pattern Jesus describes in his parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:7): "Will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them?" Israel cries; God hears; the Exodus begins. The theology of lament is embedded here: the cry of the afflicted is not lost but received, and it moves the divine response into motion.