Exodus 1:13-14

13, 14. The nature of their toil is here more fully described .

Hard bondage Rather, hard labour in clay and bricks, and all (kind of) service in the field. They were not made house-servants, or employed as artisans in any kind of skilled labour, but were set at the coarse work of brick-making for the great public buildings, canal digging, raising water from the river for irrigation, which is specially toilsome in Egypt, and similar rough outdoor labours. This remark applies only to this time of special oppression. Josephus says that they built the pyramids; but the great pyramids are made of stone, and were standing when Joseph went down into Egypt. A vast amount of brick was required for the walls of cities, fortresses, temple-courts, and private as well as public buildings. They were made of the Nile mud mixed with straw, and of clay without straw, baked in the sun, and their manufacture was a government monopoly. Immense piles of these bricks the ruins of ancient works, many of them stamped with the hieroglyphs of the Pharaohs are now found in the land of Goshen.

The opposite engraving represents a painting at Thebes, in the tomb of an officer of Thothmes III., of the eighteenth dynasty, and delineates all the processes of Egyptian brick-making, foreign captives being the labourers, directed by Egyptian task-masters.

It is a noteworthy fact, that, in an inscription of the twenty-second year of Amosis, alien labourers of some pastoral nation, like the Israelites, are described as carrying blocks of limestone from the Rufu quarries to Memphis. This, like the opposite picture, shows that events precisely like those narrated in the text were, according to the best chronology, transpiring in Egypt at the time when the Israelites were there.