Preaching and Reading the Old Testament Lessons
With this text, there now occurs a long gap of time in the biblical history of Israel. Jacob and Joseph and his eleven brothers and all their offspring have kept their flocks around the fertile delta of the Nile River in the region of Goshen. But as we read in the priestly introduction of Exodus 1:1-7 to our morning's text, all of that generation finally dies, and at the beginning of our lesson, we read the ominous sentence, "Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph."
