על חיי משה, ספר א ז׳On the Life of Moses, Book I 7
א׳
1[32] But Moses, having reached the very pinnacle of human prosperity, regarded as the son of the king’s daughter, and in general expectation almost the successor to his grandfather’s sovereignty, and indeed regularly called the young king, was zealous for the discipline and culture of his kinsmen and ancestors. The good fortune of his adopters, he held, was a spurious one, even though the circumstances gave it greater lustre; that of his natural parents, though less distinguished for the nonce,
ב׳
2[33] was at any rate his own and genuine; and so, estimating the claims of his real and his adopted parents like an impartial judge, he requited the former with good feeling and profound affection, the latter with gratitude for their kind treatment of him. And he would have continued to do so throughout had he not found the king adopting in the country a new and highly impious course of action. The Jews,
ג׳
3[34] as I have said before, were strangers, since famine had driven the founders of the nation, through lack of food, to migrate to Egypt from Babylon and the inland satrapies. They were, in a sense, suppliants, who had found a sanctuary in the pledged faith of the king and the pity felt for them by the inhabitants.
ד׳
4[35] For strangers, in my judgement, must be regarded as suppliants of those who receive them, and not only suppliants but settlers and friends who are anxious to obtain equal rights with the burgesses and are near to being citizens because they differ little from the original inhabitants.
ה׳
5[36] So, then, these strangers, who had left their own country and come to Egypt hoping to live there in safety as in a second fatherland, were made slaves by the ruler of the country and reduced to the condition of captives taken by the custom of war, or persons purchased from the masters in whose household they had been bred. And in thus making serfs of men who were not only free but guests, suppliants and settlers, he showed no shame or fear of the God of liberty and hospitality and of justice to guests and suppliants, Who watches over such as these.
ו׳
6[37] Then he laid commands upon them, severe beyond their capacity, and added labour to labour; and, when they failed through weakness, the iron hand was upon them; for he chose as superintendents of the works men of the most cruel and savage temper who showed no mercy to anyone, men whose name of “task-pursuer” well described the facts.
ז׳
7[38] Some of the workers wrought clay into brick, while others fetched from every quarter straw which served to bind the brick. Others were appointed to build houses and walls and cities or to cut canals. They carried the materials themselves day and night, with no shifts to relieve them, no period of rest, not even suffered just to sleep for a bit and then resume their work. In fact, they were compelled to do all the work, both of the artisan and his assistants, so that in a short time loss of heart was followed necessarily by bodily exhaustion.
ח׳
8[39] This was shown by the way in which they died one after the other, as though they were the victims of a pestilence, to be flung unburied outside the borders by their masters, who did not allow the survivors even to collect dust to throw upon the corpses or even to shed tears for their kinsfolk or friends thus pitifully done to death. And, though nature has given to the untrammelled feelings of the soul a liberty which she has denied to almost everything else, they impiously threatened to exert their despotism over these also and suppressed them with the intolerable weight of a constraint more powerful than nature.