Exodus 2:25

And God looked upon the children of Israel,.... With an eye of pity and compassion, and saw all the hardships they laboured under, and all the injuries that were done unto them: and God had respect

Heb. Knew them, so as to pity and help them; as words of knowledge are oft used, as 31:7. He who seemed to have rejected them, now owned them for his people, and came for their rescue.

Exodus 2:25 And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect unto [them].Ver. 25. Had respect.] Heb., Knew them. He knew their souls in adversity.

Verse 25. And God had respect unto them.] וידע אלהים vaiyeda Elohim, God knew them, i.e., he approved of them, and therefore it is said that their cry came up before God, and he heard their groaning. The word ידע yada, to know, in the Hebrew Bible, as well as γινωσκω in the Greek Testament, is frequently used in the sense of approving; and because God knew - had respect for and approved of, them, therefore he was determined to deliver them. For אלהים Elohim, GOD, in the last clause of this verse, Houbigant reads אליהם aleyhem, UPON THEM, which is countenanced by the Vulgate, Septuagint, Chaldee, Coptic, and Arabic, and appears to have been the original reading. The difference in the original consists in the interchange of two letters, the י yod and ה he. Our translators insert unto them, in order to make up that sense which this various reading gives without trouble. THE farther we proceed in the sacred writings, the more the history both of the grace and providence of God opens to our view. He ever cares for his creatures, and is mindful of his promise. The very means made use of to destroy his work are, in his hands, the instruments of its accomplishment. Pharaoh orders the male children of the Hebrews to be thrown into the river; Moses, who was thus exposed, is found by his own daughter, brought up as her own son, and from his Egyptian education becomes much better qualified for the great work to which God had called him; and his being obliged to leave Egypt was undoubtedly a powerful means to wean his heart from a land in which he had at his command all the advantages and luxuries of life. His sojourning also in a strange land, where he was obliged to earn his bread by a very painful employment, fitted him for the perilous journey he was obliged to take in the wilderness, and enabled him to bear the better the privations to which he was in consequence exposed. The bondage of the Israelites was also wisely permitted, that they might with less reluctance leave a country where they had suffered the greatest oppression and indignities. Had they not suffered severely previously to their departure, there is much reason to believe that no inducements could have been sufficient to have prevailed on them to leave it. And yet their leaving it was of infinite consequence, in the order both of grace and providence, as it was indispensably necessary that they should be a people separated from all the rest of the world, that they might see the promises of God fulfilled under their own eyes, and thus have the fullest persuasion that their law was Divine, their prophets inspired by the Most High, and that the Messiah came according to the prophecies before delivered concerning him.

25. saw] viz. with attention and sympathy. took knowledge of them] lit. knew (them), i.e. noticed, regarded them: ‘know,’ as Genesis 18:21 (RV.), Amos 3:2, Psalms 1:6; Psalms 37:18 al.

24, 25. God heard… remembered… looked… had respect — Through all those generations of heart-break, to the eye and ear of flesh God had seemed deaf, dumb, dead; yet all the while he remembered his