Often she’d seen Pharaoh’s daughter and her maidservants bathe in a pool sheltered by reeds. NARRATOR: Now there was a Hebrew mother named Jocheved. Furious, Pharaoh ordered his soldiers to find every firstborn Hebrew boy and cast him into the Nile. NARRATOR: So Pharaoh set taskmasters over the Israelites, hoping to deplete their vigor with hard labor. But the midwives thwarted Pharaoh’s order. NARRATOR: So Pharaoh assigned two Hebrew midwives - Shiprah and Puah - with the terrible task of killing all the Hebrew boy babies at birth. PHARAOH: Our land teems with Israelites! Should war break out, they could easily side with the enemy. And this Pharaoh feared the Israelites’ numbers. But hundreds of years later, a Pharaoh came to power who didn’t know of Joseph and his legacy. NARRATOR: This love extended to his tribe - the Hebrews, or Israelites. As Joseph’s brilliant rationing strategies spared Egypt the worst of the famine, he was revered by the Egyptians. NARRATOR: When a severe famine ravaged the area, Joseph reconciled with his brothers and brought his extended family from Canaan, settling them in Goshen, one of Egypt’s most fertile regions.
His extraordinary ability to interpret dreams eventually won his freedom and rose to prominence in Egypt. Originally from Canaan, Joseph had been sold into slavery by his jealous brothers.
NARRATOR: Four hundred years before the Exodus, a Hebrew named Joseph lived in the land of Egypt. The following text is excerpted from “ The Bronfman Haggadah,” written by Edgar Bronfman with illustrations by Jan Aronson (Rizzoli, 2012).
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