Sensible Madness

After convincing the Israelites the whole "mission from God" thing was legit, Moses’ next task was to try and convince Pharaoh. So, he went in to Pharaoh and told him the God of Israel wanted him to let his people go, so that they could go have a feast out in the wilderness.

Pharaoh, looking at Moses as if he had three heads, said he didn’t know any "God of Israel," and he wasn’t about to release his workforce for anyone, much less some weird guy with a pet snake and an intermittently leprous hand.

Moses, deciding the hard sell wasn’t going to work, tried appealing to Pharaoh’s soft side instead. He said that all he really wanted was for the Hebrews to go out and spend three days in the wilderness sacrificing sheep and whatnot. If they didn’t do this, God would almost certainly kill several of them, and give various nasty diseases to others, and surely Pharaoh didn’t want that on his conscience.

Pharaoh, deciding enough was enough, told Moses and Aaron to shut up and get back to work. Further, he decided that the only possible reason the Israelites could be thinking of going off and hanging out in the forest for three days was because they didn’t have enough work to do. So, he ordered his men to stop giving them straw to make bricks, and instead make them gather their own straw. Of course, they would still be required to make the same number of bricks as always, and be beaten if they didn’t make quota.

Not surprisingly, the average number of beatings per day (a key metric in any pyramid-building contract) went way up. The leaders of the Israelites came to Pharaoh demanding to know why he was suddenly ratcheting up the floggings. Pharaoh told them it was because they clearly needed more work, since they were spending entirely too much time thinking of crazy ideas like feasting in the wilderness. The people went and told Moses this, and Moses went to bitch to God about it. Moses asked God why he hated the Israelites so much that he would ask them to do these things that just ended up making things worse for them, and why the hell he hadn’t delivered his people from slavery yet.