GOD ENSLAVED THE JEWS

Siegfried then makes this crack about God choosing the Jews and then having them enslaved for 400 years. And he asks if God cares about them.

Well, think about this. God has to get the Jews from clan size to nation size in order for them to be an identifiable cohesive culture. So he removes them from the populations of Canaan, where if they stayed, they'd intermarry and the unique calling of a unique people would be lost. To affect this, he sends Joseph ahead and tests him. Once Joseph shows his mettle, God makes him the de facto ruler of Egypt, and gets the rest of the clan there through a famine. Egyptians love Joseph but they hate shepherds, exactly what the Jews are, so the Egyptians give them Goshen, a plot of land in the northeastern Nile delta region where they are segregated from the rest of Egypt. Now God has them in a place where they can become a nation while being separated from the pagan cultures of Canaan to the north and east and the pagan culture of Egypt to the west and south.

So why slavery? Two possible reasons: one, oppression unifies the oppressed; they see themselves more clearly as one body, as an identifiable whole. And once knowing the struggles of slavery, they would be hungry for freedom and independent nation-building, exactly their next step. Think of it like a butterfly extricating itself from the chrysalis. This difficult exercise removes the moisture from its wings, an absolutely necessary step. If this step is missed, the butterfly's development is stunted; it will never fly. God thought that through, as he always does.

(Flagpole number 8...)