Sounds like multiple generations living in slavery here. I'm imagining people who lived as slaves in "bitter and hard service" for their entire lives. I wonder what it was like trying to trust God in that. Did they have hope their children or their children's children would be saved from their own fate? Did they live a hundred years on that hope?

I'm wondering where God was in the first couple paragraphs which must have spanned a long time. It's so interesting to me the way God is so involved sometimes in the most minute details to protect someone or help the people out somehow and then apparently absent as they are going from massive blessing and being overtaken by the Egyptians put into slavery and subject to the murder of their children. At some point, God steps in. Is it because the midwives feared him? Is the burden on us or does God guide us even in our ignorance or maybe even disobedience.