“Get You Forth”
Imagine the sudden confusion that must have followed upon Pharaoh’s surrender, his cry of “Get you forth.” Then to all the awful tumult of that night of death, was added the tumult of departing Israel. “And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people that they might send them out of the land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men.
“And the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading troughs being bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders.” Therefore it is that their descendants still eat unleavened bread at the time of the “Passover” feast of commemoration.
The artist has tried to suggest to us in his picture all the confusion, the wailing in one place, the bustle in another. Even a dog lies stricken, and, as one biblical passage specially reminds us, “the captive that was in the dungeon.” Pharaoh, in the center, cries out in despair to Moses and Aaron, while those two alone stand firm amid the uproar, Aaron pointing up toward God, and Moses leaning on his staff, ready, as he had bidden his people be, for the departure.
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