NOTES for Exo 5:1-23
The first request by Moses and Aaron to let the people go ended in failure (vv. 1-2). Still, God Himself had told Moses about it in advance when He sent him to Egypt (Exod 3:18-20). Then a completely natural question arises: does this mean that Pharaoh's decision was predetermined in advance?
Still, it does not mean that. The point is something else: God knows Pharaoh's heart, which is transparent to Him just as every human heart is transparent to Him, and therefore He knows that Pharaoh will not simply allow God's people to leave the country. But what prevents Pharaoh? At first Moses does not even speak yet about leaving forever; he asks only to let the people go for three days in order to celebrate their religious festival and then return (vv. 1-4). But even such a request is refused.
Of course, all of this could be explained by administrative and economic considerations alone, since such festivals distract the people from work (vv. 4-5). In addition, there was one more consideration, expressed by Pharaoh himself in the words: "I do not know the Lord" (v. 2). The Egyptian government undoubtedly had to be aware of the threat that national or tribal self-consciousness might awaken among the tribes of the delta, who in that case might well remember other times, when their ancestors came to Egypt as conquerors and a Semitic dynasty sat on the throne of the pharaohs. In such a situation, allowing the Semites to remember their patron gods, and all the more to worship them, would have been rash.
And yet the main reason, apparently, lay elsewhere. It is no accident that immediately after the request made by Moses and Aaron, the discussion turns to idleness, to the idea that the people are evidently not loaded down with enough work, and because of idleness foolish thoughts and absurd ideas begin to enter their heads (vv. 6-9, 17). And here before us is no longer the specific logic of the Egyptian authorities, but the logic proper to every authority in every age. In essence, any state is a social machine, a mechanism that functions all the more reliably and without failure the less its "elements" think about unrelated things. From the point of view of the logic proper to an ideally functioning state machine, it would be best for a person to be an ant or a bee, not because they are small, but because they are ideal worker-functionaries, never distracted from work by anything at all.
But the human being is never so far from what God intended him to be as when he becomes like a bee or an ant. In the greatest sinner the image of God is monstrously distorted; in the human-ant it simply disappears. And therefore the conflict between God and every state is so inescapable: God needs people, the state needs ants.