Commentary for Exodus 1:6

וכל הדור ההוא, the seventy souls mentioned.

וכל הדור ההוא, all of these 70 souls. None of the members of this group of migrants had assimilated to the Egyptian culture during their lifetime.

-8. וימת יוסף…ובני ישראל פרו, And Joseph died…and the Israelites were fruitful, etc. Why did the Torah have to repeat again that Joseph died? We have heard this at the end of פרשת ויחי. Why do we have to be told that all the other brothers and that whole generation of Israelites who had come to Egypt died? What is the connection between the respective deaths of the brothers and that of the generation and the proliferation of the בני ישראל in the next verse? If this was only a description of the manner in which the Jewish population explosion in Egypt occurred, the Torah should have written: ויפרו וישרצו בני ישראל, instead of ובני ישראל פרו וישרצו. The grammar is wrong here.

וימת יוסף וכל הדור ההוא, “Joseph and his whole generation died.”

V. 6. דור, verwandt mit דבר, תפר: aneinanderreihen; alle gleichzeitig Lebenden, Zeitgenossen.

וכל הדור ההוא, “and that entire generation.” This verse refers to both Israelites and gentiles, as we read immediately afterwards: ויקם מלך חדש על מצרים אשר לא ידע את יוסף, “a new king ascended the throne in Egypt, one who had not known Joseph.”

Ibn Ezra feels that the line וכל הדור ההוא, “and that whole generation,” refers to what follows, i.e. the connection with the following verse that introduces a new ruler in Egypt.

Actually, the two verses must be read in conjunction as describing the beginning of Jewish servitude and its causes. There were a total of four causes that brought about the enslavement of the Jewish people. The first cause was Joseph's death. Had Joseph lived on for some time the Egyptians would never have ruled over his countrymen. The Torah therefore informs us that as long as Joseph was alive the Israelites lived a serene and comfortable life.

The second cause leading to enslavement of the Jewish people was the death of Joseph's brothers. As long as even a single one of these brothers remained alive the Egyptians honoured them as our sages derive in Sotah 13 from Genesis 50,14 which hints that after the Egyptians had become aware of the honour paid by Canaanite kings to Jacob's bier, they began to honour all of Jacob's' sons, something they had not done previously.

The third cause leading to enslavement of the Jewish people was the death of the entire generation of Jewish immigrants, the sixty-six persons who had been born in the land of Canaan. All of these people were regarded as invited guests by the Egyptians, and there was no question of discriminating against them legally. This may also have been due to their being perceived as more intelligent than the local population so that they could outwit anyone planning to take advantage of them.

The fourth and final cause leading to the enslavement of the Jewish population was their unusual fertility. Any of the causes that had restrained the Egyptians from planning some way of keeping the Jewish population increase at bay had now been removed. When we keep this in mind we understand why the Torah wrote: "and the children of Israel had already been fruitful, etc." The Torah did not want to inform us of this detail but to indicate that it now served as a cause of the process of enslavement.

A further cause, one that did not have to do with Joseph, the brothers, or the first generation of Jewish immigrants to Egypt, was the fact that a new Pharaoh arose in Egypt. Even according to the view expressed in Sotah 11 that the word "new" only referred to new legislation designed to subdue the Jewish population, the absence of the four causes already mentioned which had held up discrimination against the Jews also helped to shape Pharaoh's attitude now. The plain meaning of the verse is, of course, that it refers to a brand new Pharaoh, a person who had not known the Joseph who had interpreted the dream of Pharaoh at least 102 years earlier.

Our difficulty is that the Torah only needed to write that the whole generation had died out. Why did the Torah have to refer separately to the death of Joseph, the brothers, and that of the generation? If there had not been enslavement as long as a single one of that generation was alive, there most certainly had not been any enslavement as long as one of the brothers or Joseph himself had been alive!

Perhaps the Torah wanted to describe a gradual deterioration in the status of the Jews in Egypt which commenced with Joseph's death. At that time the Jews who had up to then been considered the elite of Egyptian society were reduced to being no more than equals to the Egyptians at large. Once Joseph's brothers died the social position of the Jews underwent a further deterioration, some Egyptians beginning to detest them. However, they still had not lost their status of legal equality with the rest of the population. Once the last of the surviving Jewish immigrants died, the legal position of the Jews had become sufficiently shaky to enable a new king to legislate against them. The principal reason was that the proliferation of the Jews and the high degree of their visibility throughout the country frightened the local population and they feared that the Jews would eventually try to dominate them.

You may counter that according to the tradition of our sages the Jews did not suffer discrimination as long a single one of the tribal heads was alive, or according to our interpretation even as long as a Jewish immigrant survived. Our sages have not expressed themselves in such absolute terms. We find in chapter three of Seder Olam that 116 years elapsed between the death of Levi until the Exodus. The author adds that the actual enslavement did not last for more than 86 years, i.e. from the birth of Miriam. She was named מרים as a reminder of the מרירות the bitterness which characterised the life of the Jewish people at that time. You see from the above that at the time the last surviving brother of Joseph died, the Jews were still free. I conclude therefore that the enslavement did not commence until after the last of the immigrant Jews had died. The Torah compared these immigrants to the tribal heads because as long as they were alive their very lives protected the Jews against legal discrimination.