And he saw our affliction- this refers to refraining from marital relations: The Torah reads the expressions, “affliction,” “hard labor,” and “oppression” in a counter intuitive way. Literally, what the verse tells us is that first, Pharaoh, “oppressed” the Israelites by making their life unbearable; then he “imposed hard labor” upon them by forcing them to perform tasks they couldn’t complete; and finally, Pharaoh “afflicted them” by beating them and forcing them to complete these tasks. So why didn’t the Torah reverse the order of these expressions. It should have been: “our oppressing, our hard labor and our affliction.” That is, the Haggadah explains, what each of these expressions implies. “Our affliction” refers to the forced separation of couples. Some explain the expression “They saw our affliction” to mean that the Egyptians forbade the Israelite men from sleeping in their own homes so that they should be up and out early in the morning. This explanation is forced since we are not told that Pharaoh made such a decree, and if it was his intention to separate the men and women, he could have simply forbade them from marrying one another. Some of the commentators have suggested that the men voluntarily separated themselves from their wives so that they would not give birth to infants who would then be thrown in the Nile by the Egyptians. But this explanation is also difficult for we learn that when Amram divorced his wife following the Egyptian decree against the babies, Miriam convinced him to remarry Yocheved. As a result all the men took their wives back – suggesting that there was no “forced separation” of men and women except for a short period of time. The Haggadah suggests here that the forced separation lasted throughout the period of oppression. Rather, it may be that the men chose not to dwell in their homes so that they would not feel desirous of their wives. In this way the Egyptians would not be suspicious of the Israelite women and check to see if they were pregnant. The Egyptians would say that the Israelite men did not go to their homes so they could go quickly to work each day. The Israelite women knew that they would not be redeemed until they had given birth to 600,000 children. What did these righteous women do? They would take two buckets to the well. They would draw out two buckets, one filled with water and the other with little fish. They would then go to the field to visit their husbands. They would help them wash and then they would feed them; then they would engage in intimate relations. When they became pregnant the women would go to their homes, and when the time to give birth, they would go and give birth in the field, as Rabbi Akiva explains.¹⁶⁹ It is to this story that the expression “And He saw our affliction” is referring. “God saw” what the Israelites were doing. And “God knew” is a reference to God’s knowledge of their relations, as in the verse, “Adam knew his wife.”¹⁷⁰ Only God knew what the Israelite men and women were doing.

footnotes: ¹⁶⁹ BT Sotah 11b ¹⁷⁰ Genesis 4:1