Exodus Chapter 1, Verse 10
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10: Come on, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and
it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they
join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get
them up out of the land.
10: come then, let us deal craftily with them, lest at any time they be increased, and whensoever war shall happen to us, these also shall be added to our enemies, and having prevailed against us in war, they will depart out of the land.
"Let us deal wisely with them," i.e., act craftily towards them. התחכּם, sapiensem se gessit (Eccl 7:16), is used here of political craftiness, or worldly wisdom combined with craft and cunning (κατασοφισώμεθα, lxx), and therefore is altered into התנכּל in Ps 10525 (cf. Gen 37:18). The reason assigned by the king for the measures he was about to propose, was the fear that in case of war the Israelites might make common cause with his enemies, and then remove from Egypt. It was not the conquest of his kingdom that he was afraid of, but alliance with his enemies and emigration. עלה is used here, as in Gen 13:1, etc., to denote removal from Egypt to Canaan. He was acquainted with the home of the Israelites therefore, and cannot have been entirely ignorant of the circumstances of their settlement in Egypt. But he regarded them as his subjects, and was unwilling that they should leave the country, and therefore was anxious to prevent the possibility of their emancipating themselves in the event of war. - In the form תּקראנה for תּקרינה, according to the frequent interchange of the forms הל and אל (vid., Gen 42:4), nh is transferred from the feminine plural to the singular, to distinguish the 3rd pers. fem. from the 2nd pers., as in Jdg 5:26; Job 17:16 (vid., Ewald, §191c, and Ges. §47, 3, Anm. 3). Consequently there is no necessity either to understand מלחמה collectively as signifying soldiers, or to regard תּקראנוּ drager ot , the reading adopted by the lxx (συμβῆ ἡμῖν), the Samaritan, Chaldee, Syriac, and Vulgate, as "certainly the original," as Knobel has done.
