Exodus 1:14

Made their lives bitter. Undaunted, the Egyptians put forth yet greater effort to enslave Israel. Verses 13 and 14 do not record a new oppression, but the continuation and intensification of the program of hard labor already in force.

In mortar, and in brick. While stone was the material chiefly employed by the Egyptians for their great temples and other public buildings, brick was used to a large extent for palaces and lesser buildings, for city walls, for forts, for temple enclosures, and for storage houses such as those mentioned in v. 11.

All manner of service. The Hebrews had originally been employed to tend the royal flocks and herds (Gen. 47:6), but later took up agricultural pursuits as well (Deut. 11:10). There is no country where painstaking care and labor are so constantly required throughout the year as in Egypt. The annual flooding of the Nile necessitates extreme watchfulness, to save cattle and to prevent the inundation of houses and villages and the washing away of the river embankments. Cultivation is continuous throughout the year, and success depends on a system of irrigation that requires constant labor and unremitting attention. If the “service in the field” included also the digging of canals (Josephus Antiquities ii. 9.1), the lives of the Hebrews would indeed have been made bitter. To work under the hot Egyptian sun, with no shade and scarcely a breath of wind, from sunrise to sunset, and with the feet in water (Deut. 11:10), is a most grueling experience. When Mehemet Ali built his Alexandrian canal, about the middle of the 19th century, he lost 20,000 laborers out of 150,000. The percentage of loss may have been about the same in ancient times. But so far as Pharaoh was concerned, the more the Hebrews perished, the better it suited his evil purpose.