It is time you heard the truth about Moses. Come closer. Listen carefully. First, regarding Egypt: the stories are mostly lies. It is true that the Hebrew people had been settled for generations in the Land of Goshen, on the eastern fringe of the Delta where the great swamp marches with the desert, but that is almost the only true thing that has been taught about their time in Egypt. They were not exactly Egyptians—they were habiru to the valley people, meaning migrant laborers—but they are not slaves, either. Their men found work, good work, in the brickyards and pharaoh-sized construction projects that took shape in the season of inundation. Some of it was paid labor and some was corvée, labor donated in lieu of taxes for the privilege of living under the protection of Pharaoh. Meantime the women stayed in Goshen tending flocks and fields, and bearing hordes of plump babies. Food was plentiful and cheap. The famines that afflicted Canaan passed them by. If they were in bondage at all, it was a bondage to their own homesteads and gardens, not to the Egyptians, and the only walls that hemmed them in were the ones they built ourselves. At times they may have yearned after their heroic past, when their miscellaneous forefathers wandered the deserts freely and slept in goathair tents under the stars, but that harmless nostalgia was as far as they went.