The narrative opens with a new king who does not know Joseph, a policy of forced labour that fails to reduce the numbers of the Israelites, midwives who defy an order to kill the boys, and a mother who hides her son for three months and then places him in a pitched basket among the reeds of the river. He is drawn out by the daughter of Pharaoh, nursed by his own mother for a fee, and raised in the household that had ordered his death. As a grown man he kills an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, discovers the next day that the act is known, and flees to Midian, where he marries and keeps sheep. The call comes at a bush that burns without being consumed, where he raises objection after objection, is given a name for God that is a form of the verb to be, and is finally given his brother Aaron as a mouthpiece.
The confrontation with Pharaoh runs through ten plagues, each answered by a refusal that the text describes sometimes as Pharaoh hardening his own heart and sometimes as God hardening it, a doubling that has occupied theologians ever since. The final plague is met by a meal eaten in haste with blood on the doorposts, and the departure is by night. The pursuit ends at the sea, which divides for the Israelites and closes over the chariots. The song sung on the far shore is one of the oldest passages of Hebrew poetry preserved in the Bible.