When Pharaoh decided to enslave the Israelites, he consulted three advisors. According to Sotah 11a, what happened to each of them perfectly matched the advice they gave.
Balaam recommended the plan. He was later killed by the sword during Israel's war against Midian. Job remained silent—he neither endorsed nor opposed the enslavement. His punishment was suffering—the legendary afflictions recorded in his biblical book. Jethro (Yitro, יתרו) fled in protest. He was rewarded: his descendants sat in the Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish court.
The passage traces the enslavement's escalation step by step. Initially, the Egyptians lured the Israelites into labor with a "soft mouth" (peh rakh, פה רך)—a wordplay embedded in the Hebrew word for "crushing labor" (befarekh, בפרך). Rabbi Elazar explained: they began with gentle persuasion, gradually tightening the chains until freedom was gone entirely.
Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani added that the Egyptians swapped gendered labor—giving men's work to women and women's work to men—to maximize disorientation and humiliation.
The portion of the passage dealing with Miriam establishes a key principle about divine reward. Miriam waited one hour by the Nile to see what would happen to her baby brother Moses (Exodus 2:4). In return, the entire nation of Israel—millions of people—waited seven days for her when she was struck with leprosy (Numbers 12:15). Rava explained: the measure of good is always greater than the measure of punishment. God repays kindness in the same kind, but at a vastly larger scale.