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The book is full of parallels between the two narratives. Here are a few examples:
First memories of slave beatings
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Exodus
"He (Moses) went out to his kinsfolk and witnessed their labors, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen" (Exodus 2:11).
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Emancipation
Frederick Douglass described his earliest memory of his aunt being whipped.
"The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush;"
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Charge of Laziness
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Exodus
Pharaoh "You are lazy, lazy! Therefore you say Let us go and bring offerings to God" (Exodus 5:17).
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Emancipation
One European visitor to the American South in the 1780s commented, "The white men . . . are all the time complaining that the blacks will not work, and they themselves do nothing."
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Fear of Slave Uprising
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Exodus
"And he (Pharaoh) said to his people, Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground" (Exodus 1:9-10).
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Emancipation
Benjamin Martyn wrote, referring to South Carolina, "The greater number of blacks, which a frontier has, and the greater the disproportion is between them and her white people, the more the danger she is liable to; for those are all secret enemies, and are ready to join with her open ones on the first occasion. In Mississippi in the late 1850s, the increasing number of slaves "was now felt to be so alarmingly great that many people never lay down at night without fears that their throats might be cut in this sleep."
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Double Consciousness
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Exodus
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik "Abraham [the first Hebrew] was never fundamentally uprooted from the place where he made a covenant with the Creator and accepted his mission to humanity. When he crossed the river to a new land, he became its faithful citizen� He built tents, reared sheep, conducted negotiations with kings and princes and made covenants with them. He learned their language, paid taxes, and when necessary defended the country. But at the very same time he lived on the other side of the river, in those wide open spaces where God and he had met."
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Emancipation
W. E. B. Du Bois, "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of other�. One feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
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Broken spirit
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Exodus
"So Moses spoke accordingly to the Children of Israel; but they did not heed Moses, because of shortness of breath and hard work" (Exodus 6:9). The descriptor "shortness of breath" is akin to our term "broken spirit."
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Emancipation
Frederick Douglass "Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute."
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Steadfast and Honest Slave
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Exodus
Joseph's precipitous fall from grace came as a result of his refusal to yield to the entreaties of his master's wife: "Look, with me here, my master gives no thought to anything in this house, and all that he owns he has placed in my hands. He wields no more authority in this house than I, and he has withheld nothing from me except yourself, since you are his wife.
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Emancipation
Shelby, Tom's owner, described him as "steady, honest, [someone who] manages my whole farm like a clock." He characterized Tom's integrity as deeply rooted in religion, and therefore he had no fear of trusting Tom just as Potiphar had trusted Joseph. "He got religion at a camp-meeting. I've trusted him, since then, with everything I have, - money, houses, horses, - and let him come and go around the country, and I have always found him true and square in everything.
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