Task-masters— The original words signify, properly, tax-gatherers: so that the result of this counsel was, to exact a tribute to lessen their wealth, and to lay heavy burdens on them to weaken their bodies, and thereby prevent their populating and increasing. Philo tells us, that they were made to carry burdens above their strength, and to work night and day; that they were forced to be workers and servers; that they were employed in brick-making, digging, and building; and that if any of them dropped dead under their burdens, their friends were not permitted to bury them. Josephus tells us, moreover, that they were made to dig trenches and ditches, to drain rivers into channels, to wall whole towns, and, among other laborious works, to raise the useless and fantastical pyramids: but, without troubling ourselves further than with what Moses tells us in the subsequent verses, we shall find their work hard and bitter enough. Some observe, that the Israelites about this time began to corrupt their religion, and to worship the idols of Egypt, and were therefore, in the just judgment of God, thus oppressed and punished, as the prophet Ezekiel intimates, ch. Exodus 23:8. See also Ezekiel 20:7-8. Joshua 24:14.
Treasure-cities— Store-cities, as the word is rendered, 2 Chronicles 16:4; 2 Chronicles 17:12 and in ch. Exodus 32:28. Storehouses, which Hezekiah built for the increase of corn, and wine, and oil; so that here it must mean magazines for preserving the royal stores of corn as well as treasures. The first of these, called Pithom, Marsham thinks to be the same with Pelusium, which was seated near the sea, at the mouth of one of the streams of the Nile; but Bochart and others take it for that city on the borders of Arabia, which Herodotus calls Patumos, of which opinion also is Dr. Shaw. See his Travels, p. 306.