God's promise to Abraham in that God would multiply his children like the stars figures in a midrashic interpretation of the Plagues of Egypt. Finding four instances of the verb "to charge," for example in (, "vayetzan"), a Midrash taught that Pharaoh decreed upon the Israelites four decrees. At first, he commanded the taskmasters to insist that the Israelites make the prescribed number of bricks. Then he commanded that the taskmasters not allow the Israelites to sleep in their homes, intending by this to limit their ability to have children. The taskmasters told the Israelites that if they went home to sleep, they would lose a few hours each morning from work and never complete the allotted number or bricks, as reports: "And the taskmasters were urgent, saying: 'Fulfill your work.'" So the Israelites slept on the ground in the brickyard. God told the Egyptians that God had promised the Israelites' ancestor Abraham that God would multiply his children like the stars, as in God promised Abraham: "That in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying, I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven." But now the Egyptians were cunningly planning that the Israelites not increase. So God set about to see that God's word prevail, and immediately reports: "But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied." When Pharaoh saw that the Israelites increased abundantly despite his decrees, he then decreed concerning the male children, as reports: "And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives ... and he said: 'When you do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, you shall look upon the birthstool: if it be a son, then you shall kill him.'" So finally (as reports), "Pharaoh charged all his people, saying: 'Every son that is born you shall cast into the river.'"