One verse in the Torah describes the Israelites building actual structures, not only making bricks: “Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh.”
What are supply cities? They cannot simply be coterminous with [the historical] Pithom and Rameses, since these two cities were large with multiple buildings in them, including temples made of stone, [not only brick]. In other words, Pithom and Rameses were cities, but they cannot really be described as “supply” cities, and thus, the verse likely refers to structures inside these cities.
I suggest that the term “supply cities” refers to a series of mud-brick storage depots that were attached to the temples in these two cities (and many others), and which were built to store vast quantities of food that would be used for offerings to the Egyptian gods.
That the Bible refers to these structures as “cities” instead of merely “buildings” is likely a consequence of the magnitude of these projects. The area that these supply depots covered often exceeded by many times the area taken up by the temple itself. . . . [Thus] Pharaoh’s command to force the Israelites to build these temple storage depots was concomitantly a command to make God’s chosen people labor in service to gods other than God.
What Were Jewish Slaves in Egypt Building?
Initial analysis concluded that the remains were of youths aged 7-25, the bulk of whom are thought to have been under 15 when they died. Additionally, wrote Shepperson, the majority of 15- to 25-year-olds had suffered some kind of traumatic injury, and 16 percent of the under-15-year-olds were found to have spinal fractures and other injuries usually associated with heavy workloads.
“Essentially, this is a burial place for adolescents,” she said.
‘Essentially, this is a burial place for adolescents’
The physical trauma, the proliferation of multiple burials in a single grave, and the lack of grave goods buried with them all indicate the children were of extremely low status or slaves. Who they were, however, remains a mystery.
“Corvée-style labor, enforced and unpaid, was frequently used in ancient Egypt on major projects,” wrote Shepperson, opening up the possibility of them being either Egyptians or the progeny of non-Egyptian slaves.
In ancient mass graves, archaeologists find child slaves of biblical Egypt