The Egyptians enter the record first as a language and then as an army. Nephi opened his record “in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2); Lehi could read the brass plates because he had been taught in that tongue (Mosiah 1:4); and a thousand years later Moroni closed the record in characters “called among us the reformed Egyptian” (Mormon 9:32).
As a people they stand in the record as the archetypal oppressor out of whose hand the Lord delivers. Pharaoh’s armies were drowned in the Red Sea while Israel passed through on dry ground — a deliverance Nephi invoked to hearten his brothers outside the walls of Jerusalem (1 Nephi 4:2-3) and again at the seashore of Bountiful (1 Nephi 17:23-27), that Limhi rehearsed to his people in their own bondage (Mosiah 7:19), and that Alma bore to his son: “he has brought our fathers out of Egypt, and he has swallowed up the Egyptians in the Red Sea” (Alma 36:28).