A new king arose over Egypt. A king who did not know Joseph, son of Jacob. A new king with a short memory who did not remember how well Joseph had served Pharao, and how he had risen from slave and prisoner to the king’s right-hand man. A new king who didn’t remember that it was Pharao who had said to Joseph, “Settle your father and your brothers and their families in the best part of the land,” and they settled in Goshen, in the Nile delta. There they prospered; they were fruitful and prolific, and the land was filled with them.
The new king looked at those Hebrews, those resident aliens with their large families with growing suspicion. In his mind, fruitfulness and flourishing among the Hebrews represented a growing threat to Egypt. “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we.” He was afraid, and his fear shaped Egyptian policy; all his efforts had a single goal: to keep the Israelites in their place and the leading Egyptian families in power. The words in the first part of the story signal little more than fear and oppression: powerful, war, enemies, fight, taskmasters, oppress, forced labor, dread, ruthless, bitter... All it took for the favoured family of Jacob to sink from prosperity and privilege into slavery was one king who didn’t remember.
And yet, despite severe oppression, the Hebrews continued to multiply and fill the land. The king was a man of considerable power, but another power was present in and among and through the people he feared: life—irrepressible, uncontrollable life. The power of blessing pushed back against Pharaoh’s vision of the world.
Slave labor wasn’t enough to break the Hebrews, and so the king ratcheted up the oppressive measures. Summoning the midwives and giving them the obscene command to kill all newborn Hebrew boys, he more fully embraced the way of death.
“Have mercy! Lord, have mercy on my poor soul!” These are the first words in Zora Neale Hurston’s book, Moses, Man of the Mountain, published in 1939, the year that Hitler unleashed Word War II.
“Have mercy! Lord, have mercy on my poor soul!” Women gave birth and whispered cries like this in caves and out-of-the-way places that humans didn’t usually use for birthplaces. Moses hadn’t come yet, and these were the years when Israel first made tears. Pharaoh had entered the bedrooms of Israel. The birthing beds of Hebrews were matters of state. The Hebrew womb had fallen under the heel of Pharaoh. A ruler great in his newness and new in his greatness had arisen in Egypt and he had said, “This is law. Hebrew boys shall not be born. All offenders against this law shall suffer death by drowning.” So women in the pains of labor hid in caves and rocks. They must cry, but they could not cry out loud. They pressed their teeth together. A night might force upon them a thousand years of feelings. Men learned to beat upon their breasts with clenched fists and breathe out their agony without sound. A great force of suffering accumulated between the basement of heaven and the roof of hell. The shadow of Pharaoh squatted in the dark corners of every birthing place in Goshen. Hebrew women shuddered with terror at the indifference of their wombs to the Egyptian law. The province of Goshen was living under the New Egypt and the New Egyptian and they were made to know it in many ways. The sign of the new order towered over places of preference. It shadowed over work, and fear was given body and wings. The Hebrews had already been driven out of their well-built homes and shoved further back in Goshen. Then came more decrees:
1) Israel, you are slaves from now on. Pharaoh assumes no responsibility for the fact that some of you got old before he came to power. Old as well as young must work in his brickyards and road camps.
a) No sleeping after dawn. Fifty lashes for being late to work.
b) Fifty lashes for working slow.
c) One hundred lashes for being absent.
d) One hundred lashes for sassing the bossman.
e) Death for hitting a foreman.
2) Babies take notice: Positively no more boy babies allowed among Hebrews. Infants defying this law shall be drowned in the Nile.
Hebrews … found out that they were aliens, and from one new decree to the next they sank lower and lower. So they had no comfort left but to beat their breasts to crush the agony inside. Israel had learned to weep.[1]
And yet, in the deadly chaos of genocidal cruelty, two women served the flourishing of life with courage and grace. Shiphrah and Puah were midwives, and not even mighty Pharaoh with his regime of terror could turn them into servants of death. The first time God is mentioned in the great story of the Exodus is when these two women are introduced. They knew a thing or two about new life that wants to be born. They knew a lot about helping new life to emerge and thrive. And they knew everything about the shadow of Pharaoh squatting in the dark corners of every birthing place in Goshen.
But the midwives, it says in verse 17, feared God; and the fear of God gave them the courage to resist. In the first act of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance they refused to obey Pharaoh’s deathly command. And they lied to the authorities, breaking the law for the sake of justice and life.
When the king summoned them again, demanding an explanation for all the births of Hebrew boys, they said, “Those Hebrew women, you know how they are. They give birth so quickly, they’re done long before we get there.” We can almost see them wink, and we cheer at their lively defiance, but Pharaoh’s madness still had room to grow.
He commanded all his people to throw every boy born to the Hebrews into the Nile. Lord have mercy. The rule of death distorts everything. It turns work into slave labor; it turns neighbors into lynching mobs, and the great river, the source of prosperity, it turns into a mass grave.
And yet, amid the chaos of the king’s deathly decrees, life continued to break through defiantly; and it was good. A man and a woman got married and they had baby boy. His mother hid him, and when she could no longer hide him, she made a basket, put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the water’s edge. Like Noah building the ark, Moses’ mother carefully built a tiny basket boat for her infant son, so he would not drown in the deadly waters.[2] It may appear as though nothing could escape the reign of terror and death, but the floating cradle tells a different story.
Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the river, finds the basket and opens it and sees the little boy who is crying and she picks him up. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she says. She recognizes that he is a child from the slave community, a child under death sentence from her father – and yet she doesn’t toss him into the river. She too obeys a different law than her father’s, she too is part of the conspiracy of grace that resists Pharaoh’s paranoid obsessions.
Now the boy’s sister steps forward, and smart as a whip she asks, with all innocence, if perhaps her royal majesty would like her to go and get her a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for her? And before you know it, the little boy is back in his mother’s arms—and she even gets paid for taking care of him on behalf of the royal daughter!
Amy Merrill Willis writes,
While the midwives are motivated by their fear of the Lord, and the mother by her attachment to the beautiful baby, the actions of Pharaoh’s daughter emerge from her pity. But whatever their motivations, the actions of the women align with God’s own life-giving work.[3]
What can one person do against the empire of fear and cruelty? We often feel so very helpless against the death-dealing forces that surround us — the systems, the powers and principalities, the Pharaohs and Führers who make worlds with the shrewd use of the whole dictionary of manipulation, with words like powerful, war, enemies, fight, taskmasters, oppress, forced-labor, dread, ruthless, bitter…
But look a little closer and you see two midwives who fear God. They’re not afraid of God, that’s something else all together. God is not the ultimate Pharaoh or Führer, obsessed with clinging to power at any cost. Fear of God is reverence – reverence for life and the giver of life. It is hunger for righteousness, the desire to align with God’s holy purpose.
In the second part of the story, after Pharaoh’s paranoia has commanded the Egyptian people to serve as genocidal executioners, words like man, woman, conceived, bore, child, hid, sister, daughter, bathe, pity, nurse, and mother tell of a world where relationships across generations and between social and ethnic groups are built with love and compassion. It’s a world of persistent rebellion against Pharaoh’s obsessions, and it emerges around the courageously and cunningly orchestrated care of an infant.
None of the women could foresee the child’s future. None of them had seen visions of angels telling them that this little one would grow up to lead the Israelites out of the house of slavery Pharaoh had built. With reverence for life and the giver of life, with love and compassion, knowingly and unknowingly, they undermined the mighty walls of power by caring for a little one. Or as Paul put it, they presented their bodies as a living sacrifice that is holy and pleasing to God.
[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939, chapter 1.
[2] The same word תֵּבָה tebah is translated ‘ark’ in Genesis 6:14 and ‘basket’ in Exodus 2:3.
[3] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=972