The book of Exodus begins with a connection back to the Joseph story in Genesis. Joseph brought his whole family to Egypt in order to save them from starvation during a great famine, and they remained there and multiplied. Now we are generations removed from Joseph, and the new Pharoah does not know or respect Joseph and his family. In fact, he is afraid of them. He says to his people “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we.”
The Israelites have had children and multiplied, as described in the prior verses listing Joseph’s descendants. This echoes the promise of God to Abraham that his descendants would number as many as the stars in the sky, and God’s blessing in Genesis to all humanity to be fruitful and multiply.
However, these words from Pharoah should be viewed with suspicion. As becomes clearer when the passage continues, Pharoah is not a neutral narrator. It is unlikely that the Israelites actually were more numerous than the Egyptians. Perhaps in Goshen, where the Israelites lived, they may have been, but the demographics of Goshen hardly reflect the whole of Egypt.
The facts though, are beside the point— Pharaoh is not trying to make an intellectual argument. He is appealing to people’s fear, not to their minds, painting a picture of a group seen as outsiders “taking over” their land. It is more about feeling than facts.
He is saying this as part of a political speech to the Egyptian people to launch a terror campaign against the Israelites. It is part of his political agenda for Egyptian supremacy. Something that he falsely believes will cement his legacy. He continues with the action that he plans to take: “Come, let us deal shrewdly with them.” He is setting the stage to try to “justify” the horrific actions that he is about to take.
He then amplifies the fear—not only does he say that the Israelites are more powerful, but if they don’t take action now, they will continue to increase. And if a war were to occur, they may “join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” He is now imagining a future doomsday scenario where all of Egypt is at risk because of this group of people, who if you remember, have just been peacefully tending livestock in the Nile delta.
Pharoah is saying that even though the Israelites entered Egypt lawfully with protected status under a prior administration, he has decided that their papers are no longer valid. (repeat?)
Let me remind you that Pharaoh is not a reliable narrator. There is no indication that the Israelites were planning a military action of any kind. They were just living their lives, tending their flocks and taking care of their families. They had been contributing to the economy by tending sheep, an occupation that the Egyptians did not want to do themselves. And they had been peacefully coexisting with the Egyptians for generations since Joseph.
Pharoah’s terror campaign is not rooted in truth. It is rooted in self-glorification. Pharaoh is stoking fear amongst the Egyptian people as a tool to grow his own stature. It is about putting himself first. Further increasing his personal wealth and power by demonizing a group seen as outsiders.
We can see that by what he does next.
He begins by forcing the Israelites to do hard labor. Enslaving them to further his grandiose building projects. He forced them to build store cities, which were strategic hubs to hold and distribute grain and supplies, but also fortified military outposts.
He increased their tasks so that they their lives were “made bitter with hard service” making bricks and doing agricultural labor in the fields. The Egyptians are described as “ruthless” towards them.
But Pharoah saw that his measures to try and reduce the population of Israelites through forced labor were not succeeding, and the population continues to increase—a sign of God’s blessing and favor upon them. So Pharoah further increases the violence.
As if slavery and death through forced labor were not horrific enough, he now tells the midwives that they must kill every Hebrew boy during delivery.
He has mandated infanticide with the goal of genocide.
Interestingly, this particular Pharaoh is never named in the Bible, with the story referring to him generically just using his title. Pharoah after all means “king.” It is a subtle way that the Bible flips the script on this person who is so focused on his own legacy by denying him a named legacy in the Biblical retelling.
The Bible records only the names of the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah. And by naming them, the Bible is showing that they should be respected and upheld. They have a legacy worth remembering and emulating.
Unlike Pharaoh, Shiphrah and Puah fear God. Pharoah stoked fear among the Egyptians to bring glory to himself, but Shiphrah and Puah fear God and give God the glory.
Fearing God means that they are orienting their life around God. They have profound awe and respect for God, and they put honoring God above any other responsibility. So when Pharoah says to kill, but God says he created all people in his image, they put God’s word above Pharaoh’s word. They obeyed God, and disobeyed Pharoah. They let the boys live.
This is a beautiful example of civic disobedience. They follow a higher law than the law of the Pharaoh’s and kings, and they refuse to comply with an unjust ordinance. This is righteous and brave. Pharaoh has control over every aspect of their life, and yet they know that God is even more powerful than Pharaoh.
They had a choice, as we all do. All of us typically go around and for the most part follow rules. We stop at the stop sign. We pay for what we buy at the store. But when the rules of the land are not just, we should not blindly follow. Shiphrah and Puah remind us that we are held to a higher law. Fearing God means we are always putting God’s law first. We must compare the laws of our rulers to God’s law. And when they are in conflict, choose God.
Shiphrah and Puah did not have God’s commandments yet to refer to, or any Biblical text—they had not been written yet. But they feared God and knew God’s imperative to them. God had not yet written the ten commandments on the stone on the mountaintop, but they knew: “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13). They had not heard God say “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18), but they feared God, and they knew Pharaoh’s command was wrong.
Whether it was Gandhi’s salt march in India in 1930, the Danish resistance to the Nazis in the 1940s, or the sit-ins during the civil rights movement here in America in the 1960s, we can see the origins of this civil disobedience in Shiphrah and Puah.
Pharoah summoned Shiphrah and Puah back to him because he has seen that the male infants are surviving. And they lie to Pharaoh saying that the Hebrew women give birth before they can arrive. God rewards them for their righteousness, and Pharoah changes strategy—he has already escalated his persecution from forced labor to slavery to attempted infanticide from the midwives, now he commands all of Egypt to take baby boys from the Israelites and throw them into the Nile to kill them. He is deputizing all citizens to enforce his murderous decree. He is crowdsourcing a genocide.
And it is into this horrific setting, a Levite woman, gives birth to a son. The text says “when she saw that he was a good baby, she hid him three months.” This translation is a bit strange, because it makes it seem like she weighed whether or not to hide him—like it depended on him extra handsome or well-behaved.
But in Hebrew, it simply says that she saw that he was good. The language echoes exactly the language in Genesis 1 when God sees creation each day after creating the moon or the oceans, and the Bible says that “God saw that it was good.” Moses’ mother is mirroring God’s own reaction to the beauty of creation as she sees in the face of her son, what every parent sees—the beauty and miracle of God’s creation.
So while Moses is, of course, special in many ways, here he is “good” in the way that every child is good, and not a single one should ever be discarded or harmed.
When his mother can no longer hide him, she is in a truly desperate situation. In a final attempt to save him, she makes a waterproof basket for him. The word for “basket” here is only used one other time in the Bible. It is the word translated in the Noah story as “ark.” Both arks end up saving God’s creation and bringing life from the waters. Moses’ mother puts him in the river, as his sister Miriam watched at a distance. I can only imagine their tears and prayers are they set the basket down in the river.
Pharaoh’s daughter came and saw the basket, asked her maid to bring it, and had compassion on the crying child. She knows immediately that it must be one of the Hebrew children, she knows her father’s decrees, and yet keeps him anyway, another act of civil disobedience from within Pharaoh’s own household. Using her position of power to extend protection over this vulnerable child. Miriam offers to Pharoah’s daughter to get a wetnurse for the child, a common practice among elites in the region, and brings their mother, so that Moses’ mother can continue to nurse and care for her own child. And Pharoah’s daughter commits another act of civic disobedience—she does not take her as a slave, but pays her wages. She is doubly undermining her own father’s ungodly decrees.
From here, the story will go on to tell of the Exodus—of God’s great delivery of his people from slavery to freedom. Shiphrah and Puah, Pharaoh’s daughter and Moses’ mother and sister have participated this journey of salvation, because they choose to fear and honor God. To obey God’s word of love rather than Pharaoh’s word of hate. And Pharaoh, who tried to use the waters to swallow up God’s children, ends up swallowed up with his whole army in the red sea as part of God’s deliverance of Israel.
Throughout history, there have been many Pharoahs. Leaders who are consumed by securing their own power at all costs. Who stoke fear among their subjects of their own neighbors, weaponizing the state against minorities.
But we have other examples of leadership to follow. We have the bravery and leadership of these women in Egypt who followed God at great risk to their own safety.
And we have the example of Jesus, the king above all kings, who taught us that true leadership is service. Rather than holding on to power, he gave it all up. Sacrificing himself to save all people. Instead of dividing people against their neighbors, he showed us how to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Let us pray: Heavenly Father, teach us to fear you, putting your word and decrees above every other authority. Remind us that we were once immigrants in Egypt, and we are called to love and serve the immigrants among us. Give us the bravery of Shiphrah and Puah to do your will even when it is costly. And thank you for Jesus Christ, who liberates us from every chain that binds us, now and forever. Amen.