Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
27^th of August 2023

Exodus 1:8 – 2:10

I recently had a conversation with the psychologist I see about whether she and I can break the law. She cannot. If she wants to keep her registration as a psychologist she must not have a criminal record. I, on the other hand, can. The Uniting Church Code of Ethics and Ministry Practice says that, ‘It is unethical for Ministers to deliberately break the law or encourage another to do so. The only exception would be in instances of political resistance or civil disobedience’. (Code of Ethics 6.2) This is not because the Uniting Church wants its ministers to be less law-abiding than the Psychology Board expects of its psychologists. It is because of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. The Uniting Church knows that not all laws are good ones. As I have preached before, if our allegiance to God comes into conflict with our allegiance to the state, then sometimes the only God-fearing thing to do is become an outlaw.

Today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures is an example of such godly law-breaking. It tells us of the earliest act of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance ever recorded, a story that is both thousands of years old and profoundly contemporary. A new political leader turns on a minority group within his country, seeking to consolidate his power and create unity among the majority by labelling some people as outsiders and enemies. They have a different religion and they come from different stock; it does not matter to the Pharaoh that they have settled into Egypt and have enriched the Egyptians by their presence, it is enough that they are different. There is no suggestion in this story that the Hebrews are anything but loyal residents of Egypt. There is simply Pharaoh’s fear that they might, ‘in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land,’ a fear which leads him to behave in completely contradictory ways. He is apparently afraid that the Israelite people will increase in number and simultaneously afraid that they will leave. He wants to keep their numbers low, but at the same time, he puts them to work on his building projects in a way that suggests that he needs their labour. This Pharaoh reminds me a little of those people who do not want immigrants coming in to steal Australian, or British, or French, or Swiss, or American jobs, but are quite glad to have immigrants work as cleaners, and in abattoirs and aged care, or driving taxis and delivering food, doing the jobs citizens do not want to do and keeping costs down.

Pharaoh’s first attempt to deal with his Israelite problem is to ‘set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labour.’ This does not work. ‘The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread.’ There is just a hint here that a power greater than Pharaoh is looking after the Israelites. Pharaoh’s second attempt moves from slavery to ethnic cleansing. He calls two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, and tells them to kill the Israelites’ baby boys at birth, ‘but if it is a girl, she shall live’. Again, we can see that this Pharaoh is not the brightest tool in the shed. If he really wanted to prevent the Israelites from multiplying, he would kill the daughters who would grow up to bear more children. Instead, possibly because he sees all women as unimportant, he only commands the deaths of the sons.

Even that command is subverted. Shiphrah and Puah act out of that fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom and disobey Pharaoh. They let the boys live. We are only given one reason for this act of civil disobedience: the midwives feared God. The only outcome they could realistically have expected from disobeying like this would have been summary execution. But they feared God and they did the right thing; they disobeyed the law and let the Hebrew boys live.

Shiphrah and Puah are then summoned to explain themselves to the Pharaoh, and here I think they show their cunning. Pharaoh’s willingness to commit genocide suggests that he doesn’t see the Israelite people as fully human, and the explanation that the midwives give him uses that. The Hebrew women are just too vigorous, they say. They give birth before the midwives get there. The implication is that they are more like the animals that drop their children in the fields and get straight back to work than the delicate and civilised Egyptian women who need medical intervention to help them give birth. It is an argument that would have been recognised in pre-Civil War America, where slave women could be sold as ‘good breeding stock’ while white women were seen as delicate and fragile.

Since getting the midwives to kill the boys at birth doesn’t work, Pharaoh goes further and commands all his people: ‘Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.’ Pharaoh is ordering his people to commit genocide. But, again, if he had really wanted to be successful, he should have demanded that the girls be killed along with the boys because it is a group of women who manage to save the baby boy who will grow up to liberate his people.

First, we hear that a woman gives birth to a fine son. The translation we use describes her as ‘a Levite woman’ but the Hebrew is literally ‘a daughter of Levi’. Usually such a woman, if not named, would be described as the wife of a named man. But here she is described as a daughter because this story is all about daughters and sons. We can guess that one of the midwives, Shiphrah or Puah, was at his birth and disobeyed Pharaoh by not killing this son. The daughter of Levi then obeys Pharaoh by placing her son in the Nile, as ordered, but she places him there in a carefully lined papyrus basket – his own little ark. The letter of the law has been followed, the baby boy is in the Nile, but the spirit of the law has been well and truly defied.

From The Lion Classic Bible (2011) illustrated by Sophy Williams.

Now another daughter enters the story, the daughter of the very Pharaoh who has demanded this genocide. She comes down to the river to bathe; sees the basket; sends her maid to fetch it; discovers the child crying inside; and has pity on him. She knows that this must be one of the Hebrew children, one of the sons that her father has ordered killed. Jewish midrash, which fills in the gaps in the Biblical narrative, adds at this point the extra-Biblical detail that the handmaids of Pharaoh’s daughter tell her: ‘“Our mistress, it is the way of the world that when a king issues a decree, it is not heeded by the entire world, but his children and the members of his household do observe it, and you wish to transgress your father’s decree?” Immediately, Gabriel appeared and beat them to the ground, and they died.’ What Pharaoh’s daughter does is undoubtedly risky. But her compassion for this child in need outweighs her obedience to the law and to her father and she becomes the prototype of all the righteous gentiles down the ages who have saved Jews from persecution and death.

The last daughter to be involved in the rescue of this son is his elder sister, who has been watching over him from a distance. She offers to find a Hebrew nurse for the boy, and does it in such a way that she encourages Pharaoh’s daughter to take responsibility for the baby: ‘Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?’ asks his sister. Pharoah’s daughter agrees, and the sister fetches the baby’s own mother. The mother, who as a slave would have received no wages, ends up being paid a just wage for doing something she would gladly have done for free: raising her own son. Pharaoh’s daughter, through this payment, falls in with his sister’s suggestion. The payment signals her claim to the child and her protection over him. When the child grows up, probably when he is weaned, the Pharaoh’s daughter takes him as her son, and it is she who names the boy Moses. The name could be Egyptian, related to names like Thutmose and Ramose. But Pharoah’s daughter gives a Hebrew etymology, saying she has called Moses ‘draw out’ because she drew him out of the water. But the name she gives him is not ‘the one drawn out’ but ‘draw out’ – which is exactly what Moses does to the people of Israel in the Exodus.

Together, the Hebrew midwives, Pharaoh’s daughter, the daughter of Levi who is Moses’ mother, and the girl who is the baby’s sister and his mother’s daughter, have disobeyed Pharaoh and saved Moses from death. Because of their actions, Moses will grow up to become the liberator of his people and their great lawgiver. If the Pharaoh had really wanted to destroy the Hebrews he should not have overlooked the women, because it is their acts of civil disobedience that change history.

Given all this, it is a shame that the rest of the Exodus story turns into such a male-only event. The saviour son, Moses, could not have survived without the actions of five daughters, but once he is grown women seem to barely exist. Some commentators have argued that even this prologue to the Exodus is a negative one for women, because it implies that the best way women can affect history is as mothers of important men: ‘the hand the rocks the cradle rules the world,’ ‘behind every great man there is a great woman,’ and other such cliches. I disagree. This is not a story that implies that silent cradle-rocking is the only way women can serve God. Of the five women who ‘mothered’ the Exodus, the four who are not Moses’ actual, biological, mother take on active speaking roles in the story, and two of them are named, while Moses’ parents and even Pharoah himself are not.

Moses himself did not seem to underestimate the importance of mothering. As an adult he complained to God:

‘Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favour in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, “Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child”, to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors? … I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me.” (Numbers 11:11-15)

While poor Moses is unable to mother or nurse the people God has given into his care, God will later describe Her relationship with Israel during the Exodus in motherly terms:

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son … it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them. (Hosea 11:1-4)

Mothering is not the only way for women to impact the world, but that does not mean that it is not deeply significant work, work that God Herself does.

It would be nice to think that this story has no modern-day relevance, that laws will always be just, that a leader will never use scapegoating to consolidate power, that a country’s majority will never turn on a minority, that slavery and genocide are things of the past. Sadly, that is not true. Today’s story reminds us that there are times when resisting authority is the right, the God-fearing, thing to do. It also reminds us that sometimes small acts of civil disobedience can change the world and liberate a people. Thanks be to God for the courage and compassion of Shiphrah and Puah, Moses’ mother and sister, Pharaoh’s daughter, and all the women and men who have followed in their footsteps down the ages. Amen.