As we worked our way
through Genesis, I did my best to highlight the stories and the perspectives of
the women. We delved into the stories of Sarah, Hagar, Rebecca, Rachel and
Leah. Their stories contained both acts of heroic faith, as well as failures.
They were all stories to which we can we can relate.
The Exodus story is
the primary narrative of the Old Testament all of the events which follow point
back to this story and it also points forward and ultimately reveals to us the
redemption, which can be found in Jesus Christ. And this foundational narrative
begins with women. The first named people in narrative of events of the Exodus
are women. In fact Moses is the only named male in this whole story.
And Look at these
woman! Look how brave, look how courageous!
They are outspoken and defiant. They take a hold of the cruelty and
unfairness in the world and they work against it. They are rebels defying
authority, fighting for their families, saving their children, and rescuing
their people from an attempted genocide. They are fantastic, they are amazing!
And they are just women, ordinary women doing quite ordinary things, and manage
to change the world and set in motion the entire redemptive history of the
Hebrew people and ultimately all the people of God everywhere throughout the
generations. They are midwives, mothers, sisters and daughters. They are the
ones nobody ever really pays attention to, but they are doing what they do best
in the process, they save their world. Their names are Shiphrah, Puah, Jocobed
and Miriam, along with Pharoah’s Daughter (who unfortunately unlike the rest remains
unnamed throughout the narrative).
But we can’t begin
with the women (but don’t worry we will get back to them), instead we will begin
with Pharaoh. Or should I say “the King of Egypt,” which is the ironic slight
that the writer pays Pharaoh. The Pharaoh was the son of the “great god Rah.” The
title Pharaoh actually means, “great house,” originally referring to the actual
palace where the Pharaoh lived but came to reference the greatness of the house
(meaning the family) of the of the ruler of Egypt, who was considered great
because he was the son of Rah and the human manifestation of Rah’s rule on
earth. Other countries had mere “kings” but the great land of Egypt, the
blessed land of Rah and his Sons, had Pharaoh. Kings were a dime a dozen, but
there was only one Pharaoh.
For the writer of Exodus to call Pharaoh a
“king,” at the beginning of this book, is demeaning of the position, power and
greatness Egypt believed to be theirs. The author is bringing Pharaoh down from
his “godlike” position which he held in Egyptian culture and reminding everyone
that Pharaoh is just a king, like every other king, and secondly merely human, like
every other human and he held no godly power or knowledge or understanding, out
of which he is working. He does not have some godly secret knowledge or wisdom
which explains his actions in this passage.
The narrative of
Exodus begins because Pharaoh, was afraid; afraid of the power and numbers of a
small group of people who lived within the vast Egyptian empire. No
self-respecting Pharaoh would ever fear a people who lived within his empire, believing
they might become more powerful than he and his armies, no matter how many of
them there were. Pharaoh is the wielder of all power and all authority, and
fears nobody and no one, yet this Pharaoh is afraid of these Hebrew people who
are there because their ancestor rescued all of Egypt from famine. And even as
he enslaves them he not only fears them but dreads them, and what power they
might wield in being able to leave the country.
The author is
painting the picture of a worried, anxious Pharaoh who not only fears an
unarmed population within his empire but then fears but grow to fear and dread
a group of slaves, seeing the weakest and lowliest in his nation as a group to
be feared and moved against, as one would move against a powerful opponent.
This pharaoh lives in fear, he is paranoid, and he obviously doubts the mighty
army Egypt. And ultimately reveals his doubts in the extent his own power and
authority. The picture painted of this particular Pharaoh is one that every
Egyptian would find offensive and having a Pharaoh who acted in these ways
would have been an embarrassment to the Egyptian people. And then it only gets
worse. In his fear he attempts to depopulate these people he fears.
This fearful,
paranoid, anxious Pharaoh then proves himself to be also a fool. He wants to
begin a culling of these slaves he fears so greatly and he does so in the least
effective way possible. He attempts to have all the baby boys who are born to
Hebrew women killed. Anyone who has spent anytime around a farm or farm animals
knows, you only need one bull, one stallion, one ram on rooster, to make a yard
full of cows, horse, goats and chickens. You can limit the number of men in a
population but as long as one lives in each generation, he has the ability to
father many children at a time.
In order to limit
the breeding ability of a population, you do not seek to control the males of
the population, you seek to control the females. They are the key to all
breeding and population growth. This is why it was common practice, at this
time, for a conquering army to cart off the women and integrate them into their
own population. You control the women, you control the next generation. But
Pharaoh is not as smart as any peon he sent out to the front lines of his wars,
he does not seem to realize this. He attempts to control the population of the
Hebrews, by gaining control over the male population. And as we see in this
story, he fails. Pharaoh as presented in this passage is a neurotic, paranoid,
fearful, fool, who can’t even figure out how to conduct a proper genocide.
The Israelites on
the other hand are presented as hard workers who build the store cities of
Pithom and Ramses. They are tenacious multiplying in spite of the hardships
Pharaoh and his overseers have placed on them. And their tenacity frightens
Pharaoh so much that he conducts bungled population control.
Then he puts his
trust in carrying out this ill-fated depopulation policy in the hands of the
midwives who help the Hebrew women give birth. What self-respecting midwife
could ever be trusted to kill a baby she just helped birth? These are women
whose work day in and day out to help women make it safely through child birth,
something which has not been a given throughout much of human history. A midwife’s number one goal is to have at
least two living beings at the end of every birth, a mother and a child. Her
job is to usher new life into this world, not usher it out. What Pharaoh is
asking them to do is against their nature and counter to the very thing they
have committed their lives to doing.
Not only does Pharaoh
choose have these midwives as his primary means of carrying out his goal, but
he can’t be bothered to look into the women he chooses. Not only does he choose
midwives to do this work for him, who are already predisposed to not want to
kill babies, he chooses women who are “god-fearers.” This means that they had spent enough time
around these Hebrew women, and had such an affinity to them that they had come
to abandon the gods of Egypt and instead have come to believe in the God of the
Hebrews. In choosing these two particular
women, he is assuring that his plan to curb the population growth of the Hebrew
people will fail.
So when his plan at
slowing the birthrate of the Hebrews, fails, he becomes desperate, and simply
commands “all of the Egyptian people” to kill the Hebrew baby boys. If any
person in all the land saw a Hebrew baby boy they were to kill him. That seems
to me the last desperate act of this very un-Pharaoh-like Pharaoh.
This brings us once
again to all our Heroes, all the women in this story. First there is Shiprah,
and Puah the midwives who defy Pharaoh and make ridiculous excuses about why
they are failing to carry out his express orders. Then there is the vast
expanse of “Hebrew women” who refuse to allow their babies to be taken from
them, who, if the midwives are to be believed, “are not like the Egyptian
women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” Which
probably means midwives conspires with the Hebrew mothers, to save the lives of
the Hebrew baby boys. Then when that fails they hide their babies from those
who would attempt to kill their sons. That brings us to Jocobed, Moses’ mother.
She defies Pharaoh, she keeps her newborn son, she hides him until she is
unable to keep him quiet enough to keep him hidden. It is only then that, she
sends him away. We can only assume she
does so hoping that some good will come to him.
It is with Moses, in
his basket boat, floating down the river that yet another one of our courageous
female heroes comes into the picture. Miriam, his sister, follows the basket
from the shore line, watching over her baby brother. When Pharaoh’s daughter
discovers her brother, Miriam comes out of hiding and addresses her. She provides Pharaoh’s daughter with a plan
which will not only save her brother, but allow her mother to raise him, at
least for a while longer, and this time, not hidden away for fear of his death
but under the protection of Pharaoh’s daughter herself.
Pharaoh’s daughter
is also brave and noteworthy. When she sees this baby boy, whom she immediately
identifies as a Hebrew baby, she does not do what her father, the
Pharaoh, commanded. She does not toss him back into the river, instead she
pulls him out. She gives him her protection. She conspires with this Hebrew
woman and her daughter to keep him, to raise him and allow him to be HER son. She
not only refuses to kill this baby, but she chooses to invite him into
Pharaoh’s very household raising him as her own son, as Pharaoh’s grandson. That
is pretty gusty!
So, yeah we have
some amazing women doing amazing things in this passage. They are kind and compassionate,
and they are brave and rebellious. They are the true ideal of what it means to
be a follower of Christ. These women are examples for us all, we can all rally
around these sisters in their bravery, strength and rebellion and seek to
follow their examples in our own faith journeys. They are mighty, they are
amazing, and gutsy and outspoken, but they also teach us something, something
about ourselves, male and female alike, because they teach us something about
God and what it means to be the people God is calling us to be.
Yes they are
amazing, yes they are brave, but in the end they really are just every day
normal people doing ordinary things but are being pretty amazing as they do it. These midwives really are just being
midwives, bringing life into the world, preserving the life of mother and child
alike. No good midwife, who loves the work that she does would bring a child
into this world and then turn around and destroy the life she just strived to
bring into this world.
Pharaoh has asked
her to do something that is against the very nature of what she does. She can’t
kill these babies! That is NOT what midwives do. These midwives are simply
insisting on being and doing what midwives do best. That is bring life into
this world and do that above all else.
These mothers are
also doing what mothers are wont to do. They are protecting their children. No
good mother wants to see her child die. No good mother is going allow anyone to
rip her lovely baby boy out of her arms and kill him. She will find a way,
whatever that way might be, to protect the life of her child. Jacobed risks all
else to save the life of her son. These Hebrew women are doing what all mothers
anywhere, no matter where they live, or in what time in history, would do, they
are conspiring together to keep their boys alive.
Miriam, his sister,
is also simply being a good and loving sister. I am sure Miriam loved her
brother. I am sure that as the months went on and she found new ways to try to
keep him quiet so that no one would investigate the crying baby within their
home and kill him. Then when she and her mother could no longer do what they needed
to do to protect him, she found another way. She is resourceful and comes up
with a brilliant plan on the spot while she watching events unfold before her
eyes.
God uses these ordinary
people because they are doing ordinary things and being entirely and absolutely
extraordinary when they do them. We are ordinary people (well most of us, I am,
maybe one of you is a superhero and I don’t know it J ). Anyway, we are
living ordinary lives, going from day to day, doing almost entirely ordinary
things. But we too can be extraordinary when we do them.
Whenever we are
purely and simply doing our very best to be the very best at whatever we are
doing then we too can be extra ordinary. These women are heroes but they are
heroes because they are being the very best midwives they can be, they are
being truly loving mothers by courageously doing what mothers do, protect their
children. Miriam is only doing what she knows how to do, love her brother and
so she does whatever she can think of doing to save his life and restore him to
her family. Pharaoh’s daughter is simply being a loving compassionate person,
who cannot bear to have this baby killed and therefore does what she can do to
protect him.
These people are
extra-ordinary because they do what they should do, do what they can do. The
midwives were doing their job. The mothers were doing what mothers do, Miriam
was doing what big sisters do, and Pharaoh’s daughter was really just doing
what decent human beings do.
We are called to be
extra-ordinary at being ordinary people. And that is all we are really called
to do. And that is when God is able to use us to do extra-ordinary things. Just
being the very best you, doctor, desk clerk, custodian, systems operation
officer #2, whatever you do, whoever you are, being the very best, being
absolutely extra-ordinary at what you do, that is what God truly wants of you. Be
the very best at what we are doing, striving to be decent human beings and when
that conflicts with the powers that be, when our society, when our culture,
when our rulers tell us to do something that is contrary to that, we stand up
for what is right, we make a difference in the ways that we can, in the ways we
know how, in the ways that present themselves to us.
God uses these women
to do something very simple, save this one baby’s life (and I am sure there
were men and woman working to save babies all over Egypt), but this particular
baby was Moses. Moses will one day march into Pharaoh’s palace and be a
spokesperson for God and for all the people of Israel, but not everyone can do
that, not everyone is called to do that, not everyone is called to be Moses. Some
people (the majority of people) are called to be these women. These women in
this passage rescue all Israel simply by being midwives, mothers, a sister and a
decent human being. They change life as they know it in simple and ordinary
ways. They are defiant and strong and rebellious. And they do so by being who they
are, where they are. And by being who
they are without compromise. Some people are extra-ordinary by being who they
are, where they are, in their ordinary lives. In fact that is the way MOST
people are extra-ordinary.
Our culture tells us
that extra-ordinary people are the ones who do big things. Jeff Bezos, Elon
Musk, Oprah Winfrey, anyone with the last name Kennedy, people with power,
people with skills, people with money and talent in extreme abundance, these
people make a difference in our world. But let’s face it most people are not
those people. So most people are convinced that the simple ordinary things they
do with their simple ordinary lives do not matter. And that simply is not true.
That is a lie and most of us buy into.
Most of us live our
lives feeling small and insignificant and we believe we live small
insignificant lives. We can’t see how what we are doing can make any difference.
Nothing we do means much. So often we just do lackluster jobs at the tasks put
before us. We don’t strive to be extra-ordinarily ordinary. The best mother,
father, teacher, social worker, bus driver, CVS clerk we can possibly be. That
is how we be amazing. That is how we be like these women. And that is how God
will use us.
God used these women
to save all of Israel, not by asking them to do something outside of anything
they would want to do, but God used them to save all Israel because they did
what they knew to do best. They loved their children, they would not compromise
at their jobs, they would not do something they felt was wrong and instead did
what they could with the power they had to change even one boys life. They are
our heroes because they allowed God to work through them and in them as they
did ordinary things in extra-ordinary ways. And the chances are none of us will
ever be asked more than that. We too are best used by God when we live our
ordinary lives in extra-ordinary ways.
