Exodus 1:15-22

15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was
named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 16 “When you act as midwives to the
Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but
if it is a girl, she shall live.” 17 But the midwives feared God; they did not
do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. 18 So
the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have
you done this, and allowed the boys to live?” 19 The midwives said to
Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women;
for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.”
20 So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and
became very strong. 21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave
them families. 22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy
that is born to the Hebrews[a] you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall
let every girl live.”

The narrative in Exodus 1:15-22 by the Elohists emphasizes the prolife stance of two
unique women whose profession as midwives implies mediating life. It presents an
account of Pharaoh’s decision to eliminate male infants of the Hebrews using the
services of the midwives who assist the Hebrew women during child delivery. These
midwives, who in the very rare and unique instance are named in the narrative as
Shiphraph and Puah, are presented as resisting this uncanny plan of Pharaoh by
refusing to obey his instruction to kill. The Eloshist’s narrator identifies ‘the fear of God’
as the midwives’ motivation for the exceptional courage of daring the king of Egypt. It
is an intriguing narrative that betrays a mix between human allegiance to an earthly
and divine ruler, the audacity of conscience, and intrigues. It underscores the human
agency in the boundary between life and death, the ethics of profession and
homophobic and gender discrimination-based policies. It highlights the role of religion
and its perceived reward in human actions.

The Heroines of the narrative are Shiphrah and Puah; caught in the tension between
allegiance to the king and allegiance to the God of life, they opt to follow the demands
of God to protect life. The demands of Pharaoh, founded on his political design to
checkmate the proliferation and subsequent threat of the Hebrew people in Egypt is
barbaric and despicable. Aware of the anti-life stance of Pharaoh, the midwives prefer
to act in the fear of God and in service to the God of life. This fear of the numinous is
understood as the origin of religion; it is a fear that evolves and dissolves into
spirituality in terms of worship or reverence and obedience to God’s command. It is in
obedience to this divine command to preserve life that the midwives refuse to execute
the directives of the king and trick him into believing that the Hebrew women were too
strong for them.
It is therefore in the light of the moral lessons derived therein that this work seeks to
study the account of Exodus 1:15-22 purely from the point of view of narratives and
underscore the fact that tyrants succeed, and evil persists because supposedly good
persons obey their unjust orders. The qualitative method is used for this research and in
the context of which the method of literary criticism is used for the study of the biblical
texts. Within literary criticism the work employs the constructive literary approach to
study the narrative by paying attention to the text as presented in its final form. It
focuses on the literary shape of the text as poetry, and detail of the biblical text as
literature. It seeks “to highlight the artfulness, sophistication, and meaningfulness of
biblical literature both as prose and poetry”1 by assuming a basic unity, structure, and
coherence in the text. This approach comes under the general technical term synchronic
analysis. The narrative is studied in its own terms as autonomous piece of art or artefact
in the light of its internal literary dynamics. These include its narrative structure
thematic emphasis, point of view and character development. 2

The work examines the phrase ‘Hebrew midwives’ with a view to establishing the
nationality of the midwives. The term ‘Hebrew’ and its usage in the passage and in
Exodus are explored. The study discovers that the expression ‘Hebrew’ is often used
when the intent is to depict the vulnerability of the people of Israel in their relationship
with more established and powerful states in their hostile environments. This depiction
provides the narrator with the locus for indicating the spectacular and miraculous
nature of God’s intervention to help his helpless people who depend on him for
survival.

An assessment of the narrator’s description of the motive of the midwives as the ‘fear of
God’ is undertaken with a view to identifying what the phrase means and its
application to gentiles. The blessing God bestows on the midwives for their faithfulness
is examined in the light of the Akkadian and Hebrew idiom ‘to make a house’. This is
understood in terms of progeny or the establishment of families. This divine act of
blessing by God is studied in the context of Pharaoh’s obsession to destroy the lives of
the Hebrew male infants. The study thus reveals that the narrator uses the theme of
‘divine blessing’ as ultimate design to underscore the contrast between the God of the
Hebrew people and Pharaoh. This contrast serves as a summary explanation for the
motivation and the very courageous and risky choice made by the midwives against the
wishes of the king. The God the midwives fear is identified as the God of life and
therefore prolife while Pharaoh is depicted as anti-life and therefore not to be obeyed.
This God defends the powerless against the political machinations of the powerful.

The narrative in this context provides the motivation for which evil must be avoided
irrespective of who orders it and why good must be pursued and life protected even if

1
Albright, W. E. “Northwest-Semitic Names in a List of Egyptian Slaves from the Eighteenth-Century B.
C.,” Journal of American Oriental Society 74 (1954): 222-233.
2
Assmann, Jan. The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2018.
it implies daring the most powerful and risking one’s security. There is the superior
Being who will always intervene to make up for the losses incurred. The work explains
the obsessed reaction of the king against the Hebrew people as an exaggerated
xenophobia that clouds his ability to make more objective decisions and choices. The
choice of the male infants as his specific target is understood in terms of gender
discrimination or profiling, infanticide, and genocide and his attitude towards Hebrew
people in general is highlighted as xenophobic (fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners
or of anything that is strange or foreign).

Account of Exodus 1:15-22

The account of Ex 1:15-22 belongs to the larger literary unit of 1:1-4:31 on the
Preparation for Deliverance. The pericope belongs to the immediate context of 1:8-22
whose interpretive framework consists in 1:7. It presents itself in the form of a
chiasmus.

Verses 15-16
15The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah,
and the other Puah. 16“When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them
on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.”

Verse 17
But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them,
but they let the boys live.

Verses 18-19
18So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done
this, and allowed the boys to live?” 19The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the
Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth
before the midwife comes to them.”

Verses 20-21
20So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very
strong. 21And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.

Verse 22
22Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews
you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live” (NRSV).

The Murderous Instructions of the King to the Midwives vv. 15-16

The Life Saving Reaction of the Midwives v. 17
The Summons of the King and the Reply of the Midwives vv. 18-19
The Blessing of God on the Midwives vv. 20-21
The Overt Desperate Command of the King to all the Egyptians 22
Conclusion

Exodus 1:15-22 highlights the courage of the midwives who preferred to fear God and
do good by preserving lives than obey the king and perpetrate evil by killing. It
anticipates contemporary attempts by people in power to manipulate innocent and
unsuspecting citizens into corrupt practices of reversing values and enhancing a
morally decadent society. The narrative uniquely underscores the role of religion in
assisting citizens counteract these unethical conducts, forming a society that is built on
acceptable moral principles, and promoting and acting for the common good. Religion,
and in this context, the Judeo-Christian religion forms the consciences of a people based
on a moral compass of good and evil.

It produces citizens that define themselves as accountable not only to an earthly

authority but also to a supernatural authority identified as God to whom they equally
pay allegiance. It understands this God as the supreme good and the source of every
earthly authority. All formally constituted authorities come from him and in the event
of conflicts between earthly authorities and the authority of God, the latter takes
precedence. This God rewards every good deed and by implication frowns at evil
deeds.

The narrative equally reveals that this common good is to determine human actions and
in seeking it, moral values like life must not be trampled upon. While states seek what
is good for the very survival of their citizens, the means for the attainment of those ends
must not be morally evil; no action merits the quality of goodness if its consequences
are felt negatively by another half of the human society. Pharaoh seeks what he
considers good for the economic development of his people but tries to attain it by
attempting to waste the lives of the Hebrew children.

An analysis of the Exodus 1:15-21 reveals the tension between obedience to earthly
authorities and to God. The description of the children of Israel as ‘Hebrew’ in vv. 15-16
explains their state of helplessness and vulnerability in the face of the brutality of an
organized and powerful nation of Egypt. Used as slaves their oppressors seek to create
an atmosphere of perpetual enslavement around them by ensuring that they are unable
to resist the status quo, claim their independence and redefine their status as a nation.
The use of the term ‘Hebrew’ as an attributive adjective in the Masoretic Text (The
Masoretic Text defines the Jewish canon and its precise letter-text, with its vocalization and
accentuation known as the mas'sora) in relation to the midwives in v. 15 has made their
identity debatable among experts.

It is suggested in this work that the midwives were Egyptians especially based on the
improbability of the king directing Israelites to kill the children of their kinswomen. As
gentiles therefore, the two women prove themselves righteous in the face of the
manipulative designs of Pharaoh. They rise above ethnic affiliations, fear and allegiance
to an earthly king and choose to follow the dictates of their religiously formed
consciences on the respect for life and the universal compassionate sense of being
human and protect rather than destroy the lives of the innocent children.

Pharaoh’s instruction to kill male and spare female children in v. 16 is a gender

profiling and discrimination that arises from an exaggerated xenophobia. When the fear
of the other goes unchecked, the attempt to obviate the phobia leads to a redefinition of
the other as non-human and therefore an object to be eliminated. The killing itself
would be infanticide and even genocide. The choice of the birthstool, a locale for the
emergence of life, for the termination of life amounts to dealing a dead blow on the
sacredness of and value for life in childbirth.

Instructing the midwives to try such cruelty is an attempt to corrupt them and
manipulate them into distorting the very essence of their profession as mediators of life.
This attempt by the king anticipates contemporary disregards for and reversals of the
ethics that guide various professions. It is an attempt to destroy the very fabric of trust
that stands at the centre of the social contract that binds the society together. This trust
moves the society forward in its web of activities and permits citizens to trust fellow
citizens with their lives, health, safety, and security. A livelier example for the
instruction of Pharaoh today would be asking a pilot to whom air travellers have
entrusted their lives to crash a plane.

The decision of the midwives in v. 17 to resist Pharaoh is understood as recourse to

religion for answers to the moral question of the limit of human authority over the life
of a fellow human being. The fear of God first as mysterium tremendum is the origin of
religion, from out of this fear, which secondly translates into faith, reverence, and
worship, comes the guide to human activities and moral standard for life in the society.
It is from their consciousness of this guide that the midwives draw the teaching about
respecting and protecting life and consequently, prefer to offend and resist Pharaoh
than offend the sensitivity of their religiously formed consciences.

They refuse as true women and therefore mothers to inflict such a debilitating injury on
their fellow women by attempting to deny them the joy of embracing the children they
have expectantly carried in their wombs for nine months. Their refusal implies their
faithfulness to the very essence of their profession as midwives called to mediate lives.
Their courage is drawn from their religious convictions, and this consequently implies
the ironclad courage every conscientious citizen can derive from a profound and
dedicated encounter with God occasioned by religion. The narrative consequently
emphasizes the need to live by the ethics of one’s profession, respecting especially the
moral duty and trust that arise from the social contract that binds people together in a
society.

The Midwives are conscientious objectors, heroines of civil disobedience and paragons
of Godfearing virtue. Their action as conscientious objectors reveal the power of will
and character possessed by women. Motherhood, which is the natural role of women, is
the very opposite of killing. Shiphrah and Puah challenge today’s women into realizing
that though misjudged to be weaker, when determined, they can and should change
their society for the better. This they can do by remaining the counter force against
despots and the leadership crises the society is constantly facing. The midwives’
courageous decision to dare the king leads to the proliferation of life among the Hebrew
people and proves that when the moral standard for human activities is the fear of God,
the result is the care for lives and the prosperity of lives. By their names, these women
have been immortalized and made models of faith, conscience, courage, and respect for
life.

In vv.18-19 the midwives are depicted in contrast to the anti-life stance of the king as
prolife progenies who have set the standard for the battle to dare the modern-day
Pharaohs and promote and protect the lives of every human being irrespective of race,
nationality, or religious affiliation, even at the cost of one’s own favour on the sight of
the powerful. They are the forces that object to an emerging contemporary society that
tends to authorize and commend evil and victimize those who promote and insist on
the good.

The midwives in their commonplace reply to the query of the king in v. 19 represent the
vulnerable biblical minorities who, assisted by Yahweh can trick their oppressors and
wrestle themselves out of life-threatening situations. The narrative thus serves the king
with the same dish he intends for the Hebrew mothers; just as he intended tricking the
mothers into believing they had given birth to stillborn children; he is tricked on why
the midwives have not killed the children. Though represented as the incarnate god in
Egypt, Pharaoh is not able to escape being deceived; he is demythologized and
demystified as a divinely embodied leader.

The nexus between human actions and man’s religious allegiance to God underscored
in v. 17 is depicted in vv. 20-21 as reward and punishment. Religion creates a world in
which human actions are founded on the moral teachings that are derived from the
commandments of God. When these actions are in consonance with the moral
standards set by God, the actors are considered as acting in faithfulness to God or
fearing God and are consequently rewarded. Inversely, when the actions are at variance
with these moral standards, they attract punishment.

Thus, for enhancing the families of the Hebrew women whose children they refuse to
kill, the midwives are rewarded with the same measures of having their own families
(v. 21). On the other hand, when human actions are also morally acceptable, they lead to
a fruitful and progressive society; thus, by the midwives’ decision to preserve lives,
they attract fruitfulness and vitality to the Hebrew people (v. 20). Read precisely in line
with v. 22 the narrator underscores a situation where the God-fearing action of the
midwives leads to the survival of Hebrew male children born through them and attracts
the benevolent recompense of the benevolent life giving and saving God. In v. 22, the
narrator provides a summary account of the consequences of Pharaoh’s xenophobic
stance and reaction to the lifesaving attitude of the midwives. While the action of the
midwives saves lives and attracts God’s reward of a family to them and proliferation to
the Hebrew people, this same action of the midwives attracts in v. 22 Pharaoh’s act of
public execution of the infants in the Nile River.

Political crimes persist because the citizens are not able to make a distinction between
human’s sphere of influence and that of God. The midwives underscore the existence of
a superior authority, which ranks above the king, and when there is tension between
the demand of God and the demand of the king, God’s demand prevails. This
prevalence of God’s demand consists essentially in the voice for good that is evident in
every human person and guides one to choose between what is good and what is
morally wrong. It is this voice or inherent propensity towards seeking and identifying
with what is good that in part constitutes what is understood in Christianity as the fear
of God.

The same may be the case in other religions though the terminology may be different.
Every person must have the courage irrespective of religious affiliation to consent to
that voice against the evil demand of an evil leader, thwart the criminal designs of the
powerful and end the vicious circle of violence, persecution, political assassinations,
genocides, and destruction of lives and properties. It is a responsibility that goes with
being human rather than just being Christian or Moslem or otherwise. The world today
continues to witness the pharaonic style of economic policies and population control.
There are equally many well-meaning citizens of the world who resist these
manipulations and spend precious times and lifesavings fighting these onslaughts. This
same pharaonic world of today is desperately in need of modern-day midwives like
Shiphrah and Puah.

The identification of these two women by name is designed by the narrators to

accentuate the immortalization of their memories as models of conscience, courage, and
character. Like the mother of Moses, the sister of Moses, and the daughter of Pharaoh in
the subsequent narrative of Exodus 2 these midwives are to be emulated by all. While
on the other hand, the anonymous Pharaoh, and his complicit officials and those of his
land who made little or no attempt to object to his demand to kill are to be forgotten
and confined to their xenophobic and genocidal anti-life era.

In contrast to Pharaoh, the midwives emerge as righteous and compassionate gentiles

who willingly risk their own wellbeing to save the Hebrew male children by
consciously resisting their divinely embodied leader the king. Pharaoh’s decision to kill
the male children by casting them into the Nile is a cruel way to end life, and the most
painful manner to die. The decision questions the humanity of Pharaoh and highlights
the distorted mind and psychopathic nature of despots who waste lives.

Consequently, the narrative reveals the internal conflicts of tyrants and their hasty
brutal actions at placating their fears. It also identifies the negative effects and
existential threats untamed despots pose to their society. It reveals that the ability of
tyrants to implement their inhuman policies is based principally on the willing and
unquestionable collaboration of their aides. Above all it reveals the courage founded on
one’s religious conviction to do good by daring even the worst demagogue and insist
on doing what is good. Political assassinations and political violence take place because
people have willingly allowed themselves to be used by certain elements in the society
to perpetrate evil. When people, for the fear of God have the courage to resist the
tyrants or warlords and refuse to carry out unjust orders, the society will become safer
for all, dissent voices will be heard, dialogues will be possible, varieties of opinion will
be available, and progress will be recorded, and development will take place.

The apparent opposition raised against Pharaoh by the midwives who were presumed
by Pharaoh as soft target collaborators reveals more about the divine hand regulating
and directing the course of history of the Hebrew people. Even the most imperative
political designs by a more superior power like Egypt to depopulate vulnerable Hebrew
slaves turn counterproductive and becomes the
very vehicle through which the proliferation Pharaoh intended to curb becomes
realizable. The narrator chooses to underscore the invisible but unstoppable and most
superior benevolent force against which Pharaoh unwittingly and unsuccessfully fights.

European Journal of Scientific Research

ISSN 1450-216X / 1450-202X Vol. 159 No 3 June, 2021, pp.39 - 53
http://www. europeanjournalofscientificresearch.com

Exodus 1:15-22 and the Midwives who Dared

Pharaoh to Protect Lives
Christopher Naseri
Department of Religious and Cultural Studies
University of Calabar, Calabar
E-Mail: chrisnaseri@unical.edu.ng and paxcasa@yahoo.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3242-4030