The Heroes of Exodus 1-2

When four courageous women and a girl defy the most powerful ruler in the world.

Our familiarity with the story of Baby Moses’ birth can inoculate us to the astonishing drama of it, so I want to spotlight a few striking story-telling choices here: 1. the remarkable inclusion of five females in the span of twenty verses 2. the crucial conflict between these protagonists and a formidable single antagonist: Pharaoh himself, a god-man, arguably the most powerful ruler in the ancient world, and 3. the setting’s milieu of political intrigue, cruel genocidal plans and the stakes of a nation.

God’s Rebels, by: Cody F Miller

Let’s start with the latter.

The opening pages of Exodus deftly outline the political and economic tensions of an empire. It’s not only that the Israelite people have grown to outnumber the Egyptians, it’s not only that they pose a threat to the status quo, but they also carry a potential future catastrophe—if they help Egypt’s enemies, if they leave, the dynasty will be ruined. Beset by enemies on Egypt’s borders, Pharaoh has a game-of-thrones kind of problem, and his shrewdness (or desperation) initially causes him to (curiously) not kill the Hebrews but instead keep them from leaving and exploit them in bondage.

This leaves the Hebrew people enslaved and in desperate straits: bitter lives, grueling labor, unending oppression, and ruthless demands. There is no way out for them. This is the story’s first act, which pivots on the inciting incident: Pharaoh commands the Hebrew midwives to kill the Hebrew baby boys. Imagine. What suffocating evil. What insurmountable odds. What unbearable tragedy.

After laying out the nightmarish stakes, the text offers one-after-the-other-courageous actions of women, the unlikeliest of candidates to defy the most powerful man in the world.

Shiphrah & Puah, instructed to doula death, instead midwife life. Surely they knew that their own lives would be forfeit for defying Pharaoh’s decree. But they fear God. They deliver babies alongside rhetorical maneuvers worthy of a royal court. They negotiate a high stakes game that miraculously leaves them and those they save untouched. They triumph so decisively that Pharaoh leaves them alone and instead recruits all the Egyptians to do what they would not.

The impossible stakes for a people already oppressed beyond belief rise even higher. And a woman rises to meet them. Jochebed, in her postpartum haze, finds a way to hide her newborn baby for three months. We don’t know how she knows it’s time to do more, perhaps it’s all down to maternal instinct, but she knows he’s not safe anymore. Can you imagine? A new mother leaking tears and milk and love and desperate prayers into the pitch she uses to coat a papyrus basket, a fool’s dream of a little handmade boat that will float in the dangerous Nile.

How many layers would she have applied? What would be sufficient to waterproof the vessel meant to protect her unnamed-to-us beautiful baby? Desperate actions from a desperate woman. Our children’s Bibles might show us a quaint picture of a cozy baby in a broad puddle, but let’s repaint that with the insanity of crocodile-infested waters, of cobras and hippos and murky depths crowding around a vulnerable newborn. Jochebed’s choice should perhaps, more than anything, reveal that this is life-or-death, a final, last-hope effort, because there is nowhere else to turn. No matter what Jochebed does, Moses likely dies.

Jochebed’s choice is a clever one. The river is dangerous, yes, but the river is also noisy, a place where waves lapping and birds calling might mask a baby’s happy shrieks and rhythmic cries. The river is also busy, a place where women go uninhibited back and forth throughout their daily tasks—drawing water, washing pots and tools, scrubbing cloth and laying it out to dry. Perhaps Jochebed knew that the shallows where royal women bathed were secluded, off limits to soldiers or others intent on carrying out Pharaoh’s murderous hunt. Whatever her motivations, I don’t think Jochebed’s choice was an accidental one.

And neither was the decision to keep watch over the baby. I love that here, in this moment of breath-stealing danger, a little girl appears: Miriam, the watchful sister.

A girl of seven, maybe a few years older, entrusted with a family’s—indeed a nation’s—hope and future. Perhaps it’s Miriam’s smallness, her powerlessness, that enables her to pass unnoticed. Who would look twice at a woman at the river? Who would even glance at a girl? And so Miriam waits and watches. And I wonder: why is Miriam waiting to see what would happen to Moses? Is there a game plan here, and, if so, what is it? To watch baby Moses day after day, night after night, until he grows up? Is Miriam protector? Or might she be strategist?

My novelist’s imagination fills in the blanks. Could Miriam have known that Pharaoh’s daughter, whom tradition names as Bithia, bathed here?

Bithia, who sees a basket and doesn’t ignore it, who instead bends closer and opens it. Bithia who knows the baby is a Hebrew, who knows her father’s decree, who knows that every Egyptian has been ordered to kill.

Instead she rescues.

“Shall I go and call a Hebrew woman to nurse him for you?” Miriam asks, and I think Bithia must have also known the real plea behind Miriam’s query.

“Go,” she says, and then she hands Moses back to his mother with both financial provision and royal protection. It moves me to tears nearly every time, because the narrator’s choice to leave details sparse underscores something true and recognizable about how women must negotiate a world of power held by others.

Shiphrah and Puah’s careful answers and quiet opposition to evil.

A mother’s decisive, strategic, swift action.

Miriam’s loaded offer to get a nurse.

An imagined glance between Bithia and Jochebed.

Women operating within the subtext of a world that doesn’t write them as main characters.

That doesn’t make them any less heroic.

Deep Waters, by: Cody F. Miller

Some day I’ll finish my novel set here with these characters in this place and shine a spotlight on their courage and faithfulness. Until then, I’ll keep revisiting the text in the lections, reading an account that we know about presumably because Moses listened to these women who told him their side of the story:

To the midwives who could likely recount countless birthing scenes and rescued babies, 

To Bithia who leveraged her own power against the inner workings of Pharaoh’s court and perhaps later left it all to follow the Hebrew God¹,

To Jochebed, who maybe couldn’t smell bitumen without weeping and remembering the terror.

To Miriam, the first prophet named in Scripture.

Five women who risked their lives to rescue the one who would rescue a nation.

The manifold layered symbolism here and in all of Scripture is inexhaustible:

We could examine Egypt’s place in Israel’s long history. We could consider the echoes between Jesus and Israel or the parallels between Pharaoh and Herod, both genocidal kings threatened by an infant. We could look at the imagery of the waters of opposition and impending evil—the Nile and the Red Sea and the Jordan River—precursors to baptism where all pass through the depths and are resurrected to new life.

Early church writers suggest Moses’ boat was a little “ark,” connecting it and the swirling waters of the Nile with the imagery of baptism, a preservation from death and restoration to life.

I think the women, too, are a kind of ark, agents whose choices usher in salvation, even in the midst of what appears to be utter defeat.

Their actions have the fragrance of Rahab’s poker face, Abigail’s maneuvering, Esther’s strategy, Jehosheba’s quick thinking—women whose courage quietly secures rescue and salvation, perhaps foreshadowing the woman from Nazareth who will one day deliver the Deliverer into the world.²³

Mary, by: Cody F Miller

1. One of my favorite adiaphoristic interpretations is that Pharaoh’s daughter of 1 Chronicles 4:18 is Moses’ Egyptian mother.

2. More on this in previous posts:

3.