"Defiant Daughters"

Psalm 124, Exodus 1:8-2:10

The goings-on in Egypt that form the context of our story for today are grim and, sadly, all too familiar. A cruel and callous tyrant sits on the throne. He is also a bit paranoid – a lethal combination, that one, paranoia and cruelty. Whereas once the Israelites lived as honored guests in the best land of Egypt (as gratitude for Joseph’s service at the Egyptian court), the new Pharaoh recognizes no obligation to them. Indeed, the Israelites’ numbers and strength alarm him, and sees a threat to national security. They are becoming too numerous, they are producing too many offspring – they are multiplying, as God had promised to Abraham. He begins to devise ways to control them. His first idea is to makes slaves of them, slaves who construct buildings for Pharaoh’s supply cities.

But, still, to the ruler’s chagrin, this hard labor fails to check their vigor. The Hebrew people keep on producing babies. In fact, the verb “spread” used in verse 12 is the Hebrew word, parotz, which means to literally “burst forth.” It is a verb connected with fertility and wealth when it is used in Genesis. So, the Hebrew people are fertile, vigorous and, in this way, powerful. So the Pharaoh hits upon a solution tried far too often in the history of so-called civilization – genocide.

Enter, now, into our story our first set of defiant daughters. They are Shiphrah and Puah, midwives to the Hebrew people. Pharaoh calls aside these two women and tells them to kill all the baby boys in the name of Egyptian homeland security. We can tell Pharaoh is not thinking straight here. Like any ruler caught up in paranoia and cruelty, he is doing things that are ultimately not in his own interest. He is killing all the boys, the boys who will turn into men, the men who will provide the slave labor to build his cities.

We often assume that Pharaoh’s command is to kill the infant boys as they are born, but some scholars believe Pharaoh is telling the midwives to abort a fetus as soon as they know that it is male. Egyptians were known throughout the ancient world for their advanced gynecological practices, and so it is possible that the midwives did know how to at least somewhat accurately predict the gender of unborn fetuses. No matter what the exact order, we know that the midwives are not dutiful daughters of their ruler, Pharaoh. They will not participate in the killing of either fetuses or newborns. They blatantly disobey Pharaoh and then tell a bald-faced lie to his face: that the Hebrew women are so vigorous that they give birth before the midwives even get there. This defiance of the midwives has been called the “oldest record of civil disobedience in world literature.”

Now let’s just pause for a moment and consider what it meant for these midwives to participate in this act of civil disobedience. In the ancient world, the pharaoh had absolute authority. In fact, he was divine in that world, and so disobedience to the pharaoh meant transgressing the very order of the cosmos. But these midwives, these defiant daughters, tell an outrageous lie to the demigod, Pharaoh. One can only imagine the fate that awaits them if Pharaoh sees through their deception -- death, certainly, and likely a death that would not be swift and painless. Amazingly, though, Pharaoh buys their lie. The midwives survive their civil disobedience and, in fact, are blessed by God with their own families.

Whew. There’s one catastrophe averted through the work of some defiant daughters. But the story does not end there. Let’s read on. (Read Exodus 1:22-2:10)

Pharaoh isn’t done. Of course not. He turns around and issues an even more cruel decree: The average Egyptian is now to become the agent of Pharaoh’s repression, not just the specialists: that is, the soldiers who supervise the slave labor or the midwives who supervise births. Now, the average citizen is asked to participate in genocide and throw every Hebrew boy baby they encounter into the Nile.

Enter some more defiant daughters into this story. A Hebrew mother of a newborn and the baby’s sister craftily obey Pharaoh’s command to the letter of the law. They do “throw” their son and brother into the Nile. He just happens to be thrown into a papyrus basket. The Hebrew word used here for basket could actually be translated something like “little ark.” It is an allusion to Noah’s Ark, of course, the implication being that just as God saved Noah and thus humanity from destruction by water, so God will now save the Israelites through the little baby in the basket.

The sister stays behind and watches over the little basket in the reeds containing her brother. Of course, this defiant daughter could not just put her brother in a basket and then walk away. She watches, and waits. And what will she see? Will she see her brother drown? Will she see him captured and killed? Will the authorities then seek out the boy’s family and kill them too, for their disobedience? Imagine what it was like to wait, and not know. She eventually sees some women approach. Egyptian women. Can you imagine the girl’s distress? Why would she not assume that these Egyptian women are dutiful daughters of the Pharaoh?

And yet… enter some more defiant daughters. No less than Pharaoh’s daughter finds the Hebrew boy, pulls him out of the water and… has compassion on him. She recognizes the boy as one of the children her father intended to kill, and her defiant, compassionate heart will not allow her to follow her father’s genocidal orders. The baby’s sister witnesses this and, cool as a cucumber, walks up and addresses this royal woman: “Uh, would it be helpful if I went and called a wet nurse to nurse the child for you?” Yes, the Pharaoh’s daughter says. And so the girl does what she says she was going to do, and just a little bit more: The wet nurse happens to be the baby’s mother. Even more amazingly, Pharaoh’s daughter is now paying the baby’s mother to nurse her own son.

Now, let’s step back again and view this amazing scene. Pharaoh’s daughter is royalty, daughter of a god, and the girl is the daughter of a slave. In a crisis situation, a woman of rank, privilege and power listens to perhaps the least powerful person she is likely to encounter: the young female child of a slave. And she allows the child to offer the plan, to tell her what to do. Truly amazing. Truly amazing what boundaries of class, race and age defiant daughters will cross in the name of compassion.

Of course, the baby’s sister is Miriam and the baby boy is none other the Moses, the liberator of the Hebrew people. The rest of the story of the struggle and liberation of the Israelites from cruel slavery in Egypt will belong to men – to Moses, mainly, but also to Aaron. But the whole thing was kicked off by some determined, courageous women and their acts of no cooperation with authority. Puah and Shiphrah, Miriam and Moses’ mother, Pharaoh’s daughter – these defiant daughters practiced ordinary, everyday acts of resistance to evil. And these ordinary, everyday acts birthed a movement that liberated a people and have inspired similar liberation movements for centuries.

Now, what I take away from these stories is not the superiority of women, or that women have a special purchase on holy defiance. However, it’s worth noting that it is very often women in the Bible who exercise their moral authority through noncooperation with evil (other examples?). Interestingly, a woman is also the main figure in the Greek prototype of civil disobedience, Antigone. From the earliest narratives that we have in history, there is a sense that the politics of noncooperation is the special weapon of the very oppressed– and women, back then (as well as to do this day) are the oppressed people in any society. They are often the oppressed of the oppressed.

That aside, what I take away from this is how everyday and ordinary and spontaneous the women’s acts were. They didn’t wait for some leader to tell them what to do. They didn’t hold special meetings in a church basement to devise strategy. They didn’t figure out how to get out the word. Those things are all important, and those things would come later when Moses takes over this liberation movement. But the movement began because these women in the course of doing their jobs, going about their ordinary lives, decided that they could not go along with evil. And they made courageous decisions in the moment to resist it.

That isn’t to say they didn’t collaborate or go it alone—you can bet the midwives Puah and Shiphrah strategized and worked together. You can bet Miriam and Moses’ mother thought through the best plan to save their son and brother. And one can even imagine that Pharaoh’s daughter and her attendants might have put their heads together, scheming how to save this little Hebrew baby from the Pharaoh’s cruelty. The collaborate and conspire with each other, but do so without ay other directive from a leader or think tank or political party or even a Barack Obama telling them what to do. In fact, the text doesn’t even tell us they were doing what God told them to do in a dream, or through a prophecy. Perhaps, they figured, God had done enough and it was time for them to act. They drew their own line in the sand and say, over this I cannot cross.

The ordinary courage of these life-loving women forces me to ask myself (and us) some questions like… what may we be waiting for? Are we waiting for a movement to start before we take action? Are we waiting for some leader to issue “marching orders”? What opportunities may we have in each day to practice noncooperation with evil and cruelty? How are we called in the course of our day to be a defiant daughter or son -- to resist death and protect life?

Thank God we have people like Moses and Martin Luther King. Thank God for movement leaders. But let’s always remember that behind every movement leader are hundreds if not thousands of nameless, courageous people who helped birth the movement, if not the leader himself. Behind every movement for liberation and justice are thousands of nameless, courageous people of faith who worship a God of life and defy the gods of death ever day. Today, in the name of Puah and Shiphrah and Miriam, let’s celebrate them. And let’s also allow their memory to place a call on our own lives. May we have the courage to be an anonymous defiant daughter, an anonymous defiant son.