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In my Old Testament Survey class in seminary there were two names that my professor wanted us to know. He told us to memorize those names, know how to spell them, know what they did, and be able to write an essay on their significance. The names were not of your typical powerful and important Bible characters that everybody knows their story; like Abraham and Sarah or David and Bathsheba or Solomon and the Queen of Sheba or Deborah and Jael (those two might challenge the best of you Bible Trivia enthusiasts). These two names were of two very important people that I had actually never paid much mind to. Even with a university degree in Bible and Theology, and having read the Bible more than a time or two, I had not a clue who those two people were until that fateful lecture in Old Testament I. Hopefully, by the end of this sermon, you will commit these names to memory and be able to say why they are so important.
Well, the people concerned are Shiphrah and Puah, the two Hebrew midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh’s command to kill all the Hebrew boy babies at their birthing. The names themselves have meaning: Shiphrah means “fairness” and Puah means “to scatter or overflow” like a nest of caterpillars. They will start out small and grow and overflow the nest and then scatter. So, if there’s meaning in a name, then in the case of these two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, it is do the fair thing and the people will overflow.
You may have noticed as I read the passage that besides Moses there at the very end these are the only two names mentioned. Pharaoh is not named, or his daughter, or even Moses’s parents and sister. The writer of this story only mentions Shiphrah and Puah by name, two midwives among the Hebrew people. They are significant for their faithfulness to God at a time when a powerful man was designing evil against the people of God for fear of them, fear of how God had blessed them, fear that if Egypt should be attacked such a numerous people would join with the enemies to overturn Egypt. It’s the type of fear that led to the internment of people of Japanese descent during WWII here in Canada. It’s the type of fear certain people in North America feel about having people of Middle Eastern and Islamic background living in their midst and the lengths to which such people have gone to ban their immigration of such people to North America. Such fear is the root of racism.
We might could call Shiphrah and Puah the mothers of civil disobedience. They put themselves at personal risk – they risked their very lives to stand against this ungrateful Pharaoh who thought he was a god and his abuse of power. We don’t know which Pharaoh this was. The person who wrote this story down did not see fit that he be remembered. In a way he stands for all those rich powerful men who think they are gods and can do anything they want. Shiphrah and Puah show us how to handle such men, just don’t do what they want.
The one thing the writer does tell us about this Pharaoh was that he didn’t know Joseph. Apparently, he felt he owed nothing to the man or the people of the man who made Pharaoh and his family the most powerful man and family in Egypt. It was Joseph’s doings that made it so that whoever was Pharaoh owned everything and everybody in Egypt, except for the Hebrew people. This Pharaoh didn’t care that the sons of Israel, the family of Jacob, were free in Egypt because of Joseph establishing the power and wealth of Pharaoh. This Pharaoh just saw a group of people that were not Egyptian living independent in his land and becoming quite numerous and that threatened him though it need not. So, he ruthlessly enslaved the Hebrew people. But, they people persevered and continued to grow. If Pharaoh had no reason to worry before, by his actions he certainly created one. When you enslave a people, deny them rights and freedoms, it only serves to create a situation where they will rise up.
Pharaoh’s next step in his plan to do away with the Hebrew threat was to attempt genocide by infanticide – the systematic murder of babies. The same thing happened when Jesus was born when King Herod ordered all the boys of a certain age in Bethlehem be murdered in an attempt to kill God’s Messiah. Pharaoh ordered Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives to murder the Hebrew boys as soon as they are born. That would be an unconscionable thing to do, but the writer of the story doesn’t tell us that unconscionableness was the reason they disobeyed Pharaoh. They disobeyed Pharaoh due to their faithfulness to God. They feared God not Pharaoh. Shiphrah and Puah’s “civil disobedience” was the beginning of God’s undoing of Pharaoh. The greatest threat to the power of a man who thinks he is god, is people who don’t bow in fear to him and at risk to themselves do what is right in the eyes of God.
Realizing he was getting nowhere with Shiphrah and Puah, Pharaoh turned to his own people, the Egyptian people, and ordered them to throw any Hebrew boy they came across into the Nile to drown him. There is no indication how well the Egyptian people obeyed Pharaoh’s command. His own daughter certainly did not. But it does seem that the situation was bad enough that Moses’s mother had to keep him hidden. Then when he was too much of a toddler, she took this drastic measure of rigging up a basket boat and putting him in the reeds of the Nile and turning the matter over to God.
The story doesn’t say so but I am inclined to think she knew that Pharaoh’s daughter liked to bathe in the area were she put Moses. I like to think she knows that she might be able to move the princess with compassion upon seeing the baby; and that’s exactly what happened. Pharaoh’s daughter went to the river to bathe. She heard the baby crying in the nearby reeds and sent her maid to get him. She saw that he was one of the Hebrew boys and instead of throwing him into the Nile to drown him, she had compassion for him and decided to save him. Then, quite conveniently Moses’s sister popped up and said “I know a wet nurse who will nurse him for you” and the princess agrees. That “for you” speaks volumes. Suddenly, Pharaoh’s daughter has adopted the child. The girl brings Moses’s mother and Pharaoh’s daughter tells her to nurse the child “for me” and even agrees to pay her wages to do so. That’s adoption. When Moses is weaned she takes him to Pharaoh’s daughter to be raised in the house of Pharaoh.
Now here’s irony; the name Moses means “to draw out”. Pharaoh’s daughter named him Moses because she drew him out of the Nile. Ironically, he will grow up to be the one who draw’s the Hebrew people out of Egypt. Here’s some more irony: the one whom God would call to be the deliverer of the Hebrew people from Pharaoh was raised in the house of Pharaoh by his own daughter because she was moved with compassion and could not leave the boy to die in the Nile. If you want an example of God moving in mysterious ways, well you got it. I can’t imagine how Pharaoh himself must have responded when he found out his own daughter had brought home a Hebrew boy to be her son, his grandson.
Well, where was God in all this? It is interesting to note that as soon as Pharaoh enslaved the Hebrew people God began working to deliver them. We sometimes get the impression that God wasn’t watching over his people all that closely and it wasn’t until their crying out got so loud that he called Moses, which we will talk about next week. But, that’s not the case. The picture we get here is that as soon as this Pharaoh started to act ruthlessly act against God’s provision for his people in Egypt that he established through Joseph, God went to work by means of people standing on faith and acting according to compassion, people like Shiphrah and Puah and also Pharaoh’s daughter, and let us not forget the resourcefulness and bravery of Moses’s mother to keep her son alive.
We live in crazy times. We’ve got this pandemic oppressing us. The global political situation is a scary, unpredictable mess; particularly with an election campaign kicking in for our domestically well-armed neighbours to the south. There’s so much fear-mongering and misinformation being carelessly floated about by people and institutions we are supposed to be able trust. Racism and fear of foreigners are among us. Just a few days ago a couple of teen-agers in a Nova Scotia campground threateningly waved a noose at a racially mixed family. The police said they couldn’t do anything about it because the boys never actually said anything. Since when have actions not spoken louder than words.
In these crazy times we may be asking where’s God? What’s God doing about all this craziness? Well, if we take this story as any indication, God’s got plans for a better state of the world than what we had and certainly a better state of the world than the one we’re living in at present. Just as I God started to act the moment Pharaoh forgot Joseph and turned on God’s people, so we can rest assured that God has been at work to bring about his plan for things to be better. But, we should not look for a Moses-type person just yet. We shouldn’t look for some powerful man making promises to make things great again or to clean up the mess. We might rather want to look at what women are doing, look for the Shiphrah’s and Puah’s in our communities and throughout the world, women who for a matter of faith stand against the tyrants and fear-mongers; women like Pharaoh’s daughter who act with compassion; women who are resourceful and brave women like Moses’s mother and sister; women who will commit to nurturing the future generation and doing what’s best for the children rather than themselves. It may be and it’s likely that God is with us through such as these. Amen.
