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15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16 “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” 17 The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. 18 Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”

19 The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”

20 So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. 21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.

In the spirit of fairness, I give you evil kings.

After Mary I, Eadburh of Wessex, and old Jezebel, it seems fair to look at regal malevolence from the male point-of-view.  There are, of course, no shortage of examples.  And for that reason, I’m going to limit my look to evil kings in the Bible, beginning with Ahab, consort of the infamous Jezebel.  You might say Ahab is more of the unindicted co-conspirator type (see last week), but he’s a bad hombre nonetheless.  

Next, I might suggest Abimelech, who wanted to be king of Shechem, but had two problems: he was illegitimate (being the son of a Shechemite concubine) and he had 70 brothers, each with a better claim to the throne.  He killed them all, save one, and claimed the throne.  

Then there is the first Pharaoh on our list, this one made famous by Yul Brenner in the Ten Commandments.  Handsome, yes, but hardhearted, stubborn, and seemingly impervious to frogs, lice, boils, pestilence, and most other plagues.  

Or, how about King Herod, stock villain of every church school pageant since the dawn of time?  Infanticide is the quickest route to being declared an evil king, so he qualifies.  

And speaking of infanticide, we meet today’s evil king, an unnamed Pharoah who was obviously the boyhood hero of King Herod.  In Exodus 1, we learn that whatever lingering gratitude the royal house of Egypt felt toward Joseph and his people was gone.  The Egyptians felt threatened by the growing Israelite population, and feared a slave revolt or worse.

More taskmasters were appointed, and the Israelites were compelled to build new cities—cities of stone—yet the sense of threat did not recede.  The author of Exodus describes the situation in simple terms: “the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly.”  Clearly, Pharaoh needs a new plan, so he calls the midwives:

15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16 “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” 17 The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. 18 Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”

19 The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”

I don’t do sermon titles, but if I did, I might call this sermon “How to lie to a tyrant.”  For you see, when you lie to a tyrant, you need to speak to the tyrant’s bias or base assumption.  So, in this example, they describe the Hebrew women as more “vigorous,” which I expect Pharaoh heard as less refined than the Egyptian women.  Some scholars have even suggested that vigorous is code for beast-like, which would take the existing bias argument even further.  Whatever the meaning of vigorous, it’s clear that Pharaoh accepts the lie they concoct— disappointed that they have not completed their mission, but satisfied with their answer.  

So who are these women, Shiphrah and Puah?  The fact that they are named, while Pharaoh remains unnamed, tells us that they are the real subjects of the story.  Again, there is a bit of a debate about their identity, since the Hebrew is unclear.  It seems the key words can be translated “Hebrew midwives” or “the midwives to the Hebrews.”  Now, my resident scholar is out of town, so I’m flying blind here, but this translation problem could explain a lot.  

If the midwives were Egyptians tasked with obstetrics among the Hebrew women, the order to kill the male babies seems less unlikely.  If the midwives were Hebrews, then we get into a whole other conversation about servitude and the extent to which those enslaved could be expected to carry out genocide against their own people.  There is ample evidence that this occurs, but it remains a puzzle within the text.  

The one thing we can infer is that these women have status within their society.  They seem to have some oversight role among the midwives, since we can safely assume that there were more than two.  Perhaps they were the head of their guild, women responsible for the practice of midwifery throughout the society.  Such guilds functioned as both oversight bodies and centres of education.  Perhaps Shiphrah and Puah were “ministers of midwifery” within the governmental structure, the kind of people you would turn to to implement a controversial plan.*

But the plan—for a moment at least—is thwarted.  Pharaoh accepts the lie that the midwives were late every single time, and he must find a new way to proceed.  The late professor David Daube describes the action (inaction?) of Shiphrah and Puah as civil disobedience, and “the oldest record in world literature of the spurning of a governmental decree.”  It won’t take long for the next act, when Moses’ mother and the daughter of Pharaoh engage in their own flaunting of the law, but pride-of-place belongs to Shiphrah and Puah.  They are the mothers of civil disobedience, engaging in “good trouble” (quoting the late John Lewis) to overcome the ultimate example of state-sponsored violence: genocide.  

And just because the lesson for today has taken us into the realm of resistance, I want to go a step further, and draw a link between the language of Pharaoh and the great scourge of our time, white supremacy.  Listen as Pharaoh describes his view:

8 Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. 9 “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. 10 Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”

It has long been argued that “Make America Great Again” is a dog-whistle to those who believe that America peaked in the 1950s and can only be great if the clock could somehow be wound back.  And the choice of time is not accidental, since it predates civil rights legislation, gay rights, environmental regulations, second-wave feminism, and increased immigration from non-white majority nations.  The words “far too numerous for us” could be found in a tweet, and they betray a sense that some belong and some do not.  

When Hannah Arendt wrote her book on the Eichmann trial, she chose as a subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil.”  It has become a familiar and oft-deployed phrase, describing the way evil hides behind “just following orders” or “just following the law.”  When malevolent people control the levers of government, making dangerous laws or enacting corrupt policies, it falls to ordinary women and men to do the extraordinary things needed to meet the moment.

Meeting the moment, we meet Shiphrah and Puah.  They bravely defy Pharaoh and “so God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.”  Thus the House of Shiphrah and the House of Puah were founded, blessed by the God who blesses the troublemakers, those willing to defy the Pharaoh’s of this world.  

May God continue to bless those who seek justice and resist evil.  And may God bless those with the determination and creativity of Shiphrah and Puah, midwives of good trouble. Amen.