How Smart Women Saved a Future Religious Leader

Another Way for week of December 15, 2023

How Smart Women Saved a Future Religious Leader

Editor’s note: Fourth in a five-week series on Biblical women—and their babies.

Of all the stories of babies and mothers in the Bible (and even siblings as we’ll see in a minute), the mother of Moses and his sister is one of my favorite stories. We don’t usually think of it as a Christmas story at all, but there’s a link to the birth of Jesus and the insecurity that leaders feel when they sense or hear of a challenge coming from ordinary folk.

Baby Moses is one of the stories I recall and relish from my early childhood. We probably romanticized baby Moses’ predicament, coloring pictures of the baby floating in his little basket on the river while his big sister kept watch.

When I grew up, I learned more about the midwives named Shiphrah and Puah who helped save little Moses’ life. These women were not only dedicated to helping birth babies at the time, but pretty ingenious—and it is remarkable that this part of the story got recorded in the Bible at some point. Various writers of course wrote the text we know as Exodus. I’m skipping much background here but the upshot is that Joseph and his relatives (in the book of Genesis) settled in Egypt because of famine elsewhere. After that generation died, a new Pharaoh came into power who didn’t know the history and began to worry that the Hebrew peoples would become so numerous they might overtake the locals, and fight against them.

At the time, there were at least four women (one of them still a girl) whose response to the Pharaoh’s edict that all boy babies be killed (how absolutely horrible!) was “No!”

According to Exodus 1, the Pharaoh said to the Hebrew midwives, “When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and see evidence of whether it is a boy or girl, if it is a boy, kill him. But if it is a girl, let her live.”

We learn in verses 17-18 that the midwives, however, believed in God, and did not do what Pharaoh had told them; they let the boys live. Later he summons the midwives and asks, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”

The midwives coyly answer Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they have their babies so quickly that we can’t get there in time.”

The story wraps up by saying “So God was kind to the midwives, and the population of Hebrews increased.” And the Pharaoh’s edict continued to drown boy babies, but girl babies could live.

When one woman, Jochebed, got pregnant and gave birth to a son, she tried her best to hide him—imagine keeping an infant from crying!

As he grew, after three months she waterproofed a basket the best she could. She put her little boy in the basket and placed it in the river. She directed her daughter (presumed to be Miriam), to hide at a distance to see what would happen. Then Pharaoh’s daughter goes to the Nile for a bath and sees the basket; her heart goes out to the little boy in the basket. Miriam quickly comes forward and volunteers to find a nursemaid for the baby (and sends her mother, Jochebed).

I do not claim to be a biblical scholar but the connection to the baby Jesus comes in the genealogy listed in Luke 3 which ends up with another Joseph, who married Mary the mother of Jesus.

We also know that Joseph and Mary faced the same kind of terrible terror as Jochabed, almost 1400 years later. King Herod in Jerusalem was a threat to the baby Jesus for many of the same reasons. (The Pharaoh had feared an expanding population of people different than themselves.)

This year, the biblical story of baby Jesus seems particularly real and close as we get news every day of the terror currently going on in that promised land. I have read that there will be no Christmas celebrated in Bethlehem this year, due to current atrocities and fighting. I’m pleased to learn of a movement called Mennonite Action in North America which is trying to send messages and make a stand working for peace and justice.

May all this horror soon cease as we prayerfully lean on our faith in God who knows the future.

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Another Way is a column by Melodie Davis, in syndication since 1987. Another Way columns are posted at FindingHarmonyBlog.com a week after newspaper publication.  

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