Recording the Proper 16 episode of the At Home With the Lectionary podcast, and I am reminded again of how fierce Exodus 1-2 is:
Five women and a baby face off against Pharaoh in a milieu of political intrigue, cruel genocidal plans & the stakes of a nation.
What a pitch with such stellar storytelling in the details!
The story is set within the political and economic tensions of an empire. Beset by enemies on Egypt’s borders, Pharaoh has a problem, and it’s intriguing that his solution isn’t simply to wipe out the Hebrews, but to *keep them from leaving* & exploit them in bondage.
Which leaves the people in desperate straits, after which the text offers one-after-the-other-courageous actions of women, the unlikeliest of candidates to confront the most powerful man in the world.
Shiphrah & Puah, instructed to doula death, instead negotiate a high stakes game to midwife life, without which there would be no Moses.
Jochebed cleverly finds a way to hide her son: the river is noisy, a place where women can go uninhibited back and forth throughout their daily tasks. Perhaps the shallows where royal women bathed were secluded, off limits to soldiers or others on a murderous hunt.
I love that a little girl appears in this story: Miriam, the watchful sister.
Why is she waiting to see what would happen to Moses?
Is she protector or strategist?
My novelist’s imagination fills in the blanks.
Did she know that Pharaoh’s daughter Bithia bathed there?
Bithia, who knows the baby is a Hebrew, who knows her father’s decree, who knows that every Egyptian has been ordered to kill.
I think she knew the real plea behind Miriam’s query, because she hands Moses back to his mother with both 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.
Miriam’s loaded offer to get a nurse.
An imagined glance b/w Bithia & 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.
Some day I’ll finish my epic fantasy novel set here with these characters in this place and shine a spotlight on their faithfulness. Until then, I’ll keep revisiting the text in the lections, reading an account that we know about presumably because Moses listened to the women and heard their side of the story:
To the midwives who could likely recount countless birthing scenes and rescued babies,
To Bithia who must’ve known the inner workings of Pharaoh’s court,
To Jochebed, who perhaps 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 look at the imagery of the floodwaters and impending evil, the parallels between Pharaoh and Herod, both genocidal kings threatened by an infant, or Egypt’s place in Israel’s long history.
Early church writers suggest Moses’ boat was a little “ark,” connecting it and the swirling water with imagery of baptism, a preservation from death & restoration to life.
I suggest the women, too, are a kind of ark, agents whose actions usher in rescue and deliverance.
Their actions have the fragrance of Rahab’s poker face, Abigail’s maneuvering, Esther’s strategy, Jehosheba’s quick thinking – women whose actions quietly secure rescue and preservation,
perhaps foreshadowing the woman from Nazareth who delivers the Deliverer into the world.
Oratio Contemplativa 