In the first chapter of Exodus, Pharoah has already tried to stifle the Hebrew growth via hard labor. He set “taskmasters” over them in order to ensure they created bricks for the kingdom of Egypt, with the goal that maybe, with enough persecution, they would “learn their place” and prevent an uprising.
Either that wasn’t enough for Pharaoh, or it failed completely, because by the time you get to Exodus 1:15, Pharaoah is willing to try something new: infanticide.
This is a curious choice for anyone (unless your name is Herod), primarily because infanticide is illegal in Egypt, just as it is in most countries, even today. It doesn’t matter that Pharaoh is giving his stamp of approval, deciding to eliminate all the male children from an entire race of people is seen as evil by most able-thinking people.
To stem the blowback from this decision, Pharaoh calls for two Hebrew midwives, Puah and Shiphrah. He tells them to kill all the boy babies, but to do it “when you see them on the birthstool.” This refers to the support stones that are placed underneath a woman in active labor, where usually no one but the midwife can see the baby’s gender.
It’s a shocking command. As anyone who has had children knows, there is so much chaos surrounding the birth of a child, that almost anything can happen. Pharaoh’s instructions to the midwives are to kill the children in those seconds immediately after birth, so that the mothers think their babies died of natural causes.
There’s just one problem – the Hebrew midwives “feared God.”
It’s unlikely that Puah and Shiphrah are the only two midwives for an entire nation of Israelites. Most likely they were the direct supervisors of this specific group of people, and, as such, simply refused to communicate Pharaoh’s orders to the others.
When they were called back to the court, they simply explained that because Hebrew women were so much more “vigorous” than their Egyptian counterparts, they never have an opportunity to eliminate the sons.
This is obviously a lie – but one that protected thousands of boy babies from certain death. I’m sure we’ll get into the nuances of that decision in other places in Scripture (like with Rahab in Joshua 4), but we’ll table it for now.
What is clear is that the Bible wants us to know that the reason these women did what they did was because they “feared God.”
This statement is two-fold. First, it shows that the midwives saw a higher authority than Pharaoah. Whereas he told them to do one thing, their respect and reverence for God superceded any command from an earthly tyrant.
Secondly, it shows where their heart was. The Old Law is still decades away from coming into effect, so for these two women, and others like them, the only real religion they knew was to “fear God.” This attitude is what allowed them to do the right thing in an otherwise tense situation.
I’m not saying that that’s all we have to do – the Bible is clear that living for God means following His Word – but fearing God is a great start. Solomon calls it the “beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7), as well as the “conclusion” of all things (Ecclesiastes 12:13).
With a healthy fear of God, faith, strength, obedience, prayer, and everything else we’re called to do falls right into place.