RESISTING FEAR

It was the kind of cruel, inhumane decree that fear can drive us to and that only fear can attempt to justify: “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” (Exodus 1:16). But the two Hebrew midwives—remarkably, we know their names: Shiphrah and Puah—chose to reject the Egyptians’ fear and the risk to themselves. They could do that because they had a larger motivation that directed their lives and actions. By the time these humble Hebrew midwives were assisting with the birth of Moses, the people of Israel had been enslaved for many decades. They would have been tempted to assume that their enslavement was the natural order of things, and all the messages, methods, and mythology of Egyptian society would have reinforced this belief. But Shiphrah’s and Puah’s courageous acts and attitude of resistance offered an alternative way of thinking, a different theology to that insisted on by the powerful people of Egypt. And their insistence that their fear of God was stronger than their fear of Egypt laid the groundwork for Israel’s freedom, both by midwifing the birth of the boy who would lead their people out of Egypt and by maintaining an attitude that made faithfulness and freedom possible. “That genuine alternative, entrusted to us that bear that calling, is rooted not in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism but in the genuine alternative that Yahweh is. Yahweh makes possible and requires an alternative theology and an alternative sociology.”

* As the Hebrew midwives demonstrated, this is a different way of thinking and a different way of living.

* Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 9.