Exodus. Daniel Berrigan
resist!
¶
Women ponder: Shall we undo the murderous decree, shall we commit the “crime” of safe birth and rescuing? Such works will be hard and perilous.
Nonetheless a few midwives conspire. Two among them are singled out, Shiphrah and Pua.
Their profession is noble, and honored as such: to assist new life into the world. What part then shall they, the abettors of life, have in killing?
Purpose holds firm. They disobey. New life! They answer secret summonses, go on with their work.
The pharaoh hears of it, hails them in for an accounting: Why have they not followed orders? Because they “fear God,” is the author’s gloss on their holy disobedience.
Their response is a simple equivocation; delicious.
The
Hebrew women
are not
like
the Egyptian women.
These
are robust
and
give birth
before
the
midwife arrives. (Exod 1:19)
The pharaoh is omnipotent, omniscient, or so it is said. But lo! he is suddenly, strangely helpless. His hands drop. He neither prosecutes nor imprisons nor kills the malfeasants. He dare not; they are held in high esteem among the slaves. How shall he counter their hedging?
He and his decree are stalemated. He shifts tactics, issues a general order. It sounds much like a confession of defeat.
Now hear this, a command “to all his people”; they are obliged, on discovery, to cast newborn Hebrew males in the Nile.
¶
Birth and death, contention—then a kind of rebirth; valiant midwives, infants snatched from death. Through holy disobedience the law of the land is thwarted. The good news passes like a wildfire!
The image of the midwives bespeaks a modest, irrefutable strength. Their acts are a summons, a contamination: Arise!
Their example beckons others, into uncharted danger, chance-taking. And above all, lifting of the spirit!
¶
The great moment nears: the birth of a people, prefigured, imminent, in the protected birth of infants.
In the protected birth of a national hero and savior.
So momentous an event comes only through pain and reversal. The hero must be literally snatched from death.
¶
The ingenuity and courage of women! Some few, as we have noted, are named; the midwives, together with Miriam, sister of the infant. (Of her, along with brother Aaron, much will be heard later). And mother Jocabed, who launched the newborn in his craft among the reeds.
And surely another subversive detail—the daughter of the pharaoh is drawn into the web of mercy. Subversive mercy has reached far and high, into the palace itself.
¶
The genealogy of the future prophet is short, instructively so. No remote ancestry is traced, the parents only are named. The father of Moses: Amram. The mother: Jochebed (Exod 6:20).
The omissions are heavy with implication. Let this story be concentrated, sharp, close. A few names only. Read them, commit them to memory; these few will shape an astonishing future.
A further irony, and what a credential! The name of the child is conferred by the pharaoh’s own daughter. He is called Moses, perhaps, it is suggested, as an Egyptian cover.
And we marvel. In the land of oppression, all unwitting, a Hebraism is adroitly conferred; which is to say, a name that infers a vocation. Not “the one drawn from the water,” as the putative mother would have it—but “the one drawing water.” An ironic reference, one ventures, to the tasks of a slave people, “hewers of wood, drawers of water.”
¶
Legends parallel to the saving of infant Moses were current in other cultures and times. Romulus and Remus, Cyrus, and most ancient of all, Sargon, were drawn out of mortal danger in infancy.
So is Jesus to be drawn, and barely.
¶
Turn and turnabout. Infant Moses is snatched from the Nile, his mother is hired as nurse; everything dovetails wonderfully. And when the child is weaned, Jocabed gives him back to the pharaoh’s daughter, who proceeds to raise him as her own son.
The arrangement is satisfactory, one thinks, for all concerned. The king’s daughter, as far as can be known, is childless; now she has a son, to all appearances a native child graced with an Egyptian name.
And Jocabed can also rejoice. What safer haven for an endangered son than the arms of the king’s daughter?
¶
The story races along. Moses reaches adulthood, draws closer to his daunting vocation: savior of his people. Passed over in silence are the years of childhood. In view of what is to come, these do not signify.
Yet we long to know more. What of the education of young Moses? Who were his mentors? What studies did he undertake? Did an Egyptian education alienate him from his own?
And what was the impact of these years on the events he would initiate under God, this progenitor, lawgiver, mystic, instructor of his people? What resources gathered in the soul of a survivor, what courage to initiate and command, what singleness of mind, what self understanding—such qualities as would fit him to counter the pharaoh?
And what virtues would enable him to endure the desert years to come, the squabbling people, the encounters, face to face, with The One Who Is?
Of all this, our story tells nothing. The child, the youth might be a typically favored Egyptian scion, taking emoluments and luxuries for granted, blindsided by fortune.
¶
The orality of a people offers a clue. The text is all movement, abruptness. “Speed to the point, the climax; get on with it,” is the motto of Exodus. The text is racing, energetic, even antic.
Prepare to be astonished, set off kilter. Read as you run. Do not be troubled if this or that matter (of intense interest to yourself!) is ignored. Focus on a storyteller without peer. Enter his mind and intent, read between the lines. And give him large credit. He knows something you do not; he invites you to ponder.
¶
Thus the story forms from within. Whatever is included is worthy of probing and pondering; move with its implications, hints, analogies. Give the author time and space. Following where so sure a guide leads, you will come to know (to a degree!) who this Moses is, what motive impels him.
¶
The start of the great tale is an infant’s outcry amid the reeds of the Nile, a voice that, one day, will shake the world.
A helpless infant, not abandoned, is greatly loved, protected by high and low. To become—only give him time—the liberator.
Helpless? Infant? A greater than the pharaoh, a greater than a dynasty of pharaohs, is here.
¶
In the Acts of the Apostles, Stephen, the Deacon, reviewing sacred history in presence of the Sanhedrin, says only that Moses “was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22).
Some would even have it that our emerging hero is a native Egyptian. The snatching from the Nile is seen as a common type of “hero story.” A more or less fictive savior, larger than life, is saved, surrounded by loving care, and flourishes.
What ironies are captured in a few narrative phrases! In the shadow of the destroyer,