Several generations of Israelites had grown up in a society that had no heart. The Egyptians had “used them ruthlessly,” Exodus 1:14, placing “slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labour” (11), which had “made their lives bitter” (14).
The Egyptians had also created a system that was impossible to resist, or even protest against. Even the possibility of a threat was enough for the Egyptian king to order a culling of all newborn Israelite boys.
But into this society of brutal, icy-hearted madness the seed of a new society was sewn, in two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah (15). Told by the king to kill all newborn Hebrew boys, they “feared God” instead and “let the boys live” (16-17). “So God was kind to the midwives,” and he not only increased their own families, but because of them the entire nation of Israel “became even more numerous” too (20-21). Thanks to two brave ladies with a heart for God – and for their nation’s baby boys – their entire society survived and wonderfully began to create more people in Israel with a heart too.
Like the Hebrew mother of a “fine baby boy” born in Exodus 2:2. No way was she going to give him up, but to spare his life she had to hide him until it was impossible to keep his presence secret from the prying eyes of the Egyptian police. So she made a waterproof basket for the child and tucked him in “among the reeds along the bank of the Nile” (3).
Two more ladies then came to the boy’s rescue – Pharaoh’s very own daughter first of all, who saw the basket, had her slave girl bring it to her, and on seeing the baby “she felt sorry for him,” even when suspecting the baby was “Hebrew” (5-6). And then the bravery of the boy’s older sister who’d watched the whole scene unfold and risked her life in approaching Pharaoh’s daughter and asking her, “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” (7).
All these women with a heart, which led to the boy who became Moses (10). Not surprisingly, then, he had a heart too, because on going out to see how his own people were doing, his blood boiled at their conditions – and so much so he killed an Egyptian overseeing them. Despite being an Egyptian prince, Moses’ heart was with his own people.
A society with a heart, therefore, was birthed by the love and bravery of four women. No wonder, then, that Yahweh instituted “The care of women in the Mosaic law”..(next blog)
