this new Pharaoh was Ramses the third or something like that, but we don’t. In fact, if you’re really paying attention, you’ll notice that the Pharaoh isn’t even named at all. And that matters. Who gets named in the Bible is important. It’s a sign of who to focus on. It’s a sign of who, regardless of their status, is really important. And it’s always an invitation to remember.

Some Biblical characters are remembered for the good they did. Some are remembered for the evil. And it’s just a fact that more men are named in scripture than women, so when women are named it makes sense to sit up and really pay attention.

We all remember Moses. We remember that he parted the waves of the Red Sea in a daring escape from Egypt and delivered his people from slavery. But what few people remember, and I’m indebted to Kyndall Rae Rothaus of Sojourners for this beautiful turn of phrase, is that before Moses to could grow up to deliver Israel, it took 5 women to deliver him (August 2026, p. 49). Three are explicitly named in this story, which is our first clue that something extraordinary is afoot.

We remember Shiphra and Puah, two midwives who outwitted this unnamed Pharaoh. He might have been the most powerful man in the un-free world, but these clever, God-fearing women manage to outmaneuver him at every turn.

Their story, as far as I can tell, is actually the first recorded act of civil disobedience in scripture. And hey folks, I know the Bible can sometimes seem outdated - after all, these events took place over 3000 years ago - but hang in there with me and see if any of this sounds relevant.

This new Pharaoh we meet at the beginning of Exodus is a tyrant. And like all tyrants, he himself is ruled by fear…fear that he could lose it all if he’s not careful.

And so to shore up his power he resorts to the age-old strategy of rallying his base against a common enemy: in this case the Hebrew immigrants who had fled their homeland out of desperation and come to settle in his country.

Well, Pharaoh doesn’t trust these Hebrews. These foreigners pose a security risk, he says. They are not like us. They don’t speak our language. They are not of our race. They could align with our enemies at any moment. Not only that, there are so many of them and so few of us, says Pharaoh, that we need to do something about the birthrate disparity before they take over our homeland.

We’re losing our edge here. Things are out of hand. So here’s an idea: let’s put them to work. Let’s work them so hard that they’ll be too tired to multiply anymore. We'll give them the hardest, most menial labor we can imagine - all the jobs we don’t want to do. We’ll push them down so far they won’t ever be able to rise up …and then we’ll feel safe again.

But the Hebrews merely grow stronger and more numerous and as a result Pharaoh only grows more fearful and suspicious. He exercises nearly complete control over these people, but it isn’t enough, and as a result his mind takes an even darker turn.

He decides he needs to get to the root of the problem…Babies!…we need to get rid of their babies!  Which is horrific, sure, but unfortunately, not all that unusual. It is well documented by now that there is a straight line that runs from fear to dehumanization to oppression to outright genocide. We see it etched time and again into our historical record.

By this point in the story, Pharoah isn’t just obsessed with the idea that the Hebrews don’t belong. He’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t even believe they deserve to exist. So he calls upon Shiphrah and Puah for help.

Interestingly, we don’t know if these two women were Hebrew midwives or Egyptian citizens who served as midwives to the Hebrews. All we know is that these two women are called to the throne room and told to kill all the boy babies born to the Hebrew women.

“Don’t worry about the girls,” says Pharaoh. What harm can girls do? (This may also be the first use of dramatic irony in scripture. I’m not sure). Anyway, “don’t worry about the girls,” he says. “Just strangle the baby boys the moment they’re born and we’ll be all set.”

Now Shiphrah and Puah could have taken a stand right then and there in the throne room. They could have said, “With all due respect sir, we are health professionals. We took an oath to do no harm, and we will die here in defiance before we break our sacred promise.” They could have gone down in history as martyrs and ignited a movement. They could have gone big. They could have been bold.

But instead, they played it cool. They gave Pharaoh some serious side eye, got out of there, and proceeded to quietly thwart his plan. They didn’t allow him to define a new normal but hewed to the very values that had motivated them to become midwives in the first place - their reverence for mothers, babies, and the miracle of life. They may have feared or revered Pharaoh, but they feared and revered God even more.

And when Pharaoh called them back to say, “what gives, there are still tons of these Hebrews around?,” their response is brilliant. They use Pharaoh’s own penchant for dehumanization against him: We tried to do as you asked, but as you yourself know sir, “the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous (khayot - literally like animals) and give birth before the midwife comes to them” (Exodus 1:19).

They know that Pharaoh has ceased to view the Hebrews as fully human. How else could he enslave them? How else could he command that their babies be killed? The midwives use his own racism against him and it works! He’s so blinded by prejudice that he believes them at their word and these women who have quietly and courageously defied this Pharaoh, go free (http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=972).

Shiphrah and Puah continue their life giving work in the world and God blesses them with large families of their own. Presumably full of baby girls who they raise up and train as midwives and other agents of resistance. The Hebrews thrive even more and Pharaoh, in desperation, next calls on all “good citizens” to start throwing these foreign baby boys into the Nile.

Again horrific, but not, unfortunately, unusual. I think of the 64,000 children who have died or been injured in Gaza because of their perceived threat to the state of Israel. I think of the violence Israeli settlers are even now perpetrating on Palestinian families in the West Bank.

I think of the 6200 children who have been booked and imprisoned by ICE since this administration came to power again in 2024: 6200 children, over 500 of whom are babies under the age of 3. Babies booked, processed, and held in facilities like Dilley out in Texas or Burlington right here in Massachusetts because of the supposed threat they pose to our national security.

I mean, God only know what those babies might grow up to do. And that’s the point. The threat and the promise. Babies grow up. And if we’re allowed to teach them well, they remember.

Which brings us back to one very special baby boy whose name we all know.

When Moses’ mother looks down upon him in chapter 2, she sees that “he is good” - the Hebrew here a perfect echo of the words God spoke over creation. She places him in a little boat, literally an “ark” made of pitch and bitumen…the same material the Hebrew slaves are mixing together day in and day out to make bricks for the Pharaoh’s great tomb. And in her own subversive way, this Hebrew mother adheres to the king’s command. She releases her baby boy into the Nile.

Her name is Jochebed. We know this because 4 chapters later, buried in a genealogy, she and her husband Amran are named as the parents of Moses and Aaron. Jochebed, with the help of those midwives, dared to deliver Moses into the world and then she let him go.

Weirdly, the baby’s sister Miriam, is not mentioned in chapter 6 as her mother’s daughter. But she is named explicitly right here in chapter 2, where she has taken it upon herself to watch over her baby brother.

Suddenly, who should come along but Pharaoh’s daughter. Miriam fades back into the reeds as the princess spots the little ark. She calls to her servants and has the strange basket brought to her. “This must be one of the Hebrew’s children,” she says with pity in her eyes and something in her words or demeanor stirs up courage in Miriam. It’s clear that the princess knows the pain her father’s policies have wrought. Clear that she knows he is wrong. The Princess knows in her heart that no matter what her father claims, this baby is a human being with as much of a right to life as any other. But what can she do?

Thankfully, Miriam, thinking fast and daring greatly, approaches the Egyptian royal. She proposes an arrangement and the Princess, thinking just as fast, agrees. Pharaoh’s own daughter adopts the baby, and then offers to pay his mother - a slave - a wage to raise her very own son.

It’s such a wonderful story. The same Pharaoh who said, “let every girl live,” is undone by the small, quiet actions of women at every turn. Jochebed, whose baby has survived at all thanks to the stealth courage and quick thinking of Shiphra and Puah, effects a desperate little act of resistance of her own which, with the help of young Miriam, opens the door for Pharaoh’s daughter to commit a small act of non-compliance and reparation.  The Pharaoh’s own daughter refuses to obey, to hate, to participate in the oppression of another people.

But who was she? Her name is not mentioned anywhere in Exodus. And yet -and this is so exciting to me - we know.

I am indebted to my colleague and - for those of you keep score at home - Mount Holyoke grad, the Rev. Liddy Barlow, for this information.

“The Bible,” she writes, “offers only the faintest hint of what happened to (Pharoah’s daughter)…

We don’t know how she reacted when the baby she saved grew up to be an exiled murderer and then a stammering prophet. We have no idea if she ever spoke to her father in the midst of the plagues, leveraging her power on behalf of her adopted son and his family. We don’t know how she felt that night when Moses led the people far away from her river, across the Red Sea.

And yet, deep in the dusty parts of First Chronicles, where they list the long genealogies of the people of Israel, we find this note under the descendants of Judah:

“One of Mered’s wives gave birth to Miriam, Shammai, and Ishbah the father of Eshtemoa. . . . These were the children of Pharaoh’s daughter Bithiah, whom Mered had married.”

In the end, it seems, the princess (left her father’s house to become a part of Jocebed’s), linked not just by adoption but also by marriage. The noblewoman attended by servants became a wilderness refugee, wandering with her new clan for 40 years in the shadow of Sinai. She gave birth to her own vulnerable children and named her daughter Miriam after that brave girl at the riverside. Bithiah became Jesus’ great-great-auntie, an unlikely ancestor winking from his family tree (https://www.christiancentury.org/lectionary/august-23-21a-exodus-1-8-2-10).

I think that is amazing and worth remembering and I hope that you will.

I hope you will remember these women, my friends. Remember them, because these women show us the way to re-member ourselves. That is they show us how to bring things back together, mend what was broken in their day and is still being broken in ours: mend our common humanity.

Regardless of our differences, these women remind us that we are still one family, and when we take the risk to love that truth into being, we don’t just deliver others, we deliver ourselves into the life God wants for all of us…because all children our God’s children. Remember. Amen