Exodus 1:8-2:10 Commentary

Comments, Questions and Observations:

On Pharaoh

Over time, we’ll see Pharaoh’s heart become hardened, which means that, at some point and in some way, his heart was tender and open. How does a person like that come to the conclusion that having infants murdered and people enslaved and oppressed is a good idea? That seems to be a valuable question.

Ellen Davis “The disparity between Gods’ intention and Pharaoh’s perception is the great tension that dominates the account of Israel in Egypt: because Pharaoh does not see things as God does, he sets himself against God’s plan for the world.”

In many of our pews sit people with power in systems of government, education and business. They are constantly asked to make decisions that affect people, families and communities in real time. How do we resource them to think Christianly while they sit at the head of the boardroom table, grade student papers, make budget cuts, write employee evaluations and everything else they do with the power entrusted to them?

As we continue in this story, take a minute to sit in Pharaoh’s seat of power and privilege (which perhaps has more similarities to your own than you would first assume) and talk to God about the tension and disparity between the way you see things and God’s unfolding plan for the world. Will you let your will be bent to God’s plan or will your heart be hardened?

On the Israelite Midwives

Can you imagine what it must have been like for them to be summoned to the palace, given a direct order, called back in and rebuked for insubordination? These women have absolutely no positional power but they are bound and determined to obey God and preserve human life and flourishing. They lived out what was right, even when it was hard and even when it was, in a sense, wrong to do what was right.

Without the authority to directly confront the Pharaoh, their only option is to let the power of their integrity come out sideways. It is interesting to play with the gender dynamics of this story. In other words, who has all the positional power? And then a follow-up question: who is getting things done?

So take a minute to kneel with these women — bowed before Pharaoh’s throne. Kneeling with them as they coach women to breathe and to push and to bring life into the world. No matter how broken the world is, there is no going back now. Talk to God about what it means to obey, to have integrity, to protect and preserve life even — ESPECIALLY — when there is immense risk involved. May God bless you, as God blessed the Hebrew midwives.

On Miriam/Moses’s Family

Moses’ mother at her child. With the tenderness of God reviewing the creation at the end of each day, she declares that he is good. Looking in his eyes with his tiny fingers wrapped around her pinky, she knows with just as much certainty that Pharaoh’s plan is not good and she cannot let it break her family.

In a circumstance where Miriam may be young, awed by riches and a princess in her midst, she is not overwhelmed or overcome. She makes a brilliant adoption plan that holds her family together a little longer and secures a future for her brother in an otherwise uncertain world.

So this morning we sit and rock a moment with Moses’s birth family. Because their story creates a container that holds so many stories of broken families. Some are collapsed from the inside by abuse and contempt, by unfaithfulness, infertility, death, by ordinary disappointment and extra-ordinary challenges. And those families broken by external pressures: children taken from their parents, vulnerable in refugee camps around the world, separated by systems of mass incarceration, by human trafficking, by broken people and broken systems. Can we sit with them a moment too?

Pharaoh’s Daughter

This is — at its root — an adoption story. Moses has a birth family, with its own religion, language and culture. And, thanks to Pharaoh’s daughter, he will have an adopted family, with a religion, language and culture of its own. The tension of these two belongings will always be part of Moses’ story.

But if anyone can help him navigate it, I’d put money on Pharaoh’s daughter. Without her participation in this story, the set up would fall strictly along ethnic divisions. Pharaoh and the Egyptians against the Hebrews. But Pharaoh’s daughter shows us it is possible to be a part of a dominant and dominating culture without giving up and in to the structures around you. Although she stands to gain from the system as it is, she chooses to align herself with those who have no power. She seems to stand in solidarity with the oppressed.

I say “seems to” because the Hebrew text leaves some leaves holes in the plot. Rather than blaming shoddy storytelling, scholars of the text invite us to play in the not-knowing. In fact, Jewish scholars of these texts are often way more playful than we allow ourselves to be.

So let’s stand knee deep in the Nile with Pharaoh’s daughter a moment and wonder our way into the text. Does Pharaoh’s daughter take the baby because she assumes she can, given the comparative gap between her status and his? Does she use Moses to fulfill a maternal longing? Maybe. Humans are complicated and often do things for a number of reasons. That could be one. But surely they had nursemaids in Pharaoh’s household. Is it, perhaps, worth wondering why she allowed the child to go back to his people until he is weaned? Does she realize what’s happening in Miriam’s offer of “a Hebrew woman” to nurse the baby? Is she playing along? Or is she getting played? We are left to wonder.

Finally, let’s see if we can come close to seeing this story from God’s perspective…

In the rhythm of Hebrew Scripture, whenever the narrative runs stuck, God provides a baby. This is most obviously the case in the opening chapters of Luke and Matthew’s Gospels with the birth of Jesus. And that baby and this baby are both born against a backdrop in which those in power sought to oppress God’s people with the rampant murder of their babies. Both found their reprieve in Egypt, Mary and Joseph fleeing across borders and Moses being carried into Pharaoh’s court as a chosen child.

They are both caught between two worlds. For Moses, the Hebrew people of his birth and the Egyptian court of his childhood. For Jesus, the divinity and the humanity coexisting in his very being.

The parallels will continue through the desert for a time of trial and testing, a calling from God, the death of a Passover lamb and the liberation of walking from death to life on dry ground in the middle of the Red Sea as a precursor of Jesus’ own death and resurrection.

So, you see, there is a non-speaking (or not-YET-speaking) character in all of this. God will pull and tug at Pharaoh’s heart and who will accomplish the liberation of God’s people even when Pharaoh’s heart is hardened. God emboldens the Midwives with wisdom and courage to obey. He rewards their subversion of injustice, their manipulation of power. So they can stand in an unenviable position, yet without regrets.

God comforts the oppressed, in this case a family holding a beloved child, trying to decide how to keep him safe and how to let him go. God guides and directs Moses’s basket into the waiting arms of salvation, a rescue, a plan for his life but also the complication of a life lived between two worlds.

Although God is not yet speaking, God is acting in such a way that Moses’s story belongs to, reflects and participates in Jesus’s story. And God continues to act in such a way that our stories belong to, reflect and participate in Jesus’s story. Everything that happens to us, everything that we accomplish, every heartbreak, failure or disappointment will make sense one day when all of our stories are fitted together in Christ.

Illustration Idea:

In the midst of a national awakening around the murder of George Floyd, a theologian with a focus on intercultural studies wrote a blog post in which she calls out the “Disney Princess Theology” of many privileged communities and churches. She writes:

“As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt. … And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society — and it has made them blind and utterly ill-equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.”

This text offers a great opportunity to play with where you and your congregation naturally situate yourselves within the text by taking a kind of forced perspective from the vantage point of various characters: Pharaoh and the midwives. Of both Moses’s birth and adoptive families, before ending up trying on that old princess tiara again.