Exodus and Liberation

A Subversive Reading of Shiphrah and Puah

Exodus 1:15–21

Introduction: The Story the Canon Almost Skipped

The story of Shiphrah and Puah is easy to miss. It occupies seven verses in the opening chapter of Exodus, it introduces no hero the tradition will remember, and it is quickly overtaken by the more famous story of Moses in the basket. The commentaries move through it quickly. The lectionary skips it entirely. And yet, read carefully, it contains a theological claim so subversive that the rest of the Bible never quite recovers from it: that the first act of resistance against empire in the canonical narrative is performed not by a prophet, not by a priest, not by a king, but by two women whose professional identity consists entirely in their proximity to the most physically vulnerable moment in human life.

To read this text subversively is not to read it against its grain. It is to read it with the grain that dominant interpretation has consistently chosen to sand flat. The subversive reading pays attention to who acts, from where they act, by what authority they act, and what the narrative rewards. When those questions are asked honestly of Exodus 1:15–21, the answers are theologically disorienting in the best possible sense.

The text reads: ‘Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live. But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live’ (Exodus 1:15–17). In these three verses the entire theological drama is established: imperial command, vocational identity, moral orientation, and the act of life-saving defiance that those three things together make possible.

The Liminal Location of Power

Before attending to what the midwives do, it is worth attending to where they stand. Midwives are liminal figures by profession: they occupy the threshold between life and death, between the labouring body and the newborn body, between the intimate domestic space of the household and the public world of community and politics. Their authority is real but uncodified – it derives not from institutional appointment but from accumulated expertise in a domain that the powerful require but cannot control.

This liminality is, in the world of the text, both a social vulnerability and a theological resource. Phyllis Trible’s literary analysis of Exodus 1 draws attention to the way the narrative positions the midwives at the precise intersection where Pharaoh’s political calculation meets the irreducible particularity of individual human birth: the birthstool is the one location in the entire Egyptian empire where the king’s decree must be enforced by hand, in the intimacy of a specific woman’s labour, by the specific judgment of a specific midwife (Trible 1994, 34). Pharaoh cannot be present. His decree must travel through the bodies of the very women he is asking to kill.

This is the structural vulnerability of all totalising power: it requires human instruments for its implementation, and human instruments have hands and eyes and consciences. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has noted, in her broader account of women’s agency in the Hebrew Bible and early Christianity, that the spaces of domestic and reproductive labour, precisely because they are designated ‘women’s spaces’ and therefore beneath the serious attention of those who manage public power, consistently become the spaces in which the most consequential acts of subversion occur (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, 92). Pharaoh’s blindspot is the birthstool. Shiphrah and Puah exploit it without a second’s hesitation.

Fearing God: An Orientation That Overrides Imperial Command

The text’s explanation of the midwives’ resistance is theologically precise: ‘the midwives feared God’ (v. 17). The phrase yare’ elohim –  to fear God- is not a description of religious sentiment. In the Hebrew wisdom tradition, it is the name for a comprehensive moral orientation rooted in accountability to a reality more ultimate than any human authority. It is the fear of God, not fear of Pharaoh, that structures the midwives’ perception of what the situation actually requires.

Walter Brueggemann’s reading of this phrase in the context of the Exodus narrative identifies it as the text’s first counter-ideological move: Pharaoh’s world is, ideologically speaking, a closed system in which he is the final horizon of authority, the one before whom all other claims yield (Brueggemann 1994, 30–31). The midwives’ yare’ elohim introduces a crack in that closure: there is another claim, prior to Pharaoh’s, that governs how these women read their situation and what they decide to do in it. Empire requires that its instruments see only the empire. The midwives see past it.

This is not a uniquely religious insight – it is a structural observation about the conditions under which resistance becomes possible. Any system of domination depends, for its implementation, on the willingness of those at the operative level to accept the system’s account of reality as the only account available. The midwives’ yare’ elohim is the name for their refusal of that account. Something, a moral orientation, a prior loyalty, a different account of what the situation is, allows them to see past the authority of the decree to the life of the child. And seeing clearly, they act accordingly.

Carolyn Pressler notes the naming politics of the passage: Pharaoh is identified by his title; the midwives are identified by their names (Pressler 2006, 19). The God who is feared by Shiphrah and Puah is, implicitly, the God who knows names – the God who recognises the irreducible particularity of persons that imperial systems require to be flattened into categories and managed as populations. The king of Egypt, despite his power, is never named in the text. The midwives, despite their vulnerability, are named twice. This is the narrative’s first subversive move: the powerful are anonymous; the resisters have faces.

The Lie That Saves: On Deception as Moral Act

The midwives’ response to Pharaoh’s interrogation has generated considerable discomfort in the interpretive tradition: ‘Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them’ (v. 19). The statement is, almost certainly, a lie – or at very best a strategic misdirection. They almost certainly did not fail to arrive in time; the narrative has given us no reason to think so. They chose not to kill the children and then, when questioned, constructed an explanation that Pharaoh could not easily disprove.

The tradition has been uncomfortable with this. The discomfort reveals something important about the kinds of moral framework the tradition has imported into its reading of the text, frameworks in which the prohibition on deception functions as an absolute regardless of context, and in which the moral virtue of the resisters must be kept unambiguous.

But the text itself shows no discomfort whatsoever. It does not note the deception with a tone of regret or qualification. It moves directly from the lie to the divine reward: ‘So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families’ (vv. 20–21). The text rewards the midwives not despite the lie but within the same sequence of events that includes the lie. The moral logic of the narrative is not that the deception is an unfortunate necessity to be acknowledged and moved past; it is that the deception is an act of wisdom, of the particular kind of wisdom that powerless people develop when they need to navigate systems designed to destroy them.

Musa Dube, in her postcolonial feminist reading of the trickster figures in biblical narrative, argues that the deceptive acts of the vulnerable, from the midwives to Tamar to Rahab, constitute a recurring biblical pattern in which the wit of the marginalised outwits the strength of the powerful, and in which the narrative’s moral sympathy is consistently with the trickster rather than with the tricked (Dube 2000, 85–87). The lie of Shiphrah and Puah is in good canonical company. It belongs to the tradition of the clever widow, the resourceful servant, the unexpected reversal, the tradition in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first by means of exactly the kind of strategic intelligence that power tends to underestimate.

What Pharaoh Cannot See

The epistemological dimension of the midwives’ trickery is worth dwelling on. Pharaoh cannot imagine that Shiphrah and Puah are deceiving him. His entire world-view depends on the impossibility of their resistance: they are women, they are professional practitioners of a low status occupation, they are members (or servants) of an enslaved people, they have no institutional standing, no formal authority, no means of external support. They are, within Pharaoh’s categories, non-agents. And non-agents do not resist.

This epistemological blindspot is not Pharaoh’s personal failure; it is the structural consequence of his position. Domination requires the ideological construction of those it dominates as passive, incapable, or compliant – not merely as a justification for domination but as a practical precondition for it. If Pharaoh genuinely believed that the midwives might defy his decree, he would have sent supervisors, created accountability structures, introduced surveillance. He did not, because he could not imagine that defiance was available to them. And so he left the empire’s most critical demographic operation in the hands of the two women most motivated to subvert it.

R. S. Sugirtharajah, writing on the postcolonial dimensions of biblical narrative, identifies this pattern across the Hebrew Bible: the powerful are consistently outwitted by those they have categorised as non-threats, because the categories of domination are always epistemologically distorting (Sugirtharajah 2001, 107). The midwives exploit Pharaoh’s blindspot not by attacking the empire from outside but by inhabiting the empire’s own categories presenting themselves as obedient, explaining their failure to comply in terms that fit the empire’s assumptions about Hebrew women, while acting in direct contradiction to those categories. This is not cowardice; it is craft. The craft of those who have no other weapons.

Survival as Theological Act

There is a tendency in liberation theology and more broadly in theologically engaged social ethics to valorise dramatic, public, confrontational forms of resistance while treating quieter, more durable, less visible forms as merely pragmatic rather than theologically significant. Shiphrah and Puah do not march. They do not issue declarations. They do not organise a coalition. They continue doing what midwives do helping mothers give birth to living children – while refusing to allow the political instrumentalisation of that act.

This quotidian form of resistance deserves fuller theological attention than it has typically received. James Scott’s anthropological work on ‘weapons of the weak’ the hidden transcripts, the strategic compliance, the subterranean forms of resistance practised by dominated communities in the everyday texture of their lives identifies exactly this kind of resistance as both more common and more historically consequential than the dramatic confrontations that tend to capture both scholarly and popular attention (Scott 1985, xvi–xvii). The midwives are practitioners of precisely this tradition: their resistance is durable precisely because it is embedded in the ordinary performance of their professional vocation.

Theologically, this matters because it locates the locus of God’s liberative action not in the exceptional and the dramatic but in the ordinary and the persistent. The God who rewards Shiphrah and Puah acts through the texture of professional life faithfully lived in defiance of what empire demands. For communities in which dramatic confrontation is either impossible or prohibitively costly, this is not a lesser theology of resistance; it is a more honest account of where liberation actually happens and how it is actually sustained.

The Gift of Families: Divine Irony and Imperial Reversal

The divine response to the midwives’ resistance is, at first reading, unexpectedly domestic: ‘because the midwives feared God, he gave them families’ (v. 21, vayya’as lahem battim, literally ‘he made for them houses’). Commentators who read this as a simple personal reward miss the structural irony the text is constructing. Pharaoh’s entire policy is aimed at the destruction of battim at the demographic elimination of the household units that constitute the social system of the people he fears. The midwives’ act preserves battim; their reward is battim. God gives back, with structural precision, exactly what Pharaoh sought to destroy, and gives it first to the women through whom the destruction was supposed to be implemented.

Trible’s rhetorical analysis notes that this reversal is one of the governing patterns of the Exodus narrative: the instruments of death repeatedly become the agents of life (Trible 1994, 35). The river into which the male children are to be thrown becomes the river from which Moses is rescued. The palace of Pharaoh becomes the home in which the future liberator is raised. The midwives who are commanded to kill become the first community rewarded with the gift of generational life. The empire’s logic of death is repeatedly, systematically, ironically reversed by the God who hears the groaning and acts through the most unexpected agents.

This structural irony is not decorative. It is a claim about the kind of God being described and the kind of historical logic this God operates within. Empire works by accumulation – accumulating power, accumulating compliance, accumulating instruments. God works by reversal – working through the instrument empire has left unguarded, through the space empire has designated as beneath surveillance, through the life that empire has designated for death. The midwives are not incidental to this theological claim; they are its first illustration.

Ecclesiological and Ethical Implications

What does it mean to read this text seriously in the context of a faith community? Several implications press themselves forward from the subversive reading we have been developing.

First, the community of faith must attend to who is not in the room. Pharaoh’s failure is an institutional failure: he has organised his structures in such a way that those most likely to subvert his purposes are those most trusted with their implementation. Any institution that concentrates its attention on those it considers important while designating others as peripheral has reproduced Pharaoh’s epistemological blindspot. The church that wants to know what God is doing in the world must be willing to ask who it has left unsupervised at the birthstool.

Second, the moral significance of ordinary professional faithfulness must be recovered. Shiphrah and Puah do not perform heroic acts of dramatic sacrifice. They do their job in defiance of what those in power demand. The ordinary practitioner, the teacher who teaches truthfully, the medical worker who cares honestly, the bureaucrat who enforces the law rather than its corrupt administration, participates in the same theological tradition as the midwives. The subversive reading of this text refuses the restriction of moral seriousness to the dramatic and the public (Scott 1985, 29).

Third, the community of faith must be suspicious of its own comfortable accounts of where God’s liberative action occurs. The canon places the first act of liberation not in the sanctuary, not in the court, not in the academy, but at the birthstool – in the marginal professional space of two women whose names the tradition has barely bothered to learn to pronounce. Brueggemann’s observation that the prophetic imagination consistently locates divine action at the margins of what the dominant culture regards as significant is nowhere more precisely illustrated than here (Brueggemann 2001, 13).

Conclusion: Learning to Pronounce Their Names

Shiphrah. Puah. Two names that most congregations have never heard read aloud. Two names that the tradition has treated as throwaways narrative furniture to be moved out of the way before the real story begins. A subversive reading of Exodus 1:15–21 insists that they are not furniture. They are the story’s first theologians, its first ethicists, its first practitioners of the kind of resistance that makes all subsequent liberation possible.

The king of Egypt is not named. The midwives are. This is the canon’s first and most compressed statement of a theological conviction that will run through the entire narrative of Scripture: that the God who is met in this story is the God who knows and preserves the names of those whom empire has decided are not worth naming. To read this text seriously is to learn, at minimum, to pronounce their names. Shiphrah. Puah. And to ask, with genuine theological seriousness, who in our own context is doing what they did – preserving life in defiance of the systems designed to extinguish it – whose name we have similarly failed to learn.

Bibliography

Brueggemann, Walter. 1994. A Social Reading of the Old Testament: Prophetic Approaches to Israel’s Communal Life. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Brueggemann, Walter. 2001. The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Childs, Brevard S. 1974. The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

Dube, Musa W. 2000. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis: Chalice Press.

Pixley, Jorge. 1987. On Exodus: A Liberation Perspective. Translated by Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Pressler, Carolyn. 2006. Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

Propp, William H. C. 1999. Exodus 1–18. Anchor Bible 2. New York: Doubleday.

Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. 1983. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad.

Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sugirtharajah, R. S. 2001. The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trible, Phyllis. 1994. Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.