Thomas J Parlette
“Tools in the Hands of God”
Exodus 1:8-2:10
8/27/23
You’ve probably never met an undercover operative (that you know of), but they are everywhere if you believe all the movies and TV shows about them.
One of the favorite shows in the Parlette household is the long running series “NCIS.” NCIS featured a character named Ziva David, a Mossad operative and daughter of the Israeli spy agency’s director. In an arrangement between the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and Mossad, Ziva joins the NCIS team as a liason officer, replacing the agent who died at the hands of her half-brother Ari. Ziva has a background in the military, as do all Israeli women, and she trained in the special-ops unit known as Kidon – transforming herself into an expert in sabotage, assassinations and psychological; warfare. In her own way, and for her own reasons, Ziva sees herself as a player in the national struggle to save and protect the nation of Israel.
In today’s passage from Exodus, we meet some more female undercover operatives as they struggle behind the scenes to save and protect God’s covenant people.
Their story is an account of how God saved a nation through their daring and defiant actions. These two women rank right up there with the other biblical female operatives such as Deborah, Rahab, Esther and Jael. All these accounts are stories of incredible courage and daring – tales of how the nation of Israel was saved from certain destruction.
These women of biblical history are every bit as interesting as some of the female operatives of more modern times – especially those that came out of World War II. For example, there was:
Virginia Hall, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by OSS chief William Donovan in 1945. And her exploits did not end with World War II, Hall spent another 16 years with the CIA.
Or, there was Yolande Beekman, also a spy in World War II. She was first derided by the Nazi’s as a “nice girl who darned socks.” But she became a wireless operator for a resistance cell, and her unit was dedicated to blowing up canals and railway infrastructure in the area. Codenamed “Mariette,” she was so successful that the Gestapo brought in teams of radio detector vans to track her down. She was finally arrested in a canal-side café and transported to Dachau concentration camp, she was executed in 1944 at the age of 32.
And there was the gun-toting Nancy Wake, known as the “White Mouse of the French Resistance”, perhaps best known for planning and leading a raid on a Gestapo headquarters that left almost 30 Germans dead or wounded. (1)
Without their exploits, history may have turned out quite differently.
Our passage from exodus begins with the words, “a new king arose in Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” There was a very good reason the new Pharaoh, probably Rameses II, did not know Joseph – whose story we visited last week, with its own elements of palace intrigue and shenanigans. By this time – Joseph is history, ancient history. It has been several hundred years since Joseph’s administration of Egypt’s granaries saved the nation from starvation.
In the intervening years, the Hebrew descendants of Joseph and his brothers had been fruitful and multiplied, and the Pharaoh, fearing that they might rise up against them, turned the erstwhile guests of the kingdom into slaves – a condition in which they labored for more than 400 years. Hose alive at the time of our story had no memory of anything but captivity. Their fathers and their father’s fathers were slaves. That’s just the way life was.
The conditions were bad. The Egyptians “set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor… But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.”
The crowning blow was the edict that all male Hebrew babies were to be killed at birth. Girls could live – they were not seen as a threat; but the boys received a sentence of death. “Pharaoh commanded all his people, ‘Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live,” the story says.
This is of course how we learn about one particular little boy who was spared – a child who would grow to become the greatest and foremost leader of the Hebrew people, the boy in a basket – Moses. And had it not been for a group of female operatives working behind the scenes, Moses would never have survived.
There are 4 major players, or groups of players in this story. Two are individuals who know each other and act in concert with each other. And two are teams of players who coordinate a strategy to achieve their aims.
First, there is Jochebed, the mother of Moses. She defied Pharaoh’s cruel order by keeping her baby boy hidden for at least three months. Then, when she couldn’t hide him anymore, she got a papyrus basket for him and plastered it with bitumen and pitch – interesting, the same stuff that Noah used to make the Ark back in Genesis. Jochebed put her child in the basket and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river.
Then, we have Miriam, Moses’ older sister. Miriam’s job was to linger around the riverside, keeping an eye out for her baby brother and report back to her mother. She was the lookout, the guardian, the sentry. She kept watch to make sure the basket wasn’t attacked by animals, or float away downstream.
Next up, we have the midwives. They were told by the Pharaoh that male babies were to be killed. But this group of women – two of whom are mentioned by name, Shiphrah and Puah, “feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them.” They were deliberately disobeying orderings from the very top. And when they were called before the king to explain their disobedience, their excuse was a bit flimsy – “The Hebrew women are strong,” they said, “not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.”
And finally, we have the princess and her attendants. A royal princess of the court of Rameses II discovers the baby, and finding him adorable beyond belief, disobeys her father’s command. “The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews children,” she said.
Now, Miriam, who is watching all this unfold, comes up with an ingenious plan. Risking her life, she intervenes and interrupts the Pharaoh’s daughter and her entourage. “I think I know of a woman who could nurse the baby. Would your highness want me to fetch this woman?”
Well, the princess thinks this is a wonderful idea, and Miriam runs off to fetch the nurse who, of course, is Moses’ mother, Jochebed.
It was the princess who gave the baby his name. When the lad grew up, Jochebed took him to the Pharaoh’s daughter, and “she took him as her son. She named him Moses, because, she said, “I drew him up out of the water.” And so Moses was raised by his Egyptian mother, received an education in the court of the Pharaoh and lived the life of a royal. Moses’ mother and her attendants were able to deceive the Pharaoh for years.
And that is the story of how some female operatives changed the course of history.
The astute reader might wonder – Where is God in this story. Aside from a brief mention in verses 20-21, God is scarcely mentioned in this passage. So where is God?
Well, God is present, but God is working quietly, behind the scenes. God is found in the relationships of Hebrew men and women and the children those unions produce. God is sitting in a stool beside Shiphrah and Puah as they grasp the shoulders of newborn Israelites babies and bring yet another life into God’s covenant people. God can also be seen in the brave resolve of those two midwives who refused to carry out Pharaoh’s “final solution.”
It is striking that the names of these women have been preserved for us in scripture. In the broad sweep of the Old Testament, it is mostly the names of the very famous that are recorded (and almost all of those names are men, not women.) Yet the author of Exodus was savvy in realizing that Shiphrah and Puah deserved recognition in the course of salvation history because it was indeed no one less than God who was fulfilling the covenant with Abraham through them. (2)
Each of these women had different roles in the drama surrounding the birth of Moses, and each role was vital. Each of them were tools in the hands of God. They all shared some common characteristics, they all were defiant in the face of an unjust order. But maybe we can look at that from a different angle and say that they were all highly defiant – in defense of their objective. Or perhaps courageous in their conviction to do what was right and resist their authoritarian ruler. Although defying the political regime, the head of state and countless officials lower on the food chain, they were united by their belief in the rightness of their actions.
Is this story encouraging us to resist oppressors and persecutors? Yes, I would say it is.
Now, none of us want to do serious jail time. But what would have happened to the Civil Rights movement of Rosa Parks had given up her seat on the bus to the white man who asked for it? What would have happened if women like Dorthy Height, Fannie Lou Hamer, Daisy Bates and Septima Poinsette Clark had been afraid to resist and speak out.
Think about how the absence of defiant women would have altered the abolitionist movement or the quest to secure voting rights for women – women like Jane Addams, Susan B Anthony, and Sojourner Truth. These women were successful because they didn’t believe or behave in the manner expected of them.
I realize that most of us aren’t called to the vocation of full-time defiance.
So how can we have a part in saving the world?
Perhaps we have overlooked another form of defiance that doesn’t involve protest marches, shouting chants or carrying banners.
The defiance of love and kindness would appear to be counterintuitive. Yet each act of love and kindness is a rebellion against tyranny, bitterness and unkindness. It is a way of saying, “We do not agree with the aggressive, evil, back-stabbing, back-talking, hostile and oppressive behavior we see in play in our culture today. We stand against these. We will openly and subversively sow love and kindness regardless of any perceived outcome. We are united in pursuit of a common objective.”
Each act of kindness rebuffs the haters among us.
Each unexpected demonstration of love helps to restore faith in humanity and perhaps in God.
The first thing is not to have any expectations. Surely the mother of Moses did not know whether her defiance would have a good outcome. Moses sister, likewise, could only do her job and watch the baby in the river. The midwives could only fear God and do what was right. The Pharaoh’s daughter could only obey her maternal instinct and defy her father to save the child. The actions were grounded in hope, not expectations. Ultimately they depended on an act of God.
In 1984, Linda Down ran the New York City marathon. She was the last person to complete the race – it took her 11 hours. Even though she suffers from cerebral palsy and ran with the help of crutches – she still finished. When asked by a reporter why she ran the marathon, Linda replied, “We are living in negative times. Things feel impossible today. I thought that if I could try to do this, it might be an inspiration to others, and maybe they would try some big things too.”
Then she added, “But those last 11 miles were an act of God.”
The reporter asked, “What do you mean, ‘an act of God?’
With 11 miles to go, I ran out of my own strength. I didn’t have any more. I finished the race on borrowed power.” (3)
As the midwives learned, everyone who trusts in God, and takes those defiant steps for what is right, can depend on borrowed power – the power of God.
As Paul wrote to the church in Corinth – “Therefore my brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” For we are tools in the hands of God.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Homileticsonline, retrieved August 2nd, 2023.
2. Ibid…
3. Ibid…
