In today’s first reading we continue the story of the infant Moses. Pharaoh’s first tactic to enslave the Israelites did not diminish their numbers. The follow-on tactic was to demand that the Hebrew midwives kill all Hebrew male babies (but not female babies, Ex 1:17) as they are born. Ironically, Pharaoh sees no threat from Israelite females, yet it is females (the midwives) who are the very ones who begin Pharaoh’s undoing. The midwives’ vocation from God is to preserve and protect life. Pharaoh demands that they deny their vocation and kill. In the Bible’s first act of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance for the sake of justice, the midwives refuse to obey Pharaoh’s deathly command. They lie to the authorities, breaking the law for the sake of justice and life. They explain to Pharaoh that the Hebrew women just give birth too quickly before we can arrive (v.19). It is in this time frame that Moses is born.

At this point Pharaoh moves on to his third tactic: turn the Nile River, Egypt’s main source of water and life, into an instrument of death by tossing all the Hebrew males into the river to drown or be eaten by the ever present crocodiles. Again, Pharaoh allows the Hebrew girls to live; he wrongly sees them as no threat. Ironies abound. It is a powerful cross-cultural and intergenerational alliance of three women – Moses’ Hebrew mother Jochebed (Exodus 2:1-3), Moses’ Hebrew sister Miriam (v.4), and Pharaoh’s Egyptian daughter (vv. 5-10) – who disobey Pharaoh and rescue the baby Moses. The three women succeed in making the river a place of rescue and life.

As is the case so often in the Bible, God uses what the patriarchal and power-hungry Pharaohs of the world consider as low and despised in their eyes (Hebrew women) as instruments to shame and overthrow the arrogant and the strong (1 Samuel 2:1-10 – Hannah’s prayer; Jeremiah 9:23). It is the beginning of the fracturing of Pharaoh’s power and world view. God is at work bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly (Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:52).

The reading quickly moves through the face of Moses being raised in the court of Pharaoh, to his killing an Egyptian, to beginning “life on the run.”

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