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brisk cold and snow. Nevertheless, the sojourn allowed me time to think a bit about Passover, relative to the fear that seems so pervasive in the news. I wondered if the Pharaoh reigning at the time of Moses' birth suffered from paranoia -- and why? The Pharaoh is not named, but certainly by the time he takes his station, the Children of Israel "bore fruit, swarmed, grew mighty, and the land filled up with them."
Perhaps this Pharaoh, who "knew not Joseph," was Seti I, but we are not told. What we are told is that he feared that if war broke out, "they would be added to our enemies and make war upon us." His answer was to enslave the Israelites and force them into hard labor. We are next told that Pharaoh's fear ran so deep, that he devised a scheme to reduce their numbers by killing all male children -- genocide by selection. Was it the first attempt to destroy Jews or any ethnic or religious group? It certainly wouldn't be the last. We are told that Pharaoh instructed two midwives this way: "When you help Hebrew women give birth, if it is a boy, kill him, but if it is a girl, let her live." And while the name of the Pharaoh is lost to us, we know the names of the women -- Shifra and Pua -- who disobeyed the order of the King of Egypt and let all the children live. When called upon to explain why the male children lived, the midwives said to Pharaoh,
"… not like the Egyptian are the Hebrew (women); before the midwife comes to them, they have given birth." Hearing this, Pharaoh orders that all newborn males be thrown into the Nile. This leads to the story of the birth of one particular baby boy, who was set into the Nile in a basket and retrieved by the Pharaoh's daughter. She named him Moses -- in Egyptian meaning "he who was pulled out." Think about this: absent Pharaoh's fear and absent his outlandish paranoia, history might well have written an entirely different course for our forebears and, perhaps, the persecution (s) that followed might never have occurred. The result? No Passover. What think you of this strange tale, made possible by the heroism of two midwives?
Micah
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