Shabbat Parashat Shemot - 5781

Shabbat Parashat Shemot - 5781

Rabbi Hal Miller

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of one was

Shifrah and the name of the second was Puah. [Shemot 1:15]

In Shemot 12:37, the Torah tells us that six hundred thousand men on foot departed

Egypt. When we calculate women, children, and non-Jews who came along for the

ride, we see that the caravan constituted something over 2.6 million people. Our

verse seems to indicate that a total of two midwives served this entire population.

How is that possible?

The verse specifies "Hebrew midwives", so we could say that perhaps there were

a thousand non-Jews serving in the role as well. Rashbam seems to think so when

he says this phrase means "the ones who were Jewish", but we have no indication

that there were in fact others. In fact, the Torah seems to imply the opposite, when

in verse [1:19] these two midwives reply to Pharaoh that Jewish women don't need

this service and can handle giving birth by themselves.

On verse 19, Rashi follows Onkelos and says that what these two are telling Pharaoh

is that all Jewish women are wise in the ways of midwifery, so any neighbor can serve

without having to call in a professional. This, though, leaves us asking why Pharaoh

would have ended up only giving his orders to two women.

This question seems to also bother Sforno. He explains that Pharaoh called in and

spoke to the midwives resident in the capital, and notes that obviously these two could

not cover the entire Jewish population in Egypt, but very few Jews lived in the capital.

Apparently it was Pharaoh's intent to begin this new program there, and then expand

it to the outlying areas once he got things established. Given the explanation he

received in our parsha, Pharaoh abandoned the scheme, seeing it would do no good.

In any event, it seems a stretch that Pharaoh would try to use two Jewish midwives to

carry out an extermination of the entire Jewish population. Something else had to have

been driving his action here. Perhaps he understood, from whatever source, that the

Jewish savior would be born in the capital, thus only needed to destroy one particular

baby to further his causes. This would explain why he only needed to contact the lead

midwives in the capital, and would explain why he didn't press the issue with them once

he realized they were not going to cooperate. He could see that not only would they

fail to follow this order, but any other Jewish midwives would too, so he had no need to

try convincing additional women.

If so, then the Torah is showing us something of the thought process of Pharaoh. Why?

Perhaps because this serves as a justification for God's later action in hardening the

heart of Pharaoh. We now see that he was in fact irretrievably wicked, proved merely

through his thoughts and attempts at pushing such action off onto others.