Called By Name: Meyalledot, the Midwives, and the God Who Names

We don't know Pharaoh's name. The book of Exodus opens with the most powerful man on earth giving an order to drown a generation of children, and the text never once tells us what he was called. Three thousand years later he's still just "Pharaoh," which is a job title.

We do know the names of the two women who beat him. Shiphrah. Puah.

That's where I wanted to start this week, because it's the whole argument of Exodus 1 compressed into a detail most of us read past.

The one sentence that breaks everything

We've been walking Genesis in order all summer. Jacob wrestling in the dark, Joseph in the pit, Joseph in the palace clearing the room so he can tell his brothers to come closer. Then the book turns a page and one sentence does all the damage: a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.

Not an invasion. Not a war. Just somebody in charge who doesn't remember the story.

Joseph had saved Egypt. He fed the entire country through seven years of famine. A few generations later there's a man on the throne who has no idea, and when he looks out at the Hebrews, here's what he says: they are more numerous and more powerful than we.

More numerous. He's counting them, and that's as far as he gets. Not a family, not neighbors, not the descendants of the man who saved his grandfather's kingdom. A quantity. A risk you can run the numbers on.

Once people are a quantity, the math takes over, and the math in Exodus 1 goes taskmasters, forced labor, mortar and brick. The word the text keeps circling back to is ruthless. It always starts the same way, with somebody who stops using names.

Meyalledot: the word for midwife that means life-bringer

Then the escalation comes, and two women walk into the story with their names attached: the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah.

Scripture did that on purpose. The king goes unnamed for the entire chapter. Two working women who deliver babies for a living are entered into the permanent record by name.

Their identity is sitting right there in what they're called. And a king whose entire program is death walks up to two people whose title means life-bringer and tells them to stop.

They don't argue. They don't organize. They keep doing their jobs. The text says they feared God and let the boys live. When Pharaoh hauls them in to explain themselves, they tell him the Hebrew women are just too quick, they deliver before the midwives can get there. Sorry, sir. Doing our best.

They lie to his face, and God blesses them for it.

Five women and a basket in the reeds

From there the story hands the baton down a line of people with no power at all.

A Levite mother hides a baby for three months, and when hiding stops working she builds a small boat and sets him in the reeds. His big sister walks down to the river with him. The Hebrew describing what she does is closer to taking up a post than to standing around watching. She has no plan and no leverage. She just refuses to walk away. We don't get her name here. We get it much later, on the far side of the sea, when she picks up a tambourine and leads Israel in their first song as free people. Miriam.

Then Pharaoh's daughter comes down to bathe. Sit with who that is for a second. She's the daughter of the man who signed the order, and she opens the basket, sees the boy crying, and says out loud that this is one of the Hebrews' children. She knows exactly which order she's breaking, and she happens to be the one person in Egypt who can break it and survive.

Miriam sees the opening and takes it: should I go find a Hebrew woman to nurse him for you? So Moses grows up in the palace, funded by Pharaoh, nursed by his own mother, who is now on the payroll of the man trying to kill him.

Pharaoh's daughter names him. And scripture never gives her a name either. She's filed under her father's office. Another job title.

Five women get Moses to adulthood: two midwives, a mother, a sister, and the daughter of the enemy. Not one of them holds an office. Not one of them is trying to bring down Egypt. Everything downstream, the plagues, the sea, the mountain, comes through a basket in the reeds that some kid was watching.

Sober judgment cuts both ways

Paul says something adjacent to this in Romans 12, in a completely different register. He tells the Romans not to think of themselves more highly than they ought, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure God assigned.

We usually hear that as a warning against ego. Sit down, don't get a big head. I think it's more precise than that. Sober judgment means an accurate read, and an accurate read cuts in both directions. Overestimating yourself is one error. Deciding you're nobody is the other one, and in my experience it's the more common one.

Shiphrah and Puah had an accurate read. They knew exactly what they were, which was two midwives. Not generals. Not prophets. So they did the midwife-sized thing, and the midwife-sized thing turned out to be the hinge of the Old Testament.

The name Peter couldn't carry yet

Which brings us to Caesarea Philippi and the second half of Matthew 16.

Jesus asks who people say he is, and the disciples have answers ready. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. Then he changes one word and asks it again: who do you say I am?

Peter goes first, and gets it right. Jesus doesn't say thank you. He gives him a name, formally, the way you'd read it off a document. Simon, son of Jonah, everything you've been up to this minute. And now you're Peter. Rock.

A few verses later Jesus tells them where this is headed: Jerusalem, arrested, killed, raised on the third day. And Peter, roughly four minutes into being the Rock, pulls him aside and says no, not you, I won't let it happen. Jesus turns around and calls him Satan, because Peter is standing in the road, trying to talk him out of the one thing he came to do.

So Peter receives the most solid name in scripture and then, inside one conversation, proves he can't carry it. He's the least rock-like man in the room. And the name holds. Jesus doesn't downgrade him to a provisional rock pending review. Peter will deny him three times before this is finished, and the name holds through that too.

The name came first. Peter spent the rest of his life catching up to it.

Pharaoh counts. God names.

That's the week, and it's the same move in all three readings. Pharaoh's whole theology fits in three words: more numerous than we. God's method is a name. Shiphrah. Puah. Peter. And Paul taking the time to tell a church that you, specifically, have a measure and a function that isn't the same as the person sitting next to you.

We live inside Pharaoh's arithmetic most days. You're a headcount, a customer segment, a number in a system that has never once used your name and never will. You are not a crowd.

And there's a version we do to ourselves, where we decide whatever we've got is too small to bother with. Neither of the midwives was anybody either. Neither was the girl in the reeds who did nothing except refuse to look away.

You already know what's in front of you this week. The call you keep not making. The kid who needs you to look up. That's your basket in the reeds.

Listen to the full episode for the whole walk through Exodus 1, Romans 12, and Matthew 16, and come back Thursday, when we take these same readings from a completely different angle.