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The women in Exodus
We first meet Miriam as guardian and protector on the riverbank, then as prophet and leader after the deliverance at the Red Sea and finally as prophetic challenge to power in the wilderness. What Hebrew Bible scholar Phyllis Trible calls the ‘Miriamic presence’ (Trible 2001:173) becomes the Miriamic tradition, the prophetic tradition of faithful resistance against empire, the early temptation in ancient Israel to imitate the ways of empire and against patriarchal power and privilege. Miriam emerges against the darkness of unimaginable oppression: a darkness pierced only by the light of the fierce, audacious hope held by two women.
The tyranny of the Pharaoh we meet in Exodus 1 leaves no room for misunderstanding. The Egyptian taskmasters aimed to ‘bend’, ‘to wear out anyone’s strength’, to ‘break them down physically’, to ‘crush’ the Israelite slaves. Their goal was not only physical, it was also to ‘crush their spirit so as to banish the very wish for liberty’ (Keil & Delitzsch n.d.:422). ‘This Pharaoh suggested three means of oppression: the first was forced labour, the second infanticide, [and] … the third was mass infanticide’ (Keil & Delitzsch n.d.:422). This despotism, as all despotism, ‘knows only two paths - enslavement and murder’ (Jacob 1992:22).
Siphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, defy the command of Pharaoh to kill the baby boys even as the Israelite women are on the birth stool. They become the symbol of resistance, standing in for the whole people of Israel. It is not just the people under imperial tyrannical rule who cannot stand tyranny however, John Calvin writes, reflecting not only the political situation in his own time, but building a framework for resistance against such conditions generally. God self ‘cannot endure tyrants and [God] listens in empathy to the secret groans of those who live under them’ (Calvin 1981; Commentary on Isa 14:7-8).
Elsewhere, Calvin will radicalise this thought considerably. Not only does he tell us that the longing for freedom and justice is ‘implanted in us’ by God, but also that the cries against oppression are not only heard by God, but ‘it is as if God hears [God]self in the cries of the oppressed’ (Commentary on the 12 Minor Prophets,...