EXOD12 The opening chapters of Exodus plunge us into the midst of epic events. Almost at a stroke the Israelites are transformed from protected minority to slaves. Moses passes from Prince of Egypt to Midianite shepherd to leader of the Israelites through a history-changing encounter at the burning bush. Yet it is one small episode that deserves to be seen as a turning point in the history of humanity. Its heroines are two remarkable women, Shifra and Puah. We do not know who they were. The Torah gives us no further information about them than that they were midwives, instructed by Pharaoh: "When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is if it isa girl, let her live" [this verse]. A Hebrew description of the two women as hameyaldot haIvriyot it could mean" the Hebrew midwives"; so most translations and commentaries read it. But it could equally mean, "the midwives to the Hebrews," in which case they may have been Egyptian. That is how Josephus [Antiquities of the Jews, 2.9.2], Abarbanel, and Samuel David Luzzatto understand it, arguing that it is simply implausible to suppose that Hebrew women would have been party to an act of genocide against their own people. What we do know, however, is that they refused to carry out the order: "The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told him to do; they let the boys live" (Exodus 1:17). This is the first recorded instance in history of civil disobedience: refusing to obey an order, given by the most powerful man in the most powerful empire of the ancient world, simply because it was immoral, unethical, inhuman. The Torah suggests that they did so without fuss or drama. Summoned by Pharaoh to explain their behavior, they simply replied: "Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive" (Exodus 1:19). To this, Pharaoh had no reply. The matter-of-factness of the entire incident reminds us of one of the most salient findings about the courage of those who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. They had little in common except for the fact that they saw nothing remarkable in what they did. [See James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), 35-39, and the literature cited there]. Often the mark of real moral heroes is that they do not see themselves as moral heroes. They do what they do because that is what a human being is supposed to do. That is probably the meaning of the statement that they "feared God." It is the Torah's generic description of those who have a moral sense (See, for example, Gen. 20:11).