EXOD24 The story of the midwives that belongs to a larger vision implicit throughout the Torah and Tanakh as a whole: that right is sovereign over might, and that even God Himself can be called to account in the name of justice, as He expressly mandates Abraham to do. Sovereignty ultimately belongs to God, so any human act or order the transgresses the will of God is by that fact alone ultra vires. These revolutionary ideas are intrinsic to the biblical vision of politics and the use of power. In the end, though, it was the courage of two remarkable women that created the precedent later taken up by the American writer Thoreau in his classic essay Civil Disobedience (1849) that in turn inspired to Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the 20th Century. Their story also ends with a lovely touch. The text says: "So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, He gave them houses [this and following verse]." Luzzato interprets this last phrase to mean that He gave them families of their own. Often, he writes, midwives are women who are unable to have children. In this case, God blessed Shifra and Puah by giving them children, as He had done for Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel. This too is a not unimportant point. The closest Greek literature comes to the idea of civil disobedience is the story of Antigone who insisted on giving her brother Polynices a burial despite the fact that King Creon had refused to permit it, regarding him as a traitor to Thebes. Sophocles' Antigone is a tragedy: the heroine must die because of her loyalty to her brother and disobedience to the king. The Hebrew Bible, however, it is not a tragedy. In fact, biblical Hebrew has no word meaning "tragedy" in the Greek sense. Good is rewarded, not punished, because the universe, God's work of art, is a world in which moral behavior is blessed and evil, briefly in the ascendant, is ultimately defeated. Shifra and Puah are two of the great heroines of world literature, the first to teach humanity the moral limits of power.