The Hebrew Midwives in Exodus 1: Faith, Fear, and Obedience
Short answer: The Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1:15-21 were Shiphrah and Puah, two women ordered by Pharaoh to kill the newborn sons of Hebrew women. The king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah, and he commanded them to kill the boys and let the girls live. The text says they did not do what Pharaoh asked because they feared God, which is the point of the passage. It does not say they lied out of cowardice or that God approved of deception as a general rule. It says they feared God, they spared the children, and God dealt well with them.
Who the Hebrew Midwives Were and What Pharaoh Ordered
Exodus opens with a family that multiplied in a foreign land until a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. The narrative of Exodus 1:8-14 explains that this king, threatened by Israel's growth, enslaved the people and made their lives bitter with hard service. When affliction failed to shrink the population, he turned to a more direct method. The text introduces two women by name, Shiphrah and Puah, described as Hebrew midwives, and puts a royal order in their hands. This is not a vague threat or a general atmosphere of danger; it is a specific command from the throne aimed at the lives of newborn boys.
Pharaoh's method was to exploit the exact moment of birth. Midwives attended women in labour and were the first to see the child. He apparently reasoned that if the boys could be quietly killed at delivery, the population could be controlled without open slaughter. The command shows how far a powerful state will go to secure itself, and it shows how ordinary the setting of defiance was. God did not raise up an army at this point. He used two women at the bedside. The rescue of an entire people began with the faithful refusal of two people whose names the Bible preserves. Their work was humble, but the moment was decisive.
It is worth noticing that the narrative does not tell us whether these two women were literally Hebrew by blood or Egyptian women who served Hebrew mothers, though the plain reading calls them Hebrew midwives. It also does not tell us how many midwives served the whole nation, so we should not turn two names into a claim about the total number of births or attendants. The text is spare and focused. Two women are named, one command is given, and one response is recorded. The rest of the story, including the multiplication of Israel, is left to the wider narrative and to God's promise to Abraham, which is quietly at work behind every line.
The order itself is a hidden crime. Pharaoh did not announce it publicly in the way he later announced the drowning of boys in the river. He spoke privately to the midwives. This means the obedience he demanded would have been invisible and deniable, exactly the kind of evil that thrives when no one is watching. It also means the midwives' refusal was invisible and costly. Nobody would have praised them for it. They had no public platform, no crowd of supporters, and no legal protection. They simply had a choice between the king's word and the lives of children, and they chose the children because they feared God.
What It Means That the Midwives Feared God
The reason the text gives for their refusal is not political theory, humanitarian instinct, or cultural loyalty to their own people, though any of those might have played a part. The text says they feared God. Fear of God in Scripture is not terror of a cruel master; it is reverent awe, the settled conviction that God is real, that he sees, and that his verdict matters more than any human verdict. That conviction produced action. A fear of God that never moves the will is not the fear of God the Bible describes. These women acted because they believed God was worth more than Pharaoh's approval and more than their own safety.
Fear of God also reframes who the real authority is. Pharaoh spoke with the weight of empire; he could imprison, enslave, or kill. Yet the midwives weighed his command against the law of the God who made life, and they found it wanting. They did not organise a rebellion, write a manifesto, or seek a public hearing. They simply did not do what was commanded. In the Bible's moral logic, this is not lawlessness but a higher loyalty. When human authority commands what God forbids, the creature does not owe the creator's place to the state. That is a dangerous principle when misused, and the next section deals with that danger, but it is the principle the passage itself demonstrates.
Their fear of God was also practical and costly. These women lived under the same regime that enslaved their neighbours. Refusing the king could mean death, and the text does not romanticise the risk. It simply says they feared God and let the boys live. Faith in Scripture often looks like this: not a feeling but a decision made under threat, when the cost is real and the outcome is unknown. Hebrews 11:23 later describes Moses' parents in similar terms, saying they were not afraid of the king's commandment. The same quiet courage runs through this whole opening section of Exodus, and the midwives stand at its head.
It is also significant that this is one of the few places in the Old Testament where two women are named together for an act of faith in a narrative dominated by men. They were not prophets, priests, kings, or warriors. They were midwives. Their memorial is a verse in the most famous book of deliverance in the Bible. God is not embarrassed by small callings. The work he honoured was the work of catching a child, and the courage he recorded was exercised in a birthing room, not on a battlefield. The church has often drawn encouragement from this, and rightly so, but the point is not merely that women can be heroic. The point is that God sees faithfulness where the world sees only routine.
Did the Midwives Lie, and Does the Bible Approve It?
When Pharaoh confronted them, the midwives gave an answer that has troubled careful readers for centuries. They explained that Hebrew women were vigorous and gave birth before the midwife arrived. The question is whether this was a lie and, if so, whether the Bible is endorsing deception. The text does not explicitly label it as a lie, and it does not command us to imitate the wording. It says God dealt well with the midwives, and it says they feared God, which is the reason given for sparing the children. The moral weight of the passage falls on the sparing, not on the excuse. Anyone who turns this verse into a general licence for lying has gone further than the text goes.
Several observations help here. First, the midwives were in a situation of lethal injustice, and the Bible elsewhere records faithful people who misdirected wicked men to protect innocent life and were not condemned for it, as with Rahab in Joshua 2. Second, the narrative is not set up as a moral textbook on truth-telling; it is a rescue story in which God preserves his people. Third, the Bible's own teaching elsewhere is clear that God hates lying, so this passage cannot be read as permission to lie when it suits us. The most honest reading is that the text does not resolve the question as neatly as we would like, and readers who honour Scripture should say so rather than forcing a tidy answer.
What the passage does establish is that God commended the midwives' refusal to kill, and that this refusal flowed from their fear of God. It does not establish that every difficult situation creates an exemption from the ninth commandment, nor does it give us a formula for when deception is acceptable. Faithful Christians have differed on this point for centuries. Some hold that any intentional falsehood is sin and that the midwives' words must be read as a true report, perhaps because Hebrew women really did deliver quickly. Others hold that protecting innocent life in that extreme case was the weightier duty. The passage itself does not settle the debate, and it is honest to say so.
What we can say with confidence is that the midwives were not acting out of love for falsehood. They were acting out of fear of God and regard for human life, and God's blessing rests on that. The story is not a manual for deception; it is a testimony that God remembers those who fear him and honour life when it is costly to do so. Read that way, the passage still challenges us. It asks what we do when the powerful ask us to participate in quiet evil, and whether our fear of God is real enough to move our hands. It does not ask us to imitate every word in the account.
God Dealt Well With the Midwives
The end of the passage records a striking promise. Because the midwives feared God, he made them households, and the people multiplied and grew very strong. The blessing is concrete and relational. Households in the ancient world meant family, name, security, and inheritance, a stake in the future. Pharaoh attempted to erase a people; God gave two women a lasting family. The contrast is deliberate. The man who feared a population boom tried to end generations, and God answered by giving his faithful servants a lineage. The wording also links the blessing to their fear of God rather than to the success of their strategy, reminding us that God rewards persons, not merely outcomes.
There is a wider theological point here. God had promised Abraham descendants like the stars, and no imperial edict could cancel that promise. The midwives became, in a small way, agents of the covenant's survival. The narrator even notes that the people multiplied and grew strong, which is the very thing Pharaoh was trying to prevent. The mechanisms of the oppressor failed, and the promised line continued toward Moses, the exodus, and eventually the Messiah. When God makes a promise, the gates of hell, or the throne of Egypt, cannot hold it back. The midwives are a case study in how God keeps his word through ordinary people who simply refuse to do evil and trust him with the consequences.
This also warns us against using the blessing as a measuring stick. Not every faithful act in Scripture is visibly rewarded in this life, and Jesus himself tells his followers to expect persecution. The midwives received a good outcome; other faithful servants have died without one, as Hebrews 11 acknowledges of those who were sawn in two and killed with the sword. If we read the midwives only as a formula for blessing, we will be shaken when our obedience costs us and no household follows. The point is not that faithfulness always pays off visibly. The point is that God saw them, God dealt well with them, and God can be trusted whether or not we ever see the same result.
Still, their story should encourage us to expect that God cares about the details of our obedience. He did not merely tolerate the midwives; he dealt well with them. That phrasing suggests deliberate kindness, not bare permission. It is the same posture he shows again and again to those who honour him at cost. The passage invites us to trust a God who notices what no one else notices, and to believe that even an act no one applauds can be a seed God will water. That is a great comfort to anyone whose faithfulness is unseen. The God of Shiphrah and Puah has not changed.
The Midwives and the Wider Story of Exodus and Christ
The midwives' courage sits at the headwaters of a river that flows directly to the exodus. Because they let the boys live, Moses was born. Exodus 2:1-10 tells how a Levite couple hid their son for three months, and when they could hide him no longer, they placed him in a basket among the reeds of the Nile. The river Pharaoh meant to use as a grave became the water that carried a deliverer to his rescue. The very instrument of death becomes the vessel of life. This is the pattern of the whole Bible, and it begins with the quiet defiance of two midwives whose names most Israelites would have forgotten and God did not.
Hebrews 11:23 comments on the next generation of this story, saying that Moses was hidden by his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and were not afraid of the king's commandment. The same fear-of-God courage that marked Shiphrah and Puah reappears in Moses' parents. It runs through the story like a seam of gold. The point is not that these people were sinless; it is that fear of God overruled fear of the king. That is the obedience which pleases God, and it is the obedience that God used to preserve a redeemer for his people. Ordinary acts of courage, woven together, become the fabric of God's plan.
Later, when Peter and the apostles were commanded not to teach in Jesus' name, they answered, "But Peter and the apostles answered, 'We must obey God rather than men.'" That sentence in Acts 5:29 is often called the midwives' principle. It does not mean that every disagreement with a government is divine obedience; Christians are told elsewhere to be subject to governing authorities, and the church has usually recognised that only direct commands to sin justify refusal. But in that narrow and costly place, where the state commands what God forbids, the faithful servant says no. The midwives said it before Peter did, and they said it without a sermon, a crowd, or a defence.
There is a thread from the midwives to Moses to Christ himself, whose life was also threatened by a murderous king in the days of Herod, and who was preserved in Egypt of all places until the danger passed. God's pattern is consistent: he hides, he preserves, he delivers. The courage of two midwives became part of the way God brought his Son into the world through a line he had preserved for centuries. That is a staggering thought, and it is not sentimental. It is the Bible's own logic: God uses small obediences to accomplish great redemptions, and he does not lose a single act of faithfulness along the way.
What the Hebrew Midwives Teach Us Today
The first lesson is that fear of God outranks fear of people. This is not a hypothetical principle; it is a daily one. We are all tempted to go along with things we know are wrong because the cost of refusing seems too high. The midwives show us that the question is not whether refusal is costly but whether God is real. When he is, obedience becomes possible even under a death threat. This does not mean every Christian is called to heroic confrontation. It means that in whatever sphere God has placed us, we do our work before him and refuse to participate in destroying life or spreading evil, trusting him with the result.
The second lesson is that faithfulness is often invisible. These women did not lead a movement or deliver a speech. Their obedience happened in the middle of the night, in pain-filled rooms, with no witnesses except God and the mothers. If you serve in a hidden place, this passage is for you. It says that God sees what the world does not. It also warns us against measuring our lives by recognition. The hand that caught the child mattered more than the hand that signed the decree, and the woman no one remembered is the one God named in Scripture. He is not dependent on our platform to use our obedience.
The third lesson is to honour life. Pharaoh's order treated newborn boys as a threat to be erased, and the midwives refused to coerce their hands into that evil. The church's long commitment to protecting the vulnerable, the unborn, the elderly, the disabled, and the stranger is not a political slogan; it is a continuation of the midwives' instinct. Where the powerful and convenient decision is to eliminate the weak, the people who fear God insist on life. The Bible never apologises for this. The Creator counts children as blessing, not burden, and those who fear him learn to count the same way and to act on it when it costs.
The fourth lesson is that God keeps his promises through ordinary obedience. He had promised Abraham a multitude, and the midwives were part of how the promise survived the attempt to kill it. You do not know what your small faithfulness is protecting. You do not know what child, what church, what testimony, or what future obedience is downstream from the choice you make this week. Shiphrah and Puah could not see the exodus from their birthing stool, but God was already writing the story. The same is true of us. We obey the God who sees the end from the beginning, and we trust him with what happens next.
Biblical fidelity check
The passage establishes several things clearly. It establishes that Pharaoh ordered the killing of Hebrew boys. It establishes that Shiphrah and Puah disobeyed that order. It establishes that their motive was fear of God. It establishes that God dealt well with them and gave them households, and it establishes that the people of Israel continued to multiply. These are the data of the text, and any teaching about this passage should be built on them. The passage does not establish a comprehensive political theory of revolution, nor does it tell us how a state should be resisted in every case, nor does it give us detailed rules about when a Christian may disobey a government.
The common misreading is to treat the possible falsehood of the midwives as the central point and either to celebrate lying whenever it seems useful or to reject the story altogether as morally confused. Both moves go beyond the text. The passage centres on the refusal to kill and on the fear of God, not on the excuse offered to Pharaoh, and it never commands us to imitate the wording. A second misreading is to turn the midwives' disobedience into a general warrant for resisting any authority we dislike. Scripture balances this passage with commands to honour governing authorities and with the apostles' own patient suffering. The right reading holds both: God is obeyed first, refusal is limited to what he forbids, and the consequences are left with him.
Other passages that speak to Exodus 1:15-21
Several related studies help this passage come into focus. The theme of God speaking and acting through his Son runs through the letter to the Hebrews, and What Does Hebrews 1:2 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application traces that theme in detail. A broader overview of that book's opening chapter is available in Hebrews 1: God Speaks by His Son. The idea of God writing his law on the hearts of his people, which shapes how we read the obedience of the saints under the old covenant, is explored in What Does Hebrews 10:16 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. And the call to hold fast the confession in the face of pressure, which echoes the midwives' courage, is treated in What Does Hebrews 10:23 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application.
Frequently asked questions
Who were the Hebrew midwives named in Exodus 1:15-21?
They were Shiphrah and Puah, two women who attended Hebrew mothers in childbirth during the Egyptian oppression. The text names them but tells us little else about them. It does not state whether they were Hebrew by blood or Egyptian attendants who served Hebrew women, though the plain reading calls them Hebrew midwives. It also does not say how many midwives served the whole nation, so we should not turn two names into a statement about the total number of births or attendants. What matters for the story is their response to Pharaoh, their fear of God, and the fact that God remembered them by name.
Did the Hebrew midwives lie to Pharaoh, and does the Bible approve?
The text does not explicitly label their answer as a lie, and it does not command us to imitate their wording. It says they feared God and let the boys live, and God dealt well with them. Some readers conclude they deceived Pharaoh to protect innocent life, as Rahab did in Joshua 2. Others hold that their report may have been true because Hebrew women really did deliver quickly. Faithful Christians have differed on this question for centuries. What the passage establishes is God's commendation of their refusal to kill, not a general licence for deception.
What does it mean that the midwives feared God?
Fear of God in Scripture means reverent awe and settled trust that makes obedience possible even under threat. It is not terror of a cruel master but the conviction that God is real, that he sees, and that his verdict matters more than any human verdict. This fear moved the midwives to refuse Pharaoh's order and spare the children. The text ties God's kindness to them directly to this motive, saying he dealt well with them because they feared him. The same posture appears in Moses' parents and in the apostles, who said they must obey God rather than men. Such fear is not a feeling but a decision acted on.
