What Does Exodus 1:19 Mean?

The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them." The midwives' answer emphasizes the vitality of Hebrew women: vigorous (Hebrew: chayot, "lively, vigorous") and delivering before midwives can arrive.

The answer is plausible enough to explain the outcome without directly confessing the defiance. Whether this is a whole truth, a half-truth, or a strategically framed truth has been discussed throughout Jewish and Christian interpretation. What is clear is that the answer diverts Pharaoh's accusation without falsely claiming they killed the children.

The word chayot (vigorous) used for the Hebrew women is related to the word for life, chay. The midwives are telling Pharaoh that Hebrew women are full of life in a way that outpaces the death-dealing structures he has tried to impose. There is an inadvertent theological confession in the midwives' answer: the people Pharaoh is trying to suppress are intensely alive, alive in a way that his system cannot contain. The God of life is at work in the bodies of Hebrew women in ways that Pharaoh's death decree cannot reach.

The practical wisdom of the midwives' response reflects the kind of shrewdness that Jesus commended in Matthew 10:16: "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves." Navigating between the command of a state power and the command of God requires the capacity to give an account that is true, or at least not false, while not providing the material for one's own condemnation. The midwives do not boast of their defiance before the one who commanded them. Their fear of God was enacted in private; their account of it to Pharaoh was managed with the wisdom that survival required.