Who were Shiphrah and Puah, and were they right to defy Pharaoh?

Pharaoh gave a covert order: when you assist Hebrew women in childbirth, kill every boy, let every girl live (Exodus 1:16). The two midwives who received that order are named: שִׁפְרָה (Shiphrah, from the root for "be fair, beautiful") and פּוּעָה (Puah) — a detail the narrator emphasizes, because Pharaoh himself is unnamed throughout this chapter. The women are named. The king is not.

Their title is הַמְיַלְּדֹת (hameyalledot, from יָלַד, "bring forth") — literally, "those who bring forth." They are life-givers by vocation, standing between the promise of verse 7 and its threatened extinction in verses 9–14.

What they did

They did not obey Pharaoh. The text puts it in a single verse:

"But the midwives feared God (יָרֵא + אֱלֹהִים, yare + Elohim), and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live." — Exodus 1:17

The Hebrew verb for what they did to the boys is וַתְּחַיֶּיןָ (vattechayyeyna, H2421 Piel — they preserved alive, they actively caused life to continue). The narrator is precise: this is not passive neglect of the kill-command. It is active preservation of life, set directly against Pharaoh's command to kill (H4191, "cause to die," Exodus 1:16).

The question of their reply

When Pharaoh summoned them and demanded an explanation, the midwives told him the Hebrew women were vigorous — חָיּוֹת (chayyot, H2422, a word found nowhere else in the entire Bible, built from the same life-root) — and deliver before a midwife even arrives (1:19).

Whether this answer was true, evasive, or an outright invention, the narrator does not say. He records no divine censure. He records no editorial comment at all on the wording of their reply. The next words are simply blessing: "So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong" (1:20).

The text commends two things explicitly: their fear of God (named as the motive in verse 17) and its result — the boys lived. Verse 21 then gives the causal chain: "Because the midwives feared God, he made them houses." The particle כִּי (ki, "because") makes this explicit — the fear of God is the stated reason for the reward, not the cleverness of their answer.

Were they right?

The text answers a different question from the one we tend to ask. We want to know: was the deception justified? The narrator wants to tell us: these women feared God more than they feared a throne that had the power to execute them, and God vindicated them. The fear of God, not the precise content of their reply, is what the narrative names twice and rewards once.

This is the first recorded act of civil disobedience in the Bible with an explicit theological rationale: the fear of God set over the command of a king. The logic surfaces again in Daniel — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego before Nebuchadnezzar's image (Daniel 3:16–18), Daniel before Darius's decree (Daniel 6:10). It becomes a stated principle in the New Testament: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). The New Testament even cites the next generation's defiance of the same decree — Moses' parents hid him because "they were not afraid of the king's edict" (Hebrews 11:23) — and calls it faith.

What God gave them

The reward fits the act with exact justice. וַיַּעַשׂ לָהֶם בָּתִּים — "he made them houses" (H1004 bayit, Exodus 1:21). In biblical idiom a "house" is not a building but a household, a posterity, a lineage — the same sense as the promise to David, "the LORD will make you a house" (2 Samuel 7:11). Those who gave life to other women's sons received sons of their own. Life preserved, life given. The arithmetic is God's.

For the full study of the fear-of-God pattern across the canon — from Joseph in Genesis 42:18 through Daniel through the apostles — see The Midwives Feared God.