Pharaoh Feared Hebrew Babies and Hebrews Feared Giants

Most people picture Pharaoh's war on the Hebrews as soldiers in the street. Louis Ginzberg, gathering the rabbis in his early twentieth-century Legends of the Jews, tells a quieter and more sickening version. The war was fought inside kitchens, by women carrying their own babies.

The Visit That Was Not a Visit

Pharaoh had a problem. The Hebrew midwives would not kill on his order, and Hebrew mothers were hiding their newborns wherever they could find a corner of silence. So he sent his officials house to house. When that failed, he tried something colder.

The rabbis preserved in Ginzberg describe the scheme. Egyptian women, holding their own infants, would come visiting in Hebrew homes. Friendly faces. A neighborly call. The visiting baby would coo or cry, and any hidden Hebrew infant, hearing one of its own kind, would answer back. The mother sitting on her own child to keep him quiet would see her secret crawl out of her arms toward the sound.

Then the Egyptians took the child away.

The Midwives and the Field

Behind that was an older decree. Pharaoh had ruled that only Egyptian midwives could attend Hebrew births, so the killing could be done in the first minute of life, before a mother had named the boy or held him long enough to know him. Any family caught concealing a son would be put to death along with their kin.

Ginzberg says some Hebrew men gave up. They left their wives rather than father children who would be murdered. Others kept faith. Their wives, when labor came, walked out into the open fields, gave birth alone in the dirt, and left the babies there.

This is where the legend becomes lullaby. An angel washed each newborn, anointed him, swaddled him, and pressed two smooth stones into his hands. From one stone the baby sucked milk. From the other, honey. The infant's hair grew down to his knees and became a coat. The earth opened and took the child in, hid him in the soil like a seed, and when Pharaoh's bailiffs rode out hunting they found only grass. Later the ground would crack open again, the children would walk out of it, and each one would find his way home to the father who thought he was lost.

A Generation That Did Not Trust Its Own Eyes

Forty years later, those children were grown men in the desert. Moses sent twelve of them, one for every tribe, into Canaan to scout the land. They came back carrying grapes so heavy two of them had to share a pole. They also came back broken.

Ten of the twelve told the people the land ate its own inhabitants. The Canaanites, they said, were giants. Ginzberg preserves the line that ruined Israel for a generation: "We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." Caleb tried to shout them down. Joshua too. The crowd had already chosen the panic.

The Sentence God Could Not Forgive

God's anger in the legend fixes on one half of the sentence. "I have no objection," He says, "to your saying, 'We were in our own sight as grasshoppers.' I take it amiss when you say, 'And so we were in their sight.' How can you tell how I made you appear to them? How do you know you did not appear to be angels?"

That is the hinge of the whole story. The spies did not just feel small. They decided, in advance, how they were being seen. They handed their identity to the enemy and let the enemy describe them back to themselves.

The Inheritance Pharaoh Left

Look at the two scenes side by side and the architecture of (Exodus 1) and (Numbers 13) starts speaking to each other. Pharaoh built a state around the conviction that the Hebrews were too many, too strong, growing in the dark, dangerous even as infants. He needed to believe they were monsters in order to justify what he did to their babies. The very fear that drove him to send Egyptian women into Hebrew homes was the same fear, mirrored, that would later make Hebrew men in the wilderness shrink themselves into insects.

Pharaoh saw giants where there were only newborns. The spies saw giants where they themselves had been the impossible children, the ones the earth itself had hidden and fed.

The Stone in the Hand

The angel in the field gave each infant two stones, milk in one, honey in the other. Forty years later the same people stood in front of a country that flowed with milk and honey and said it would devour them. The promise they had been nursed on, in the soil, became the thing they refused to walk into.

Ginzberg lets the irony sit without explaining it. The book of Numbers does the same. A generation that had been raised by miracles could not, when the moment came, recognize itself as the miracle. They looked down at their own hands and saw grasshoppers, and that was enough.