The Women Who Kept Israel Alive Under Pharaoh

The Exodus story is usually told as the story of Moses. The Talmud remembers it differently. According to tractate Sotah 11b (redacted c. 500 CE in Babylonia), the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt in the merit of the righteous women. Without them, there would have been no people left to redeem.

Rav Avira, the fourth-century Babylonian sage, preserved what the women actually did. When they went to draw water from the river, God sent small fish into their pitchers. They came home with pitchers half full of water and half full of fish. They heated two pots: one of warm water to bathe their husbands, one of fish to feed them. Then they carried both to the fields where the men were laboring, washed them, anointed them with oil, fed them, and lay with them between the sheepfolds, between the borders and fences of the fields, where no overseer could see.

The verse that preserved this act came from (Psalms 68:14): "When you lie among the sheepfolds, the wings of the dove are covered with silver." The rabbis read "silver" as plunder. The intimate defiance of those women in those fields, refusing Pharaoh's design to break the nation by separating families and grinding the men into exhaustion, earned Israel the right to carry out Egypt's wealth when they left. Silver for silver. Gold for gold.

When the pregnancies came, the women did not give birth in houses. They went to the fields and delivered alone, under the apple trees. The verse that holds this is from Song of Songs (Song of Songs 8:5): "Under the apple tree I awakened you; there your mother was in travail with you." The midwives named in the Torah, Shiphrah and Puah, were identified by the Talmud as Jochebed and Miriam, who served the whole community. But these women in the fields gave birth without anyone to help them at all.

God sent angels from heaven to take the place of the missing midwives. The angels washed the newborns, prepared them, and brought them two gifts from the earth itself: honey from one stone and oil from another. "He suckled them with honey from a crag and oil from a flinty rock" (Deuteronomy 32:13). In the middle of Egyptian territory, the children of slaves were nursed by heaven.

When Egyptian soldiers found the hidden infants, they brought oxen and plowed the fields to kill them. "The plowers plowed upon my back; they made long their furrows" (Psalms 129:3). But the babies were absorbed into the earth before the plows reached them. They were not found. They were hidden underground like seeds, and when the soldiers left, they emerged like grass (Ezekiel 16:7). Later they came home in flocks, like sheep returning to their pasture.

There is a detail at the end of this teaching that reframes the entire story of the Red Sea. When God revealed Himself at the sea, splitting the water and letting Israel pass through, the Talmud says it was these same children, now grown, who recognized Him first. "This is my God, and I will glorify Him" (Exodus 15:2), they sang. They knew His face. They had seen it before, as infants in the dirt, when He sent angels to nurse them from stones. The whole nation sang at the sea, but the children who had been raised underground sang with recognition.

The Sotah text names no individual woman in this passage. The great acts that sustained the nation were done by unnamed women carrying water pitchers and walking to fields at night and giving birth alone. Miriam would prophesy. Jochebed would float a basket. The midwives would lie to Pharaoh and save the boys. But behind all of that, unnamed women were keeping the population alive one fish, one pot, one birth, one hidden baby at a time.

The Talmud's claim is not subtle. The Exodus was not primarily a military operation or a divine intervention. It was the result of women who refused to let the nation die quietly, in private, under conditions designed to make resistance seem impossible. They made it seem possible anyway.