The Egyptian mid-wives.
Enter the Hebrew midwives, the players poised to receive the future that God had promised. They were summoned and ordered to end each new male life before a breath could be drawn. “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” By keeping the opposition’s numbers down, the king thought, he could preserve his power. But the king did not know Joseph, nor the God who preserves a remnant. The midwives, on the other hand, feared God alone. To put it another way, the midwives Shiphrah and Puah knew they were players in a drama that was bigger than they were. So they played their part as God’s people, and let many babies live. Then the king said, “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile…”
“Now a man from the house of Levi went and took to wife a daughter of Levi,” the story goes on. “The woman conceived, and bore a son.” But under the king’s sentence of death, this child was doomed to die in the waters of the Nile. Until, that is, his mother saw something of God, something goodly in his face. Then she hid this babe among the reeds along the Nile, where he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. In Moses the midwives’ small saving act was then magnified by God’s mighty hand.