The book of Exodus opens with a demographic boom among the Israelite population of Egypt in the decades following the death of Joseph; this population explosion, in fact, is what spurs Pharaoh to enslave the Israelites. Failing to stem the tide, Pharaoh then issues his genocidal decree to the midwives: drown all male Israelite children. The midwives’ refusal to comply is the first of many acts of heroism in this book, as Sarah Rindner writes:
[T]he fecundity and abundance of the beginning of Exodus is characterized in a way that [suggests it is] somewhat unseemly or even animalistic. Israelite fertility frightens and perhaps sickens the Egyptians. The Israelite population explosion seems somehow related to the Egyptian attempt to dehumanize the former through back-breaking labor. When the midwives Shifrah and Puah explain to Pharaoh why they are unable to clamp down on Israelite procreation, they say that Hebrew women’s reproductive powers are unstoppable; [the Hebrew phrase they employ is] usually translated as “because they [the Israelite women] are vigorous,” but [can be rendered more literally as] “because they are like animals.” . . .
Shifrah and Puah straddle the line between unbridled nature and conscious human choice and control. By profession, they are human intermediaries in the realm of teeming and unfettered nature. Pharaoh asks them to disrupt these natural processes by killing every boy that is born, but they resist by pointing to the uncontainable fecundity of the Hebrew women. In fact, their act of resistance is not a relinquishing of human responsibility in the face of nature run amok. Their standing up to Pharaoh represents precisely the opposite—it is a refusal to see human procreation in purely naturalistic, amoral terms. This is why the midwives are explicitly described as “fearing God.” For the midwives, awareness of God is a bulwark against undifferentiated masses and human anonymity.
Read more on Book of Books: http://bookofbooksblog.com/2015/12/31/the-midwives-of-parshat-shemot/