“When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” – Exodus 1:16

Today’s Scripture Reading (July 6, 2015): Exodus 1

In preparation for the release of “Jurassic World” a few weeks ago, I decided to watch the original “Jurassic Park.” Michael Crichton’s original adventure was ground breaking in so many ways. It was the first movie where we were greeted with the image of dinosaur’s as they may have actually existed. It drove the science behind dinosaur discovery forward, and maybe for the first time we had a credible theory about how dinosaurs could be brought back to life. The movie doesn’t describe finding some previously undiscovered valley – or plateau – where the extinction process failed and dinosaurs still roamed. Instead, it postulates the cloning of dinosaurs by using the DNA found in the blood of mosquitoes trapped in tree bark. It was an interesting hypothesis with at least some scientific merit.

But the movie also examined what is maybe the bigger question - just because we can do something, does that mean that we should do it? One of the classic lines from the movie on this subject is straight out of Crichton’s book – “God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.”  The line in the movie is spoken with disbelief. Is this really a good idea? One of the safeguards the park had introduced to have control over breeding was that all of the dinosaurs that had been created to inhabit the park were female. Without a male dinosaur, no reproduction could happen. But then another tag line is introduced “Nature always finds away.” Of course, by the end of the movie we find out that nature has indeed found a way, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are reproducing at will.

Apparently Egypt’s strategy was the same one employed by Crichton’s dinosaur park – make sure that there are no males to reproduce. If the strategy had been successful, Israel would have gone extinct in a single generation. Any offspring that did happen would have been assimilated into the larger Egyptian society – but Israel itself would be no more. But instead, nature found a way in midwives that refused to kill helpless babies.

But there is another element that seems to be overlooked in the story. If the Egyptian policy had been fully implemented, Israel would have been gone in a generation, but Egypt’s slave force would also have been decimated. History has proven that the threat of the destruction of a slave force is always met with opposition. It is true that the midwives had refused to kill the boys, but there just might have been a political reason for why. While the king may have feared the sheer numbers of the people of Israel, the affluent of the society may have feared the loss of their slave force. And when the two fears came together, only one could win.

And in this case, the winning fear may have ensured that the males of Israel would survive, at least in enough numbers to guarantee the survival of Egypt’s slave population. The society simply couldn’t exist without them. Nature had found a way. And the story of Israel remained alive for at least another generation. 

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus 2