Sensible Madness

To recap, Jacob and his 70 family members all went into Egypt, Jacob and his entire generation eventually died, and his offspring went on to have tons and tons of offspring themselves. Eventually, it got to the point where there were so many of them that you couldn’t swing a cat in Egypt without hitting a handful of Israelites. This was a big deal, of course, because Egyptians were big into cats, and the cats were getting sick of smacking into Hebrews all the time, never mind being swung around to begin with.

It came to pass that a new Pharaoh took over Egypt, and he had never heard of Joseph or his deeds, and so had no real idea why all these Israelites were hanging around in the first place. Noticing there were actually more Israelites than Egyptians in Egypt by this time, Pharaoh felt the best course of action would be to enslave the Israelites and give them so much work to do they wouldn’t have any time to think about doing anything nasty to Pharaoh or his people.

As further insurance against the impending "Hebrewization" of Egypt, Pharaoh told the Israelite midwives to kill all the male children as they were being born, but let all the girls live. Unfortunately for Pharaoh, midwives generally aren’t known for their baby-killing prowess, and so they ignored the order. Pharaoh, pissed off that he was being ignored, demanded to know what the hell was up with all these male babies all over the place in the Israelite settlements. The midwives, thinking fast, claimed that they wanted to kill all the boys, but the Hebrew women kept popping out the kids before the midwives got there, and once the kid was out of the mother, it wasn’t the midwives’ department anymore. For some crazy reason, Pharaoh bought this explanation, and God was so tickled by it that he blessed the midwives and gave them a bunch of stuff.

Unfortunately, Pharaoh had a Plan B: He ordered his people to toss any Hebrew boy babies they found into the river, and keep the girls. So, the Hebrews found themselves in a bit of a pickle despite the midwives’ efforts.