In the Torah reading שמות Shemot (“names,” Ex. 1:1–6:1) and its parallel passage, we learn about Moses and Samuel, great leaders of ancient Israel. But their greatness came from their humility, not grasping at the reins of power. Because of their meekness, Heaven appointed them to be chief agents of the power of Heaven on Earth.

How much more does the Messiah, the exact representation of Heaven (Heb. 1:3), show us what a faith-worth leader should be.

Who does God remember?

When the Torah gives us the name of a person, it’s because God wants us to remember that person for some reason. The reason we don’t know the name of the pharaoh that was the oppressor of the Hebrews is that God didn’t want him to be remembered. This is why to this day we can only guess as to which pharaoh was the arch-oppressor of Israel.

In Egyptian theology, if your name is forgotten on earth, your spirit dies in heaven. God was happy to make sure this particular pharaoh’s name was forgotten so that his name died with him.

On the other hand, the names of the righteous midwives who refused to kill the Hebrew babies are recorded for us so their memory is eternally with us.

God valued these people enough to make sure their names were recorded and if He finds them valuable, we should too. He also rewarded these midwives with households that survived the onslaught that decimated the rest of Egypt.

Playbook of oppression: taxation and slavery

Pharaoh’s attempts to check the Israelite proliferation unfolded in four stages which were more oppressive. First they were subjected to forced or draft labor, slavery, a secret attempt to murder newborn boys, and a public attempt to do the same.

They also attack the leadership of the community they want to dehumanize, then they use those humiliated leaders to humiliate and subjugate the others. Oppressors always use incremental steps to subjugate others. That is human nature, which was the same in the time of the Pharaoh as it was in the days of Hitler as it is now.

The Egyptians were enslaved to Pharaoh by having to pay him 20% of their income every year, but the type of slavery he forced on the Israelites was far more brutal.

The slavery in Egypt doesn’t appear to be chattel slavery that we think of in America. Based on Moses’ statement to Pharaoh that the children of Israel needed to take their own flocks with them into the desert for three days to worship HaShem, we can ascertain that the slavery of Egypt was more of an extreme sort of feudalism or serfdom where they had to give Pharaoh their labor for a good portion of the year.

Amram and Jochebed had three children: Aaron, Miriam and Moses. Aaron was three years older than Moses and it is most likely that Pharaoh’s edict to kill the Hebrew boys was put into law well after Aaron was born and was only applied to the youngest children. It appears that Pharaoh’s edict to throw all the Hebrew boys into the Nile was not retroactive.

The midwives who spared the Hebrew boys from execution used very sophisticated racist code-language to plant the idea in Pharaoh’s head that the Hebrew women didn’t need midwives because they bred like animals.

The best leaders are those who don’t want to be

When God calls Moses at the burning bush, we are told the bush was a thorn bush. I don’t know for sure why God chose a thorn bush rather than another tree for this revelation but this is not the last time we read about thorn bushes in the TaNaKh.