Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

In his article, “The Oppression,” Nahum M. Sarna argues that the Jewish Exodus from Egypt took place about 1,300 years B.C., and that it was more socio-politically motivated than the Bible tells us. He uses the Books of Genesis and Exodus and corroborates the events of both using known history and archaeological evidence. According to his timeline, the Hyksos, a “conglomeration of ethnic groups” (70) that included the Israelites, “seized power and ruled Egypt for about a century and a half” (69). When the Egyptians finally regained control, they were wary of all foreigners.

Serna describes how, to keep foreigners from seizing control of Egypt again, and to protect a key military point, the Egyptians systematically enslaved the male Jews. As I read “The Oppression,” I thought that if Sarna’s version of events was true, the Egyptians would have good political reasons to fear a Jewish uprising: it had happened before so it could happen again. This virtually establishes a prophecy in their mind, and they become paranoid that the Israelites will usurp their authority. Sarna states: “If the anxieties of the authorities were understandable in the circumstances, the reaction to the potential menace posed by the presence of a large, foreign population in a strategic area can only be described as iniquitous. The Pharaoh took draconian measures to limit the growth of the Israelites, and to this end he cunningly devised that adult males be pressed into slavery” (71). Arguably, this is a strategy frequently employed throughout history by those people in power who are afraid they’ll lose their power to a foreign body.

But Sarna also makes an intriguing observation: “There is no evidence that the Israelite women were enslaved” (74). Similarly, the Book of Exodus states: “Pharaoh then commanded all his subjects, ‘Throw into the river every boy that is born to the Hebrews, but you may let all the girls live’” (Exodus 1:22, New American Bible). I can’t help but wonder how if he is correct, if the Bible is correct, then why would the Pharaoh persecute just the men and not the women? Why would the Pharaoh have mercy on the girls, but not the boys? In the antebellum American South, for example, plantation owners indiscriminately put men and women, boys and girls to work. Additionally, they separated families to ensure obedience, which is quite different than allowing Jewish women and children to cohabitate with their Egyptian masters.

I believe it goes back to the fact that the Jews have always been a patriarchal society, and in patriarchal societies, it is the men who fight in war. The men are the threat to the established order. The Egyptians knew the women would not be the ones going to war against them if the Israelites decided to rise up, and so they did not perceive them as a viable threat to their power over the region.

But if I am correct in my assumption, it is both interesting and ironic how the Egyptians underestimate the Israelite women; according to Sarna, the first recorded act in history of “civil disobedience in defense of a moral cause” occurs when the midwives refuse to slay the firstborn sons of the Jews. According to the Bible, this act is what saves Moses, the great prophet of the people of Israel, their Lawgiver, and the man who ultimately winds up usurping the Pharaoh’s power of the Jews. For the Egyptians, then, this act of subdued female rebellion indeed engineers the loss of control they feared to begin with. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, just not in the way the Egyptians expected.