JANUARY 12 • 2023 | 41

on history. Throughout the 
Middle Ages, the Church, 
knowing that knowledge is 
power and therefore prefer-
ring to keep it exclusively in 
the hands of the priesthood, 
had forbidden vernacular 
translations of the Bible. In 
the course of the 16th cen-
tury, three developments 
changed this irrevocably. First 
was the Reformation, with 
its maxim Sola scriptura, “By 
Scripture alone,” placing the 
Bible center-stage in the reli-
gious life.
Second was the invention 
in the mid-15th century of 
printing. Lutherans were con-
vinced that this was Divine 
Providence. God had sent the 
printing press so that the doc-
trines of the Reformed church 
could be spread worldwide.
Third was the fact that 
some people, regardless of the 
ban, had translated the Bible 
anyway. John Wycliffe and his 
followers had done so in the 
14th century, but the most 
influential rebel was William 
Tyndale, whose translation of 
the New Testament, begun in 
1525, became the first printed 
Bible in English. He paid for 
this with his life.
When Queen Mary I took 
the Church of England back 
to Catholicism, many English 
Protestants fled to Calvin’s 
Geneva, where they produced 
a new translation, based on 
Tyndale, called the Geneva 
Bible. Produced in a small, 
affordable edition, it was 
smuggled into England in 
large numbers. Able to read 
the Bible by themselves for 
the first time, people soon 
discovered that it was, as far 
as monarchy is concerned, a 
highly seditious document.
It tells of how God told 
Samuel that in seeking to 
appoint a King, the Israelites 

were rejecting Him as their 
only Sovereign. It describes 
graphically how the Prophets 
were unafraid to challenge 
Kings, which they did with 
the authority of God Himself. 
And it told the story of the 
midwives who refused to 
carry out Pharaoh’s order. On 
this, in a marginal note, the 
Geneva Bible endorses their 
refusal, criticizing only the 
fact that, in explaining their 
behavior, they told a lie. The 
note says, “Their disobedi-
ence herein was lawful, but 
their dissembling evil.”
King James understood 
clearly the dire implication of 
that one sentence. It meant 
that a King could be dis-
obeyed on the authority of 
God Himself: a clear and cat-
egorical refutation of the idea 
of the Divine right of Kings.
Eventually, unable to stop 
the spread of Bibles in trans-
lation, King James decided to 
commission his own version, 
which appeared in 1611. 
But by then the damage had 
been done and the seeds of 
what became the English 
revolution had been planted. 
Throughout the 17th century, 
by far the most influential 
force in English politics was 
the Hebrew Bible as under-
stood by the Puritans, and it 
was the Pilgrim Fathers who 
took this faith with them on 
their journey to what would 
eventually become the United 
States of America.
A century and a half later, 
it was the work of another 
English radical, Thomas 
Paine, that made a decisive 
impact on the American 
revolution. His pam-
phlet, Common Sense, was 
published in America in 
January 1776 and became 
an instant best seller, selling 
100,000 copies almost imme-

diately. Its impact was huge, 
and because of it he became 
known as “the father of the 
American Revolution.” 
Despite the fact that Paine 
was an atheist, the opening 
pages of Common Sense, 
justifying rebellion against a 
tyrannical King, are entirely 
based on citations from the 
Hebrew Bible. In the same 
spirit, that summer Benjamin 
Franklin drew, as his design 
for the Great Seal of America, 
a picture of the Egyptians (i.e. 
the English) drowning in the 
Red Sea (i.e. the Atlantic), 
with the caption, “Rebellion 
to tyrants is obedience to 
God.” Thomas Jefferson was 
so struck by the sentence that 
he recommended it to be used 
on the Great Seal of Virginia, 
and later incorporated it in 
his personal seal.
The story of the midwives 
belongs to a larger vision 
implicit throughout the Torah 
and Tanach as a whole: that 
right is sovereign over might, 
and that even God Himself 
can be called to account in 
the name of justice, as He 
expressly mandates Abraham 
to do. Sovereignty ultimate-
ly belongs to God, so any 
human act or order that 
transgresses the will of God 
is by that fact alone ultra 
vires. These revolutionary 
ideas are intrinsic to the bib-
lical vision of politics and the 
use of power.
In the end, though, it was 
the courage of two remarkable 
women that created the prec-
edent later taken up by the 
American writer Thoreau in 
his classic essay Civil 
Disobedience (1849) that in 
turn inspired Gandhi and 
Martin Luther King Jr. in the 
20th century. Their story also 
ends with a lovely touch. The 
text says: “So God was kind to 

the midwives and the people 
increased and became even 
more numerous. And because 
the midwives feared God, He 
gave them houses.” Ex. 1:20-
21
Luzzatto interpreted this 
last phrase to mean that He 
gave them families of their 
own. Often, he wrote, mid-
wives are women who are 
unable to have children. In 
this case, God blessed Shifra 
and Puah by giving them 
children, as he had done for 
Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel.
This, too, is a not unim-
portant point. The closest 
Greek literature comes to the 
idea of civil disobedience is 
the story of Antigone who 
insisted on giving her broth-
er Polynices a burial despite 
the fact that King Creon had 
refused to permit it, regarding 
him as a traitor to Thebes. 
Sophocles’ Antigone is a trag-
edy: The heroine must die 
because of her loyalty to her 
brother and her disobedience 
to the King. By contrast, the 
Hebrew Bible is not a tragedy. 
In fact, biblical Hebrew has 
no word meaning “tragedy” 
in the Greek sense. Good 
is rewarded, not punished, 
because the universe, God’s 
work of art, is a world in 
which moral behavior is 
blessed and evil, briefly in 
the ascendant, is ultimately 
defeated.
Shifra and Puah are two of 
the great heroines of world 
literature, the first to teach 
humanity the moral limits of 
power. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 

served as the chief rabbi of the 

United Hebrew Congregations of the 

Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teach-

ings have been made available to all at 

rabbisacks.org. This essay was written 

in 2014.

