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.