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.