The two Hebrew midwives of Exodus 1:15-21 — Shiphrah ('beauty') and Puah ('splendor,' or 'one who cries out') — who commit the FIRST recorded act of civil disobedience in the Bible: ordered by the king of Egypt to kill the newborn boys on the birthing-stones, they 'feared God' (yare Elohim) and refused, letting the boys live. Their nimble answer to Pharaoh — the Hebrew women give birth before a midwife can arrive — the narrator does not stop to judge; 'God dealt well with the midwives, and made them households' (families of their own). The story withholds the mighty pharaoh's name and preserves these two — the moral inversion the whole book runs on. (Whether they were Hebrew women or Egyptian midwives OF the Hebrews the grammar leaves open; the tradition made them Jochebed and Miriam, Moses' mother and sister.)