https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=w0zLXEj-8EQ
When you do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women and see them upon the birthing stools, if it be a son, then you shall kill him.” And that’s that instrumental usage that you were talking about before. There is a huge issue here. The Hebrew is completely indeterminative whether the midwives were Hebrews or not. And I’m not going to throw out Hebrew often. I feel very self-conscious at all. But for those who know Hebrew, they will know what I’m talking about. It can be the Hebrew midwives or the midwives of the Hebrews. There is no possible way based on those two words to know which it is. I am convinced, and Jewish tradition doesn’t agree with me. I mean, post-biblical Jewish tradition. The Torah, I think, does agree with me, but Selahvi. I believe they were Egyptians. I do not believe he would have ordered Hebrew midwives to murder every Hebrew boy. Do you think there’s a purposeful ambiguity there to leave it up to the question? That’s beautiful. It may well be. That’s right. Well, it certainly is. The Hebrew is ambiguous. That is correct. If the irony gets corrupt enough, then people turn against themselves. That’s right. However, just on logical grounds, when he gets angry at them for not doing it, it would be odd he’d get angry at Hebrews for not killing Hebrews. But my biggest proof you’re coming to, where it says that they feared God and didn’t listen to Pharaoh. Again, that’s one of my favorite lines in the whole Bible. You either fear humans or you fear God. Fear God is the root of freedom and wisdom. And the word for God is not Jehovah or Yahweh. It’s Elohim. So when Jews fear God, it’s generally fear Yahweh. And in this case, it’s fear Elohim, the universal word for God. And I am convinced that they are Egyptians. Douglas, do you have any sense of what it means in this passage and more broadly that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and an appropriate, let’s say, precondition for freedom? Why do you think it’s conceptualized as fear? Well, I think there’s a proper fear that in this case, I think is linked to transcendence. So there’s the fear of the tyrant, which is normal and natural and which we are all subject to. But there should be a greater fear, the fear of the transcendent principle, violating that. And of course, this is why the postmodern attack on traditional Western culture is so dangerous. I mean, of course, it goes back to the very origins of Western culture with the Sophists. But the idea that there is no such thing as an objective moral order, and there certainly is no transcendent basis for that, that would make this whole narrative unintelligible. It also makes the tyrant the final arbiter in some real sense, right? You know, people have asked me, and I’m always embarrassed by this, but people have commented on my courage for speaking up, so to speak. And I think you don’t actually understand the situation. I’m not courageous in my speaking up. I’m more afraid of the alternative. And part of the reason for that was that when I was a clinician, I spent thousands, tens of thousands of hours dealing with people’s serious problems. One of the things I learned was, and I really learned this, was that you don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost, but that is just not the case. You will pay the piper.