Pharaoh’s Daughter – Exodus 2:5-10

     The focus and interest of the biblical storyteller was Moses. The other people surrounding him get less attention. But many of them played valuable parts in the Exodus story.  One of these is the daughter of Pharaoh. 
     Background: The Israelites had come to Egypt as welcome guests. One of their own people, Joseph, was second only to the pharaoh in power and importance. By interpretation of the Pharaoh’s dream, and by wise administration, he had saved the nation from starvation. Along the way he also had enriched the Pharaoh considerably. So when his extended family sought refuge from the famine, they were not unwelcome refugees.
     Generations passed. A new dynasty had risen that did not care about an ancestor of these foreigners. (By which we can see that the Israelites had not assimilated into Egyptian culture.)
     Though the Hebrew population probably was not statistically large compared to all of Egypt, it was large enough to worry the Egyptians. The Hebrews were enslaved. To keep their numbers down, the Egyptians ordered that the male babies should be thrown into the Nile after birth. (Drowning was not the only form of death, for crocodiles and hippos were also quite dangerous).
     A man of the house (tribe) of Levi married a Levite woman. Again the story concentrates upon Moses, so it is not explained when his brothers and sisters were born. The story is worded in such a way as to assume that Moses was first born, although this is probably not the case. His brother Aaron and a sister named Miriam are mentioned later in the Biblical story. In chapter two, an unnamed sister (probably Miriam) is clearly an older child. By tradition, Aaron was also older. A genealogy in Exodus 6, indicates that Aaron was the son of Amram and Jochabed (Moses’ mother and father), and not the child of another marriage. Numbers 26:59 also lists Miriam as their child.
     The birth of Moses was probably, however, the first in the family after the edict of death to baby boys had been put in place. The family bravely hid him for three months. At this point he may have grown too active to keep hidden. The mother decided to comply with the order –cleverly. For she made a basket, lined it with bitumen (mineral pitch or asphalt), likely to make it waterproof. (In the same way, the Native people of the Santa Barbara region used to use tar that floated ashore).
     The child was placed in the basket then set in the Nile among the reeds
     His sister stayed close and watched.
     The daughter of Pharaoh came to the river to bathe. The child was found and recognized to be of the Hebrews. She took pity on him and determined to save the child. His sister stepped forward and offered to find a nursemaid for the baby. Thus Jochabed was able to care for her own son, though when he was weaned she had to give him up to the princess. Pharaoh's daughter named him Moses which means to “draw out.”
     This story shows a woman who was willing to defy power in order to save a child.  The compassion of the princess for Moses seems to indicate that she didn’t fear the Hebrews the way her fellow Egyptians did.
    

Jewish traditions give us many more details. As with all legends, it is difficult to know how much are based on historical fact and how much is story.

According to the tradition, the name of the princess was Thermutis. At the time of Moses’ infancy there was a scorching heat sent to trouble the Egyptians for their oppression of the Hebrews. Thermutis sought relief in the Nile, but physical discomfort was not her only reason. She was determined to cleanse herself also of the impurity of idol worship. Her maids are said to have protested her desire to help the child, but she persisted. Another strand of legend says that when she saw that the child was Hebrew, she decided she had better obey her father’s command, but his crying roused her pity and she resolved to save him.  Moses refused to receive food from an Egyptian wet nurse, so his sister Miriam offered her mother.

One legend is that a prophecy had been made that a boy child would bring trouble upon Egypt during this nine month period. Pharaoh had ordered all male children to be thrown into the river, Hebrew and Egyptian alike, because the child’s doom lay in water. But once Moses was in the water, the astrologers came to the Pharaoh and announced that the danger had been averted (the correct child having been set adrift), so Pharaoh lifted the edict.

 

(See more next week).

What do you think about Thermutis’ act of peaceful civil disobedience?