![]() ![]() ,” meaning the Hebrews, and he clearly knew at that point. Did Moses look different from the Egyptians? Did Pharaoh know Moses was Hebrew but overlook it to indulge his daughter, or did Bithiah have to hide Moses from him and others at court? When did Moses find out he was Hebrew? (The biblical narrative skips from Bithiah naming Moses as a toddler to “One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people. Scripture gives us no information about Moses’s upbringing and very little about his adoptive mother, so questions are unavoidable. ![]() She names him Moses, Egyptian for “son” but also sounding like the Hebrew word mashah, “to draw out” (of the water). She hires Jochebed as a wet-nurse (it’s unclear whether she knows Jochebed is Moses’s birth mother) and, once the child is weaned two to three years later, receives him into the palace. When she discovers the baby, she knows he’s Hebrew, and presumably out of compassion, she decides to raise him as her own. In this verse she is called a Judahite (i.e., a Jew), which Megillah 13a says is because she repudiated the gods of her people-that when “she came down to bathe at the river” ( Exodus 2:5), it was to cleanse herself of idolatry essentially, to perform a ritual conversion to Judaism, as her loyalties will bear out. Pharaoh’s daughter is unnamed in the biblical narrative, but Jewish tradition gives her the Hebrew name Bithiah, “daughter of Yahweh” ( Leviticus Rabbah 1:3), identifying her with the woman in 1 Chronicles 4:18. Then there’s Jochebed, Moses’s birth mother, who relinquishes her son in order to save him, placing him in a basket on the Nile: Nikondeha imagines her navigating the basket across the river and placing it strategically in a thicket of reeds to be discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter, whose pensive nature and possible sympathies she had been observing for the past three months. ![]() In her excellent new book Defiant: What the Women of Exodus Teach Us about Freedom, practical theologian and community developer Kelley Nikondeha talks about the exodus of the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt as a series of small rescue operations, starting with the midwives who refuse to carry out Pharaoh’s death order. In addition to the enslavement, Pharaoh issues an imperial edict that all newborn Hebrew boys are to be killed. But their peaceful coexistence comes to an end when a new pharaoh comes to power and conscripts the Hebrews into hard labor. At the beginning of the book of Exodus, the Hebrews have been in Egypt for several generations, their migration blessed by a previous pharaoh in appreciation of Joseph’s handling of a food crisis. ![]()
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