#Exodus 2:1-10

The birth of Moses

There is SO MUCH going on in these ten verses it’s hard to know where to start.

Okay, let’s start with which story we’re in. The mother needing to hide her male child can really only fit in the E story, where Pharaoh has ordered genocide.

This is confirmed by the recognition by Pharaoh’s daughter that a hidden child must be one of the Hebrew babies (using the same term, Hebrew, that is found in 1:15-22). This being so, we get to ask the fun question that almost never gets asked: when was Moses born?

We’re all accustomed to the notion that Israel was enslaved for 400 years, because that’s the canonical fact and the traditional understanding. But only P ever gives us a number, and we’ve already seen that E doesn’t even have slavery.

In fact, E can’t have a long period of oppression, because E only has genocide, and in one generation Israel would be eliminated. So when is Moses born in E? Immediately after Pharaoh issues the decree to kill all the Israelite boys. Now: when did that happen?

Canonically, it has to be at the end of the 400 years. But in E, it happens, so far as we can tell, pretty much right after the death of Joseph. Which - and I love this - is exactly in line with what God told Abraham back in Genesis 15.

There, God tells Abraham that his descendants will be strangers (not slaves!) in a foreign land, and that they will return to Canaan, but not until the fourth generation. In Gen 50 we read that Joseph lived to see the children of the third generation of Ephraim. And here we are.

Moses is part of the fourth generation. So in E there’s no 400 years. Israel is in Egypt, as God predicted, for four generations. Then things go bad and it’s time to go.

A reminder that canonical claims often come from only one of the sources, and shouldn’t be extrapolated into all of them. Israel being in Egypt for a long time isn’t a universal claim in the Bible. The amount of time spent there varies from source to source. Tradition, not fact.

Okay next topic. The identification of Moses’s parents as Levites seems a common tradition (at least it’s explicit in E and P, and maybe implicit in J). This I think has multiple rationales and impacts:

Just as Moses has no burial place, so too he has no family territory, because Levites don’t have land. (I don’t know if anyone has ever thought of this before, including me, but I like it).

If there was potentially a connection between Levites and the teaching of laws or Torah, as is clearly the case in D at least, then it makes sense for the lawgiver to be a Levite.

And of course identifying Moses’s parents as Israelites generally (regardless of tribe) helps to counter the obvious question of why the dude has such an obviously Egyptian name. And that’s the impetus not only for the parentage, but for this entire story.

The story ends with his naming, and it’s pretty clearly designed to be an etiology. But it’s important that the person who names him is Egyptian, as this explains why his name is Egyptian. (Moses = “son” in Egyptian, as in Thutmosis, “son of Thoth,” or Rameses, “son of Ra.”)

The obvious ridiculousness is the etymology itself, where the Egyptian princess uses a Hebrew root to explain the Egyptian name, but it doesn’t really work anyway. Still: why does Moses have an Egyptian name? Because it wasn’t given to him by his Levite parents. Case closed.

But to make sure that we don’t have any doubts about Moses’s essential Israelite identity, the story gets his own mother to nurse him. Shout out to Cindy Chapman’s work on breast milk as an important source of acculturation and identity in the ANE and ancient Israel.

Next major item: the obvious fact that this story is modeled almost note for note on the Sargon birth legend. (To even ask if it’s the other way around is to presume a much more prominent cultural role for Israel in the ANE than it ever actually had. It was a backwater.)

It’s easy enough, and I think probably right, to simply point out that Israel’s great mythical founding figure is modeled in part on Assyria’s great (real, but by 1500 years later effectively mythologized) founding figure. More than that is pretty speculative.

As noted yesterday, there is a real density of female characters here. The only ones named are the midwives from the end of Exod 1. And while they play an integral role in bringing about the salvation of Israel from Egypt, they are still mostly narrative devices to that end.

That is, these female figures all operate in support of Moses’s survival - they, mostly unnamed, are narrative props leading to the dramatic naming of the male hero. This is not to downplay their importance, or how remarkable this passage is in the biblical context.

Just to say that it isn’t outside of the biblical context. This is still a story about men, almost certainly by and for men, and we may appreciate the heightened role of women here without pretending that the biblical text is somehow not inherently and irredeemably patriarchal.

There’s still so much more to be said about these verses, but I’ll stop here. If there’s some aspect I didn’t mention that you want to raise, I’m here for it. I think these ten verses are about as good as it gets in terms of showing off the many potential facets of critical work.