Exodus 2:1 to Exodus 4:31. Preparation and Call of Moses.
Exodus 2:1-10 E. His Birth and Upbringing. If the text can be trusted, we are informed that a man of the house of Levi took (to wife) the (only) daughter of Levi (cf. Exodus 6:20, Numbers 26:59 P), who would thus be, according to the genealogy of P, his aunt, or the sister of his father Kohath. Possibly, however, the text has been abridged, and ran, as LXX with some variations suggests, took one of the daughters of Levi to wife and made her his own (lit. had her). It is implied in Exodus 2:2 that Moses was the firstborn. But in Exodus 2:4; Exodus 2:8 he has a grown-up sister. Moreover, in Exodus 15:20 Miriam is called pointedly the sister of Aaron, and in Numbers 12 complains with him against Moses. This would all be explained if E had related the birth of Aaron and Miriam from Jochebed, and of Moses from a second wife having another name, and if the editor had by abridgment removed the discrepancy with P. Another suggestion has been that Moses was in the oldest tradition of unknown parentage, and Aaron and Miriam unrelated to him. Maternal love and pride would sufficiently explain the three months-' concealment. In Hebrews 11:23, where LXX (cf. Syro-Hexaplar) is followed in ascribing the action to both parents, a deeper motive is found in an intuition of faith in the child's future, based on his comeliness (cf. Acts 7:20). The ark (Exodus 2:3) or chest, in which the child was laid was made of papyrus (mg.) strips, cut from the pith of the tall reed-like plant which then grew along the lower Nile, though now only found higher up the river. Cf. Isaiah 18:2 for light boats or canoes made of this material. The ark was made watertight with asphalt (slime), which was imported into Egypt from the Dead Sea (pp. 32f., Genesis 14:10) for embalming and other purposes, and with pitch. It was then placed in the reedy growth by the river's brink. It is not clear whether suph, which furnished the Heb. name for the Red Sea (Yam Suph) denoted any specific plant. The Nile banks in the S. half of the delta are now bare, but so late as 1841. were thickly fringed with reeds. That the Divinely-called hero or heroine must overcome all obstacles in the path of destiny was a widespread faith in antiquity, as shown by the stories of Semi-ramis, Perseus, Cyrus, and Romulus. What Driver calls the singularly similar story of Sargon, king of Accad (3800 B.C.), is worth quoting. My lowly mother conceived me, in secret she brought me forth. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she closed my door; she cast me into the river, which rose not over me. The river bore me up; unto Akki, the irrigator, it carried me Akki, the irrigator, as his own son. reared me (Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, 1912, p. 136). In spite of E's fondness for naming, the princess has no name in the text. Later traditions supply the lack with Tharmuth, Thermuthis, Bathja, and Merris. The last, given by Eusebius, recalls Meri, the name of one of the 59 daughters of Rameses II, her mother being a Kheta princess. Of this the first two may be variant forms. While the princess bathed, perhaps from a bath-house, her ladies-in-waiting guarded her privacy from the bank. From the water she saw the chest, and sent the female slave who was in attendance on her in the water to fetch it. Josephus suppresses the circumstance of the bathing. Compassion for the little foundling, whose exposure proved his Hebrew parentage, led the princess to evade her father's edict. The sister intervened at the psychological moment with her offer to find a woman giving suck, and the child's mother is bidden to suckle it under the guise of a wet-nurse or foster-mother. An Egyptian woman would hardly have undertaken the task. So he grew, i.e. (cf. Genesis 21:8) till he was weaned, which would be at three or four years, and became a son to her. On this slender statement tradition built largely, Josephus and Philo much amplifying the modest inference of Stephen that he was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22). Driver points out that if, according to Erman, a good Egyptian education comprised such things as moral duties and good manners, reading, writing, composition, and arithmetic, it also included such undesirable items as mythology, astrology, magic, and superstitious practices in medicine. It is safer to say that the most certain historical inference from Exodus 1:15 to Exodus 2:10 is that Moses had an Egyptian name (meaning born. cf. Thutmosis, Thoth is born, Ra-mses, etc.). If he had been invented he would have had a Heb. name. The derivation (Exodus 2:10) is a purely popular play on the sound of the word in Heb.
Exodus 2:6. Render, And she (the princess) opened it and saw him. The child is an ungrammatical gloss not found in LXX. The next words, and, behold, a boy weeping, may be derived from J, the sound of the child weeping being in his narrative the clue.