Why was baby Moses put in a basket?

A king afraid of his slaves

Exodus opens with Jacob’s descendants multiplying in Egypt until “the land was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). A new Pharaoh sees a threat.

Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come, let’s deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it happen that when any war breaks out, they also join themselves to our enemies

His plan comes in three steps, each worse than the last. First, forced labor on the store cities of Pithom and Raamses. Then a secret order to the midwives. When that fails, an open order to the whole nation: “You shall cast every son who is born into the river” (Exodus 1:22). The daughters may live. Without its sons, Israel would vanish into Egypt within a generation.

Two midwives who said no

Before the river, Pharaoh tried the birth room. He told the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill every boy as he was born.

But the midwives feared God, and didn’t do what the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the baby boys alive.

Called to explain, they had an answer ready: Hebrew women are vigorous and give birth before the midwife arrives (1:19). The text never names this Pharaoh, the most powerful man on earth, but it names the two women who outwitted him, and it says God gave them families of their own (1:21). Many call it the first recorded act of civil disobedience.

Three months, then the river

A Levite couple has a son. His mother sees that he is a fine child and hides him for three months. When she can hide him no longer, she makes a basket.

When she could no longer hide him, she took a papyrus basket for him, and coated it with tar and with pitch. She put the child in it, and laid it in the reeds by the river’s bank.

Notice what she does. Pharaoh ordered every son put into the Nile, and she does put him in the Nile: in a waterproof box, in the slow water of the reeds, with his sister watching. The Hebrew word for the basket, tevah, appears elsewhere only for Noah’s ark. Once a floating box saved a family from the flood. Now one saves a single child.

Who found him, and who raised him

Pharaoh’s daughter comes down to bathe and opens the basket. The baby is crying. She knows at once what he is: “This is one of the Hebrews’ children” (2:6). She keeps him anyway. The sister steps out and offers to find a Hebrew nurse, and fetches their own mother, who is now paid to nurse her own son. When he is weaned, the princess takes him as her son and names him; what that name means is a story of its own.

• His parents: Amram and Jochebed, both of the tribe of Levi (Exodus 6:20).
• His sister: unnamed in Exodus 2, traditionally Miriam (Numbers 26:59).
• The princess: never named in Exodus. Josephus calls her Thermuthis; Jewish tradition calls her Bithiah, after a “daughter of Pharaoh” in 1 Chronicles 4:18.

So Moses grew up in the palace. Stephen, in Acts, says he “was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22).

An old story shape

A baby set adrift and raised by strangers was a familiar story in the ancient Near East. An Assyrian text known as the Legend of Sargon has the infant Sargon of Akkad laid by his mother in a basket of reeds sealed with bitumen and set on a river, where a man drawing water lifts him out. Scholars still debate what the likeness means. Centuries later, Matthew tells of another king killing baby boys, and this time Egypt is the refuge: see Herod and the babies of Bethlehem.