Miriam Prophesied Moses Before He Was Even Born

Most people remember Miriam for the tambourine at the sea. A few remember the well that followed her through the desert. Almost no one remembers that the entire story of the Exodus starts with a little girl shouting down her own father.

The decree had come from Pharaoh: throw every newborn Hebrew boy into the Nile. According to Shemot Rabbah, the fifth-century rabbinic commentary on Exodus compiled in the Land of Israel, Amram, the most respected man among the Israelites, did the math and reached a grim conclusion. If his sons were going to be murdered anyway, why bring more sons into the world? He divorced his wife Jochebed and told the rest of the community to do the same. The community listened. Across Goshen, marriages quietly dissolved. The Hebrew future was being cancelled from the inside.

Miriam was, by the tradition's count, somewhere around five or six years old. She went to her father and said the sentence that would change the world. "Father, your decree is worse than Pharaoh's." Pharaoh was only killing boys. Amram was killing boys and girls. Pharaoh was cruel in this world. Amram was cutting his children off from the world to come.

Louis Ginzberg, in his Legends of the Jews (completed in 1938 after thirty years of work synthesizing rabbinic literature), preserves the moment Amram realized his daughter was right. He brought the case before the Sanhedrin. They ruled that since Amram had started the separation, Amram would have to end it. So he remarried Jochebed under a wedding canopy, and Aaron and Miriam danced at their parents' second wedding. The angels, the tradition says, proclaimed, "Let the mother of children be joyful." All across Goshen, the other couples saw what Amram had done and undid their own divorces.

Jochebed conceived. And then the vision came to Miriam.

The Talmud tractate Sotah (11b, redacted around the fifth century in Babylonia) says Miriam was already known as a prophetess by then. Shemot Rabbah sharpens the detail. She saw a man in dazzling linen who told her the child her mother was carrying would save Israel from Egypt. She told her parents. When Moses was born, the house filled with a light so bright that Amram kissed her on the head and wept. For a moment, the prophecy seemed obviously true.

Then came the basket, and the river, and the reeds, and what had to have felt like the longest walk of Miriam's life as she followed her baby brother downstream to see where the current would take him. And when Jochebed pressed her head in anguish and said, "Where is your prophecy now?" Miriam did not have an answer. She only had the order her mother had given her, which was to go and see. So she went.

The standard Sunday-school version has her stepping out from the reeds when Pharaoh's daughter lifts the baby out of the water and kindly offering to fetch a Hebrew nurse. The rabbinic version is more audacious. Ginzberg, citing Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish philosopher, and the Palestinian Targum, describes Miriam sprinting home "with winged steps, speeding like a vigorous youth" to fetch not just any nurse but her own mother. The baby had refused every Egyptian breast. Of course he had. His mouth, the later midrash insists, was already set apart for the words of God. And so Jochebed got paid two silver pieces by the daughter of Pharaoh to nurse the son of her own womb. Miriam had cut the deal.

Decades later, her mouth would get her into trouble.

The Torah is almost surgical in Numbers 12. Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses "on account of the Cushite woman he had married." What exactly they said, the text does not say. But Sifrei Bamidbar, the tannaitic midrash on Numbers compiled in third-century Palestine, opens the tent flap. Miriam, walking past Moses's tent, had noticed that his wife Zipporah was not adorning herself like the other married women. When she asked why, Zipporah explained: Moses no longer came to her. He was on call for God. The pillar of cloud could descend at any hour, and a prophet who never knew when he would be summoned could not live a married life. Miriam thought this was a catastrophe. She said as much to Aaron. They meant well. They were wrong anyway.

The cloud lifted off the tent of meeting. When Aaron turned to look at his sister, her skin was white as snow.

Moses did not argue. He did not justify. He drew a circle in the sand around himself and refused to leave it. His prayer, Ginzberg records, was eleven Hebrew words long: El na refa na lah. God, please, heal her, please. Even in this moment of crisis, Moses kept the prayer short. Too long and the people would grumble that he was grieving more for his sister than for them. He chose brevity, and he chose her.

She was healed. Seven days outside the camp, then readmitted. The entire nation of Israel, the text says in Numbers 12:15, did not travel until Miriam returned. The whole exodus stopped for her. Sifrei Devarim (compiled around the same period as Sifrei Bamidbar) says that the tribes moved only when Miriam led them forward. She had started the story. She had fought to keep her brother alive in the womb, pulled him from the Nile, talked her way into his nursery. The forward motion of the Exodus had her fingerprints on every mile of it.

When Miriam died in the fortieth year, the miraculous well that had followed her through the desert went dry. Ginzberg says Moses did not notice for six hours. He was sitting alone, weeping for his sister, when the people came demanding water. He had nothing to give them. There was nothing left to draw from.

The girl who had talked her father out of despair could no longer talk a single drop out of the ground.