The Light at Moses' Birth Reached Back to the First Day of Creation

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The House Filled With Light

When Moses was born, the house filled with light.

His mother saw that he was good (Exodus 2:2). The word did not belong only to the nursery. It reached back to the first day, when God saw the light, and it was good (Genesis 1:4). The baby in Egypt carried a brightness older than Egypt. Before the Nile held him, creation had already made room for him.

Jochebed did not hide him because he was pretty. Beauty would not have been enough. Pharaoh's decree had turned infant boys into hunted lives. She saw tov (טוב), the kind of good Torah uses for the first light. That made the birth a creation scene inside a slave house. Egypt had ordered darkness. The house filled anyway.

Three Months of Hiding

The Egyptians counted from the day Moses' parents remarried after the decree. Jochebed was already three months pregnant. She had a head start, and she used every hour of it. For three months the hidden light had to be guarded like a flame cupped against wind. Every ordinary sound in the house became dangerous, because Egypt had made birth itself illegal for sons of Israel.

The searchers were sly. They went into houses where they thought a baby had been born, and they brought a small Egyptian child and made him cry, so that a hidden Hebrew boy would hear and cry with him. Jochebed held her mouth shut. She held the child's mouth too. The light in the room could not be allowed to answer.

The brightness did not remove the danger. It made the danger worth defying. When she could no longer hide him, she coated a wicker basket with clay and pitch. The Nile that Pharaoh had turned into a grave was about to hold a creation she refused to give up.

The Basket Among the Reeds

She placed the child in the basket and set it among the reeds on the bank of the Nile (Exodus 2:3). The water that was supposed to swallow Hebrew sons received this one as a hidden charge. Sister watched from a distance. The house behind them went dark again, ordinary, empty of the light that had filled it at the birth.

The basket rode. Pitch held. A current that had been a sentence became, for one afternoon, a hiding place. Creation's first light had gone into the river Pharaoh meant for darkness, and it did not go out.

The Signs at the Bush

Years later Moses stood at a bush that burned and was not consumed, and he did not want to go. He asked how Israel would believe him. God placed signs in his hands. The staff became a serpent and returned to a staff. The old cunning from Eden was already in the world. Moses had written that the serpent was more cunning than all the beasts of the field (Genesis 3:1). Egypt had learned that cunning in speech, in decrees, in the crying babies carried from house to house.

God told him to put his hand in his bosom. He put it in and took it out, and the hand was leprous, like snow (Exodus 4:6). Slander is told in secret, close to the chest. The serpent's spots were leprous marks. Moses had spoken against the people he was being sent to save, and the affliction answered in his own flesh. He put the hand back. It came out restored, like his flesh.

Each sign spoke in the language of the first stories. Serpent, body, water, blood, earth. Egypt had used water as a grave. God would turn water into testimony. Egypt had tried to make Hebrew bodies disposable. God showed a hand wounded and healed at command. Moses was not given tricks. He was given creation reversed and restored in miniature, so he could walk back toward the river that had hidden him.

The Coffin in the River

When the time finally came to leave Egypt, the nation gathered dough, children, fear, and borrowed wealth. Moses went looking for Joseph's coffin. Generations earlier, Joseph had made Israel swear to carry his bones out when God remembered them (Exodus 13:19). The promise had waited under Egyptian years. Some say he was buried in the Nile. Moses stood at the water that had once held his own basket and called.

"Joseph, Joseph, the time has arrived for what you said. The Lord will remember you." The coffin began rocking. Moses took it. All Israel was engaged with silver and gold. Moses was engaged with bones. He was not Joseph's son. He was not obligated. He involved himself anyway, because a hidden child who had ridden that river once would not leave its dead in it.

God said to Moses, in that hour, that the wise-hearted take commandments. Joseph had been obligated to bury Jacob. Moses was not obligated to bury Joseph, and still he did it. Therefore God, who has no obligation to any creature, would tend Moses and bury him. The child whose birth had echoed the first day now carried memory through the water. He did not let the Exodus become only an escape for the living. The dead who had trusted the promise left too, up out of the same Nile that had hidden him.