Pharaoh's Daughter Converted the Day She Saved Moses

Most people picture Pharaoh's daughter as a bystander. A princess who happened to be bathing, happened to spot a basket, happened to feel sorry for a crying baby. The Talmud in Sotah 12b, compiled in sixth-century Babylon, tells a completely different story.

She came to the Nile that morning to wash away her father's idolatry. The Hebrew word the Torah uses, lirhotz, means to bathe, but the rabbis read it the same way they read a line from (Isaiah 4:4): "When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion." This was not bathing. This was immersion. This was conversion. Pharaoh's daughter was walking away from her father's world before she had any idea Moses was waiting for her in the reeds.

Her handmaidens tried to stop her. "Our mistress," they said, "when a king decrees a decree, even if the whole world ignores it, surely his own household obeys. And yet you defy your father?" The angel Gabriel heard that. He struck them dead where they stood, all but one, because a princess should not be left completely alone.

She reached for the basket. The Torah says she sent her amah to retrieve it, and two rabbis argued about what that word meant. One said it meant her arm. One said it meant her maidservant. If it meant her arm, something extraordinary happened: her forearm stretched across the water, extending many cubits beyond its natural length, to bring the basket to shore. The Talmud reports this without apology. The moment demanded a miracle, so there was one.

When she opened the basket, she did not just see a baby. Rabbi Yosei bar Rabbi Hanina said she saw the Shekhinah (שכינה), the divine presence, resting over the child. The infant was glowing.

They brought him to every Egyptian wet nurse in the palace. Moses refused to nurse from any of them. Rabbi Elazar explained why: a mouth that would one day speak with God face to face could not take its first nourishment from an impure source. So Miriam, hovering at a careful distance all along, stepped forward and offered to find a Hebrew nurse. She brought Yocheved. The woman who had floated her son down the Nile was hired, and paid wages, to raise him.

Rabbi Hama bar Hanina points out that when Pharaoh's daughter handed Moses back to Yocheved, she said something she did not know she was saying. "Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages." The Aramaic of that phrase, the rabbis noted, could also be read as: "This one is yours." She was prophesying the truth without knowing it. The mother got her son back, and she got paid.

There is something almost unbearable in the structure of this story. The man who would eventually destroy Pharaoh's empire was raised in Pharaoh's palace, funded by Pharaoh's treasury, saved by Pharaoh's own daughter, who had already, quietly, left her father's world behind. The midrashic tradition could not resist the irony. Neither should we.