The Ark on the Nile and the Princess

The day Moses was placed on the Nile was the twenty-first of Nisan, the same calendar date on which the children of Israel would later stand at the far shore of the sea and sing praise to God for their redemption. The ancient teachers who recorded this in the Legends of the Jews did not think this was an accident.

Before Jochebed set the ark down, she built it carefully. Bulrushes, because they float. Pitch on the outside only, not the inside, because she did not want her son to breathe the smell of pitch. Over the child she spread a small canopy to keep the sun off him, and as she did it she said: perhaps I will not live to see him stand under a marriage canopy. Then she left him.

His sister Miriam stayed near the water. She had prophesied before Moses was born that her mother would bear a son who would redeem Israel. When the pregnancy came, her father Amram had kissed her on the head. When Jochebed was forced to place the baby in the river, Amram struck Miriam on the head and demanded: what has become of your prophecy now? Miriam stood at the river's edge to find out.

The Legends of the Jews say that God sent scorching heat to plague Egypt on that morning, and the people suffered with leprosy and boils. Thermutis, the daughter of Pharaoh, came to the Nile seeking relief in the water from her burning skin. She also came, the text adds, to cleanse herself of the impurity of idol worship that filled her father's palace. She stepped into the river and saw an ark floating in the reeds.

She ordered her handmaids to fetch it. They said: our mistress, a decree that a king issues may sometimes be disregarded, but at least his own children and household observe it. Do you wish to break your father's command? Immediately the angel Gabriel appeared. He seized all the handmaids except one and buried them alive in the earth. Thermutis went to get the ark herself.

The ark was sixty ells away. She stretched out her arm and her arm stretched with it, reaching miraculously across the water until her hand closed on the wood. When she touched it, the leprosy vanished from her skin. She opened the ark and found an exquisitely beautiful baby, and the Shekinah, the Divine Presence, resting beside it. She saw the sign of the covenant on the child's body and knew he was a Hebrew boy. She knew her father's decree. She was about to leave him there.

The angel Gabriel struck the child. Moses cried out with a voice like a young man's, and Aaron, lying beside him, wept too. Thermutis heard and was moved. She called for an Egyptian woman to nurse the child. He refused one after another. The text explains: God would not permit Moses's mouth, the mouth that would one day speak with the Divine Presence, to draw nourishment from a woman who worshipped idols.

Miriam stepped forward. She had been watching from the shore, and now she walked to the princess and offered to find a Hebrew nurse. Thermutis agreed. Miriam ran with the speed, the text says, of a vigorous youth, and brought back her own mother. Thermutis handed the infant to Jochebed, saying: here is what is yours. Nurse this child and I will pay you two silver pieces. She did not know she was paying a mother to raise her own son.

In Egypt, among the nobles, Pharaoh had been told by his astrologers that the redeemer of the Hebrews had been dealt with: his doom lay in water, and he had been placed in water. Pharaoh ended the decree of drowning. The astrologers had seen something true but had understood it backward. Water would indeed be Moses's doom, but not the Nile. It would be the waters of Meribah, decades later in the desert, that would keep him from entering the promised land. The Book of Jasher, an ancient text cited directly in the Hebrew Bible at Joshua 10:13, confirms this sequence: the plagues on Egypt, the princess at the river, the rescue achieved through the child's own crying.

The child was given many names. His father called him Heber, because for his sake the family had been reunited. His mother called him Jekuthiel, hope set on God. His sister called him Jered, because she had gone down to the water. His brother Aaron called him Abi Zanoah, because their father had returned to their mother for this child. His grandfather Kohath called him Abi Gedor, because the Heavenly Father had built up the breach in Israel. His nurse called him Abi Soco, because he had been kept hidden in a tent for three months. And Israel called him Shemaiah ben Nethanel, because through him God would hear the people's sighs and give them the Law. Each name held a piece of the story. The name the world remembers, Moses, was given by the princess who pulled him from the river: the one I drew from the water.

The Ginzberg tradition preserves this catalog of names not as a redundancy but as a theology. Every person who had touched this child's life in its first weeks named what the child had meant to them, and the names together form a kind of collective prayer. What the Torah records in a single verse, the ancient teachers expanded into a portrait of a community trying to say, in the only language available to them, that something had happened here that they did not fully understand and could not afford to forget.