The Baby the Midwives Saved Had Ten Names

Most people meet Moses already grown, sandals off, staring at a burning bush. The rabbinic imagination tells a different opening. Before the prophet, there was a baby with ten names, and before the baby, there were two women who decided that Pharaoh could go ahead and kill them first.

Pharaoh asks his cabinet how to murder a people

Louis Ginzberg, drawing on Tanchuma, Sotah, and Shemot Rabbah in his Legends of the Jews (1909-1938), opens the Exodus with a council scene the Torah only hints at. The Israelites were multiplying so fast that the Egyptians felt the land thicken around them like underbrush. Pharaoh called his three trusted advisors. Balaam said kill them. Jethro walked out. Job, the Job, kept his mouth shut, and Ginzberg says he paid for that silence later with every sore on his skin.

Balaam's plan was clever in the worst way. Don't send soldiers. Send midwives. If a midwife smothers a newborn at the moment of birth, who can prove anything? And the gods of Egypt, Pharaoh's counselors believed, would never punish women for doing their jobs.

Two midwives walk into the throne room

The two women Pharaoh summoned were not strangers to the story. In Ginzberg's retelling of the midwives, Shiphrah is Jochebed, mother of the baby not yet born. Puah is Miriam, the daughter who will one day stand on a riverbank and watch a basket float. Miriam was a child. She still spoke up.

"Woe to this man," she said to Pharaoh's face, "when God visits retribution on him for his evil deeds." Jochebed grabbed her daughter's arm. She apologized. She is only a girl, she said. She does not know what she is saying. Pharaoh let it pass. He gave them the order and sent them home.

They did not obey. Ginzberg, drawing on Sotah 11b, says they did the opposite of what was asked. When a mother had no food, the midwives went door to door collecting from wealthier Hebrew women so the baby would not starve. When a mother was alone, they stayed. They prayed over the cribs. They became, quietly, the first resistance.

The lie that saved a generation

Pharaoh noticed. He called them back. Explain yourselves, he demanded. Their answer is one of the great pieces of holy mischief in the Ginzberg corpus. The Hebrew women, they said, are not like Egyptian women. They are like animals of the field. They give birth before the midwife even arrives. By the time we get there, the baby is already nursing.

It was a lie wrapped in flattery. It cast the Hebrews as primitive, almost beneath notice. Pharaoh believed it because he wanted to. He let them go. And then he made the decree public. Throw every newborn boy into the Nile. The midwives could no longer hide what was happening behind closed doors. So Jochebed went home, and three months later she had a son.

The boy with ten names

The Torah names him once. Moses. The rabbis could not bear that. In Ginzberg's account of the infancy of Moses, the baby comes back to Jochebed after Pharaoh's daughter draws him from the river, and for two years he lives in his birth mother's arms. Every relative gives him a name. Every name is a prayer in disguise.

His father Amram called him Heber, "reunited," because the baby brought him back to the wife he had divorced in despair. Jochebed called him Jekuthiel, "my hope is in God," because she had handed him to the river and the river had handed him back. Miriam called him Jered, after her own descent to the bank to watch the basket. Aaron called him Abi Zanoah, the one who made his father return to his cast-off wife. The grandfather Kohath called him Abi Gedor, the one who built up the breach, because the drownings stopped on the day he was born. The nurse called him Abi Soco, the tent-hidden one, for the three months he was kept secret. The people of Israel called him Shemaiah ben Nethanel, because through him God would hear their groaning and give them the Torah.

At four months, Ginzberg says, the baby began to prophesy. He told his mother in some wordless way that one day he would receive Torah from a flaming torch.

The tenth name comes from the woman who broke the decree

The last name was given by the woman who should have killed him. Pharaoh's daughter pulled him out of the water and called him Moshe, "because I drew him out." The Zohar adds a strange detail. Of all ten names, this is the only one God ever used. The princess of Egypt, raised in the house that ordered the killing, gave the prophet the name God spoke from the burning bush.

Read the chain backward. A king commands genocide. Two midwives lie to his face. A mother builds a basket from reeds and pitch. A sister hides in the reeds. A princess disobeys her father. Six women, across three palaces and one riverbank, conspire to keep one baby alive. The baby grows up and ten names get folded down into one.

What the midwives knew that Pharaoh did not

The midwives appear in the Torah for four verses and disappear. Ginzberg gives them the scene Exodus refuses to write. Two women stand in front of the most powerful man in the world, look at his order to drown babies, and decide that the gods of Egypt are not their problem. They walk out. They go back to work. They lie when they have to. They feed children that are not theirs.

The Torah says God dealt well with the midwives and built them houses. Ginzberg's Abraham, smashing his father's idols, learned the same thing the midwives already knew. Power that has to be defended by killing infants is not power. It is a stone Marumath, propped up by carpenters, blessing nothing. The midwives saw through Pharaoh the way Abraham saw through Terah. They did not announce it. They just stopped obeying.

One of them later held a baby with ten names and rocked him while his mother prayed.