The Girl Who Out-Decreed Pharaoh and Waited for the Prophet

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The Decree That Came From Inside the House

Pharaoh had given his order and the Hebrews were dying. Every boy born was to be thrown into the Nile, and the river was doing what rivers do with the things thrown into them. Amram did the math. He was the leading man of his generation, the one the others followed, the one who carried enough authority that when he made a decision the community made it with him. He looked at the decree and reached the obvious conclusion: why bring sons into the world to watch them drown? He sent his wife away. He divorced her.

And every Hebrew husband in Egypt sent his wife away the same afternoon.

Midrash Aggadah, the Torah commentary gathered in the Buber recension around the twelfth century, records this as a collective decision made in grief and reasonable logic. No soldier had raised a sword. The slaves had simply agreed, quietly and rationally, to stop having children, and the line of Abraham would end in one generation by consent.

The Argument That Saved a Nation

Then Amram's daughter stood up and prosecuted her own father.

She was not pleading. She was not weeping. She was a girl with a legal argument and she delivered it without softening a word. Father, your decree is worse than Pharaoh's. He condemned only the boys. You have condemned the boys and the girls together, because children unborn have no share in either this world or the next, and Pharaoh has not gone that far. He attacks this world alone. You attack both worlds at once.

And then the hardest line: Pharaoh is wicked. Heaven may yet nullify what a wicked man decrees. You are righteous. What you decree will stand. So whose decree is actually more dangerous to Israel?

Amram heard the argument and could not answer it. He took his wife back. Every husband in Egypt took his wife back that same day. The girl who had spoken carried no office, no authority, no standing in the assembly of men who had made the decision. She had only the argument, and the argument was sufficient.

What She Saw From the Bank of the Nile

Later, her mother put a basket in the river and her brother was in it, and the girl stood at a distance to watch, because she had already prophesied what was going to happen and she needed to know if she was right. The Torah says she stood to know what would be done to him, and the sages read that phrase carefully. She was not standing to help. She was not standing to intervene. She was standing to know, because she had spoken a prophecy in the household and now the prophecy was in a basket in the river and her credibility as a prophet was floating with it.

The Midrash Aggadah noted that the Holy One did not let the moment go unremarked. The Shechinah, the divine presence, came and stood beside her on the bank. Not to comfort her. To watch with her. Two figures at the edge of the Nile, one of them having made a claim about what was coming and one of them having been the source of what was coming, standing together in the same posture of waiting to see what the basket would do.

The Serpent in the Lodging House

The tradition placed one more thread in this same myth, a strange one. When Moses was on his way to Egypt to deliver the word God had given him at the burning bush, something happened at the lodging house on the road. An angel, the tradition says the angel Uriel, came in the form of a serpent and swallowed Moses to the hips.

Why? Because Moses had delayed the circumcision of his son Gershom. He had been in a hurry, or had reasoned that travel was not the right moment, or had told himself the circumcision could wait until they arrived. The serpent that swallowed him to the hips was not attacking Moses. It was marking the boundary of the delay. This far and no further. His wife Zipporah understood immediately, took a flint, and circumcised the boy herself, and the serpent released Moses from its mouth.

The sages placed this episode in the same orbit as Miriam's prophecy and Miriam's vigil at the Nile. Moses had been rescued from the river by the faith of a girl who stood and watched to know. He had been rescued from the serpent by the action of a woman with a flint. The great deliverer of Israel arrived in Egypt already having been twice carried by the courage of women who were not surprised by what was coming because they had either prophesied it or recognized it the moment it appeared in their doorway.