The princess opens the basket. She does not find a quiet, sleeping infant. She finds a crying baby.
"And she opened, and saw the child, and, behold, the babe wept; and she had compassion upon him, and said, This is one of the children of the Jehudaee."
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (2:6) keeps the detail that stopped sages in their tracks for centuries. She knew. Just from a cry, she knew. No circumcision mark had to be inspected. No genealogy was produced. A single sob told her: this is a Hebrew baby.
The rabbis debated why. Some said the cry of a hunted child sounds different from the cry of a safe child. Others said the Holy One had given the baby a distinctive voice so his identity could not be mistaken. The Zohar (published c. 1290 CE in Castile) will later suggest that the baby's shekhinah — the indwelling Presence that would one day rest on the ohel mo'ed — was already shining faintly through his cry.
But the Targum's line is perhaps more human. She had compassion upon him. Whatever she recognized, what moved her was not ethnic identification but pity. A daughter of the man who had decreed this baby's death is now weeping over him. The chain of cruelty has been broken in one woman's heart.
This is how tyrannies actually end. Not in a single battle. In the private decision of one person — often someone inside the palace — to refuse to carry the decree any further.
Beloved, the revolution starts at the sound of someone else's child.