In the 130th year after the Israelites went down to Egypt, Pharaoh had a dream. Sitting on his throne, he saw an old man holding a merchant's balance scale. The old man gathered up all the elders, princes, and great men of Egypt, bound them together, and placed them in one pan of the scale. Then he set a single milch goat in the other pan. The goat outweighed them all.
Pharaoh woke in terror. One of his eunuchs interpreted the vision: "A child will be born among the Hebrews who will destroy all the land of Egypt." The king immediately summoned the Hebrew midwives—Shifrah and Puah—and ordered them to kill every male child born on the birthing stools. But the midwives feared God more than Pharaoh. They let the boys live, telling the king that Hebrew women gave birth like wild animals of the field, too fast for any midwife to arrive in time.
The imagery of the scale dream is striking. In the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, this vision frames the entire Egyptian genocide as a response to prophetic dread—the realization that a single child from an enslaved people could topple the mightiest empire on earth. The goat, small and unassuming, outweighing all the power of Egypt, is a vivid metaphor for the birth of Moses—a baby hidden in a basket who would grow into the man who broke Pharaoh's kingdom.