Birth of Moses

The event

Moses entered the world under a death sentence. Pharaoh, alarmed by the growing number of Israelites in Egypt, had ordered every newborn Hebrew boy thrown into the Nile River. Moses' parents, Amram and Jochebed of the tribe of Levi, defied the order in faith, hiding their son for three months before setting him afloat on the river in a papyrus basket sealed with tar and pitch — an act Hebrews 11:23 calls the fruit of their faith rather than mere desperation.

The basket came to rest exactly where Pharaoh's own daughter was bathing. Moved with compassion at the sight of the crying infant, she drew him out of the water and, through the quiet arrangement of his sister Miriam, hired his own mother Jochebed as his nurse. Moses grew up in Pharaoh's palace, trained, as Stephen later recalled in Acts 7, in all the wisdom of the Egyptians — an education God would one day use for Israel's deliverance, though Moses could not have known that at the time.

The story is a small but striking picture of how God works throughout the book of Exodus: often through the courage of unnamed or overlooked people — two Hebrew midwives who feared God rather than Pharaoh, a sister keeping watch on a riverbank, a princess with a soft heart — to preserve the line through which the whole nation, and eventually the Messiah, would come.

Dating

This date is calculated backward from the traditional 1446 BC Exodus, since Moses was eighty years old when he stood before Pharaoh (Exodus 7:7). Scholars who favor the late-date Exodus (c. 1260s-1250s BC, tied to the reign of Rameses II) would place Moses' birth roughly two centuries later, in the mid-1300s BC. Either way, Scripture's own interest is less in pinning an exact year than in showing God's providence in preserving the deliverer of Israel from Pharaoh's decree.

Scripture references

• Exodus 1:22-2:10
• Acts 7:20-21
• Hebrews 11:23