By the Hands of Women was Moses Saved

This Shabbat, all around the world, the Torah portion called Shemot will be read in synagogue and studied by millions. This week, we meet Moses, whose life story dominates the rest of the Five Books of Moses. Our tradition teaches that the prophecy of Moses was superior to that of any other prophet, before or since.

 

Moses is a major player in the story of the Jewish people. He spoke to God directly, led the newly-freed Israelite slaves out of Egypt and brought the Ten Commandments down from Mt. Sinai. Moses spent 40 years in the desert leading and he brought the Jewish people right to the border of the Holy Land. Even people who know very little about Judaism or about Biblical narrative have heard of Moses.

 

The fact that Moses was born at all, or that he survived multiple threats to his life, is credited to the actions of women. This week’s Torah portion includes the famous story of God calling to Moses from the midst of a burning bush. But wait! Were it not for the women in his life, Moses would not have lived to experience that remarkable moment.

Just before his birth, Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, charged the Hebrew midwives Shifrah and Puah with killing all male children at birth. Moses was first saved by the midwives’ intrepid defiance of Pharaoh’s plot of infanticide. Interestingly, there is a strong tradition that Shifrah and Puah are nicknames for Yocheved and Miriam, the mother and sister of Moses.

When Pharaoh’s infanticide plan failed, he decreed that all male children be drowned in the Nile. During this decree, Moses’s mother Yocheved was able to keep him hidden for his first three months of life. When she could no longer hide him, she prepared a waterproof basket, placed Moses inside and set her infant son floating in the water near the bank of the Nile. By fashioning a protective basket and placing him gently in the river, Yocheved saved Moses from certain death a second time and giving him another chance at life.

Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe in the Nile, while her maids walked along the Nile's edge. She saw the box in the rushes, and sent her slave-girl to fetch it. Moses’s life was saved a third time when the daughter of Pharaoh, whom the Torah names Batya, rescued him from the river.

Batya tried unsuccessfully to get Moses to nurse from an Egyptian woman. Rather than starve to death, Moses’s sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, “Shall I go and call a Hebrew woman to nurse the child for you?” A deal was struck and Moses’s own mother, Yocheved, nursed him until the age of two. This solution saved Moses from death, this time by starvation, a fourth time.

After weaning, Moses was returned to Batya who raised him as her own son, in open defiance of her father Pharaoh. When he was grown, Moses went out among his people and saw an Egyptian slave master kill one of the Hebrew slaves. Confirming first that no one was watching, Moses killed the Egyptian and buried his body in sand. The next day, upon learning that there were witnesses to his crime, Moses fled to the land of Midian to escape the wrath of Pharaoh.

In Midian, he met Tziporah, one of the seven daughters of Yisro, the priest of Midian. Not knowing the true identity of the stranger Moses, Yisro threw him into prison and ordered that he not be given any food or water. Tziporah took pity on Moses and secretly brought him food and water every day for ten years. Thus Tziporah, who later became Moses’s wife, saved his life a fifth time.

There is a sixth life-saving incident, which occurs after God called to Moses from the burning bush, in which Tziporah saved Moses again, this time from an angel of God who comes to kill Moses for the sin of delaying the circumcision of his second son. This incident is found in the thorny verses of Exodus 4:24-26.

Moses was the greatest prophet and most praised leader the Jewish people have ever known. But were it not for the worthy women who saved him from death again and again, the Jewish people would have been eternally bereft of his peerless leadership.