[Translation w/commentary is by EF/Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses; additional commentary from RA/Robert Alter, and REF/Richard Elliott Friedman.
A reminder about the commentary from P&H/Pentateuch and Haftorah, ed. Dr. J.H.Hertz; this resource book is as invaluable as the others; however, the commentators often go beyond what is stated in the text, making presumptions and logical conclusions. It is wise for the reader to keep in mind that while the comments might be plausible, they are outside of the simple text and should not be understood as fact. Since much of it is Rabbinic commentary, this is to be expected; their target audience are Jews, not gentiles; therefore they justify and rationalize the behavior and action of the acknowledged great figures and heroes of their people. We are like outsiders looking in.
This is why we provide the balance from three other commentaries; it takes a lot of work to put these together so we hope readers and students appreciate the effort. If no one ever reads these posts, only the typist/admin/poster have benefitted and that’s too bad!–Admin1]
Chapter 2
[P&H] THE BIRTH AND EDUCATION OF MOSES.
Providence overrule the despotic plans of men, and Israel’s future deliverer is being prepared for his task in the very court of the merciless tyrant. The marvellous and unique experience of a people from the midst of another land and people would be both impossible and inexplicable, apart from a great directing genius. This chapter opens the story of the Father of the Prophets, the Liberator and Teacher of Israel, the man who not only led the children of Israel from the Egyptian house of bondage, but brought them to Sinai and trained them to become a free people consecrated unto God an righteousness.
‘Moses was a great artist, and possessed the true artistic spirit. But this spirit was directed by him, as by his Egyptian compatriots, to colossal and indestructible undertakings. He built human pyramids, carved human obelisks; he took a poor shepherd family and made a nation of it—a great, eternal, holy people: a people of God destined to outlive the centuries and to serve as a pattern to all other nations a prototype of the whole of mankind. He created Israel’ (Heine),
Even in its literary form this chapter is noteworthy. Few portions of Scripture condense so many dramatic incidents into a few verses. The power of the narrative only gains thereby.
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[EF] Moshe’s Birth and Early Life (2:1-22) Picking up from the last phrase of Chap. 1, “let every daughter live,” Chap. 2 opens as a story of three daughters (the word occurs six times here), Moshe’s real and foster mothers, and his sister.
It has long been maintained that the story of Moshe’s birth is a classic “birth of the hero” tale, sharing many features with other heroes of antiquity. The parallel most often drawn is that of Sargon of Akkad, whose birth story is set in an era before Moshe but was written down later; similar elements include being separated from the real parents through a death threat, and being set adrift on the river. Hallo cites other parallels in Hittite an Egyptian literature noting at the same time that “none of them includes all the elements of the Moses birth legend.”
If, as I maintained in the introduction (“On the Book of Exodus and Its Structure”), most of this material has been collected for didactic and not for historical purposes, we are entitled to ask what this story was intended to teach. It cannot simply be written off as an attempt to explain away Moshe’s name and origins. Two elements seem crucial.
- First, the text as we have it centers around the activity of women—giving birth, hiding, watching and adopting Moshe. The female principle of life-giving triumphs over the male prerogatives of threatening and death-dealing; the Nile, source of all life in Egypt, births another child.
- Second, the story and its continuation to the end of the chapter set up Moshe as a man of two sides: Hebrew and Egyptian. He is at once archetypal victim (of Pharaoh’s death decree) and archetypal collaborator, growing up, as he apparently does, in Pharaoh’s palace.
What are we to make of this two-sided fate and personality? It may well have been intended as a reflex of the people of Israel itself. Often in the Hebrew Bible the hero’s life mirrors that of Israel (see Greenstein 1981), and the case of Moshe is a good example. Moshe develops into a Hebrew—that is, he eventually recovers his full identity. This is accomplished, first, through his empathy with and actions on behalf of “his brothers” (vv. 11,12), then through his exile from Egypt and finally through the purifying life in the wilderness as a Shepherd. Thus Moshe’s personality changes are wrought by means of separation, and the same process will characterize the coming Plague Narrative (with its emphasis on “distinction” between Egypt and Israel) and the entire Israelite legal and ritual system, which stresses holiness and separation.
The first section of the chapter (vv. 1-10) uses a number of repeating words: “take” appears four times, indicative of divine protection; “child” seven times (Greenberg 1969); and “see,” which as I have mentioned, will recur meaningfully in Chap. 3. There is also a threefold motif of death threat in the chapter: at birth, on the Nile, and at the hand of the avenging Pharaoh. Isbell notes several items of vocabulary (e.g., “deliver,” “feared,” “amid the reeds”) that return in the victory account at the Sea of Reeds (Chap. 14).
From the other two accounts here (vv.11-14 and 15-22), we learn all we need to know about Moshe’s early personality: he is Hebrew-identifying but Egyptian-looking; concerned with justice, but impetuous and violent in pursuit of that goal. It is also ominous that his first contacts with the Israelites end in rejection since that will so often be his experience with them later on. The doubly unsatisfactory situation of confused identity and impetuous means must be rectified, and it is exile that accomplishes it. The Midianite wilderness transforms Moshe into shepherd, foreigner, father, and seer—in short, into a son of the Patriarchs.
Incredibly, the man whose activity is to span four whole books has, it seems, half his life (or, according to the chronology of 7:7, two-thirds of his life!) described in a single chapter. Typical of biblical storytelling, much has been compressed and left out, but enough is told to establish the person who is to come.
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1 Now a man from the house of Levi went and took (to wife) a daughter of Levi.
[P&H] the house of Levi. i.e. tribe of Levi. His name and that of his wife are given in VI,20. Here the narrative hastens on to the story of the Redemption.
took to wife. The explicit language in these two verses brings out an important characteristic of Judaism. In other religions thee founders are represented as of supernatural birth. Not so in Judaism. Even Moses is human as to birth, as also in regard to death (Deut. XXXIV,5).
[RA] took. This verb is commonly used in biblical Hebrew for taking a wife, even when “wife” is elided, as here. It is worth translating literally because the verb is echoed in the woman’s “taking” the wicker ark (verse 3) and in the Egyptian slavegirl’s “taking” the ark (verse 5).
2 The woman became pregnant and bore a son.
When she saw him—that he was goodly, she hid him, for three months.
[P&H] bore a son. Two children had already been born to them—Miriam, the elder, was a young woman at the time of the birth of Moses; and Aaron, who was born three years before Moses. The king’s order to drown the Israelite children must have been promulgated after the birth of Aaron, as his life had not been in peril.
when she saw. Better, and she saw that he was a goodly child, and she hid. etc.; because the mother would in any case have been anxious to preserve his life.
a goodly child. i.e. a ‘good child’; not betraying his presence by crying, so that she could hide him for a space of three months (Luzzatto).
[EF] she saw him—that he was goodly: The parallel in Genesis is “God saw the light: that it was good” (Gen I:4). goodly: Handsome (so Ibn Ezra, among others), although others interpret the Hebrew tov as “healthy” given the context. What is important is the Genesis connection just mentioned. three months: Another “perfect” number, which will recur with the Israelites’ three-month trip to Mount Sinai.
[REF] gave birth to a son. Moses is profoundly a lone figure. Although he has a family, Exodus is not about family relations and does not develop them in Moses’ case. Coming on the heels of Genesis, with its long stories of families, this is striking. We learn little of Moses’ mother and less of his father. The most central family relationship is between Moses and his brother Aaron, yet it plays no role in the story. Aaron need not be Moses’ brother for the sake of the development of the story; their interactions usually do not depend on it at all. And Miriam, when she is first identified by name, is identified as “the sister of Aaron,” rather than of Moses (15:20), and she and Moses are never pictured exchanging any words. Family members play a part in the birth story of Moses, but the account establishes, after all, not a relationship but the distance between Moses and his family; it is about his being raised by others, from another people. Moses has a family of which he is husband and father, but this just further demonstrates the point, because the text merely reports that he has a wife and sons. They play no role. There is no story about them except the strange story of Zipporah’s circumcising their son, and it is only three verses long (4:24-26), and it is incomprehensible.
3 And when she was no longer able to hide him,
she took for him a little-ark of papyrus,
she loamed it with loam and with pitch,
placed the child in it,
and placed it in the reeds by the shore of the Nile.
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[P&H] an ark. A chest. The Heb. for ‘ark’ is elsewhere used only for Noah’s ark.
bullrushes. The Heb. is an Egyptian loan-word. It denotes the paper-reed (called papyrus), growing ten to twelve feet high. Its leaves were used for making boats, mats, ropes, and paper.
slime. i.e. bitumen—to make it watertight.
flags. A kind of reed, of smaller growth than the papyrus.
[EF] little-ark: The term used to designate the little basket/boat, teiva, has clearly been chosen to reflect back to Noah’s ark in Genesis. The implication is that just as God saved Noah and thus humanity from destruction by water, so will he now save Moshe and the Israelites from the same. papyrus: A material that floats; it was also used in biblical times for writing, including biblical texts. in the reeds: Another foreshadowing; when Moshe grows up, he will lead the liberated people through the Sea of Reeds. The word suf (reeds) appears to be a loan-word from Egyptian.
[RA] As numerous commentators have observed the story of Moses begins with a pointed allusion to the Flood story. In Genesis, a universal deluge nearly destroys the whole human race. Here, Pharaoh’s decree to drown every Hebrew male infant threatens to destroy the people of Israel. As the ark in Genesis bears on the water, the saving remnant of humankind, the child borne on the waters here will save his imperiled people. This narrative recapitulates the Flood story, itself a quasi-epic narrative of global scope, in the transposed key of a folktale: the story of a future ruler who is hidden in a basket floating in a river has parallels in Hittite, Assyrian, and Egyptian literature, and approximate analogues in many other cultures. Otto Rank sees the basket as a womb image and the river water as an externalization of the amniotic fluid. Psychoanalytic speculation apart, it is clear from the story that water plays a decisive thematic role in Moses’s career. He is borne safely on the water, which Pharaoh had imagined would be the very means to destroy all the Hebrew male children. His floating along the reeds (suf) foreshadows the miraculous triumph over the Egyptians that he will lead in the parting of the Sea of Reeds (yam suf). His obtaining water for the thirsting people will figure prominently in the Wilderness stories.
[REF] the Nile. The same river that means death for all the other male newborns means life for Moses.
4 Now his sister stationed herself far off, to know what would be done to him.
[P&H] stood. Better, ‘took her stand,’ not far from the place reserved for bathing.
[EF] to know: Better English would be “to learn.” This first occurrence of the Hebrew word yado’a foreshadows the later theme of the Egyptians’ and the Israelites’ coming to “know” (or “acknowledge”) God’s power. For the moment, and in the story that follows, the issue is one of revealing information—Moshe’s fate (2:4) and the discovery of his crime (2:14).
5 Now Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe at the Nile,
and her girls were walking along the Nile.
She saw the little-ark among the reeds and sent her maid, and she fetched it.
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[P&H] came down. From her palace, probably at Zoan (Tanis), one of the chief royal residences in the Delta.
by the riverside. To give warning of any intrusion upon the privacy of the princess.
handmaid. Her personal attendant at the moment of bathing.
[EF] Pharaoh’s daughter: Her station is important, for it enables Moshe to be saved and to be brought up in the Egyptian palace (useful both for his political future and for literary irony of situation). girls: Maidservants.
6 She opened (it) and saw him, the child—
here, a boy weeping!
She pitied him, and she said:
One of the Hebrews’ children is this!
[P&H] a boy that wept. lit. ‘a weeping boy’.
she had compassion. Despite Pharaoh’s orders, she is moved to spare the child. She ‘feared God’.
one of the Hebrews’ children. Only a Hebrew mother, in desperation to save her child from destruction, would thus expose it on the River.
[EF] She opened . . . boy weeping: The emphatic, halting syntax of the narrative brings out the visual drama of seeing, taking, opening, and identifying. One of the Hebrews’ children: How does she know that? The simplest explanation lies in the situation itself and not in any identifying marks. Who else but a Hebrew, under the threat of losing her baby, would set a child adrift? Is this: Or “must this be.“
[RA] and, look, it was a lad weeping. “Lad,” na’ar, is more typically used for an older child or a young man, but it may be employed here to emphasize the discovery—“and look,” wehinah—that this is a male child. (It might also be relevant that na’ar occurs elsewhere as a term of parental tenderness referring to a vulnerable child.) The fact that this is a male child left hidden in a basket would be the clue to the princess and her entourage that he belongs to the Hebrews against whom the decree of infanticide has been issued. Nahum Sarna notes that this is the sole instance in the Bible in which the verb “to weep” is used for an infant, not an adult.
7 Now his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter:
Shall I go and call a nursing woman from the Hebrews for you,
that she may nurse the child for you?
[P&H] sister. When she saw that the ark was found she ventured to join the princess’s attendants to see what would happen to her brother.
a nurse of the Hebrew women. lit. ‘a woman giving suck’. A native Egyptian woman would not have undertaken to nurse a Hebrew child (Driver).
8 Pharaoh’s daughter said to her:
Go!
The maiden went and called the child’s mother.
[EF] Go: In biblical Hebrew, a verb repeated from a question is the equivalent of “Yes,” for which there was no other expression.
9 Pharaoh’s daughter said to her:
Have this child go with you and nurse him for me,
and I myself will give you your wages.
So the woman took the child and she nursed him.
[P&H] give thee thy wages. Pharaoh’s plans for the annihilation of the Israelite children are defeated by women—the human feelings of the midwives, the tender sympathy of a woman of royal birth, and a sister’s watchfulness and resource in extremity. ‘It was to the merit of pious women that Israel owed its redemption in Egypt,’ say the Rabbis.
10 The child grew, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter,
and he became her son.
She called his name: Moshe/He-who-pulls-out;
she said: For out of the water meshitihu/I-pulled-him.
[P&H] the child grew. He remained under his mother’s care till he was quite a lad. During these most impressionable years of his life, his mother must have instilled in him the belief in one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, an Eternal Spirit without any shape or form that the mind of man could devise; and imparted to him the sacred traditions of Israel, the story of the Fathers in Canaan, of Joseph in Egypt, and of the Divine promise of deliverance from Egyptian bondage. When Moses returned to the Palace, he received, as the adopted child of the princess, the education of boys of the highest rank, probably at Heliopolis—‘the Oxford of Ancient Egypt’ (Stanley). There he ust have learnt many things which from a Hebrew point of view would be extremely undesirable for him to know’ (Driver0. But whenever the priests undertook to initiate him into their fantastic idolatry, he remembered the teachings of his childhood; and he remained a Hebrew.
he became her son. He was adopted by the princess, and life at the Egyptian court gave him the training which was essential for a leader of men. ‘Deep are the ways of Providence! It was His inscrutable intention that Moses should be reared in a Palace, that his spirit might remain uncurbed by the oppressive and enervating influence of slavery. Thus he slew the Egyptian because his heart could not see violence and injustice, and from the same generous motive he took the part of the daughters of Reuel against the shepherds. It served another purpose also. Had he always lived amongst his own people, they would not so readily have accepted him as their leader, nor would they have shown him the respect and deference which were essential for the accomplishment of his great mission’ (Ibn Ezra).
Mose. Heb. Mosheh, the Hebraised reproduction of an Egyptian word which probably means ‘child of the Nile’ (Yahuda). The explanation of the name given in the text (‘because I drew him out of the water’) rests upon the similarity of sound, as is repeatedly seen in Genesis the word Mosheh resembling the word for ‘the one who is drawn out.’
[EF] grew: His age is not mentioned, but weaning may be inferred (c. Gen. 21:8) as the appropriate boundary, and hence the child was probably around three (De Vaux 1965). he became her son: A formulaic expression for legal adoption. Moshe/He-Who-Pulls-Out: Trad. English “Moses.” Mss is a well-attested name in ancient Egypt, meaning “son of” (as in Ra’amses—“son of Ra”—in Ex. I:11). Thus it is quite appropriate that Pharaoh’s daughter names her adopted son in this manner. However, there is an explicit irony here, as Buber (1988) and others have pointed out. The princess in a Hebrew folk etymology (one base on sound rather than on the scientific derivation of words), thinks that the name Moshe recalls her act of “pulling out” the baby from the Nile. But the verb form in moshe is active, not passive, and thus it is Moshe himself who will one day “pull out” Israel from the life-threatening waters of both slavery and the Sea of Reeds.
[RA] And the child grew. The verb clearly indicates his reaching the age of weaning, which would have been around three. This might have been long enough for the child to have acquired Hebrew as his first language. The same verb “grew” in verse 11 refers to attaining adulthood.
became a son to her. The phrase indicates adoption, not just an emotional attachment.
Moses. This is an authentic Egyptian name meaning “the one who is born,” and hence “son.” The folk etymology relates it to the Hebrew verb mashah, “to draw out from water.” Perhaps the active form of the verb used for the name mosheh, “he who draws out,” is meant to align the naming with Moses’s future destiny of rescuing his people from the water of the Sea of Reeds.
[REF] Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. The story is intriguingly similar to the legend of the Mesopotamian king Sargon, found in Assyrian and Babylonian texts, in which a priestess places her infant son in a basket of rushes with pitch on its exterior and casts him into the river, and a water-drawer retrieves the baby and rears him as his son. This and other literary parallels to the birth account of Moses suggest how enigmatic the biblical story is. Freud observed that such stories generally involve three steps: (1) a child is born of noble or royal lineage, (2) the child comes to be brought up as a commoner, and (3) the child grows up and eventually arrives back at his rightful place in a royal house. Freud noted that such stories were conceived etiologically, composed as justifications of cases in which commoners rose to thrones. The historical truth in such cases lay in the second step: the king really came from commoner roots. The story was composed to legitimize his kingship, as an answer to those who would deny his royal blood. Freud considered the birth story of Moses against this background and suggested the possibility that here, too, the truth behind the etiology lay in the second step, that Moses was an Egyptian, and that the birth story was composed to explain how an Egyptian had come to be the leader of the Israelites. Freud’s interest (on this particular point of his larger study) was primarily historical, and his hypothesis has never been proved or disproved; but it is also important because it indicates what the Torah and its audience valued. In the Israelite story, the values are reversed. The royal house is step two, the aberration, rather than the prized position. Moses’ royal placement simply is not what is important. There is no information about his early life in the Egyptian court. We are informed that he is nursed by his own mother, but we are not certain what this report is supposed to establish. We cannot even be certain that it means that Moses thus knows that he is Israelite. Later the text says that he “went out to his brothers and saw their burdens” (2:11), but this wording, too, is not definitive as to whether he nows that the Israelites are his kin. There is even ambiguity in his killing of an Egyptian taskmaster whom he sees striking a slave: is it because of his bond with the Israelites or his sense of justice? In a curious parallel to the deity Himself, Moses’ background and motives are mysterious.
she called his name Moses. Even learned people often recall this story out-of-order, imagining the Pharaoh’s daughter naming Moses as she draws him from the water, but she does not in fact name him until after he has grown and his mother brings him to her. What was he called until that time? Classical and recent commentators have not addressed this. Since the text does not tell us, we must assume that the concern is to explain the origin of the name Moses and that there is no interest in pursuing whether there was any prior name given by his parents. Presumably the only name known in tradition and history was Moses, and so the author was not free to make up any other. And the story had to ascribe the naming to the Pharaoh’s daughter because she was the one in power, the one who would present him to the Egyptian society, and so on. Still, we can hardly resist wondering why the parents would not be pictured as giving their son a name. If he is with them until he is weaned, that may be several years, and we can hardly resist imagining what the parents would call him. Imagine—this is my midrash—that they do not give him a name. They call him ‘the child” (Hebrew hayyeled). When they talk to him they call him “my child” (yaldi). And this gives those years a mysterious, portentous quality. They know that his naming simply is not in their power. And so his fate is not in their hands either. Count how many times you call your child by his or her name in a day, and you will know how many times these parents are reminded of their unique situation: thankful that their son alone is spared from death but sad and frightened that he will be raised by others, from the very household that is their enemy, and worried that he will not know who his real people and family are. From the perspective of Jewish history,, this is not a singular experience. In the 20th century, Jewish parents in Europe gave their children to non-Jewish families to save them during the holocaust.
because I drew him. The naming of Moses argues both for and against the story’s historicity. On one hand, there is the unlikelihood of the idea that the princess would know Hebrew, let alone choose to derive the baby’s name from a Hebrew etymology. And in fact the name Moses is not Hebrew. It is Egyptian, meaning, “is born,” as in the name Ramesses, meaning “Ra (the sun-god) bore him.” On the other hand, the fact that the great leader of Israelites has an Egyptian name (as do other early priests: Phinehas, Hophni) is evidence that Israelites did indeed live for some time in Egypt. Names are valuable evidence in tracing a community’s origins and history. One might suggest that the Egyptian name Moses was just made up to make the story sound authentic. But we can be fairly certain that the Israelites did not make it up, precisely because they told the story about the princess calling him Moses “because I drew him”—which shows that the Israelites were not conscious of the name’s Egyptian meaning!
11 Now it was some years later, Moshe grew up;
he went out to his brothers and saw their burdens.
He saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, (one) of his brothers.
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[P&H] when Moses was grown up. lit. ‘when Moses became great’, he went out to his brethren. In alter ages it must alas be said of many a son of Israel who had become great, that he went away from his brethren. Not so Moses. He went out of the Palace into the brick-fields where his brethren toiled and agonized in cruel bondage. It was lovingkindness to his people that impelled him to do so. There are ten strong things in the world, say the Rabbis: rock is strong but iron cleaves it; fire melts iron; water extinguishes fire; the clouds bear aloft the water; the wind drives away the clouds; man withstands the wind; fear unman man; wine dispels fear; sleep overcomes wine; and death sweeps away even sleep. But the strongest of all is lovingkindness, for it defies and survives death. Now Moses was filled with lovingkindness. Full of pity, he watched his brethren groaning beneath their burdens. ‘What has Israel done to deserve such wretchedness?’ he wondered.
an Egyptian smiting. Probably one of the taskmasters applying the lash to an Israelite. We know only too well from ancient writings and paintings what the flogging of slaves was like. Moses for the first time saw a poor Hebrew flogged, and it was more than he could bear. His loyalty to his kin had not been destroyed by his Egyptian upbringing.
[EF] some years later: Heb. yamin, lit. “days,” can mean longer periods of time, and often years. Here the narratie skips over what it considers unimportant, and we are presented with a young man, who already has strong identity and opinions. his brothers: Occurring twice in this verse, this phrase can only mean that Moshe was aware of his background, and concerned with the plight of the Israelites (Heb. r’h b-, “see” with a specific preposition, indicates not only observation but sympathy).
[REF] Moses. Although Exodus is ultimately about God, Israel, and Egypt, the narrative attention is focused on Moses from its second chapter to the end. Thus, although Exodus is about nations and extraordinary divine interventions into the course of human affairs, it directs its readers to this dynamic through the lens of an individual man. Notably, even though Exodus is not about individuals in the way that Genesis is, it introduces a figure in whom character development reaches a new level, equaled by no other figure in the Hebrew Bible except possibly David. Moses is pictured at various stages in his life, expressing a variety of moods and emotions, changing, especially in the way in which he relates and speaks to God.
12 He turned this-way and that-way, and seeing that there was no man (there),
he struck down the Egyptian
and buried him in the sand.
[P&H] he smote. Moses resembles ‘the great patriots of the past and the present, who have taken the sword to deliver their people from the hands of tyrants. His act may be condemned as hasty In its immediate results it was fruitless, as is every intemperate attempt to right a wrong by violence. However, it allied Moses definitely with his kinsmen’ (Kent).
[EF] no man (there): Although some have interpreted this as “no man around to help,” the expression taken in context would seem to indicate that Moshe was afraid of being seen. This incident reveals Moshe’s concern and early leanings toward being a liberator, but also demonstrates his youthful lack of forethought. In fact, it will take God, not Moshe’s own actions, to set the liberation process in motion. struck down: This is the same verb (Heb. hakkeh) that the narrator used in v. 11 to describe the fatal beating received by the Israelite slave.
[RA] and saw there was no man about. Although the obvious meaning is that he wanted to be sure the violent intervention he intended would go unobserved, some interpreters have proposed, a little apologetically, that he first looked around to see if there was anyone else to step forward and help the beaten Hebrew slave. “About” is merely implied in the Hebrew. In any case, there is a pointed echoing of “man” (‘ish)—an Egyptian man, a Hebrew man, and no man—that invites one to ponder the role and obligations of a man as one man victimizes another. When the fugitive Moses shows up in Midian, he will be identified, presumably because of his attire and speech, as “an Egyptian man.”
13 He went out again on the next day, and here: two Hebrew men scuffling!
He said to the guilty-one:
For-what-reason do you strike your fellow?
[P&H] to him that did the wrong. i.e. to the man who was in the wrong.
[EF] Hebrew men scuffling: A rhyme in Hebrew, anashim ‘tviyyim nitzim.
[RA] Why should you strike your fellow? The first dialogue assigned to a character in biblical narrative typically defines the character. Moses’s first speech is a reproof to a fellow Hebrew and an attempt to impose a standard of justice (rasha’, “the one in the wrong,” is a legal term).
14 He said:
Who made you prince and judge over us?
Do you mean to kill me
as you killed the Egyptian?
Moshe became afraid and said:
Surely the matter is known!
[P&H] who made thee a ruler. A typical attitude of a small but persistent Jewish minority towards anyone working for Israel. The Rabbis speak of it as the Dathan-and-Abiram type of mind (Nu. XVI).
surely the thing is known. Referring to the death of the Egyptian. The Midrash takes these words as an answer to his question why Israel should suffer such slavery. Now he knew the person: they deserved it. It is characteristic of the faithfulness of the Sacred Record that his flight is occasioned rather by the malignity of his countrymen than by the enmity of the Egyptians’ (Stanley).
The first action of Moses shows him swept away by fierce indignation against the oppressor; the second, anxious to restore harmony among the oppressed. In both these acts, Moses is seen burning with patriotic ardour. His nature, however, requires to be freed from impetuous passion. In the desert, whither he is now fleeing, his spirit will be purified and deepened, and he will return as the destined Liberator of his brethren.
15-22. MOSES IN MIDIAN
[EF] Who made you prince . . .: One hears here echoes of Moshe’s later experiences with his “hard-necked” people, which commence in the book of Exodus (Greenberg 1969). judge: Or “ruler.” I have retained “judge” here in order not to lose the connection with 5:21.
[RA] Who set you as a man prince and judge over us? These words of the brawler in the wrong not only preface the revelation that Moses’s killing of the Egyptian is no secret but also adumbrate a long series of later incidents in which Israelites will express resentment or rebelliousness toward Moses. Again, “man” is stressed. Later, “the man Moses” will become a kind of epithet for Israel’s first leader.
thing. The Hebrew davar variously means “word,” “thing,” “matter,” “affair,” and much else.
15 Pharaoh heard of this matter and sought to kill Moshe.
But Moshe fled from Pharaoh’s face and settled in the land of Midyan;
he sat down by a well.
[P&H] Midian. In the south-eastern part of the Sinai peninsula. Here he would be beyond Egyptian jurisdiction. The main home of the Midianites appears to have been on the east side of the Gulf of Akabah.
[EF] Moshe fled . . . and settled: The details about what must have been a psychologically important journey are not spelled out, as the narrative rushes toward its first great climax in Chap. 3. More important than the journey motif is that of exile, brought out tellingly in v. 22. settled . . . sat: Adding the “settle down” of v. 21, we hear a threefold use of yashov, perhaps to stress Moshe’s new life.
[RA] Midian. The geographical location of this land in different biblical references does not seem entirely fixed, perhaps because the Midianites were seminomads. Moses’s country of refuge would appear to be a semidesert region bordering Egypt on the east, to the west by northwest of present-day Eilat.
sat down by the well. The verb yashav, “sat down,” is identical with the previous verb in this sentence where it reflects its other meaning, “to dwell” or “to settle.” It makes sense for the wayfarer to pause to rest and refresh himself at an oasis as Moses does here. “The well” has the idiomatic force of “a certain well.”
16 Now the priest of Midyan had seven daughters;
they came, they drew (water) and they filled the troughs,
to give-drink to their father’s sheep.
Image from saltlakebiblecollege.org
[P&H] priest of Midian. Heb. kohen, which does not necessarily mean priest. It may also mean “chief’. And so Onkelos and Rashi translate it here. The sons of David are likewise termed kohanim in II Sam. VIII,18, where it only means nobles or officers.
to water their father’s flock. Even to this day the young women tend the sheep among the Bedouin of the :Sinai peninsula.
[EF] Priest of Midyan: This title has spawned extensive theorizing about the origins of Mosaic religion (sometimes called the “Kenite Hypothesis” after the Kenites, a tribe of smiths connected to Moshe’s father-in-law and spoken of favorably at a number of points in the Bible). It has been suggested that Moshe learned the rudiments of his religious legal system from this source. We do not have enough evidence to make a positive judgment on this theory; biographically, it does make sense for Moshe to marry into a holy family of some sort. seven daughters: The requisite “magic” number, a in a good folk tale
[RA] seven daughters . . . came and drew water. By this point, the ancient audience would have sufficient signals to recognize the narrative convention of the betrothal type-scene (compare Abraham’s servant and Rebekah, Genesis 24, and Jacob and Rachel, Genesis 29): the future bridegroom, or his surrogate, encounters a nubile young woman, or women, at a well in a foreign land; water is drawn; the woman hurries to bring home news of the stranger’s arrival; he is invited to a meal; the betrothal is agreed on. In keeping with the folktale stylization of the Moses story, the usual young woman is multiplied by the formulaic number seven.
17 Shepherds came and drove them away.
But Moshe rose up, he delivered them and gave-drink to their sheep.
[P&H] drove them away. These ‘chivalrous’ Arabs wished to water their own sheep first, although the women had already filled the troughs. Moses again takes the part of the injured side, but this time without violence.
[RA] the shepherds came and drove them off. Only in this version of the betrothal scene is there an actual struggle between hostile sides at the well. Moses’s intervention to “save” (hoshi’a) the girls accords perfectly with his future role as commander of the Israelite forces in the wilderness and the liberator, moshi’a, of his people.
18 When they came (home) to Re’uel their father, he said:
Why have you come (home) so quickly today?
[P&H] Reuel their father. Reuel seems to have been their father while Jethro was the father-in-law of Moses. The word Jethro means, ‘His Excellence,’ and may be regarded as a title borne by the priest or chief of Midian, whose proper name is given in Num. X,29, as Hobab. Reuel, therefore, was the grandfather (often called ‘father’ in Scripture; see Gen. XXVIII,13 and XXXII,10) of the shepherdesses. If Jethro and Reuel are taken as one person, there is nothing unusual in one man having two names (e.g. Jacob, Israel); and South Arabian inscriptions show many chieftains having two names.
ye are come so soon. Reuel was familiar with the usual delay caused by the interference of the shepherds.
[RA] Why have you hurried back today? With great narrative economy, the expected betrothal-scene verb, “to hurry,” miher, occurs not in the narrator’s report but in Reuel’s expression of surprise to his daughters.
19 They said:
An Egyptian man rescued us from the hand of the shepherds,
and also he drew, yes, drew for us and watered the sheep!
[P&H] an Egyptian. Moses’ dress and speech would be Egyptian.
drew water for us. lit. ‘he actually drew water for us’; they are surprised at the kindness of his action in helping them to draw water.
[EF] An Egyptian man: Moshe would have been recognizable as such from his manner of dress and lack of facial hair. In addition, he is not yet fully an Israelite, spiritually speaking.
[RA] he even drew water for us and watered the flock. Their report highlights the act of drawing water, the Hebrew stressing the verb by stating it in the infinitive before the conjugated form—daloh dalah (in this translation, “even drew”). The verb is different from mashah, the term associated with Moses’s name, because it is the proper verb for drawing water, whereas mashah is used for drawing something out of water. In any case, this version of the scene at the well underscores the story of a hero whose infancy and future career are intimately associated with water.
20 He said to his daughters:
So-where-is-he?
For-what-reason then have you left the man behind?
Call him, that he may eat bread (with us)!
[P&H] where is he? Expresses displeasure that they had failed in hospitality towards the stranger who had befriended them.
[EF] So-where-is-he: This is one word in the Hebrew (ve-ayyo). The whole verse stands in ironic contrast to Moshe’s earlier treatment (v. 14) at the hand of “his brothers” (Childs). There, he was rejected; here, his host cannot welcome him quickly enough. For-what-reason: Similarly this is one Hebrew word (lamma).bread: As often in both the Bible and other cultures, “bread” is here synonymous with “food.”
[RA] Call him that he may eat bread. “Call” here has its social sense of “invite,” and “bread” is the common biblical synecdoche for “food.” Reuel’s eagerness to show hospitality indicates that he is a civilized person, and in the logic of the type-scene, the feast offered the stranger will lead to the betrothal.
21 Moshe agreed to settle down with the man,
and he gave Tzippora his daughter to Moshe.
[P&H] was content. Or, ‘agreed.’ One cannot help contrasting the breadth with which the wooing of both Isaac and Jacob is recounted, with the extraordinary, nay irreducible, brevity with which the wooing of Moses is told. What we would call the ‘romantic’ element in the story of Moses disappears like a bubble; it is the woe of his People that engrosses his mind.
Zipporah. The meaning of this name is “bird”. The Midianites spoke a language kindred to Hebrew.
[EF] Tzippora: Trad. English “Zipporah.” The name means “bird”; such animal names are still popular among Bedouin.
22 She gave birth to a son,
and he called his name: Gershom/Sojourner There,
for he said: A sojourner have I become in a foreign land.
[P&H] Gershom. Heb. ger, ‘a stranger,’ and sham, ‘there,’ in a strange land. His heart was with his suffering brethren in Egypt.
strange land. i.e. foreign land.
23-25. Transition to the Call and Commission of Moses.
[EF] Gershom/Sojourner There: Related to the Hebrew ger, “sojourner” or resident alien. The name more accurately reflects the sound of the verb garesh “drive out” (so Abravanel), which plays its role in the Exodus stories (and in Moshe’s recent experience in the narrative). A sojourner . . . in a foreign land: The KJV phrase”a stranger in a strange land,” is stunning, but the Hebrew uses two different roots (gur and nakhor).
23 It was, many years later,
the king of Egypt died.
The Children of Israel groaned from the servitude,
and they cried out;
and their plea-for-help went up to God, from the servitude.
[P&H] many days. Rabbinic tradition assigns 40 years to the period spent by Moses in exile from Egypt.
the king of Egypt died. Probably Ramses II, who reigned 67 years. The Israelites evidently hoped that his successor, Merneptah, might offer them some relief; but hey were disappointed. The regime of ruthless oppression towards Israel would now become the status quo. They realize the hopelessness of their bondage. Therefore, ‘they cried unto God.’
[EF] the king of Egypt died./The Children of Israel groaned: The change in regime does not prove beneficial to the suffering slaves, but makes it possible for Moshe to return to Egypt thus impelling the narrative along and reestablishing the link between Moshe and his people. cried out: The same verb (Heb. tza’ok) is used to describe the “hue and cry” of Sodom and Gomorra (Gen. 18:20).
23-24 groaned . . . cried out . . . plea-for-help . . . moaning: As in 1;7, four phrases describe the Israelites’ actions. Note also the double use of “from the servitude.”
24 God hearkened to their moaning,
God called-to-mind his covenant with Avraham, with Yitzhak, and with Yaakov,
[P&H] remembered His covenant. Not that He had forgotten it, but that now the opportunity had come for the fulfillment of His merciful purposes.
[REF] 23-24. groan, cry, wail, moan. Four different words are used in the Hebrew to describe their crying. This conveys that their agony is intense, continuous, and pervasive.
25 God saw the Children of Israel,
God knew.
[P&H] took cognizance of them. God did not close His eyes to their suffering (Rashi), but He chose His own time when to send deliverance and cause Israel to go forth from Egypt.
[EF] knew: Others, “took notice,” but yado’a needs to be noticed throughout the book as a key word.
[RA] 24-25. Until this point, God has not been evident in the story. Now He is the subject of a string of significant verbs—hear, remember (which in the Hebrew has a strong force of “take to heart”), see, and know. The last of these terms marks the end of the narrative segment with a certain mystifying note–sufficiently mystifying that the ancient Greek translators sought to “correct” it –because it has no object. “God knew,” but what did He know? Presumably, the suffering of the Israelites, the cruel oppression of history in which they are now implicated, the obligations of the covenant with the patriarchs, and the plan He must undertake to liberate the enslaved people. And so the objectless verb prepares us for the divine address from the burning bush and the beginning of Moses’s mission.