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Baby Moses found at the Nile River |
Some years later, after Joseph had died, a new pharaoh came
to rule over Egypt . By this time Jacob’s descendants, the
Israelites, had been living in Egypt
for many years, and there were now a great number of them.
The new pharaoh knew nothing about Joseph and all that he
had done to save the people from starvation, and he said, “These Israelites are
getting so many that they might join up with our enemies. We must find a way to suppress them.”
So the Egyptians put slave-drivers over the Israelites to
make them work harder and harder, and they made them build store-cities for
pharaoh. The more cruelty they were
treated, however, the more the Israelites seemed to increase in numbers. The Egyptians grew to fear them and they made
their lives miserable by being cruel and forcing them to work even more.
In the end Pharaoh issued an order that all baby boys born
to the Israelites should be killed as soon as they were born. The nurses to whom this order was given
refused to obey it, because they feared God, so finally the Pharaoh made an
order to all the people saying that every new baby boy born to the Israelites
should be drowned in the River Nile, but that they could let girls live.
Naturally the Hebrews were most unhappy about this law.
One family already had two children---a girl named Miriam
and a boy named Aaron---and to them another baby boy was born. He was a fine baby, and the mother could not
bear to see him drowned, so she managed to keep him hidden for three months.
As he grew bigger, the time came when she could hide him no
longer, and so she and the family had to think of another plan. She made him a little basket from the
bulrushes or reeds which grew at the side of the Nile
and which were often used to make boats.
Then she covered the basket with a tar-like substance to the river. There she hid the basket among the reeds
which were growing at the water’s edge.
The baby sister, Miriam, waited a little distance away to
see what would happen to her baby brother.
Presently, pharaoh daughter came down to the river to bathe,
and as she and her servant walked along the riverbank, she suddenly spotted the
basket in the reeds. She sent one of her
slave-girls to fetch it. The girl
brought it and when it was opened, the princes saw the baby boy. He began to cry and the princess felt sorry
for him. “This is a Hebrew baby,” she
said.
Then the sister Miriam had an idea. She ran forward from where she had been
hiding and said, “Shall I go and ask one of the Hebrew women to come and look
after him for you?”
“Yes, please do so,” answered pharaoh’s daughter, and clever
Miriam hurried off and brought back her own mother.
“Take this baby and look after him for me,” said the
princess, “and I will pay you for doing so.”
The baby’s mother was delighted to have her own baby back again,
although she may have realized that the princess would want to keep him in due
course, when he was older. However, in
the meantime, the mother gladly took back her own baby to nurse him in safety.
Later, when the boy was older, she took him again to
Pharaoh’s daughter, and the princess adopted him as her own son. “I drew him out of the water,” she said, “and
so I will call him Moses. (The name Moses sounded rather like the Hebrew word
meaning “to draw out”).
So Moses grew up as prince in pharaoh court, though he never
forgot his own people.
When he was a young man, he went out to see how the Hebrews
were living under the hard conditions of the Egyptians.
He was horrified when he happened to see an Egyptian kill
one of the Hebrews. In his anger, Moses
in his turn killed the Egyptian and buried his body in the sand. He thought no one had seen him, but that did
not make his wrong-doing any better.
The next day, he went out again, and this time he saw two
Hebrew men fighting. We went up to them
and asked one of them, “Why are you fighting with one of your own countrymen?”
The man answered rudely, “Who made you a judge and ruler
over us? Are you now going to kill me
like you killed that Egyptian yesterday?”
Then Moses was frightened.
“People know what I did,” he thought to himself.
His wicked deed reached the ears of pharaoh himself who
thought that Moses deserved to be killed for what he had done. Moses was terrified and fled from the
country, and went to live in the land
of Midian
When they reached home, their father asked how it was that
they were back early that day. “An
Egyptian helped us,” they said. “He even
helped us fetch water.”
“Why you left that man there?” asked Jethro. “Go back and invite him to come and have a
meal with us,” he said hospitably.
So the girls went and brought Moses to their home. He agreed to live with them and helped to
take care of Jethro’s sheep and goats.
After a time, he married one of the daughters whose name was Zipporah.
Many years later the pharaoh of Egypt
died, but the people of Israel
were still suffering in their slavery, and they asked God to help them. God remembered the promises He had made to
Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, and He promised He would send someone to
deliver them from their bondage.
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