The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
In a sense, Jochebed doesn't hand Moses over once. She does it twice. First when she puts him in the water, and second when, after he's weaned, she gives him back to Pharaoh's daughter a final time for her to raise.
And the princess herself makes a decision not once, but twice, to defy her own father's law. She knows that the child is a Hebrew child and takes him out of the river to save him, but then after time has passed, she has no second thoughts and takes him into her home as her son.
And she names him.
Both women disappear from the story at this point, and the story of Moses will go on without them. And yet, without their story, Moses' life would have taken a very different turn. Two women, defying one tyrant not once, but twice. Loving one child.
I'm not sure I could have been a courageous. Handing my child over again after getting precious time with him?
But knowing that the alternative was...well, what?
I have to admit that I am a huge second guesser of decisions I make. Self-doubt is where I seem to be more comfortable. So this story has always been amazing to me.
Yet I also have never lived under the life-crushing kind of law that Moses' mothers did: a law that literally meant life or death for a child.
But I have felt that same kind of protective love.
I will probably continue to dither about some decisions for the rest of my life. But I can rest assured that the love and faithfulness of God is more like that of these two mothers. No second guessing. Love of perfect understanding.
A mother's love.
When I read this story I am reminded that the love of God is not boxed in in terms of gender. God's love encompasses the kind of fierce, protective love that two women shared for a baby on the Nile.
Without second guessing.
God of love, your fierce love for us is like the love of a mother who is swept away by devotion to her child. While we realize that not everyone has been fortunate enough to have that strength of love from a mother, we know that we have that from you. Thank you! Amen
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