“A Choice of Three”based on Exodus 1:22-2:10

All
the way back in October, we talked about the Hebrew midwives of
Exodus chapter 1, Puah and
Shiphrah.  Those two subversive women had pulled out all the stops.
The Pharaoh told them to kill Hebrew boy babies at birth.  Puah and
Shiprah disobeyed direct orders from the Pharaoh and used his biases
against the Hebrew people to justify it. Their courage and wisdom had
saved the boys!  But only for a moment, after they refused to follow
unjust orders, the orders changed.  

And
that’s where today’s story starts.  Pharaoh is said to be worried
that the Hebrews are going to overtake the Egyptians (a common way
that oppressors justify inhumane treatment).  Since the midwives
won’t kill the baby boys at birth, he orders that all Hebrew baby
boys be thrown into the Nile at birth.  As I mentioned when
discussing the midwives, “It took me entirely too long to figure
out why the boys were to be killed.  I was thinking of males as
especially strong laborers in the fields, and wondered why you’d want
to have fewer of them.  If you wanted fewer descendants, I thought,
why not kill the girls who have the babies and leave the workers?
Our Bible Study participants responded that the death of the male
babies meant that the females would be sexually available to the
Egyptians, and they’d presume that as half-Egyptian – the next
generation would be more pliable and ‘better.’  The participants in
the Bible Study figured this out by considering American slave
history.”¹

This
story is an old story.  Order than even the version we have.
Scholars say this story about the birth of Moses is an adaptation of
a story that was already ancient in his time.  Sargon
of Akkad, believed to live in the 23^rd
or 24^th
century­ before the common era, was a ruler of the Akkadian
Empire.  According to Wikipedia (which is sometimes much pithier in
explaining things than any other format),  “A Neo-Assyrian text
from the 7th century BC purporting to be Sargon’s autobiography
asserts that the great king was the illegitimate son of a priestess.
Only the beginning of the text (the first two columns) are known,
from the fragments of three manuscripts. The first fragments were
discovered as early as 1850.”²
So this story was ALSO written down many centuries after it
happened, which means we can’t be certain what it sounded like in the
time of Moses, but it is the best piece of comparison available. The
text is found the book “The Ancient Near East” and reads:

“Sargon,
the mighty king, king of Agade, am I.
My
mother was a changeling, my father I knew not.
The
brother(s) of my father loved the hills.
My
city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the
Euphrates.
My
changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.
She
set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.
She
cast me into the river which rose not (over) me,
The
river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of
water.
Akki,
the drawer of water lifted me out as he dipped his e[w]er.
Akki,
the drawer of water, [took me] as his son (and) reared me.
Akki,
the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener,
While
I was a gardener, Ishtar granted
me (her) love,”³

It
seems likely that the myth of Sargon’s birth was adapted to explain
the birth of Moses.  The similarities are pretty obvious, including
naming that Moses came from a family of Levites, the holy tribe from
which later priests would emerge, while Sargon was the son of a holy
priestess.  The whole thrown in a river part is obviously similar,
as is the emphasis on “drawing out” the child from the water,
and raising him as the son of the one who drew him out.  The Sargon
story explicitly states that he was loved by a powerful goddess, the
Moses story is the opening to a long narrative about being specially
chosen by YHWH.

However,
when we have likely source material, the interesting part is not the
similarities, it is the differences.  The differences here are
astounding.  Of course, the Moses story feels more complete, for one
thing.  It is since the stone on which the Sargon birth story is
written is incomplete.  But we also have a reason for Moses being
put in the river (the decree of Pharaoh), and a masterful turn at
the end that the one who decreed that baby Hebrew boys be put in the
river is the one in whose household the baby is raised.  The format
of the story that we have now was polished over many years into an
excellently crafted final form.

Also,
the Sargon birth story has a more limited role for human women: his
mother gives birth and puts him in the basket.  The Moses birth
story is an intricate weaving of the actions and intentions of THREE
women, and of whom could easily be “the” subversive woman of the
today’s story.  Moses’s mother is not just the woman who birthed
him.  She is the one who notices he is an especially fine baby, and
decides to try to save him. She keeps him hidden at home for three
months.  And then she carefully crafts the waterproof basket she
lays him in.  To this point the story is similar enough to Sargon’s,
but at the same time, the story seems to want us to believe that God
takes care of where the basket floats off to, and wants us to deduce
that God put the basket in the sight-line of the Egyptian princess.
Personally, I think that loving mother who risked her own life for
her son and carefully crafted the basket ALSO would have tried to
make sure the basket went to a good place, but I do think the faith
tradition tells it so we think of it as God’s hand at work.  On a
related note, I think this proactive mother might have instructed
her daughter to watch over it!  

The
story doesn’t tell us if babies in waterproof baskets were often
floating down the Nile, but the constraints of the story (that is,
the command from the one in charge to put baby boys in the river)
seem to make it likely.  It seems like the other women would have
taught her how to weave the basket and how much tar to use.  It even
seems likely that for the first 3 months Moses’s mother pretended
she’d had a girl and everyone just played along.  I don’t think the
story really believes that Moses was the only baby whose mother
tried to save him, even though the story is designed to help us
believe that Moses was specially cared for by God.

Whether
instructed to or not, Moses’s sister (maybe Miriam) stays at hand
and watches where the basket goes.  I imagine her to be at a very
good age for this: young enough not to be noticed by grown ups and
to be free to play as she wished, yet old enough to understand the
importance and be able to convincingly play her role.  And she
played her role to perfection!  Nothing like this is in Sargon’s
story.

Meanwhile,
in Moses’s story one of the princesses has gone down to the river to
bath, attended by handmaidens.  She sees the basket, she sends a
maid to get it, she opens it. She sees a crying baby, and has
compassion for him.  I’m told the Hebrew word for compassion
connotes the womb, so this may have some connotations of “and her
womb leapt.”  She knew what was happening, what her father’s
decree had been, and she decides to ignore its intentions.  She uses
the power she has to adopt him, bring him into the palace, make him
a part of the Pharaoh’s family.  She has money that she controls in
order to pay for a wetnurse.  We spent some time in Bible study
wondering if she was her father’s favorite, or if there were so many
princesses that no one really noticed her, if she was defiant, if
she was above the law, or if she had special circumstances.  By her
presence in the palace, I think it is likely she was unmarried, and
that may well imply she was quite young as well.  However, there are
other explanations that might also suffice.  Her story is mostly
missing, but her actions are direct and subvert the law of the land.
That’s unique to this story.

Moses’s
sister steps back in with the most brilliant possible solution,
asking the princess if she’d like the baby nursed by a woman of his
own community.  Then she brings her brother back to their mother to
be nursed!  In fact, it makes me wonder if the whole family moved
into the palace.  (maybe, maybe not).  But Moses gets fed by
mother’s milk and fed by his family’s story and identity at the same
time.  He also gets the privilege of being in the royal family and
the knowledge of how the political system works.  The way this story
is used to explain Moses’s identity and compassion for his people
AND his insider knowledge of the Pharaoh and his political system is
a unique part of the Hebrew story – as is the attention to nursing
the baby and the brilliant move by the women of his family to keep
caring for him while also making money to care for their own needs.
All of this is in the portion of the story the Hebrews adapted.

In
fact, given the way the story is adapted, and given the dominance of
human women in it, I’ve started to wonder if it is implied that they
are all working together.  Perhaps many people thought the Pharaoh’s
decree was immoral and were working together to subvert it.  Maybe
these women had devised this all as a plan, and made it flow so
seamlessly because it was well-rehearsed.  Maybe they thought that
the care of babies was more important than decrees of politics.  Or
maybe it doesn’t go this far, but maybe there was just a lot of
winking involved when it really happened, and that princess knew
EXACTLY who she was hiring to feed “her” baby.

This
is, after all, a story about saving the baby who would save the
Hebrew people.  It is also a story of interdependence.  No one of
the three women in it could have pulled off saving Moses alone.  The
choice of heroine is any one of the three, but perhaps it isn’t much
of a choice when they all need each other and Moses needs all of
them.  The story the Hebrew people tell also says that they needed
Moses, and his cross-cultural competencies, to be free.  That means
they needed all three of these women – including the Egyptian one
– to be free from Egyptian oppression.

So,
the Hebrews took an old myth and reworked it in genius ways.  They
added several heroines, more intrigue, and a broader context.  The
premise that the Hebrew people benefited from the skills Moses had
as someone stuck in-between worlds strikes me as interesting.  I
hear a lot about the struggles of being in-between: particularly for
people who have two or more racial identities, or for those who live
between the values of different countries due to immigration in
their family’s recent past, or even those whose social class changes
over their life times.  Many people are in-between and it is often
very uncomfortable. Is also a position that enables translations
between groups to be possible, and it can be a position of
incredible power when circumstances emerge in particular ways.

The
liberation of the Hebrews is a meta-narrative of the Torah, and a
story with resonance well beyond the Hebrew people.  It was a
primary narrative for African American slave communities in this
country, and is often source of hope for oppressed communities
seeking liberation.  I love that it took collaboration, rule
breaking, deep compassion, and connections between unexpected
partners to make it all happen.  May we keep noticing the strange
ways God is up to making liberation happen – including by
connecting unexpected partners and using people who stand in
in-between places!  Amen

1  Sermon
10-6- 2017.

2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad#cite_ref-46
accessed July 20, 2017

3 J.B.
Pritchard’s The
Ancient Near East,
Volume I, page 85.

—

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

July 30, 2017