The Baby in the River-Basket

Joseph's coffin waited in Egypt, and while it waited, Jacob's family grew. Seventy people had come down with old Jacob. Now their great-great-grandchildren crowded the land.

Then a new Pharaoh sat on Egypt's throne, a king who had never heard of Joseph. He looked at all those Israelite families and was afraid.

"Look!" he told his people. "These Israelites are too many and too strong for us. We must be clever."

So Egypt made God's people slaves. They stamped mud and straw into bricks and built cities for Pharaoh. But the harder Egypt worked them, the more babies were born. (This was not how the clever plan was supposed to go.)

So the king called in two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah. (A midwife helps a mother when her baby is born.) "If a Hebrew baby is a boy," he said, "kill him. If it is a girl, let her live."

But the midwives feared God more than they feared the king, and they let the boys live.

Pharaoh sent for them again. "Why have you done this?"

"Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women," they said. "They are strong! The babies are born before we even get there!"

So God was good to the midwives and gave them families.

So Pharaoh ordered all his people, "Every Hebrew boy that is born, throw him into the Nile!" And baby boys died in the river.

In one Israelite home, a mother named Jochebed had a son, and she would not give him to the river. For three months she hid him. But babies get louder as they grow.

So she wove a basket out of reeds and smeared it with tar until no water could leak in. She laid her son inside and set the basket among the reeds of the Nile, the very river Pharaoh had chosen for him. His big sister, Miriam, crouched in the grass to watch.

Then Pharaoh's own daughter came down to bathe. She spotted the basket and sent a servant girl to fetch it. She lifted the lid, and there was a baby boy, crying. Her heart went out to him. "This is one of the Hebrew babies," she said.

Out of the grass popped Miriam. "Shall I go and find a Hebrew woman to feed the baby for you?"

"Yes, go," said the princess.

Miriam came back with her mother. "Take this baby and nurse him for me," the princess told Jochebed, "and I will pay you." (So Pharaoh, who wanted every Hebrew boy in the river, now had his own household paying a Hebrew mother to feed her son.)

When the boy was older, his mother brought him to the palace, and he became the princess's son. She named him Moses. "I drew him out of the water," she said.

But one basket could hold only one baby. Moses came up out of the river, and the other boys in the Nile did not.

Years went by, and God's people waited for the rescue he had promised.

Then another king grew afraid of a baby. King Herod wanted the newborn king of Bethlehem dead. But God warned the baby's father in a dream, and the family slipped away by night to Egypt, of all places. Herod's soldiers killed the little boys of Bethlehem, but the boy he hunted was already gone.

That baby was Jesus. Moses was drawn out of the river. Jesus went down into death itself, and on the third day God drew him up out of the grave alive, so he could draw his people out after him.