Not here, but in the sixth chapter, we find the names of the father and mother of a baby who grew to be a very great man. Amram was a grandson of Levi, one of Jacob’s sons, and Jochebed belonged to the same family. We do not know how many children they had, but the baby that we read about the first thing in this chapter, was not the first child. There was an older boy, named Aaron, and a sister too, whose name was Miriam, and this baby’s name was Moses. We read about all three of these children of Amram and Jochebed in chapters that follow this one, but of Moses we learn something in nearly every chapter, and he it was to whom God gave the work of writing the first five books of the Bible.
When Moses was born, the king had said that all the boy babies that belonged to the children of Israel must be thrown into the river, and Jochebed, to save her baby from death, hid him for three months. When she thought she could not hide Moses any longer, she took a kind of basket, called an ark, made of bulrushes, or reeds, that grew by the water’s edge, which she made water tight with resin and pitch. In this the mother put her baby, and laid it among the weeds on the bank of the river. ‘ Then she must have gone home to pray, and wait to see what God would do. From what we are told in Hebrews 11:23,23By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents, because they saw he was a proper child; and they were not afraid of the king's commandment. (Hebrews 11:23) we know that both the parents of this baby believed God, and trusted in His word, and though it must have been very hard for Jochebed to put her child in the ark of bulrushes and go away, we may be sure that she knew that God would see that no harm came to him.
If Moses’ mother was out of sight of the ark, his sister was not, though she stood a long way off, waiting and watching to see what would happen to her little brother. After a while the daughter of Pharaoh came down to the river with her maidens to wash, and they walked along the river’s side. Then the lady saw the ark, and perhaps she was curious to know what might be inside of it. She sent one of the maids to get it, and when it was opened, there lay a little baby, and it was crying! “Poor little thing,” thought the princess, “this is one of the Hebrews’ children, one of the boy babies that were to be killed,” and she felt so sorry for it, that she could only think of keeping the baby for herself.
By this time Moses’ sister had come to the place where the princess, and her maids, and the baby were, and she said, “Shall I go and call a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee?” And that led to her bringing her mother, Moses’ mother, who got her baby back again, now to be nursed for Pharaoh’s palace. A few years after this, Moses, now a boy of perhaps six or seven, went to school where he was taught all that the Egyptians could teach him (Acts 7:2222And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds. (Acts 7:22)), but we are taken next to see him when forty years old.
Though he lived in a king’s palace, Moses did not forget his own people, and one day he went to visit them. When he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, Moses killed the Egyptian, and hid his body in the sand. He thought his people would understand that God was going to deliver them by him, but when, the next day, Moses tried to stop two Hebrew men fighting, one of them said, “Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me as thou killest the Egyptian?” Soon Pharaoh heard of what Moses had done, and tried to kill him, so Moses went away to the land of Midian. God’s time had not come yet, for the people to be set free, and forty more years rolled by during which Moses was a stranger in a foreign land, where he was married to Zipporah, and a baby was born, whose name was Gershom, “a stranger here.” After forty years as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, and forty years tending sheep in Midian, Moses knew himself only as one of God’s chosen people, the children of Israel, and thought of them in their sadness in Egypt.
But not only Moses, One far greater than he, was thinking of the children of Israel, hearing their groans, and their sighs, and soon God would punish their wicked oppressors, and bring them out of Egypt.