Moses, Oy Moses, The Women Knew of Your Heritage

Nadene Goldfoot                                             

Jochabed placing Moses in the Nile River with help of his sister, Mirium 

                               

   

The Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile River with her handmaidens and they found a little cradle-like basket floating down the river and stuck in the bulrushes with a whimpering baby inside.  If the Princess didn't realize where this baby had come from, the handmaidens  knew.  They listened to gossip.  Mirium tells them of a wet-nurse she knows.
                                                                     
The report was already well-known to them.  All boy babies of the Hebrew slaves were being slain because their numbers had grown so fast.  The Egyptian government were suddenly afraid that these slaves might turn on them because of their vast numbers today, so the only way could think of slowing them down was to kill the boy babies. People responsible for this dastardly "Population Control" execution talked about it.  Facts were leaked.    Hebrew slaves were useful.  They would soon be building the Egyptian storage cities that would save Egyptian lives, but they already were close to reaching the  numbers of  a 600,000 population.  The Egyptian's population numbered anywhere from 2 to 4 million.
                                                                               

 

This little new-born boy had been born to the Hebrew slaves of Amram and Jochebed, his wife of the tribe of Levi.  His big sister, Miriam, was given the task of watching the basket from the lush growth along the Nile to see that he was kept safely hidden.  Today many Arabs have the name of Omran, so much like Amram.  Moses meant-to be drawn out of water.  Though all new-born look so much alike, his skin coloring may have been a little different from the surrounding population.  That could have been a give-away.   It was one thing to hear the decree and have no feeling about it and another to be so close to one of the new-born scheduled to be slaughtered.  They could not stomach the idea of this baby being ripped apart with the sword.

The Princess and her ladies could not resist the tiny new-born.  They decided that the Princess must save his life.  They conspired, and pretended that the Princess had given birth to him.  He was her baby.  They were told by Miriam, hiding nearby, that she knew of a wet nurse that could feed him.  Of course they all put two and two together and realized that the real mother would be the wet-nurse.

The Bible tells how the Israelites are enslaved in Egypt and eventually escape under the leadership of Moses. At least one pharaoh is involved, the "pharaoh of the oppression" who enslaves the Israelites, and the "pharaoh of the exodus" during whose rule the Israelites escape. The biblical story does not name or give enough information to identify the period in which the events are set. These are some candidates put forward for the role of Pharaoh of the Exodus:
                                                                       

The Pharaoh could have been Thutmose II b: 1493 to 1479 BCE.  He died childless, some thought.   

•  Alfred Edersheim proposes in his "Old Testament Bible History" that:
•  Thutmose II is best qualified to be the pharaoh of Exodus based on the fact that he had a brief, prosperous reign and then a sudden collapse with no son to succeed him. His widow Hatshepsut then became first Regent (for Thutmose III) then Pharaoh in her own right. Edersheim states that Thutmose II is the only Pharaoh's mummy to display cysts, possible evidence of plagues which spread through the Egyptian and Hittite Empires at that time.^{[citation needed]}
• Amenhotep II (1425–1400 BC). Shea suggested that there were 2 Amenhotep II's. The first one died in the Sea of reeds, after which his brother took the same title.
• Akhenaten (1353–1349 BC). Sigmund Freud in his book Moses and Monotheism argued that Moses had been an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten's death.  Nothing leads to such a conclusion in our Tanakh.  This is supposition.  Our story in our bible says clearly that he reacted when seeing an Israelite being beaten to death by his overseer and was intercepted by Moses, young and strong enough to do so in his anger and he accidentally misjudged his own strength, and killed the overseer.  Knowing that this was punishable by death, he fled and ran to Midian.                                                 
  
• Ahmose I (1550–1525 BC): Most ancient writers considered Ahmose I to be the pharaoh of the Exodus

"Ahmose I married his sister, Ahmose Nefertari (the daughter of Ahhotep I and Seqenenre Taa II), and the couple were blessed with a number of children. Two of their sons died at a young age (Sapair and Saamen), but the third went on to become Amenhotep I. As well as honouring his mother, the king respected his powerful sister-wife. She already held the title, "Second Prophet of Amun", an exceptional rank for a woman, and he gave her the title "God's Wife of Amun". This begun the convention of naming the chief wife of the pharaoh by this title. 

Our princess in the Exodus story would have been the daughter of Ahmose, if he were the correct Pharaoh.  I have found Moses' birth to have taken place in 1391, however.  Our Jewish and Christian timetables are not in agreement in this case.  The Exodus is said to have happened in 1579 BC, figured by a Christian timetable.   

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• The point is, that a princess would have been married to a Pharaoh, and they might have been siblings as this was the usual pairing to keep control of power.  They saw no problem with it.  This could have been the case.  They may have lived in separate quarters, and she could have been through a 9 month period of time not seeing her husband-brother in order to pull such a stunt off that the baby was hers.  Her ladies in waiting would have sworn to it.  They all looked forward to the baby being in their life.  
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•   "Oh, did I forget to tell you?  I've must have been pregnant for I just gave birth to this boy!"  I had wondered why I felt a little out of sorts!   
•                                                          
  
•                                            "  Time of New Kingdom
• 1570 B.C - 1070 B.C
  "Dynasties Eighteen to Twenty
  
  The New Kingdom was arguably the height of Egyptian civilization. Dynasty Eighteen ruled from Thebes and included notable Pharaohs such as Hatshepsut (the most famous female ruler), Tuthmosis III (often called the Napoleon of Egypt) and Akhenaten, the "heretic" Pharaoh who introduced a form of monotheistic religion based on the Aten (the sun disc). Following the disruption caused by the Atenist heresy a new Dynasty was founded by a soldier and vizier Ramesses I. His successors Seti I and Ramesses II (Ramesses the Great) left their mark on the ancient world both in terms of their military campaigns and their building works. The kings of the Twentieth Dynasty took the name Ramesses to connect them with their illustrious predecessors, but they did not live up to the name. This was partly due to a mass displacement of people around the Mediterranean (caused by the Trojan War and the fall of the Mycenaean culture) and a series of poor harvests causing widespread famine. A confederation of races known as the "Sea Peoples" destroyed Egypt's historical enemy, the Hittites, and threatened Egypt's borders. By the end of the dynasty, Egypt was torn by civil war and the treasury was empty."

Resource: The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaohs_in_the_Bible
http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/ahmoseI.html
http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/kingslist.html
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2275/what-was-the-estimated-population-living-in-egypt-around-1446-bc