Tar and Pitch

The order was for every Hebrew boy, and it went out to everyone.

Then Pharaoh commanded all his people: “Every son born to the Hebrews you must throw into the Nile, but every daughter you may allow to live.” Not just the soldiers, or the midwives, who had been told once already and quietly refused. All his people. Any neighbor could do it.

The next verse goes inside one house. Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, and she conceived and gave birth to a son.

A boy, born into a country where the law said to drown him.

The chapter never gives her a name. She is a Levite woman, then the boy’s mother, and that’s all. Her name turns up four chapters later, in a list of families. And Amram married his father’s sister Jochebed, and she bore him Aaron and Moses. By then the story has long since moved on to her son.

She wasn’t new at this. There was a daughter in the house old enough to be trusted at a riverbank, and the book says later that Aaron was three years older than Moses. So she had a small boy at home already, and a girl, and now a newborn the law said belonged in the river.

When she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him for three months.

The text doesn’t say how. A baby doesn’t hide well. He cries when he’s hungry, and walls are thin, and every neighbor had been told what to do. Whatever it took, she did it for about ninety days.

Then the verse turns. But when she could no longer hide him...

There comes a day when the hiding stops working. Nothing in the verse explains that day, whether he got too loud or somebody started asking. It only says she couldn’t anymore.

What she did next is the whole chapter.

She got him a papyrus basket and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in the basket and set it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.

Read the order. She didn’t carry him to the river and figure it out there. She got the basket. She coated it, with two kinds of sealing, tar and pitch. Then she put him in. Before she let go of him, she made the thing that would hold him after she did.

The King James calls the basket something else. She took for him an ark of bulrushes. An ark. The Hebrew word there, tevah, shows up in only one other story in the Bible, the one about Noah. A box that floats, sealed against the water, with a life inside that couldn’t be saved any other way.

Then she set it among the reeds. Not out in the current. In the reeds, near the bank, where it wouldn’t drift. That much the text says. What she was thinking, and whether she picked that stretch of bank because of who came down there to bathe, the text leaves open.

And his sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.

That’s the waiting, in one sentence, and it isn’t even the mother’s. Her daughter, unnamed here too, stood far enough off not to look like she was guarding anything, and near enough to see. Nobody records whether her mother sent her or she went on her own, or where the mother was. Home, maybe, with Aaron. Maybe she couldn’t stand to watch. The record leaves her out of that hour.

What the sister saw was a princess.

Soon the daughter of Pharaoh went down to bathe in the Nile... And when she saw the basket among the reeds, she sent her maidservant to retrieve it. She opened it. And behold, the little boy was crying. So she had compassion on him.

She knew what she was looking at. This is one of the Hebrew children, she said. Her father’s order said where that child belonged. She had compassion instead. The text gives her that word and nothing against her, and so will this chapter.

Then the girl who’d been standing at a distance came forward. Shall I go and call one of the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you? The princess said to go ahead. And the girl went and called the boy’s mother.

So the mother came down to the river where she had left him, and was handed her own son.

Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will pay your wages.

Wages. She was paid to nurse her own baby, by the household of the man who had ordered him drowned. We aren’t told whether Pharaoh’s daughter knew whose child she was handing over. Nobody in the scene says a word about it. So the woman took the boy and nursed him.

She had let go of him on the river. He came back to her protected, with wages, and with a princess’s name over him. For the first time in his life she didn’t have to hide him.

That would be a good place to end. The next verse doesn’t.

When the child had grown older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son.

She brought him. The same woman, letting go of the same boy, a second time. Not into the water this time. Into a palace. The text doesn’t say how old he was, or what that walk was like, or whether she saw him in the years after. It says he became her son, and it means the princess.

She let go twice. The first time she did it to save his life. The second time she did it because that was the arrangement, and the arrangement was what had saved his life. Both times she was the one who carried him to the handing over.

Here the chapter reads between the lines. She had him for those nursing years, however long they were, in her own house, among his own people. The next time the story picks him up, he’s a grown man raised in the Egyptian court, and the first thing it says he did is this. One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his own people and observed their hard labor. His own people. The text doesn’t say how he knew who they were. It never names his mother as the one who told him. But somebody had, and she was the one who had him when he was small enough to learn it.

You can’t keep them safe by holding on. She tried, for three months, and she was right to try, and then the holding stopped working. What she could still do was build something that would hold him when her hands couldn’t, and then let go of it. And letting go wasn’t the end of her part. It was where her part came back to her, for a while, with wages.

Where this meets your week

When hiding stops working. For three months she kept him close and kept him quiet, and then she couldn’t. Maybe there was a season when you could keep the one you’re waiting for near: under your roof, on your plan, inside walls you could watch. That season ended. The text doesn’t fault her for the day it ended, and it doesn’t stop the story there either. Say it to one person you trust this week, out loud: I can’t keep them safe anymore. It’s the first true sentence on the way to building something that can.

When all you can do is watch from far off. His sister stood at a distance. Not in the river, and not gone. Close enough to see, far enough not to be in the way. You may have a window like that: a photo someone posts, news that comes through a cousin. Pick one way to keep track and keep it to that. Look once, then put the phone down. Standing at a distance is still standing there.

When someone else is holding them. A princess opened the basket, and her compassion is why he lived. Somebody else may be the one near the one you’re waiting for now: a friend’s family, a partner, a boss, a group you’d never have picked. The text gives the rescuer only kindness. This week, speak well of that person to someone, or thank them in one plain line if you can reach them. Leave out the advice.

When you get them back for a while. She was handed her son again, for a season, knowing how it would end. A visit, a few weeks after a hard break, a stretch when they need you for something practical. Don’t spend it on the conversation about where they’ve been. Do the ordinary care in front of you, the way she nursed him. Cook the meal. Fix the thing. Let the season be what it is.

Seal one basket.

Write the one you’re waiting for a letter you won’t send. One page. Put in it only what you’d want them to have if you weren’t around to say it. What you saw in them when they were small. That you’re glad they were born. No requests. Nothing about coming back, or what they ought to do. Nothing they’d have to answer.

Seal it. Write their name on the front. Put it with your important papers, where it will be found, and tell one person where it is. Then leave it there. That’s the tar and the pitch. It’s for the day your hands can’t reach them.

The last line of the story belongs to the woman who raised him. She named him Moses and explained, “I drew him out of the water.”

She did. It was his mother who had made sure there would be something there to draw out.