II.

THE BIRTH, EDUCATION, AND EARLY LIFE OF MOSES.

(1) There went.--Comp. Genesis 35:22; Hosea 1:3. The expression is idiomatic, and has no special force.

A man of the house of Levi.--Note the extreme simplicity of this announcement; and compare it with the elaborate legends wherewith Oriental religions commonly surrounded the birth of those who were considered their founders, as Thoth, Zoroaster, Orpheus. Even the name of the man is here omitted as unimportant. It is difficult to conceive any one but Moses making such an omission.

A daughter of Levi--i.e., a woman of the same tribe as himself, a descendant of Levi--not a daughter in the literal sense, which the chronology makes impossible.

Verses 1-10. - THE BIRTH, ESCAPE, AND EDUCATION OF MOSES. Some years before the Pharaoh issued his edict for the general destruction of the Hebrew male children, Amram of the tribe of Levi, had married Jochebed, his kinswoman (Exodus 6:20). They had already had two children - Miriam, a daughter, born probably soon after the marriage, and Aaron, a son, born some twelve years later. Soon after the issue of the edict, Jochebed gave birth to her third child, a son, who therefore came under its terms. Knowing as she did what fate was in store for him, if his existence became known to the Egyptians, she "hid him three months." Then, despairing of being able to keep him concealed much longer, she devised the plan related in vers. 3-4, which proved successful. Verse 1. - There went a man. The Hebrew language is deficient in tenses, and cannot mark pluperfect time. The meaning is, that "a man of the house of Levi had gone, some time before, and taken to wife a daughter of Levi." Miriam must have been fourteen or fifteen at the time of the exposure of Moses. By a daughter of Levi, we must not understand an actual daughter, which is irreconcilable with the chronology, but one of Levi's descendants - "a wife of the daughters of Levi," as the LXX. translates.

2:1-4 Observe the order of Providence: just at the time when Pharaoh's cruelty rose to its height by ordering the Hebrew children to be drowned, the deliverer was born. When men are contriving the ruin of the church, God is preparing for its salvation. The parents of Moses saw he was a goodly child. A lively faith can take encouragement from the least hint of the Divine favour. It is said, Heb 11:23, that the parents of Moses hid him by faith; they had the promise that Israel should be preserved, which they relied upon. Faith in God's promise quickens to the use of lawful means for obtaining mercy. Duty is ours, events are God's. Faith in God will set us above the fear of man. At three months' end, when they could not hide the infant any longer, they put him in an ark of bulrushes by the river's brink, and set his sister to watch. And if the weak affection of a mother were thus careful, what shall we think of Him, whose love, whose compassion is, as himself, boundless. Moses never had a stronger protection about him, no, not when all the Israelites were round his tent in the wilderness, than now, when he lay alone, a helpless babe upon the waves. No water, no Egyptian can hurt him. When we seem most neglected and forlorn, God is most present with us.And there went a man of the house of Levi,.... This man was Amram, the son of Kohath, and grandson of Levi, as appears from Exodus 6:18.

and took to wife a daughter of Levi; one of the same house, family, or tribe; which was proper, that the tribes might be kept distinct: this was Jochebed, said to be his father's sister; see Gill on Exodus 6:20, her name in Josephus (s) is Joachebel, which seems to be no other than a corruption of Jochebed, but in the Targum in 1 Chronicles 4:18 she is called Jehuditha.

(s) Antiqu. l. 2. c. 9. sect. 4.