Torah Study Blog

Last week we looked at the traditions surrounding the birth of Moses, and we mentioned that Moses’s mother is not named in Exodus, although she is named in other traditions. Let’s review the passage:

And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took for a wife a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived and bore a son (Exodus 2:1-2).

That all seems straightforward. But all is not always as it seems! In biblical times, entertainment options were more limited than the myriad modes of entertainment we have available today. Historians know that, because most of the community was illiterate, passages from the Torah were read out loud on market days – Mondays and Thursdays - and on Saturdays. Similar to what we see today at services, the words were read from a parchment scroll – in fact, public reading of the Torah is the oldest thing in our tradition that Jews still do today.

The foundational document of the Judaism we practice today is the Talmud. In ancient times the Rabbis would debate the words in the Bible, trying to extract the deeper meaning, and to be able to answer questions from their followers. The Rabbis needed to be able to speak intelligently about all the aspects of the Bible, including any strange statements or inconsistencies.

We may remember that, because of an edict from Pharaoh that all newborn boy babies should be killed, Moses’s mother had to hide Moses. She kept him hidden for three months, then she put him in a basket which she placed among the reeds, to float down the river. Then, “his sister stationed herself at a distance, to learn what would befall him” (Exodus 2:4).

The Rabbis found much to discuss from just these four brief passages. You’ll recall that the passage starts by saying that a man and woman marry and have a child. So, where did this sister come from? Polygamy was accepted in biblical times and one Talmudic passage suggests that the man must have had another wife with whom he had a daughter. In fact, the

Talmud goes on to say that the daughter was a very wise young girl, Miriam, who would grow up to be an important prophetess in our tradition. According to the Talmud, Miriam advised her father to marry the woman in the first place. This theory makes sense when, later in the story, the baby Moses is brought out of the river by Pharaoh’s sister. Miriam, seeing an opportunity, approached Pharaoh’s sister and offers to find a wet-nurse for the baby. Then Miriam, “went and called the child’s mother.” (Exodus 2:8) Alert readers will see that she went to get the “child’s mother” – as opposed to getting “their mother.”

The next strangeness is harder to reconcile. In the passage, the parents of Moses are described as being a man from the house of Levi and the daughter of Levi himself. Genesis 46:11 tells us that Levi had three sons, one of whom was Kohath. Numbers 26:59 concurs that, “Kohath begot Amram. Therefore, Amram is the grandson of Levi.

The name of Amram’s wife, also according to Numbers 26, was “Jochebed daughter of Levi.” According to this, Levi is the grandfather of Amram, and the father of Jochebed. Therefore, Amram married his aunt. This is a fact that presented problems for the Rabbis.

After Moses led the Israelites out of bondage, God instructed Moses to remind the people that they are not to “copy the practices of the land of Egypt ... or of the land of Canaan” (Leviticus 18:2). God made it clear that the Israelites will be a people set apart and they will hold themselves to a higher moral standard. Leviticus 18 includes among a list of prohibitions that Israelites will not marry their aunt, neither on their mother’s nor their father’s side, nor marry an aunt who is an aunt by marriage only; meaning that she married into the family (Leviticus 18:12-14).

A Talmudic debate from at least the 5th century CE calculates that Jochebed must have been 130 years old when she bore Moses! The Rabbis first addressed her advanced age by saying that, when she married Amram, she became like a young woman again.

Other passages take liberties, apparently out of thin air. A passage from the Targum, or the interpretation of the person reading the Torah passages out loud, suggested that Jochebed was Amram’s cousin and then goes on to call Amram a saint.

A passage from the Talmud claims that Jochebed was Amram’s maternal aunt, so it was ok. But we already read in Leviticus that men were prohibited from marrying their maternal aunts, so that is not right.

How could it be that Moses was born of a forbidden union? In fact, there are other forbidden unions in the Torah. Genesis 20 tells us that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, was actually his half-sister. And Genesis 29 tells us that Jacob married the sisters, Leah and Rachel – another union forbidden in Leviticus (Leviticus 18:18).

Because of the commentary over the centuries we can see that these forbidden relationships caused people to be uncomfortable. However, the fact is, our traditions tell us that these women and their handmaidens went on to birth the heroes of Judaism.

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter