Exodus2chapter 2

Exodus 2:1-2

Neither parent is named in this chapter, and the genealogy at Exodus 6:20 supplies Amram and Jochebed after the fact. The mother sees that the child is goodly and hides him three months against a standing royal order, which Hebrews 11:23 credits to faith and says the parents were not afraid of the king's commandment. Stephen describes the same infant at Acts 7:20 as exceeding fair.

Exodus 2:3

The basket is called an ark, and the Hebrew word is tebah, the word used of Noah's vessel through Genesis 6 to 9. Those are the only two places the word occurs in the Old Testament, and both vessels are sealed with pitch, at Genesis 6:14 and here. Each one carries life through water while a whole generation is being destroyed in it. Pharaoh's decree at Exodus 1:22 was that every son be cast into the river, and the mother puts her son into the river inside an ark.

Exodus 2:4-6

The sister posts herself downstream to see what will be done, and the chapter leaves her unnamed, though Exodus 15:20 and Numbers 26:59 give her as Miriam. Pharaoh's daughter identifies the child correctly the moment she opens the ark, saying that this is one of the Hebrews' children, and she keeps him. The decree of Exodus 1:22 is broken inside Pharaoh's own house by Pharaoh's own daughter.

Exodus 2:7-9

The sister's question puts the child back into the arms of his own mother, and the mother is then paid wages out of the Egyptian court to nurse her own son. An order to drown the Hebrew boys ends with Pharaoh's household funding the upbringing of the man who will lead them out. Those first years with a Hebrew woman are what stand behind Hebrews 11:24, where a grown man refuses to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter.

Exodus 2:10

An Egyptian princess gives the name and the verse explains it in Hebrew, Because I drew him out of the water, from a root meaning to draw out. Egyptian names built on the element mes were common in the period, Ahmose and Thutmose among them, and commentators have long read this name from both languages at once. Acts 7:22 says he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and the child drawn out of water will take a nation through it in chapter 14.

Exodus 2:11-12

Moses goes out to his brethren and looks on their burdens, and his first recorded act as a grown man is to defend someone who cannot defend himself. Acts 7:23 puts his age at forty and Acts 7:25 says he supposed his brethren would have understood that God would deliver them by his hand. He looks this way and that way before he strikes, and readers have long divided over the act, with Stephen at Acts 7:24 reporting it as the avenging of a man oppressed and Matthew Henry faulting the manner of it.

Exodus 2:13-14

On the second day the man Moses corrects is a Hebrew, and the answer he gets is a refusal of his standing. Who made thee a prince and a judge over us is the sentence Stephen quotes at Acts 7:27, and at Acts 7:35 he answers it, saying that this Moses whom they refused was the one God sent to be a ruler and a deliverer. The rejection by his own people comes forty years before the deliverance rather than after it.

Exodus 2:15

Moses leaves the court he was raised in and ends the verse sitting at a water hole in a foreign country. Genesis stages that scene twice, with Abraham's servant at Genesis 24:11 and with Jacob at Genesis 29:2, and the same shape runs a third time from here to verse 21. Hebrews 11:27 says he forsook Egypt not fearing the wrath of the king while verse 14 says Moses feared, and readers take the two either as different moments or as fear of a man set beside faith in God.

Exodus 2:16-17

the priest of Midian had seven daughters: Women come to draw water, shepherds drive them off, and Moses stands up and waters the flock himself. It is the same act he did in Egypt at verse 12, taking the part of people being pushed around, so his first recorded deed in each country is of one kind. The Genesis versions of the scene put the service at the water in other hands, Rebekah watering the camels at Genesis 24:19 and Jacob rolling the stone from the well at Genesis 29:10.

Exodus 2:18-20

The daughters run home and tell their father, as Rebekah did at Genesis 24:28 and Rachel at Genesis 29:12, and the stranger is called in to eat bread. They report him as an Egyptian, which is what his dress and his speech made him to a Midianite eye. The priest is Reuel here and Jethro at Exodus 3:1 and 18:1, and Numbers 10:29 names Raguel as the father of Hobab, so some read Reuel as the clan head or grandfather while others read the two names as belonging to one man.

Exodus 2:21-22

The scene closes the way the other two closed, with the traveller taken into the household and a marriage following, as at Genesis 24:51 and Genesis 29:28. The son is called Gershom because Moses says he has been a stranger in a strange land, and stranger is the word of the promise at Genesis 15:13, that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs. The man who will lead Israel out of its sojourning names his own son after his.

Exodus 2:23

The king dies and the bondage stands, and the verse says by reason of the bondage twice in one breath. The Hebrew root behind that word is abad, the root Exodus 1:13 and 1:14 used five times over for the labour laid on Israel, and the same root carries the worship Pharaoh will be told to release them for at Exodus 8:1. The text records the cry with no one named as its hearer, saying only that it came up unto God.

Exodus 2:24-25

Four verbs fall in two verses with God as the subject of every one, heard, remembered, looked and had respect. Remembered is the verb used of Noah at Genesis 8:1 and of Rachel at Genesis 30:22, and in each place it marks God acting on a promise rather than recalling something he had lost track of. The covenant named is the one cut with Abraham at Genesis 15, where the affliction and the coming out were both told in advance, so what begins in chapter 3 is the keeping of a word already given.