The Story of Moses' Ark
This one Hebrew boy was the in-breaking of God’s restoring purpose for all of creation through his people.
There’s a silly joke along the lines of, “How long was Moses in the ark?” Said quickly, the person listening doesn’t always tend to catch the name, but hearing “How long” and “ark,” they assume the question is talking about Noah. They think about the flood narrative in Genesis 6-9 and answer, 40 days, or a year, or some other guess.
Obviously, the question is a trick, because no matter what answer returns, the joker says, “Moses wasn’t in the ark. Noah was!” Followed by a groan, or a polite chuckle.
But in the second chapter of Exodus the joker gets joked, because Moses did spend some time in an ark, though our Bibles usually translate it “basket” (Ex. 2:3). The same word for “basket” shows up 28 times in the entire Bible, twice in the story of Moses, and the other 26 times refer to Noah’s ark.
This matters, because the book of Exodus starts with a clear focus on God renewing his purpose for creation through his people. When God made the world, he made humans in his image, commanding them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).
He re-issued this command after Noah landed on the slopes of the mountain (Gen. 9:1), and both Genesis 1 and 9 feature four key Hebrew words: “bear fruit” (פרה), “multiply” (רבה), “fill” (מלא), and “earth/land” (אֶ֫רֶץ).
God called the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to live into this purpose, one they inhabited after years of captivity: “The Israelites were fruitful, increased rapidly, multiplied, and became extremely numerous so that the land was filled with them” (Ex. 1:7).
The promises to Abraham were being fulfilled along with the mandate to all creation, all while the people wiped sweat and tears from their faces in Egyptian brick-mills and fields.
Exodus calls back again to the earliest stories of the world with that word, “ark” or “basket.” Early in Genesis, God saved humanity through a family in the water in an ark, and early in Exodus God was restoring his calling for creation, saving his people to fulfill his purposes for creation through a boy in the water in an ark, and through an unlikely, all-female cast of heroes.
The second chapter of Exodus continues this theme with more unlikely heroes, after already showcasing the midwives who defied the most powerful man in the world. The story actually names these women, Shiphrah and Puah, as their story shows a general push against Pharaoh’s ungodly tyranny (Ex. 1:15-22), and in the next paragraph the story of “a man from the family of Levi” who “married a Levite woman” (Ex. 2:1) gives specific and particular shape to the story.
God made the world and he entered into relationship with the world, and then when the world turned away from him, God turned toward a chosen family. One of the founding sons of this family was Levi, born to Abraham’s grandson through an unwanted wife (Gen. 29:34). Now we arrive in Exodus’s second chapter, centuries later, a son and a daughter of this house getting married in dark times of Israel’s Egyptian captivity. We learn their names later (Ex. 6:20; Num. 26:59),* but this text in Exodus doesn’t tell us those names. Instead, after reading “Levi,” we don’t get any more proper names until the key moment when the boy is named (2:10). This name gives the text an “aha” moment, showcasing the work and wonders of God’s loving purposes.
This Levite marriage produced what marriage should: “The woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son” (Ex. 2:2). But this pregnancy created a problem. All Hebrew sons had to be tossed into the great river of Egypt, because Pharaoh was afraid of this subservient people forming a rebellion of male soldiers. This mother ignored the edict, as the midwives had done, for as long as she could: “when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months” (2:2).
Most moms think their babies are beautiful even if they look like an alien, but something deeper is also happening in the face of this baby boy. This mom didn’t just think this baby was cute, but literally she saw that he was good. The Hebrew word good (or tov) fills the first account of the world, when God made everything and said, repeatedly, good, good, good, good. “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed” (Gen. 1:31).
So when the mom saw the face of this good boy, she wanted to save the life of her baby, like any normal mom would. But she also saw the renewed goodness of God’s original intention for creation. She glimpsed life like God intended. She held that goodness and nursed him until he got too big to hide. Because she trusted and feared the Lord rather than the king: “By faith, after he was born, [he] was hidden by his parents for three months, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they didn’t fear the king’s edict” (Heb. 11:23).
And while history doesn’t repeat itself, God’s providence does rhyme. So in Genesis God washed the earth of evil and restored his purpose for humanity by putting a chosen family in an ark to save them through the waters. And Noah built an ark, put his entire life inside, and trusted that God was faithful.
This story rhymes with that one. This mom “when she could no longer hide him, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with asphalt and pitch. She placed the child in it and set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile” (Ex. 2:3). God was working to restore his purpose for humanity by putting a chosen son into an ark to save him through the waters. And like Noah, this mom built an ark, put her entire life inside, and trusted that God was faithful. Because any parent knows that every single child can be the entire world, even with multiple children. As a kitschy fridge magnet reminded me when I was a kid: “A mom can love every child with all her heart, and all of her children can have all of her love.”
By the edge of the river, in the reeds, the little ark wouldn’t float away. Inverting the horrible practices of “exposure,” where some cultures leave babies out in the yard to die, this good boy was protected and watched over: “Then his sister stood at a distance in order to see what would happen to him” (Ex 2:4).
We read the story and quickly know what happened, but that girl and mom didn’t know how it would happen. Imagine a girl, eight years old, hiding in the bushes, making sure the little basket didn’t float downstream, hoping that no crocodiles would bother it. Imagine that mom back home, her baby son and her daughter with him. She couldn’t protect him or hide him anymore, but she knew that God can when we can’t, and she did what she could.
We live in an Exodus 2:4 world, where we put our treasures in baskets and yield them to the Lord’s will and providence, and we watch and wait. It’s tedious, painful, frustrating, and feels like forever in the moment. But watching and waiting at a distance can be the centerpoint of God’s will for us in a season, and the bushes a few dozen yards from the reeds on the riverbank can be the place we’re called to sit for a while. So we sit, watch, and wait, expecting and hoping for God to do what he can do when we’ve exhausted all that we can do. In those moments, question of faithfulness are, “Have I done what I can?” And, “Am I waiting in faith?”
And God’s providence is merciful and kind and full of hope, as this little Hebrew family found, when an unlikely candidate to play the hero entered into the narrative: “Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe at the Nile while her servant girls walked along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds, sent her slave girl, took it, opened it, and saw him, the child—and there he was, a little boy, crying” (Ex. 2:5-6).
This would have been a catastrophic turn for this Hebrew family. Egyptians hated Hebrews, the people overrunning the land. “But the more [the Egyptians] oppressed [the Israelites], the more they multiplied and spread so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites” (Ex. 1:12). That word “dread” can mean “loathe” or “feel disgust.” An Egyptian finding the basket was a disaster, and a royal Egyptian?
Total catastrophe. But things turn quickly and fully for the good for this family, what J.R.R. Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe,” a sudden turn of events for the good. The Egyptian princess “felt sorry for him and said, ‘This is one of the Hebrew boys’” (Ex. 2:5-6).
These Hebrew ladies also wouldn’t have expected the princess to ignore her father Pharaoh’s command to “throw every son born to the Hebrews into the Nile, but let every daughter live’” (Ex. 1:22). The boy’s mother had technically obeyed this command, casting her son into the Nile, but the Egyptian princess reversed and subverted that command, taking a Hebrew son out of the river.
Instead of disgust, hatred, or fear, this princess “felt sorry” for the boy, and decided, on the spot, “I’m going to let him live. I’m going to provide for him. I’m going to protect him.”
The boy’s mom and sister couldn’t have expected that. They only hoped to get him through the day, as theologian John Calvin said, to have him survive until dark, so he could nurse. Their next step was as muddy as the water at the edge of the river. They only had faith in the watching and waiting while the basket bobbed and rocked between the reeds.
The girl, the sister, again brought her “can” and gathered up her courage, approaching the princess: “Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘Should I go and call a Hebrew woman who is nursing to nurse the boy for you?’” (Ex. 2:7). Trust and boldness go together in this young girl’s approach, reminding us that we bring what we can even when we know we can’t, and we do what we can, trusting God to act and do what only he can.
This point of view isn’t some kind of syncretistic, semi-Pelagian self-help slop. It’s the way God made the world. His sovereignty doesn’t erase our response and action. We act, we do, we can, and God does what he does, in us, through us, in spite of us. We don’t know how he will, but we do what we can in our very limited way, all while we trust his unlimited “can.”
And in the midst of the watching and waiting, we are tempted to wonder if God is really for us. If God is really good, kind, and merciful. How can a good God require us to put our good gift in a basket at the edge of the river, at the mercy of whoever or whatever might come along?
Yet his mercy and kindness governs the world, and the circumstances of our lives. “Then Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will pay your wages.’ So the woman took the boy and nursed him” (Ex. 2:9).
God returned the boy to his mom, and she got paid to do what she wanted to do more than anything else on earth. God is so merciful and kind, and you and I can trust his mercy and kindness.
A skeptic or cynic might say (and my own heart wrestles with this question, too): “Yes, that’s great for this one little family. But what about the thousands of families having babies who didn’t get a free pass from a princess?” Or imagine another Hebrew family who hears this story saying, “That’s great for Moses and his mom and his sister, but what about us? What about our son?”
And I don’t have easy answers for that family, or for you or for myself. This story doesn’t mean that we can map it onto any circumstance or good thing we’ve figuratively put in a basket on the edge of the Nile as we watch and wait. The story doesn’t mean that our circumstances will end so favorably, with a job and our good thing back. That kind of interpretation misapplies a descriptive text with a promise that the text doesn’t make.
Yet we do know that this story signals God’s goodness, not just to this family, but to all of Israel, and through Israel to all of the world. The salvation of this boy wasn’t just good news for his little family. It was salvation for the people. God intended deliverance.
Because “when the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, ‘Because,’ she said, ‘I drew him out of the water’” (Ex. 2:10).
This one salvation story was actually the salvation story for all of Israel. This one Hebrew boy was the in-breaking of God’s restoring purpose for all of creation through his people. Scholars wonder how an Egyptian princess could have named her son with a Hebrew name, but whatever the circumstances, the name again inverts and subverts her own father Pharaoh’s specific command. This boy was put in the Nile and drawn back out.
So we don’t know exactly how any given circumstance will turn out. I don’t have a word from the Lord for your finances, or your family, or your future, or my own—at least in the short term. I don’t have easy answers, but as a pastor friend of mine recently preached at an especially tragic funeral, “The Scriptures don’t give us answers to all of our questions. They give us a Christ.”
So I don’t have a word for the future, but I do have the Word made flesh.
God will save his people, he will accomplish his purpose, and he will use unlikely heroes along the way. In this text he uses women in a culture that denigrated them, and slaves in a culture that loathed them.
Yes, decades unfolded from the basket in the Nile to the parting of the Red Sea. But God’s purposes and the work he is doing in the scope of his timeline pass as quickly as it takes us to read from verse four to verse six. The interim between circumstance and salvation is a blink in the economy and the timescale of the Lord. So the waiting feels like forever, and the suffering feels like it won’t end, but the Lord’s economy exchanges time at a rate of a thousand years to a single day. In the eternal horizon of our lives with Jesus, momentary light affliction will yield an eternal weight of glory.
Bank on it.
Here the Scriptures give us a forerunner of Christ, a chosen son, who would benefit and bless not just his own little family, but all of God’s people.
God’s love is covenantal and providential, and his works rhyme throughout time.
Noah went into the ark and came back out.
Israel was sent into Egypt and led back out.
Jesus was carried into Egypt and then came back out.
Jesus was buried in a tomb and came back out.
We enter the water of baptism, and come back out.
In this good boy, Moses sent into and drawn out of the water, God was renewing his special love for his people for the sake of the whole world.
*I deleted a line I originally had here about them being distant cousins, because that is likely wrong, and the relationship is debated in light of Exodus 6:20 and Numbers 26:59.