Then
his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call a nurse for you
from the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for you?”
And
Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the maiden went and called the child’s
mother.
Then Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child
away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took
the child and nursed him. (Exodus 2: 7-9)
God is clever, really clever; and He has a heckuva sense of
irony. The family whose state-mandated genocide had
forced Moses’ mother, Jochebed, to abandon
him: that same family HIRED Jochebed to nurse him. Pharaoh’s money paid Moses’ mother to be
Moses’ mother. And, since she was
working for Pharaoh’s daughter, her family, while enslaved, would have been given the the
protection and favor of the king. God found
a way to turn their enemy into their patron.
God can and does use
the people who hurt you to deliver help you.
But, benevolence and patronage did not change the rulers' sense of ethnic superiority.
When Moses was around 3 years old, his mother had to bring
him to servant’s entrance of the palace, hand him over to Pharaoh’s daughter, explain
to her baby boy “This is your mother now,” and then . . .
then she had to walk away.
And the child grew,
and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. So she called
his name Moses, saying, “Because I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:
7-10).
On the one hand, Pharaoh’s daughter was doing her part
to mitigate the suffering of the oppressed minority.
She had seen a little Hebrew boy abandoned by his parents, but instead of calling the police (I mean the palace guards) on the boy so he could be killed like the others, she sent for a wet
nurse. In a world that had normalized
the murdered bodies of Hebrew sons, this most privileged member of the most
privileged majority had compassion.
The daughter of the evil king might turn out to be a decent person.
On the other hand, unexamined privilege creates a kind of
social blindness which makes you look stupid to the un-privileged.
When Pharaoh’s daughter discovered baby Moses floating in
the reeds, she accepted the offer of a Hebrew wet nurse without question. A wet nurse is a lactating woman hired to provide breast-milk to another woman's child. The fact that Jochebed was lactating
meant either she had an unweaned child of her own or she'd recently given birth. A few questions along the lines of basic interest in Jochebed's story would have revealed that she had birthed a child 3 months earlier, but the child was now "gone." Either the child had died from sickness or been murdered on Pharaoh's orders.
If the princess had cared to hear the poor, disadvantaged Hebrew woman's story, she might have realized she was asking/ ordering a woman still grieving her own child to breastfeed a baby who would be taken from her as soon as he was off breast-milk. Pharaoh's daughter was compassionate but she was also blinded by her privilege. She didn't see the insensitivity and ignominy of her intervention in the minority community.
Pharaoh’s daughter probably thought she was doing the community a favor.
The baby wouldn't be their child anymore, but he was alive.
On the other hand, he wasn’t their child anymore.
People born into social, economic, and ethnic privilege forget that the "favors” for which “people like them” should be grateful are only
necessary because of the political, economic, and literal genocides ordered by their fathers. Amram
and Jochebed, poor and imperfect as they were, were fully capable of rearing
Moses without the princess's patronage, if his very existence didn't trigger a lethal response from the “helpful” authorities
of the state.
On the one hand, Moses would grow up with opportunities no Hebrew child
had known since the days of Joseph. He would
be educated by the greatest tutors of the age, trained in politics, the
sciences, the arts, philosophy, mathematics, and military strategy. He would always have plenty of food, the best clothes, and the latest chariots. A slave baby left in a river would be called
a prince of Egypt.
On the other hand, Moses’s parents didn’t even get to choose
their youngest child’s name. Pharaoh’s
daughter called him Moses, so it didn't matter what name had been given him at birth. They had to teach him to answer to “Moses.” After a few years of government aid the the Women Infants and Children in Amram's and Jochebed's houshold, the
system took Moses from his mother and gave him to the rich Egyptian lady who wanted
him.
For centuries, White people in America and Europe “saved” Native
American, Black, African, and Asian babies by taking them from their “disadvantaged”
families and raising them as their own.
On the one hand, being willing to love a child born by a
stranger from a foreign culture indicates a heart of deep compassion. That's godly love.
On the other hand, millions of those foster and adoptive parents felt
it was their Christian and/ or American duty to save those colored babies from all
the heathen vestiges of their inferior birth culture whether the babies' parents wanted them saved or not .
Because of compassion, Pharaoh's daughter wanted to give the poor, cute Hebrew
baby a better life. But because of her
PRIVILEGE, she didn’t confront her father about the conditions that made
being a young Hebrew male so dangerous.
Ecclesiastes 3:9-10 9 That
which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will
be done,
And there is nothing new under
the sun.
10 . . .It has already been in ancient
times before us.
From the princess’s perspective, she was adopting a poor
minority baby and giving him a good life.
From Moses’mother’s perspective, the government had tried to kill her
baby and when that failed they came and took her baby away.
Pharaoh’s daughter was oblivious to her privilege. But Moses’ mother and sister were not. They understood
that she didn’t understand, and they did what the underprivileged have always done. They used the social blindness of their oppressors
to their advantage. Moses’ family gained 3 or years with
the child they expected to mourn 3 months after he was born. AND they got Pharaoh to pay for the childcare.
Somewhere in those 3 scammed years of being a whole family, Mama and
Miriam indoctrinated Moses with an
un-shakeable sense of his Hebrew-ness.
They built a connection to the community that stayed in Moses through
all the years of assimilation and indoctrination in the palaces of the king of
Egypt.
Moses’ family were oppressed and exploited, AND they were smart enough to outwit the royal family. Pharaoh’s
daughter was genuinely compassionate AND she was obliviously privileged.
3 Lessons to Take Away from the Story of Baby Moses:
1. No matter their
social class, people are complicated.
2. The privileged are
not as smart as they think they are, and the “under-classes” are not as dumb as
they’re thought to be.
3. Compassion is a
perfect starting point, but compassion isn’t the end of the conversation.
--Anderson T. Graves II is a writer, community
organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership
development.
Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of
Miles Chapel CME
Church in Fairfield, Alabama. He writes a blog called
A Word to the Wise at
www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com
Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
Support by check or money order may be mailed to
Miles Chapel CME Church
P O Box 132
Fairfield, Al 35064
