Pharaoh's Daughter

This week, we read Parshat Shemot, the first Parshah or Torah portion in the Book of Exodus, the second of the five books of the Torah. In Parshat Shemot, we are introduced to several extremely important and instrumental women, all of whom were intimately involved with Moses or Moshe in some fashion. These include Yocheved, Moses’s mother, Miriam, Moses’s sister, Shifrah and Puah—the Hebrew midwives who boldly refused to adhere to Pharaoh’s decree to kill all newborn males and Batya or Bithiah—Pharaoh’s Daughter who, upon going down to the Nile River to bathe sees Moses in the basket and heroically rescues and raises him as her own son within the palace.

Although Pharaoh’s Daughter is directly responsible for Moses’ survival, she is mentioned very briefly in the Torah’s text and very little is known about her aside from the fact that she was the daughter of Pharaoh. She is not even named. The rabbis and sages, through Midrash seek to creatively fill in the missing pieces in the life stories of characters who aren’t fully fleshed out in the Torah or Tanakh—Hebrew Bible, including Pharaoh’s Daughter. These midrashim (plural for Midrash) lend insight into the motivations of different characters actions in the Tanakh, as well as the path their lives took. The rabbis also sought to give moral lessons through the vehicle of Midrash. The midrashim which focus on Pharaoh’s Daughter highlight her compassion and selfless, attributes which we all should emulate.

Throughout Jewish midrashic tradition, Pharaoh’s daughter is richly rewarded for her selfless act of rescuing Moses at the Nile, for by doing so she aided directly in the Exodus from Egypt. Although she is not named in the Torah’s account, the Rabbis give her the name of Batya (daughter of G-d) or Bithiah. Many midrashim identify her as Bithiah, the woman mentioned in the First Book of Chronicles. There are many midrashim which discuss her later life and marriage, as well as midrashim which focus in on the miraculous acts that happened during and in the aftermath of her rescue of Moses. Additionally, many midrashim wonder why she went down to the Nile River. Although the Torah states that it was merely to bathe, one Midrash has her going to the Nile to immerse for the purpose of conversion to Judaism, having completely repudiated her father’s decrees as well as his worship of idols. The rabbis henceforth consider her to be amongst many other devout female converts in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible including the most famous, Ruth.

Another tradition notes that she went to bathe in the Nile because she had Leprosy and upon touching Moses’s basket she was immediately cured.

In addition to ponderings about why Batya or Bithiah went down to the Nile in the first place, there are several midrashim which discuss the miraculous way in which she rescued Moses. Owing to the fact that she, as Pharaoh’s daughter could not go into the Nile to rescue him herself; she asks one of her maids to rescue him. The term used for maid, “amitah”, can also mean arm, so some midrashim posit that rather than having one of her servants go in and rescue him, she was literally able to stretch out her arm so far that she was able to grab Moses and get him out of the Nile without needing to go in herself.

Due to the fact that she drew him from the water, Batya names him Moses. She raises him in Pharaoh’s palace, just as if he was her own son and in a very interesting turn of fate, hires Yocheved, Moses’s mother to nurse him. The rabbis laud her for her compassion and her selflessness in raising Moses as her own child, knowing full well his origins. She left Egypt along with the Children of Israel during the Exodus. She is believed to have been given the gift of tremendous longevity and was amongst the very few to have the privilege of entering the Garden of Eden or paradise while still alive.