Shemot 5786

♫ A-Tisket, A-Tasket, That Box Was Not a Basket ♫

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Read my two “Bible Guy” columns here and here.

This week we begin the book of Exodus with the section named after it, Parashat Shemot (Exod 1:1–6:1), and I’m going to be talking about Exodus 2.

For background, you have to remember that at the end of chapter 1 Pharaoh has decided to kill every Jewish boy who is born. Chapter 2 tells us:

^{Exod 2:1} A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. ² The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw how beautiful he was, she hid him for three months. ³ When she could hide him no longer, she got a wicker basket for him and caulked it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile. ⁴ And his sister stationed herself at a distance, to learn what would befall him.

^{Exod 2:5} The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the Nile, while her maidens walked along the Nile. She spied the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to fetch it. ⁶ When she opened it, she saw that it was a child, a boy crying. She took pity on it and said, “This must be a Hebrew child.” [NJPS]

And the rest is history. The Jewish Study Bible says:

This story has parallels in birth legends of other heroes, some of which pre-date the Bible, such as Sargon of Akkad who in infancy was born in secret and exposed in a river in a reed basket sealed with pitch, but was found and later became king.

So the story in Exodus 2 not only makes a certain sort of intuitive sense; it’s actually a legendary tradition to be put in the river into a basket if, as an infant, you have to be hidden for some reason.

In fact, though, our text does not say that Moses was put in a basket. It says that he was put in a תֵּבָה teiva, and (to be more specific) in a תֵּ֣בַת גֹּ֔מֶא teivat gómeh:

• NJPS: a wicker basket

• KJV: an ark of bulrushes

• NRSV: a papyrus basket

• Everett Fox: a little-ark* of papyrus

Fox’s footnote describes the “little-ark” (a word he created as part of his effort to make his English translation as Hebrew as possible) this way:

* little-ark: The term used to designate the little basket/boat, teiva, has clearly been chosen to reflect back to Noah’s ark in Genesis. The implication is that just as God saved Noah and thus humanity from destruction by water, so will he now save Moshe and the Israelites from the same.

Both Fox and the King James version help us see (as NJPS and NRSV do not) that teiva is a literary reference here. The word occurs 28 times in the entire Bible: twice in our story (in v. 3 and v. 5) and the other 26 times all in the Flood story. This is indeed the word for Noah’s “ark.” But I should remind you that the English word ark comes from the Latin arca, which means a box, a chest, or a coffer.

In case you are wondering, the Ark of the Covenant is a different kind of box entirely, an אָרוֹן aron, a word that’s used mostly for the Ark of the Covenant (אֲרוֹן הַבְּרִית aron ha-brit) but also for ordinary things, like a chest that you would keep money in (2 Kgs 12:10). In Gen 50:26 you will see it as Joseph’s coffin, and it still does mean “coffin” today in modern Hebrew. It can mean a closet as well.

So that’s a kind of a generalized box. The teiva that Moses is put in is a “box” that you have to use when you need to put someone in a floating container. If you stop and think about it, all right — we really want Moses to be put in a basket, but it’s not that strange for a box to be made out of wicker (as NJPS translates gomeh). Papyrus too is a reed, so … fine. Weave your wicker or shape your papyrus into the rectangular shape of a box rather than the rounded shape of a basket. Certainly whatever kind of reed box they might have had in the house would have been suitable for putting Moses in the river.

When it comes to the Flood, though, Noah’s ark is also a teiva, and this is the key usage of teiva in the Bible. I discussed that word in my Genesis column and, as I also pointed out there, Noah’s ark is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. That makes 450,000 cubic cubits of space.

It’s true, Noah had to on-board two of every kind of animal on earth (and seven pairs of some kinds), so a lot of space was certainly required. The thing to remember, though, is that Noah’s “ark” was a box — a rectangular box, not a boat or a ship. It can float, but it can’t sail anywhere. At 300 cubits long — that’s 450 feet — it was five times longer than the Mayflower.

To return to our parashah, the conclusion that Moses is put in a teiva to remind us of the teiva that saved all life on earth in the days of Noah certainly makes a lot of sense. Nonetheless, the actual object described by the word teiva makes way more sense to save little baby Moses by keeping him afloat in the water. Again, it’s a box of the size that one might have around the house, made out of papyrus or reeds.

You might, therefore, conclude that in the history of these legends the box that Noah kept the animals afloat in for a year comes from the little box, the little ark, that kept Moses afloat in the Nile, hiding him (temporarily) from the Egyptians who would have drowned him. That’s not correct, however. Noah’s box — even though it makes no sense, and the box for Moses does make sense — comes from the box in the traditional ancient Near Eastern story of the Flood.

You only have to look at Gilgamesh Tablet 11, where a guy named Utnapishtim, the Noah of the ancient Mesopotamians (or one of them, anyway) preserves all life on earth in a box that’s not even rectangular: it’s a cube that is 120 cubits (180 feet) in all three directions. The epic of Gilgamesh dates from way before the Torah was written or Moses lived, by anyone’s calculation.

So we have two stories about a teiva, one of which makes a certain logical sense, Moses’s little box, and one of which is clearly the literary explanation even though it makes no logical sense, the box from Utnapishtim and the ancient Mesopotamian Flood story that the Noah story is mimicking.

All of which means that the little papyrus box that Moses is going to be saved in this Saturday has much larger implications than you might have thought.