The story of baby Moses is one of the biblical narratives from which we retain a strong mental image but tend to lose the details. We remember the basket in the Nile. The six women are a little harder to sort out because the story moves quickly among them. And the chilling part we easily forget is how the baby ended up in the river: how once again someone in authority decided it was okay to kill babies en masse and convinced the population of the same. Last week, I reflected on this theme in connection with the Gospel story in which Jesus refused to heal a foreigner, in the background of which was Israel’s persecution of the Canaanites (click here to read the sermon). Interestingly, once Israel leaves Egypt, eighty years after Moses’ birth and the beginning of the oppression described here, God instructs them to love the foreigners in their midst because they themselves were once persecuted foreigners. Yet Israel would later treat the inhabitants of Canaan much as they themselves had been treated in Egypt, God’s command notwithstanding.

The story spans the first two chapters of Exodus (click here to read full text). Its first seven verses form a bridge from Genesis, reminding us how the Israelites came to be in Egypt. Joseph was a great-grandson of Abraham and lived in Canaan with his eleven brothers, after Abraham had moved there from Ur and established his family in what he believed was the land God had promised to his descendants. Joseph’s jealous brothers, however, sold him into slavery in Egypt, where, against all odds, he rose to extraordinary power in Pharaoh’s court through his ability to interpret dreams. Eventually, he reconciled with his brothers and brought them to Egypt because by then a famine had arisen in Canaan. This is where Genesis ends. Generations pass, and Exodus opens with language that recalls its blessing “to be fruitful and multiply”: the Israelites do just this.

But verse 8 changes everything. What was just described as a blessing, a new Pharaoh “who did not know Joseph” now considers a threat. He looks at this rapidly growing population and tells his people that the Israelites have become too numerous and too powerful. If war comes, he says, they might join Egypt’s enemies. Nothing has actually happened yet, but the assumptions about who they are and what they might do begin the pattern of dehumanization that has appeared in the world time and again. While reading last week’s Gospel, we had to keep the historical context consciously in mind: for centuries, Canaanites had been thought of as those who might lead Israel into idolatry. Here, Exodus explicitly gives us the full pattern of how a political myth can be constructed from fragments of reality and then make increasingly extreme actions appear necessary. The progression is essentially this: categorization into us and them, imagined threat, euphemisms that normalize violence, and finally full-blown atrocity.

First, those who are simply neighbours or residents become distinctly them. Then comes exaggeration: they are more numerous than we are. As the Canaanites were called dogs by the Israelites, here the person, baby, becomes replaced by a category, threat. Then an imagined, hypothetical future problem licenses very real violence in the present. As such, Pharaoh does not have to persuade his people explicitly to kill Hebrew children, only to present them, as they would later be presented many times in various parts of the world, as simultaneously inferior enough to mistreat and terrifyingly powerful enough for that mistreatment to be represented as self-defence. Once that frame has been accepted, the language changes from emotional to administrative: “deal shrewdly with them,” like the euphemisms of later political regimes, “purges,” “disappearances,” and other words that make human suffering sound like procedure.

This makes me think of the model proposed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman for how institutions can influence public thought through the framing of information, in part through language choices. It intersects with a larger debate about the relationship between language and thought in which Chomsky had participated as a linguist before writing as a political analyst, though he had always had political interests. Linguists of the preceding generation, Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, became associated with the hypothesis that language determines thought. A familiar example concerns how languages spoken in the Arctic distinguish among the kinds of snow that may be less salient to speakers elsewhere. Sapir himself never stated the stronger, textbook version of the claim and held a weaker position described as linguistic relativity, which goes only so far as to say that language influences thought. As such, language does not necessarily trap us into perceiving the world in a certain way or lock us into a way of thinking, but it supplies us with categories that assist interpretation. Chomsky, as a linguist of the generation that followed Sapir and Whorf, rather than wrestling with the “chicken and egg” of thought and language, emphasized the innate cognitive capacities out of which language develops. As a political analyst, however, he went on to examine how language can be manipulated to influence whole populations.

Language does not have to determine thought completely in order to influence it profoundly. In the story of Moses, we see how, by the time babies are thrown into the Nile, the regime has already constructed a world in which they signify something other than themselves: a demographic abstraction rather than tiny bodies in baskets. Such repeated descriptions can frame a question as “common sense”: not whether something must be done about “these people,” but what must be done. Once this occurs, behaviours that would otherwise be morally unthinkable appear simply as policies related to national security, numbers, and population growth.

I know from my own family’s history how a political system can create categories of suspect people, demand obedience and participation, and make neighbours implicate one another. Here, the Israelites were sent to forced labour as foreigners, but two of my ancestors were sent to labour camps because they were regarded as belonging to the wrong class within their own people. One returned home many years later; the other was lost. This was in the 1930s, in a country where the old class hierarchy had been turned upside down, only for power to shift increasingly to the state and its secret police over the two decades that followed. The story I heard repeatedly as a child was that members of my family were ordered to testify falsely against a neighbour and refused, whereas the neighbour, when pressured to testify against them, did not refuse.

This makes me wonder about something Exodus does not explain: how, exactly, did the authorities know which neighbour was an Israelite and therefore belonged among the forced labourers? In other times and places, how have people been revealed as belonging to the targeted category? I suspect that quite often lives have hung in the balance simply through someone’s willingness to disclose or conceal another person’s identity, similar to the choice every woman in Moses’ story faced. The bottom line is that the future liberator of Israel survives only because each of six women, one after another, sets herself free from the pattern of violence established by the state.

The first two, the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah, are summoned by Pharaoh and secretly ordered to kill every Hebrew boy at birth, yet they refuse. Their moral conviction about the sanctity of life made in the image of God causes them to use Pharaoh’s own ethnic categories and stereotypes against him, telling him that the Hebrew women “are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” The same language intended to divide people thus becomes a means of protecting life, which again shows that language does not have to lock us into a particular way of thinking. Unfortunately, Pharaoh responds by escalating the violence, abandoning attempts at secrecy and openly ordering all the baby boys to be thrown into the Nile.

The next two women we meet are Moses’ mother and sister. For three months, his mother hides him. Once she can no longer do so, she puts her baby into a basket that she tries her best to waterproof and places it among the reeds on the bank of the Nile. That detail, three months, is emotionally significant to me, even though the text does not dwell on it. Those of us who learned this story in Sunday school long ago might be tempted to picture “baby Moses” generically, almost as an iconographic newborn placed serenely into a basket. But I remember my own children at three months old. The anxiety about keeping your child alive begins long before then and never entirely disappears. What I have experienced, however, is how quickly parental love that begins as instinct becomes a genuine relationship based on the first glimpses of the unique personality of this child: their expressions, sounds, preferences, and comforts.

So Moses’ mother has spent those months feeding, holding, and getting to know him. Unable to protect him, now she has to let him go. Some people know something about that kind of letting go in ways far more painful than others. Sometimes a child is lost early, or grows into an adult whom we can no longer protect, or drifts somewhere we wish they did not have to go. The basket among the reeds holds some of that parental helplessness: doing the last thing you can think of to protect your child. The word for “basket” here is tevah, used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible only for Noah’s ark. At the level of the Hebrew vocabulary, the mother makes a tiny vessel to carry life through waters of death, a symbol of hope for salvation against all odds. And unlike most of those who have lost their children, Moses’ mother is granted more time with him, made possible by the courage and ingenuity of the baby’s older sister, who stays nearby because she cannot let go of him either. We will later know her as Miriam, who dances in the desert with a tambourine following the crossing of the Red Sea, but here she is just a girl who has also spent three months getting to know her baby brother.

Then the last two women enter the story: Pharaoh’s daughter and her attendant. The princess comes down to bathe, notices the basket, and sends the servant to retrieve it. As soon as she opens it, she knows that “this must be one of the Hebrews’ children.” At that very moment, Miriam steps forward and asks whether the princess would like her to find someone to nurse the child. Pharaoh’s daughter agrees, and Miriam fetches the baby’s own mother, who is then paid to nurse the very child whom Pharaoh has ordered to be killed. There is certainly both humour and subversion in that. Both the princess and her attendant, who does not betray what is happening, have learned that the baby in a basket belongs to the population defined as dangerous. And yet when they hear him crying, they encounter this baby. The abstraction gives way to compassion, and they recognize him as a tiny human being worthy of life and love.

Dehumanization and oppression work by creating linguistic and cognitive abstraction. Love, in contrast, works through particularity. Pharaoh turns the Nile into an instrument of death for many, but Moses’ mother sets a tiny ark upon its waters to save this one life. Where Pharaoh sees a demographic threat, love insists upon seeing this child, this person, this life, in whom the image of God dwells: the sanctity of life is maintained by midwives protecting each particular newborn; a mother’s or sister’s instinctive care grows into a relationship with this particular baby; compassion blossoms when the princess and her servant recognize the tiny body in the basket as an individual. God, who is love, insists upon each particular life as the vessel of God’s indwelling presence, whose worth comes from being made in God’s own image, yet uniquely expressed in the particularity of every human being.