ABSTRACT
In one instance the Hebrew Bible is astonishingly specific: Moses was three months old when his mother constructed a chest designed to float the baby in the river Nile. The females who save Moses, his mother, sister, and the Egyptian princess, are granted neither name nor age. This chapter focuses on one of these, Miriam, who was Moses's older sister. It ventures to combine the textual history of a single biblical episode with its visual narrative. The analysis of biblical episodes involving children has been usefully placed within the larger context of Near Eastern social, ritual, and funerary cultures. In biblical annals the story of Moses's infancy is replete with children. Rabbinic commentators of the Exodus narrative developed a model of Miriam which revived Pseudo-Philo's portrait of Miriam as a homely visionary. The biblical Miriam operates in several spheres as she bridges between home and river, and between her mother and her brother.
