The story of Moses is one of the most amazing and important stories in the Bible. Moses' entire life is amazing; starting with his birth and escape from certain death.
For 400 years, the people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt. They did lots of work for the Pharoah, or King of Egypt. But there was a problem. The Israelites kept growing in numbers. There were so many of them that Pharoah began to worry that they would rebel and rise up and fight against Egypt. So Pharoah began to increase their work, making it harder and harder; but still, they grew more and more in numbers.
So Pharoah made a decree. He told the Egyptian midwives to kill all the little boys that were born so that the Israelites would only have girls. But the midwives were afraid of God, and they refused to do what Pharoah ordered them to do. So Pharoah gave an order that all little boys should be cast into the river, and all little girls could stay alive.
Now there was an Israelite man and his wife who had a little boy. The little boy's mother could not bring herself to kill her son, so she hid him for three months. When she could not hide him anymore, she made a little ark of bulrushes and put the little boy in it and put him in the reeds by the river.
The little boy's sister stood far off and watched to see what would happen to her brother. To her amazement, she saw Pharoah's daughter come to the river to bathe, and she found the ark. When she opened the ark, the baby cried, and Pharoah's daughter felt sorry for him. Then the little boy's sister asked Pharoah's daughter if she should go and get someone to nurse the baby, and Pharoah's daughter agreed. So the little boy's sister ran and called her mother, and the little boy was nursed by his own mother. When the little boy was weened, he was brought back to Pharoah's daughter. She named him Moses, and raised him as her own son. |
