What Does Exodus 2:3 Mean?

When she could no longer hide him, she took a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river's bank. The basket (Hebrew: tevah) is the same word used for Noah's ark in Genesis. The only two objects in the Hebrew Bible called tevah are Noah's vessel and Moses' basket: in both cases, the vessel is the instrument of preservation through threatening waters for those who hold the future of the covenant. The word choice is not coincidental: the basket on the Nile carries the same theological freight as the ark on the flood waters.

The materials Jochebed uses, bulrushes, bitumen, and pitch, are the same materials used in brick-making, the very substance of Israel's slave labor. The mother of the deliverer fashions the instrument of her son's salvation from the materials of Israel's oppression. What slavery produced, a mother transforms into an ark of salvation. The bitumen that sealed the ark of Noah against flood waters now seals a basket against the Nile, and the logic is the same: God preserves his covenant through the small faithful acts of those who trust him with the things they cannot control.

Placing the basket among the reeds by the river bank placed it at the edge of the very instrument of death that Pharaoh had designated for Hebrew sons. The Nile that was to destroy Moses now becomes the river that carries him to safety. This reversal, the weapon of death becoming the path to life, runs throughout Exodus: the Nile that kills Hebrew sons becomes the river from which the deliverer is drawn; the waters of the Red Sea that Pharaoh's army crosses in pursuit become the waters in which the army is destroyed. God consistently inverts the instruments of destruction into the means of salvation.