EXPOSITION.
CHAPTER II time before, and ta.ken to wife a daughter of Levi." Miriam must have been fonrteen o, Vers. 1-10.-Tm: BIRTH, ESCAPE, AND fifteen at the time of the exposure of Moses. EDUCATION OF MOSES. Some years before the By a daughter of Levi, we must not Ullder- Phare.oh issued hls edict for the general de- stand an actual daughter, which ill irrecon- cilable with the chronology, but one of Levi's ,struction of the Hebrew male children, Amram descendants-" a wife of the di!.ughte:ra of of the tribe of Levi, had married J ochebed, hls Levi," as the LXX. translates. kinswomll.Il ( eh. vi. 20). They had already had Ver. 2.-And the woman conceived, Not two children-Miriam, a daughter, bom proba- for the first time, as appears from ver. 4, nor bly soon after the marriage, and Aaron, a son, even for the second, as we learn from eh. vii. 7; but for the third. Aaron was three years bom some twelve years later. Soon e.fter the old when Moses was born. As no diffi.cultv issue of the edict, Jochebed gave birth to her h&.J occurred with re.spect to him, we must third child, a son, who therefore came llllder regard the edict as issued between hls birth its terms. Knowing as she did what fate was and that of Moses. When she saw that he in store for him, if•his existence became known was a goodly ohild. Perhaps Jochebed would have done the same had Moses been ill- to the Egyptians, she "hid him three months." favoured, for mothers have often loved best Then, despairing of being able to keep him their weakest and sickliest; but still it natu- concealed much longer, she devised the plan rally seemed to her the harder that she was related in vers. 3-4, which proved successful. called upon to lose a strong and beautiful baby; and this is what the writer means to Ver. 1.-There went a man. The Hebrew express-the clauses are not " simply co-ordi- language is deficient in tenses, and cannot nate." She hid him-i.e. kept him within the mark pluperfect time. The meaning is, that house--perhaps even in the female apartments " a man of tbe house of Levi had gone, some Egyptians were mixed up with the Israelites 24 THE BOOK OF EXODUS. [ou, n. 1-