MOSES RESCUED FROM THE WATER

Jochebed accordingly took an ark fashioned of bulrushes,
daubed it with pitch on the outside, and lined it with clay
within. The reason she used bulrushes was because they
float on the surface of the water, and she put pitch only on
the outside, to protect the child as much as possible against
the annoyance of a disagreeable odor. Over the child as it
lay in the ark she spread a tiny canopy, to shade the babe,
with the words, "Perhaps I shall not live to see him under
the marriage canopy." And then she abandoned the ark on
the shores of the Red Sea. Yet it was not left unguarded.
Her daughter Miriam stayed near by, to discover whether a
prophecy she had uttered would be fulfilled. Before the
child's birth, his sister had foretold that her mother would