Women in the Exodus Story: Yocheved

We continue with our series that seeks to explore the women who shaped the Exodus story. Last time, we met Shifra, Puah, and Miriam, women whose courage shaped the earliest moments of the Exodus. In this piece, we turn to Yocheved, Moses’ mother.

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Meet Yocheved

First introduced to us as a nameless “daughter of Levi”, we discover Yocheved’s name only later in Shemot - the Torah thus helps to illustrate how slavery would strip a person of all identity. She was married to Amram, also from the tribe of Levi. 

Yocheved is the mother of Miriam and Aaron before Moses is born. Midrash fills in some of her earlier stories, telling us that she was in fact the midwife Shifra. There is also a midrashic tradition that Yocheved and Amram were divorced before Moses’ birth. 

According to this tradition, Amram was the leading scholar of the generation. When he saw that Pharaoh had decreed that all the boys be cast into the Nile, he felt marriage and procreation to be futile, and so he divorced his wife. Other Israelites saw this, and following him, they also divorced. Miriam, who was six years old at the time, said:

“Father, father, your decree is harsher than that of Pharaoh. Pharaoh only decreed against the males, but you have decreed against both the males and the females”.

Amram heeded his daughter, and returned to his wife, whom he remarried in a public celebration with all possible pomp and ceremony. 

Following this, the couple’s third child, Moses, was born. Yocheved defies Pharaoh's death sentence to baby boys and hides Moses for as long as she can, then takes the desperate measure of letting him go in the river, in a basket covered with waterproof pitch, without knowing what will happen to him. 

Thanks to Miriam’s bravery, Moses is discovered by Pharoah’s daughter and Yocheved is called to nurse her own child. The Rabbis say that when the daughter of Pharaoh asked of Yocheved:

“Take [helikhi] this child and nurse it for me” (Shemot 2:9), she unwittingly prophesied: the word “helikhi” concealed the truth—“shelikhi hu [he is yours].” 

According to midrash, Yocheved nursed Moses for twenty-four months. Whether or not Moses would have known his birth family as an older child is a mystery on which our commentators are divided.

Moses and Jochebed by Pedro Américo (1884)