Women in the Exodus Story: Batya

Our final reflection on the women of the Exodus story turns to Batya, Pharaoh’s daughter.

Earlier, we explored the courage of the midwives Shifra and Puah, followed by Moses’ family: Miriam, his sister; Yocheved, his mother; and Tzipporah, his wife. Now we turn to Batya, whose moral courage and compassion also played a pivotal role in the story of the Exodus.

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Meet Batya Pharoah’s daughter is named “Batya” by the Rabbis and connected with a woman mentioned in I Chronicles 4:18 called “Bitiah daughter of Pharaoh”. Batya or Bitiah also mean “daughter of God” which is fitting. The rabbis depict the daughter of Pharaoh as a righteous figure who did not follow her father’s wicked ways, but rather converted and ceased worshiping idols.

We first meet Batya when she is bathing in the Nile and spots the basket that we know contains the baby Moses. She knows that the baby is an Israelite, takes pity, and decides to raise him as her son. In the midrashic expansion, Batya did not go there to bathe, but to cleanse herself from the idols of her father’s house - or in fact to perform the immersion needed for conversion (BT Megillah 13a).

The Midrash also elaborates that Batya’s handmaidens attempted to dissuade her from taking Moses in, reminding her of her father’s ruling regarding Israelite baby boys, but the angel Gabriel stepped in to silence them. 

The Torah text says that Batya sent out a handmaiden (“amatah”) to fetch the basket, but one midrashic approach reads “amatah” as “her hand”: a miracle was performed for her, and her arm stretched out until it could reach the ark. One tradition has her arm extending to a length of sixty cubits!

Whatever the circumstances of discovering Moshe, Batya’s bravery in bringing a baby Israelite condemned to death into Pharoah’s own palace, is extraordinary. This action would have humanised Israelites on a daily basis to Pharoah, and could be seen as a great act of non-violent resistance. 

The Rabbis applied to the daughter of Pharaoh the verse from the “Eishet Chayil” - “Woman of Valor” poem:

“She sees that her business thrives; her lamp never goes out at night” (Prov. 31:18).

In the midrashic exposition, the “night” in this verse is that of the plague of the firstborn, in which all the firstborn of Egypt died. The female firstborn also died in this plague, with the exception of the daughter of Pharaoh. 

Finally, there is a midrashic tradition that Batya did not die, but was rewarded for her deeds by entering the Garden of Eden while still alive. 

A fresco of the daughter of Pharaoh drawing Moses from the Nile, from the synagogue in Dura-Europos, Syria. Source: Wikimedia Commons