Hey y’all! Happy Friday! This has been an awesome week, Abby debuted her first blog post on Monday- Neither Do I Condemn You and if you haven’t checked it out please do! Abby gets so real sharing her testimony and we are extremely blessed to have her as part of our team. We are wrapping up our mini-series of great women of faith today with one final post. We are so excited to roll out some NEW content next week!
For the final post in our mini-series of great women of faith, I am really excited to share with you the story of Jochebed. I picked Jochebed this week because honestly I never really learned much about her and how awesome it is to have this platform to bring amazing women to light? Jochebed is a character that many people, including myself, really only know as Moses’s mother and some may not know who she is at all. She is actually only named twice in the bible- in Exodus and Numbers, and they are only accounts of family lines. Meaning Jochebed’s story doesn’t even have her name attached. Jochebed was really interesting to research because she isn’t a very prominent woman figure in the bible but she greatly influenced history. I also got to wear my “historical thinker cap” for this blog post because her story has a lot of historical background to wade through to really understand why she is such a great woman of faith. On the surface her story seems so simple- she was forced to abandon her child and put him in a river. But there is SO much more.
Let’s unpack some of the historical context surrounding Jochebed and her son, Moses. Our story takes place in Egypt roughly around c. 1500’s B.C. The Israelite's have been oppressed in Egypt for numerous years due to the famine that brought them to Egypt. With the help of Joseph, long before our story, things between the Israelite's were fairly peaceful and the two groups cohabited the land. Many generations after the death of Joseph, Egypt got a new king who didn’t know about Joseph and everything he had done to help the Egyptians when their land had famine as well. The new king said to his people,
"The Israelite's have become much too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country."
The Israelite's became more oppressed with forced labor. Oppression and slavery of the Israelite's wasn’t enough for the Pharaoh as he was scared of the Israelite's becoming too powerful and potentially overthrow his kingdom. He told the Hebrew midwives to kill all sons born from the Israelite women. Now the midwives revered the Lord and didn’t obey the Pharaoh, which only increased the Pharaoh’s anger. So Pharaoh gave the order,
“Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.”
Jochebed, the mother of Moses, greatly influenced history by giving up what she treasured and loved the most to the will of God. When the Egyptians began killing the male babies of Hebrews, Jochebed first hid her baby for several months. Once she was no longer able to hide him, she put the baby in a papyrus basket and coated it with tar and pitch to waterproof it, and set it adrift on the Nile River. The Pharaoh's daughter found and adopted him as her own son and named him Moses. God arranged it so Jochebed could be the baby's wet nurse. Even though Moses was raised as an Egyptian, God chose him to lead his people to freedom. The faith of Jochebed saved Moses.
If it wasn’t for the great faith of Jochebed Moses wouldn’t have gone on to be important to Israelite history. He wouldn’t have led the Israelite's out of Egypt during the Exodus, he wouldn’t have been given the 10 Commandments. Jochebed was willing to put the one thing she loved the most, her baby, in the Lord’s hands. She knew that God would protect her child. What I have noticed in each of the stories of great women of faith is that they are just that, faithful. They trust that God will provide, they have faith that God has their back and will do what is best in each circumstance. Some days it’s difficult to let go, especially being someone who doesn’t like to give up control, but always know at the end of the day God will provide for you.
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