- The River,* Part 3. On the basket she wove.
When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank.— Exodus 2:3
Pharaoh had ordered every Hebrew boy thrown into the Nile (Exod. 1:22). A Levite woman gave birth to a son and hid him for three months. Then the hiding stopped working. A three-month-old cries loudly enough to be heard through a wall, and she knew the day was coming when someone would hear.
She could have wrapped him in a blanket, left him on the bank, and hoped for the best. She did something wiser: she gathered papyrus reeds, wove them into a small basket, and coated it with bitumen and pitch, the thick black tar that keeps water out. Only after every seam was sealed did she lay her son inside and set him among the reeds.
Scripture does not tell us what she said as she let go of the basket. It is hard to imagine she did it without tears, or without a prayer something like this: My little one, wherever this river carries you, may this basket keep you safe. She could not go with him, so she gave him something that could.
The Hebrew word for this basket, tevah (תֵּבָה), appears in only one other story in the Bible, the story of Noah. When God told Noah to build the ark, He gave him a specific instruction: “cover it inside and out with pitch” (Gen. 6:14). A wooden boat will float, but without pitch the water slowly works its way through every joint until the boat goes down. The ark was never meant to keep Noah away from the flood. It was meant to keep the flood out of the ark.
Moses’ mother did the same thing on a smaller scale. She could not keep her son out of the Nile, so she sealed the basket against it.
Throughout Scripture, deep and rising waters often picture the danger of a world that has turned away from God. On His last night with His disciples, Jesus prayed for them this way.
I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.— John 17:15
Our children will be in the water too. Our part is to help seal their basket so the water does not get in.
For the people we love, the basket is God’s Word. It is woven a reed at a time, through years of reading Scripture together, answering hard questions from the Bible, and praying with them. A loosely woven basket looks fine on the riverbank. Its weakness shows only in the current. Faith built on a few half-remembered verses can look solid at home and start taking on water in the first year away.
So this weaving cannot be rushed or left half finished. Every time we open the Bible with our children, or with anyone we are raising in faith, we are sealing a seam before the water reaches it.
The same is true for us. We are already on the water ourselves, and the world presses against our seams every day. We can ask ourselves the same question: Is our basket tightly woven, and where has the water been seeping in?
Scripture shows one more way to go under. One night Peter stepped out of the boat and walked on the sea toward Jesus. Then he noticed the storm around him and was afraid, and “beginning to sink he cried out, ‘Lord, save me’” (Matt. 14:30).
The wind had been blowing the whole time. What changed was where Peter was looking: while his eyes were on Jesus, the water held him up.
The basket and where we look belong together. The Word we weave into our children, and into ourselves, keeps pointing us back to Jesus. When the wind rises, the verses we have read again and again are what turn our eyes back to Him.
Moses’ mother had one thing she could give her son before the river took him. She gave him a basket sealed with care, and it carried him where she could not go.
If we had to let our children go tomorrow, the best gift we could give them is a basket woven from God’s Word. It keeps the world from seeping in, and it keeps turning their eyes toward Jesus. We need the same gift ourselves. The weaving can start today.
Next time: the basket is in the reeds, and the mother can do nothing more. We’ll look at who God had waiting at the river.
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