No better compliment could have been paid Jochebed than the fact that in that corrupt, magnificent, heathen court she was able to do her work so well. Her son’s flawless choice of the Divine will made him the greatest man, the Son of God excepted, ever veiled in human flesh. That was the best possible sign and seal of her capability and faithfulness.
When her child had passed beyond the years of childhood, and, as a nurse, could no longer retain him, “she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter,” and Thonoris, with almost infinite care, completed the boy’s education by instructing him in all the wisdom of Egypt; hence Moses was prepared both negatively and positively for his life work. Positively by his great-hearted mother, Jochebed; negatively by the Egyptian princess Thonoris, thereby, by her own hand, brought up the deliverer and avenger of the oppressed Israelites.
At this point Jochebed is lost to view. She drops out of history, and nothing more is known of her. Hers emphatically was a work of faith, for in all probability she died while Moses was under discipline in the land of Midian. Her people, for whom she had wrought so heroically, were still serving “with rigor” in building for Pharaoh the “treasure cities Pithom and Raamses.” The son from whom she had hoped so much as the crown prince of the land was in exile in the back side of the desert; yet her faith held steady as she said with her parting breath, “God will deliver His people. He saved Moses from the wrath of Pharaoh and from the reptiles of the Nile; He will yet bring him back to lead Israel out of this cruel bondage.”
How many a mother has gone down to her grave in sorrow without realizing the fruit of her toil, perhaps broken-hearted, as Jochebed may have done, when she saw her son hastening into the desert to escape the vengeance which would surely have overtaken him for smiting the Egyptian. Doubtless she never again saw his face, and may have wondered to what purpose was all her labor. It is difficult to conceive of a grander purpose in motherhood than that of sending out into the world young men spiritually, morally and physically healthy, with correct principles and holy purposes; and it is one of the saddest spectacles in life when these preparations are cast aside by ungrateful or wayward acts. All human help is vain, her sorrow and her anguish are too deep to be reached by sympathy. God alone is her refuge. She is often at the throne of grace with strong cries and tears, and with a faith that will not shrink. Doubtless such were the last days of the brave, the courageous, the heroic Jochebed, as she saw the form of her beloved Moses disappear in the desert of Midian. But God honored her faith as no woman’s faith had ever been honored in the life and works of Moses, the great law-giver, and leader of Israel’s hosts out of the land of bondage.
“Faithful, O Lord, Thy mercies are,
A rock that can not move:
A thousand promises declare
Thy constancy of love.”
But though Moses had fled from the face of Pharaoh because, in his effort to defend a Hebrew who was being smitten by an Egyptian, slew the oppressor, he had not gone into the land of Midian so far but His eye followed the young refugee.
Away in the south-eastern part of Arabia, toward the close of what we may well believe to have been a long day’s travel through the burning sand of that arid country, the young refugee sat down under the grateful shade of a cluster of palm trees that flourished by the side of a well. As he sat there resting, possibly quite homesick, the daughters of Jethro, a Midianite sheik and priest, came with their father’s flock to the well to water them. The fact that it took seven of these daughters to lead the flock to the well, shows that the Midianite was wealthy. These maidens lowered their buckets into the well and then drew them up brimming full of water, and poured it out into the stone troughs. They did this again and again, while Moses was a silent observer. It does not appear that he in any way interrupted the work.