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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 836 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
The Abandoned Child is a Basket Case - Wisdom Wednesday


Wisdom-Trek Podcast Script - Day 836

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Hello, my friend, and welcome to Wisdom-Trek! I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your Guide to Wisdom and Creating a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us for our five days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. Today is Day 836 of our Trek, and it is Wisdom Wednesday.  The past several months on Wednesday we have been focusing on interpreting current events through a Biblical Worldview.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is important that you also have a proper understanding of God’s Word.  Especially in our western cultures, we do not fully understand the Scriptures from the mindset and culture of the authors.  In order help us all have a better understanding of Gods Word we are investing the next several months on Wednesday reviewing a series of essays from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars Dr. Micheal S. Heiser which he has compiled into a book titled  ’I Dare You Not to Bore Me With the Bible.’

We are broadcasting from our studio at ‘The Big House’ in Marietta, OH.   Being abandoned as a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. That can include both physical and emotional abandonment.  It would make most of us a basket case as adults.  As we continue to explore the Old Testament from the timeframe and culture in which it was written, the topic of our essay today is:
The Abandoned Child is a Basket Case
In modern stories, people destined for greatness rarely start off privileged. They are dropped off at the doorstep of an orphanage or abandoned in the rain. This literary motif goes back to ancient stories, where writers use the abandoned child theme to identify a character that rises from obscurity to privileged hero status. It’s a motif found in the biblical account of Moses’ birth. But is that really the whole story?

Moses’ story begins when Pharaoh feels threatened by the growing Hebrew population in Egypt and commands that all Hebrew male infants be killed.  This narrative is found in Exodus 1:16-22.  Moses' mother hides her newborn son for three months and then devises a risky but calculated plan: She sets him adrift on the Nile in a small basket made of papyrus reeds, waterproofed with tar and pitch.  Exodus 2:1-3 About this time, a man, and woman from the tribe of Levi got married.   The woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She saw that he was a special baby and kept him hidden for three months.  But when she could no longer hide him, she got a basket made of papyrus reeds and waterproofed it with tar and pitch. She put the baby in the basket and laid it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile River.Moses’ older sister, Miriam, watches as the basket floats to where the daughter of Pharaoh bathes. God uses these circumstances to bring Moses under the protection of Egypt's ruler.  Exodus 2:4-10.

Ancient literature outside the Bible attests to several stories in which a child, perceived as a threat by an enemy, is abandoned and later spared by divine intervention or otherworldly circumstance. Roughly 30 stories like this survive from the literature of ancient Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greece, Egypt, Rome, and India.

The Mesopotamian work known as the Sargon Birth Legend offers the most striking parallels to the biblical story. It relates the birth story of Sargon the Great, an Akkadian emperor who ruled a number of Sumerian city-states around 2000 BC, centuries before the time of Moses. The infant boy is born into great peril: His mother is a high priestess, and he is illegitimate. Consequently, his mother sets him adrift on a river in a reed basket.