What Does Exodus 2:10 Mean?
And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses, the one drawn out, and she said, Because from the waters I drew him out.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.THE KEY
Moses’s name keeps his rescue inside it: the one drawn out becomes a passage through which a people come out.
THE MEANING
The child is named for the act that brings him out: “I drew him out.” For you now, what nearly engulfs you need not become the name you carry; the drawing out can become part of your story. Rescue can become a passage through which another life is brought clear.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that what nearly swallowed you gets to name you dissolves here: the name remembers the drawing out.
THE ROOT
מְשִׁיתִהוּ
mĕšîtihû
GROWS FROM
משׁה
m-sh-h
To draw out.
“Moses, the one drawn out” in this verse is mĕšîtihû. The Hebrew verb מְשִׁיתִהוּ (mĕšîtihû, “I drew him out”) and the name מֹשֶׁה (Mōšeh, “Moses”) share the root משׁה (m-sh-h). The name carries the motion of the rescue; Psalm 18:16 uses the same root when its speaker says, “he drew me out of many waters.”
ALSO GROWS
Mōšeh: Moses; the name linked here to “I drew him out.”
מֹשֶׁה
His name preserves the rescue as part of his nature.
wayyimšēnî: “And he drew me out,” in Psalm 18:16.
וַיִּמְשֵׁנִי
The same root names rescue from many waters, opening this single deliverance into a recurring image.
THE PATTERN
Deliverance turns waters that threaten to engulf life into a threshold from which life emerges.
He stretches out from the height, takes hold of me, and draws me out of many waters.And the LORD delivered Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the lip of the sea.who once refused to yield, while the slowness to heat of God waited in the days of Noah, as the ark was being built, in which few, eight living souls, were delivered through water.THE THREAD
He stretches out from the height, takes hold of me, and draws me out of many waters.Exodus 2:10 and Psalm 18:16 share the Hebrew root משׁה (m-sh-h), “to draw out.” Here the name Moses holds the motion of rescue; the psalm gives that same motion a first-person voice: “he drew me out.”
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