NOTES for Exo 2:1-25
The life of Moses could have served as the basis for an adventure novel. The policy carried out by the Egyptian authorities toward the Semites of the delta condemned him to death before he was even born, and only by a miracle and through his mother's efforts did he remain alive (vv. 2-3). The only chance to save the boy was to place him in an Egyptian family, which is exactly what was done (vv. 3-10).
Of course, a child who grew up in an Egyptian family and received an Egyptian education was meant to become an Egyptian regardless of what blood flowed in his veins. But he spent the first several years of his life with his own mother (vv. 9-10); in those days in Egypt it was customary to leave a boy with his mother or nurse until the age of five, when it was time to go to school. And in those five years Moses had to absorb the language and traditions of his own tribe, and he did not forget them afterward.
Many years later, when he found himself in the places of his own people and saw an Egyptian overseer punishing one of the men working on a public construction project, he stood up for the man being punished, perhaps even unexpectedly to himself (vv. 11-12). But even if this killing was partly unexpected for Moses himself, his attempt to intervene in a fight and separate his fighting kinsmen was a fully deliberate act (vv. 13-14). The tragedy of the situation was that Moses wanted to be one of his own among his kinsmen and wanted to help them in every way he could, while his kinsmen considered him an outsider: Moses had grown up in an Egyptian household, had received an Egyptian education, and therefore in their eyes he was an "Egyptian" who had come from far away to look at the life of his kinsmen, a life to which he had long had no connection and in which he therefore understood nothing. Of course, the time would come when God would use this "Egyptian" for the good of his own kinsmen, and would use him in a way that neither they nor he himself could have imagined.
But for the moment he had to flee: Egyptian law punished murder severely, and Moses could face, at best, forced labor in the quarries and, at worst, execution. So he decided to flee into the wilderness, as many before him had fled from Pharaoh's anger (v. 15). For such a fugitive, if he did not die of thirst in the wilderness, there remained the possibility of settling somewhere in an oasis as a guest of some nomadic tribe and waiting for Pharaoh's death. When his successor came to the throne, one could count on an amnesty or on the case being closed because the crime was too old. Moses found refuge with the tribe of Midian, became a welcome guest there, and then a relative (vv. 16-22).
So Moses, born a Hebrew and raised as an Egyptian, became a man of the wilderness. And God began to act, carrying out His plan (vv. 23-25).