A House Filled with Light: The Birth of Moses in Late Antique Contexts

Abstract

In a homiletic cluster expounding upon the first two chapters of Exodus, Bavli Sotah 12a–b includes a tradition describing light filling the house upon Moses’s birth. While this appears to be a standard trope of the heroic nativity, this motif is uncommon. It is found only in Second Temple accounts of Noah’s birth, and in depictions of the birth of Zoroaster and apocryphal infancy gospels that were popular among Syriac Christians (and later concerning the birth of Muhammed). After examining the textual evidence pointing to the uniquely Babylonian provenance of this talmudic tradition, I explore the variations on the motif in these other birth narratives. I argue that these similarities suggest a desire on the part of the rabbis to depict the focal hero of the rabbinic imagination in cosmological and even divine terms similar to those of competing religions, though it deviates from the usual midrashic depictions of Moses.