Out of the Waters: Adoption as Giving Birth

I had never really noticed how much creation imagery there is in the beginning of the book of Exodus.  It is especially apparent when you read it in the Hebrew.  The book begins with a description of how "fruitful" the sons of Israel were.  It says, "The sons of Israel were fruitful, they swarmed, they multiplied, they became very much exceedingly numerous, and the land was filled with them" (1:7).  This echoes Genesis 1, where, when God creates humans, he tells them to "be fruitful and multiply" and to "fill the earth."  I am reminded of my cousin who has five kids and wants to buy a six acre property to fill it with her children and, one day, grandchildren.  But even more than her, this family was bursting at the seams, obeying God's call to continue the process of creating new life.

After I gave birth to my daughter, I remember thinking that I could never adopt a child, because I needed those maternal hormones released at birth and through nursing in order to care for this child round the clock.  I read Exodus chapter 2, and I greatly empathized with the mother there.  She conceived, she gave birth to a son, and "she saw that he was good."  Again, this echoes Genesis 1, where, after creating each of the things God created, "he saw that they were good."  When I saw my daughter, the overflowing sense of how wonderful, how beautiful, how precious she was took over every piece of my being.  I very powerfully "saw that she was good," and I was set to protect her.  In Exodus 2, this mother, though, was faced with the promise of immanent death for her child.  Because, even thought is God's good desire for continued creation, there are forces in the world that desire to kill, to demolish, to enslave and make life bitter for the good creations, as seen in this story through Pharaoh (Exodus 1:8-22).  And so this mother placed her new, good, beloved creation into a basket made with the materials of her slavery and placed him in the waters.  In the ancient world in which this story was written, waters often symbolize chaos and death.  The Bible begins in Genesis 1 in an uncreated universe in which there is nothing but waters, nothing but chaos.  But God's spirit hovers above this uncreated, watery, chaotic void, and speaks order, presence, creation into existence.  So in this story, the forces of destruction call for the drowning of all sons in the river (Exodus 1:22), the uncreating of them, the return to chaotic nothingness.  

In our world, there are mothers and children who experience this everyday.  Out of the water of the womb comes a new, created, good life, but there are forces in the world which make it impossible for the mother to nourish that life.  But she cannot bear to surrender this little creation to those forces.  And so, though she must depart from him and place him back in the waters, she puts him in a basket with hope, because she, his mother, cannot bring herself to drown him.

The story doesn't end there.  A rich woman from another culture, a safe woman, Pharaoh's daughter of all people, finds the basket, opens it, and when she sees the child, "she is filled with compassion."  She draws the baby up out of the waters, out of the river of death, and he becomes her son.  Twice now he has been drawn out of the waters.  First out of the waters of his mother's womb and into existence.  And now out of the no less real waters of death and into the safe arms of his adopted mother.  Her compassion gives him new life.  And with this life, God delivers all of his family in the remainder of the book.

So now I see adoption differently.  And I see creation differently.  God's call to "fill the earth" with new little creations is not just a call at the beginning of Genesis to populate the planet.  It is also a call to work against the forces of the watery chaos that seek to destroy the good creations that which God makes.  It is a call to obey that impulse of deep compassion, like Pharaoh's daughter, that God puts inside of us when we a baby, a child, a teenager, a young adult, a co-worker, an elderly widow within the waters of death, to draw them out of the waters and, in so doing, give birth to new life.