Moses and Jesus: the birth of the Savior

Judaism, Wntr, 1993 by Allan Kensky

There is one feature of the birth of Jesus which seems to have no antecedent in the Moses accounts: the idea of the virgin conception. It is commonly believed that "there was no Jewish expectation that the Messiah would be God's son in the sense of having been conceived without a male parent."(5) Traces of such an idea can, however, be found, and it is possible that there was at some point a legend about the supernatural conception of Moses, a legend that was later suppressed because of its similarities to the Jesus story.

The idea of supernatural conception is not totally alien to the history of Judaism. The idea may be found in Philo, who states (On the Cherubim, 40-48), that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses are not represented by the lawgiver as having known a woman. Sarah, according to Philo, conceived when God visited her in her solitude. Leah's womb was opened by God, not by her husband. Similarly, Moses, when he took Zipporah, found her pregnant through "no mortal agency," and Tamar and Hannah both received divine seed. Philo cautions his readers that these thoughts are "holy mysteries." Given the complexity of Philo's allegory, some have questioned whether he was really expressing a belief in a Divine conception.(6) Goodenough feeds that Philo was, indeed, expressing such a belief, and that his De Isaaca may have been suppressed (and lost) because of uncanny similarities with the birth and resurrection of Jesus.(7)

There may be a rabbinic text referring to the birth of the Messiah through an unusual seed. In Genesis Rabbah 23, in the comment on the verse (Gen. 4:25) "And she called his name Seth because God has appointed me another seed (zera aher)," Rabbi Tanhuma explained it in the name of Samuel Kuzit as referring to that seed which comes from another place (mi'makom aher), and that is the king Messiah. This line is found again in Genesis Rabbah 51 and in Ruth Rabbah, 8,1. This midrash was cited by some Christians in their disputations with Jews during the Middle Ages.(8) Traditional Jewish interpreters took these statements to refer to the fact that the Messiah is descended from Ruth, who is of a strange seed, namely Moab, who was not to enter into the congregation of Israel. This interpretation, however, seems somewhat strained. The original sense of the text may have been that the Messiah was to have an unusual conception, and the idea that Moab was the strange seed may have been a secondary interpretation coming from a time when Jews wished to disassociate themselves from ideas that seemed too Christian.

There are two possible hints in Jewish literature that the conception of Moses may have been somewhat unusual. There is a strange line in the core portion of the Passover Haggadah, in the Midrashic explication of the credo of Deut. 26, universally recognized as being very old, possibly pre-Maccabean.(9) Deut. 26:7 reads, "And God saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression." The Haggadah explains "our affliction" as abstention from sexual intercourse, and gives as its proof-text Ex. 2:25, "And God saw the children of Israel and God knew." There is no difficulty in understanding how "affliction" was associated with sexual abstinence, for, as pointed out by David Daube, the verb "to afflict" is used in passages enjoining fasting on the Day of Atonement, and the rabbis understood such fasting as including abstaining from marital relations. The association of Ex. 2:25 with this idea is much more difficult. Daube suggests that the Midrash would then be that God saw the Israelites' abstinence from sexual intercourse and, since natural propagation was impossible, God intervened, and the women, or perhaps only the mother of Moses, conceived from God.(10)