JOCHEBED
(Jochʹe·bed) [Jehovah is glory].
A daughter of Levi who married Amram of the same tribe and became the mother of Miriam, Aaron and Moses. (Ex. 6:20; Num. 26:59) Jochebed was a woman of faith and trust in her God Jehovah. In defiance of Pharaoh’s decree she refused to kill her baby later named Moses, and after three months, when he could no longer be concealed in the house, she placed him in an ark of papyrus and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. Pharaoh’s daughter found the baby and claimed him for herself, but, as it worked out, Moses’ own mother was asked to nurse him. As the child grew, Jochebed, together with her husband, was very diligent to teach her children the principles of pure worship, as reflected in their later lives.—Ex. 2:1-10.
According to the Masoretic text, Jochebed was the sister of Amram’s father Kohath; that is to say, Amram married his aunt which was not unlawful at the time. (Ex. 6:18, 20) However, some scholars believe that Jochebed was Amram’s cousin rather than his aunt, for the Septuagint so reads, conveying the same idea as the Syriac Peshitta and Jewish traditions. For example, Exodus 6:20 reads in part: “Jochabed the daughter of his father’s brother.” (LXX, Bagster) “Amram took his uncle’s daughter Jokhaber.” (La) “When Amram married he took his cousin Jokabad.” (Fn) “Amram married a kinswoman of his called Jochabed.” (Kx) A footnote of Rotherham on the expression “his father’s sister” says: “Prob[ably] merely a female member of his father’s family.” Thomas Scott in his Commentary says: “According to the Septuagint and the Jewish traditions, Jochebed was cousin, not aunt to Amram.” “The best critics suppose that Jochebed was the cousin-german of Amram, and not his aunt.” (Clarke’s Commentary) When Numbers 26:59 says Jochebed was “Levi’s daughter,” it could mean “granddaughter,” as in so many other places in the Scriptures where “son” is used to denote a “grandson.” Fenton comments that the expression ‘born to Levi’ in this same verse, “in the Hebrew idiom of language, does not mean to Levi personally, but simply a descendant of the Tribe. The length of time makes it impossible for her to have been Levi’s personal child.”
If, on the other hand, the Masoretic text is correct at Exodus 6:20 (backed up as it is by the Samaritan Pentateuch, Vulgate and various manuscripts), and Jochebed was indeed Amram’s aunt and not his cousin, then the knotty problems of chronology that result may be resolved in the following manner:
Leah married Jacob in 1774 B.C.E., and her third child Levi was born about 1771. (Gen. 29:21-23, 32-34) At the time Levi entered Egypt in 1728, he was probably forty-three years old, and had three sons, one of whom was Kohath. (Gen. 46:8, 11) Levi’s wife could have been as young as fifteen at the time. In 1634 Levi died at the age of 137 (Ex. 6:16), and he could have fathered Jochebed perhaps ten or twenty years before his death. If Jochebed was born ten years before her father’s death, or in 1644, she would have been only fifty-one years old when Moses was born in 1593. (At the time of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, 1513, Moses was eighty years old.—Acts 7:23, 30) But what about Jochebed’s mother? If she was also Kohath’s mother and at least fifteen years old when entering Egypt, then in 1644, the possible year of Jochebed’s birth, she would have been ninety-nine years old, far beyond the age of childbearing. (Sarah had stopped menstruating by the time she was eighty-nine.—Gen. 17:17; 18:11) So, granting the possibility that Jochebed’s father was Levi, her mother must have been someone younger than Kohath’s mother. In this case Jochebed, though only a half sister to Kohath, would have been an aunt to Amram.