Moses’s name means literally “drawn from water.” When Pharaoh’s daughter found him floating in a basket on the river, she named him Moses, saying “Because I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10).
Why was he in the water in the first place? Because her father had commanded that all male Hebrew babies be “cast into the river” (Exodus 1:22). He didn’t mean “floating in baskets,” of course. Moses’s mother took some creative liberties in fulfilling that commandment! Still, an infant alone in the water was in peril, and Moses’s adopted mother rescued him by pulling him out.
Moses would later rescue all of the children of Israel from slavery, leading them through the waters of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21-22). As they emerged on the other side, Moses had literally fulfilled the promise of his name, drawing them safely from the water.
The apostle Paul saw baptism in this miraculous event. “All our fathers…passed through the sea,” he wrote, “and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Corinthians 10:1-2). Moses, in effect, baptized an entire nation by leading them safely through a large body of water.
Jesus explained to the Nephites and the Lamanites that emerging from water is an essential component of baptism:
Ye shall go down and stand in the water, and in my name shall ye baptize them. …
And then shall ye immerse them in the water, and come forth again out of the water.
3 Nephi 11:23, 26
The Church Handbook is even more precise. The final instruction specifies that the priesthood holder who performs the baptism “helps the person to come up out of the water” (General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 18.7.7).
A friend of mine was presiding at a baptismal service and observed something unusual. The person performing the baptism followed all of the other steps of the ordinance correctly, but after immersing the other person in the water, simply let go, leaving them to raise themselves from the water. That didn’t seem right to my friend, and after the service, he invited them to perform the ordinance again, so that the person being baptized could be lifted from the water. My friend recognized that this is an essential part of the ordinance. We don’t baptize ourselves. We are lifted up. We are drawn from water, just as Moses was and just as the children of Israel were.
The Hebrew verb mashah (מָשָׁה), from which Moses’s name is derived, only appears three times in the Old Testament. One of those is this passage from the book of Psalms:
In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears. …
He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters.
Psalm 18:6, 16
It is God who rescues us from the deep waters of life. Just as Pharaoh’s daughter pulled the baby Moses from the river, and just as we are physically lifted from the water when we are baptized, God draws us from the trials which inundate us.
Today, I will remember and be grateful for the symbolism in Moses’s name. I will trust that God will draw me from whatever water I may be immersed in.
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