Who is Bithiah? Pharaoh's daughter is referred to as Bithiah, and she is the daughter of Ramesses I, the founding pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, and sister to his successor, Seti I. She is portrayed as a young widow, childless. Though some variations of her story exist, the general consensus among Jews, Christians, and Muslims is that she is the adoptive mother of the prophet Moses. In the Judeo-Christian narrative, Pharaoh's daughter first appears in the Book of Exodus, in Exodus 2:5-10. The passage describes her discovery of the Hebrew child, Moses, in the rushes of the Nile River and her willful defiance of her father's orders that all male Hebrew children be slain, instead taking the child, whom she knows to be a Hebrew, and raising him as her own son. Pharaoh's daughter, was having suffered from a skin disease. The pain of which only the cold waters of the Nile could relieve, and that these lesions healed when she found Moses. Rabbinic literature describes an encounter with the archangel Gabriel, who kills two of her handmaidens for trying to dissuade her from rescuing Moses. After Moses is weaned, Pharaoh's daughter gives him his name, purportedly taken from the word māšāh (Hebrew: meaning "to draw")because she drew him from the water, In her later years, Pharaoh's daughter devotes herself to Moses, and to Yahweh; she celebrates the first Passover Seder with Moses in the slaves' quarters and for that, her firstborn is the only Egyptian to survive the final of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and leaves Egypt with him for the Promised Land. In the Books of Chronicles, (1 Chronicles 4:18), she is said to have married a member of the Tribe of Judah, Mered, and to have had children with him, and she is referred to as a Jewess, indicating that she had accepted Yahweh as her own God.
