על חיי משה, ספר א ג׳On the Life of Moses, Book I 3
א׳
1[8] He was brought up as a prince, a promotion due to the following cause. As the nation of the newcomers was constantly growing more numerous, the king of the country, fearing that the settlers, thus increasing, might shew their superiority by contesting the chief power with the original inhabitants, contrived a most iniquitous scheme to deprive them of their strength. He gave orders to rear the female infants, since her natural weakness makes a woman inactive in war, but to put the males to death, to prevent their number increasing throughout the cities; for a flourishing male population is a coign of vantage to an aggressor which cannot easily be taken or destroyed.
ב׳
2[9] Now, the child from his birth had an appearance of more than ordinary goodliness, so that his parents as long as they could actually set at nought the proclamations of the despot. In fact we are told that, unknown to all but few, he was kept at home and fed from his mother’s breast for three successive months.
ג׳
3[10] But, since, as is often the case under a monarch, there were persons prying into holes and corners, ever eager to carry some new report to the king, his parents in their fear that their efforts to save one would but cause a larger number, namely themselves, to perish with him, exposed him with tears on the banks of the river, and departed groaning. They pitied themselves being forced, as they said in their self-reproach, to be the murderers of their own child, and they pitied him too, left to perish in this unnatural way.
ד׳
4[11] Then, as was natural in so strangely cruel a situation, they began to accuse themselves of having made bad worse. “Why did we not cast him away,” they said, “directly he was born? The child who has not survived to enjoy a kind nurture is not usually reckoned as a human being. But we meddlers actually nurtured him for three whole months, thus procuring more abundant affliction for ourselves and torture for him, only that when he was fully capable of feeling pleasure and pain he should perish conscious of the increased misery of his sufferings.”