Toward the end of the Book of Genesis, the Hebrews are described as guest workers in Egypt. They migrated after a drought caused a food shortage in Canaan, where they had previously resided. The Bible tells us they are initially hosted and tolerated, but at the outset of the Book of Exodus, Pharaoh realizes that they are multiplying uncontrollably. He is worried about the potential that the Hebrews may come to outnumber the Egyptians. He therefore perceives the demographic threat of multiplying foreigners as a security threat. He takes this threat as a license to employ exceptional measures against them: “Come, let us deal wisely with them, or else they will multiply and in the event of war, they will also join themselves to those who hate us.” The “wise” policies that Pharaoh devises are initially enslavement and then the systematized killing of the newborn males.

The Exodus is of course one of the most important myths of political beginning, but its constitutive moment is not at Mount Sinai, as philosophical commentary has almost invariably assumed. Politics and the constitution of law start shortly after Moses is born.

Moses's mother, Jochebed, initially hides him from slavery and infanticide. At the age of three months, she sets her baby adrift in the Nile: “And when she could no longer hide him she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.” Miryam, Moses's sister, overlooked the river from afar, waiting to witness what would become of the drifting baby. The positioning illustrates that a risk is involved and that the baby's fate is yet unclear.

Jochebed's decision to expose her boy to danger is almost impossible to imagine outside of conditions of nightmarish persecution. Importantly, however, this danger is not justified in the context of sacrifice for something greater than life. To the contrary: while Jochebed's calculated risk is made in dire circumstances, it is ultimately meant to secure individual survival for her boy. Jochebed makes a decision after which she may suffer the most terrible form of loss.