What was the name of the Egyptian princess who pulled Moses out of the river?
The Midrash says that Bisyah the daughter of Pharaoh, mentioned in 1 Chron. 4:18, was the princess who rescued Moses. The Talmud in Megillah 13a calls her Yehudiyah (see 1 Chron.4:19); and Josephus (II:9:5) and Jubilees (Ch.47) give her name as Thermutis. None of these sources gives the name of her father the Pharaoh; it may have been Malol (see Ginsburg, Legends of the Jews, 2:246). The fact that 1 Chron.4:17-18 speaks about “Bisiah the daughter of Pharaoh” and about “his Jewish wife” suggests that the two women were Moses’ adoptive mother and his real mother, and led the Rabbis to interpret the names of the children of the Jewish wife as names that could be applied to Moses.
