Miriam מרים הנביאה

Miriam was born around 2362, in the worst years of the bondage; her name is linked to the word for bitterness. Midrash says that as a girl she prophesied that her mother would bear Israel's saviour, and made her father take back the wife he had divorced over Pharaoh's decree.

She stands by the river "at a distance, to know what would happen to him", and at the right moment offers Pharaoh's daughter a nurse. The Talmud identifies her with Puah, the midwife who with Yocheved kept Hebrew infants alive.

After the splitting of the sea she takes a timbrel and leads the women: "Sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted." The sages note that the women brought timbrels out of Egypt—they expected a miracle.

One episode darkens her life: her words about Moshe's wife, for which she spends seven days outside the camp while all Israel waits.

Tradition says the well that followed Israel through the desert was given in her merit: she died on 10 Nisan 2487, and the water vanished at once.

It is worth knowing that her birth year is a computation and not a date. Seder Olam (ch. 3) derives it from the name itself: the servitude lasted "not less than eighty-seven years, the years of Miriam"—that is, she was born when it began, and is named from mar, bitterness. The printed text there reads פ"ז, eighty-seven: on that reading she is seven years older than Moses and was born in 2361. The common "six years older" gives 2362, which is what stands here. Of her age at death the Torah says nothing at all: the familiar "125" is a subtraction, and it depends on which of the two counts one takes.