Bulrush

The bulrush — the papyrus reed of the Nile — appears in three settings: as the woven material of the basket that carried the infant Moses, as the hull of the swift papyrus boats Cush sent across the sea, and as a figure for the bowed head in fasting.

The basket on the river

The Mosaic narrative opens with a mother's shipwright work. When the law of Pharaoh threatens the child she has hidden three months, she turns to the river-reeds for the vessel: "And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with bitumen and with pitch; and she put the child in it, and laid it in the flags by the river's brink" (Ex 2:3). The bulrush construction is the same papyrus craft that floats Egyptian ferries, sealed against water with bitumen and resin.

Vessels of papyrus on the waters

Isaiah's oracle on Cush sees the same craft as a vehicle of long-distance diplomacy. The land "sends ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of papyrus on the waters, [saying,] Go, you⁺ swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth, to a people awesome from their beginning onward, a nation that metes out and treads down, whose land the rivers divide!" (Is 18:2). Papyrus boats are pictured as the standard rapid messenger-vessel of the Nile and the rivers it feeds.

The bowed head as a rush

The third use is figurative, in Isaiah's polemic against an empty fast. Yahweh contrasts the outward posture with the fast he chooses: "Is such the fast that I have chosen? The day for man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head as a rush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and an acceptable day to Yahweh?" (Is 58:5). The reed bent at its head, drooping above the water, becomes the picture of self-display in fasting — bodily posture without justice.