[71] Muslims say that Pharaoh’s seven daughters were all
        lepers, and that Bathia’s sisters, as well as herself,
        were cured through her saving the infant Moses.

According to the Hebrew traditionists, nine human beings entered Paradise without having tasted of death, viz.:  Enoch; Messiah; Elias; Eliezer, the servant of Abraham; the servant of the king of Kush; Hiram, king of Tyre; Jaabez, the son of the Prince, and the Rabbi, Juda; Serach, the daughter of Asher; and Bathia, the daughter of Pharaoh.

The last of the race of genuine Dublin ballad-singers, who rejoiced in the nom de guerre of “Zozimus” (ob. 1846), used to edify his street patrons with a slightly different reading of the romantic story of the finding of Moses in the bulrushes, which has the merit of striking originality, to say the least: 

In Egypt’s land, upon the banks of Nile, King Pharaoh’s daughter went to bathe in style; She tuk her dip, then went unto the land, And, to dry her royal pelt, she ran along the strand.  A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw A smiling babby in a wad of straw; She tuk it up, and said, in accents mild, “Tare an’ agers, gyurls, which av yez owns this child?”

The story of the finding of Moses has its parallels in almost every country—­in the Greek and Roman legends of Perseus, Cyrus, and Romulus—­in Indian, Persian, and Arabian tales—­and a Babylonian analogue is given, as follows, by the Rev. A. H. Sayce, in the Folk-Lore Journal for 1883:  “Sargon, the mighty monarch, the king of Agane, am I. My mother was a princess; my father I knew not.  My father’s brother loved the mountain land.  In the city of Azipiranu, which on the bank of the Euphrates lies, my mother, the princess, conceived me; in an inacessible spot she brought me forth.  She placed me in a basket of rushes; with bitumen the door of my ark she closed.  She launched me on the river, which drowned me not.  The river bore me along; to Akki, the irrigator, it brought me.  Akki, the irrigator, in the tenderness of his heart, lifted me up.  Then Akki, the irrigator, as his gardener appointed me, and in my gardenership the goddess Istar loved me.  For forty-five years the kingdom I have ruled, and the black-headed (Akkadian) race have governed.”

Of the childhood of Moses a curious story is told to account for his being in after life “slow of speech and slow of tongue”:  Pharaoh was one day seated in his banqueting hall, with his queen at his right hand and Bathia at his left, and around him were his two sons, Bi’lam, the chief soothsayer, and other dignitaries of his court, when he took little Moses (then three years old) upon his knee, and began to fondle him.  The Hebrew urchin stretched forth his hand and took the kingly crown from Pharaoh’s brow and deliberately placed it upon his own head.  To the monarch and his courtiers this action of the