... Josephus provides a sketch of a childhood challenge to Moses, says that “he was educated with the utmost care” (Jewish Antiquities 2.233-35), and provides an extensive recital of Moses’ adult activities before his encounter with his countrymen (Jewish Antiquities 2.238-53). Philo pays particular attention, as we might expect, to Moses’ education, stressing that he was instructed by Greek, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian teachers, and that he progressed especially in moral virtue (Life of Moses 1.21-31). Such cultural assimilation is opposed by Jubilees 47.9, which insists that “Amran, [his] father, taught [him] writing” and says nothing further of Moses’ education at Pharaoh’s court. Similarly, Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities 9.16 says that Moses’ mother maintained his Hebrew name of Melchiel. Cultural competition reaches a climax in Artapanus’s On the Jews (fragment 3 Charlesworth), which makes Moses himself the teacher of Orpheus and the source of everything worthwhile in Egyptian culture. Stephen’s version again hits a middle point between these extremes: “he was educated in all Egyptian wisdom” (7:22). ...

... So, the writer explains that, far from spending most of his early years in the royal court and being surrounded by its influences, Amram served as Moses’s teacher and, like a good father in Jubilees, he instructed him in writing. The father–son pair Amram and Moses repeat the practice attested for Terah and Abram (11:16), and Moses joins the line of illustrious ancestors who were literate and contributed to a written tradition: Enoch (4:17-18), Noah (10:13-14), Abraham (11:16; 12:25-27; 21:10), and Jacob (19:14; 32:24-26; 45:16). It was after twenty-one years—not after he was weaned—that Amram brought Moses to the court for a more lasting stay; as a result Moses’s upbringing and education came from his own family, not from Tarmuth or any other Egyptian. He was a mature and fully educated man when he arrived in Tarmuth’s world. Moses then spent the next twenty-one-years in the palace. ...