Miriam is one of the tradition's recovered figures, and the recovery is recent enough to watch. The text gives her three moments: watching the basket in the reeds, leading the women with a timbrel after the sea, and being struck with a skin disease for criticising Moses over his wife — a punishment Aaron shares in the speech and not in the consequence, which Jewish feminists have been pointing out since the 1970s. The rabbis added a great deal: the well of Miriam that travelled with the camp and vanished at her death, and a place among the seven prophetesses. Miriam's cup, filled with water and set beside Elijah's wine at the seder, was invented in Boston in the 1980s and spread with unusual speed through Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist households; a smaller number of Orthodox families use it. Nobody pretends it is ancient, which is part of why it works — the tradition has always added, and rarely admitted it.