Moses and Jethro

     The standard telling goes like this: Moses kills an Egyptian, flees to the desert, and carries the knowledge of the True God to the backward nomads he encounters. It's a nice story. It's also backwards.

Answer me this: How did Moses know the One True God? 

He was raised in Pharaoh's palace, steeped in Egyptian polytheism. The Hebrews had been in Egypt for generations. So long that they'd been thoroughly assimilated into Egyptian culture. They might have retained folk memories of "the God of our fathers," but four centuries of brick-making doesn't preserve theological precision. If Moses had identified as Hebrew, he would have fled toward his people after killing that Egyptian. Instead, he ran into the wilderness not as a missionary, but as a refugee who would become a student.

      A detail that is often overlooked, or sped through because it seems of little importance, is the fact that Abraham had other children. After Sarah's death, Abraham remarries Keturah and fathers more sons. Most may think this is insignificant due to the fact that Sarah is dead, the main story is over, Isaac has been preserved, the line of Israel is what is important. This is just a quick little note that Abraham lived a bit longer and here is proof. The standard interpretation treats this like Abraham cleans house by sending these sons away. An attempt to keep Isaac's bloodline pure, just like he did with Ishmael. 

But what if God was doing something else entirely? What if sending them into the desert wasn't abandonment, but preservation? Someone had to keep the Name alive while His chosen people spent centuries making bricks with no straw and forgetting their God in Egypt. Moses was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter and, in turn, raised in the Pharaoh’s palace. Even though he was given this opportunity, it is clear that, at some point, the Pharaoh was aware that Moses was a Hebrew. Killing the Egyptian would have given Pharaoh the perfect excuse to end Moses, someone he had to have considered a threat. Moses knew this so he fled. Not towards his people, the Hebrews, but into the desert. Moses did not consider himself a part of the Hebrews. He was Egyptian in his mind, a prince. Stopping to rest and get water at a well, Moses meets, and helps, the seven daughters of Jethro (the priest of Midian), the Midianite shepherd. In return for helping his daughters water his flocks, Jethro tells them to bring him for dinner. From there, Moses stays and marries Zepora, one of Jethro’s daughters. Moses names his first son Gershom: "I have become a foreigner in a foreign land." Fair enough, that works whether Jethro's household worships Yahweh or not. His second son, however, is named Eliezer: "My God is help" or "God is my helper." Specifically, El is help. This is a Yahwistic theophoric name, meaning it incorporates the divine name into the child's name. You don't name your kid after a god you don't worship. And Moses names this child while living in Jethro's household, before the burning bush and before the Exodus. If Moses was bringing the knowledge of Yahweh to pagan Midianites, why would he give his sons Hebrew God-names in a polytheistic household? Either he's being wildly disrespectful to his hosts, or the household already worships the same God. The names only make sense if Jethro's family already knew Yahweh. 

Moses didn't stumble into Midian to wait out Pharaoh's death. He was strategically placed there by God. Jethro wasn't some random sheepherder who needed Moses to explain monotheism to him, Jethro was a priest, a keeper of something ancient. Moses, the palace-raised prince who'd never pitched a tent or survived a sandstorm, spent forty years learning live outside the comforts of the palace, and become a shepherd. Not just of sheep, but of a people who would spend forty more years in that same wilderness. What's more, when Moses encounters the burning bush at Horeb, he's already on "the Mountain of God." The text doesn't say Moses discovered it or sanctified it, it was already holy ground. The Midianites and Kenites had been worshipping there for centuries. Moses wasn't introducing God to this place; God was reintroducing Himself to Moses through it.

The Temple of Soleb in Sudan, built by Amenhotep III (18th Dynasty), lists Egypt's borders and enemies. Among them: the Shasu. Bedouins, nomads of the desert. But here's where it gets interesting: Amenhotep doesn't just list them by region like the others. He identifies them by their deity: "Ta Shasu Yahweh" : the land of the people of Yahweh. Not the land of Midian. Not the copper region. The land of Yahweh's people.

The Timna Valley holds one of the ancient world's largest copper mining operations. The Egyptians built a temple there to Hathor, the cow goddess. When the Bronze Age collapsed in the 12th century BC and the Egyptians abandoned the site, the metal-working nomads moved in. The Kenites, whose name literally means "smith”, were a people who could turn rocks into metal through what must have seemed like sorcery and they set up camp in the Egyptian ruins. The temple the Egyptians built got remodeled, destroyed, and a heavy fabric tent structure was built over the ruins. This happened to be in the middle of their mining operation and architecturally identical to the Tabernacle Moses would later construct. While excavating the ruins, archaeologists found a copper serpent there. The same iconography Moses used in the wilderness. These were the people, metalworkers, desert survivors, keepers of the Name, that Moses learned from for forty years; and when the Exodus happens, Jethro's response confirms it.

After the Exodus, Jethro rides out to meet Moses in the desert, bringing Zipporah and Moses's sons. One can imagine the family reunion as they sit around a campfire as Moses tells Jethro of the plagues and the sea parting.

  Exodus 18:11: "Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods."

The standard sermon treats this as Jethro's salvation moment, the pagan priest finally seeing the light through Moses's ministry. But read it again. Jethro isn't discovering God; he's having his faith confirmed. This isn't conversion… it's vindication. The God his people preserved in the desert just destroyed Egypt and parted the Red Sea. He is saying, “I KNEW it!”

Then comes verse 12: Jethro offers the sacrifice to God. Not Moses. Jethro, the high priest, presiding over worship with Aaron and the elders of Israel in attendance. If Jethro were a pagan, this would have been blasphemy. You don't let the unconverted lead covenant worship. But nobody objects, because Jethro isn't being initiated into something new, he's a priest performing his ancient office. He is introducing this nation of Israel to the One True God, their God! The Midianites and Kenites, the desert keepers of the Name, were returning the faith to God's people.

Moses didn't invent Hebrew monotheism from a single burning bush encounter. He spent forty years being discipled by people who had guarded that truth for generations while God's "chosen people" forgot it in Egypt. The wilderness wandering wasn't just punishment for faithlessness, it was necessary education from the only people who still remembered how to worship Yahweh and survive in the places where He spoke.

The desert wasn't empty of God. It was full of His faithful.

The day after Jethro offers that sacrifice, he watches Moses trying to judge disputes for the entire camp from morning till evening. Jethro doesn't ask permission or tiptoe around Moses's ego, he straight up tells him he's doing it wrong:

Exodus 18:13-27 "What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone."

Then Jethro lays out a complete governmental structure: appoint capable men as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. Let them handle the small cases, bring only the difficult ones to you. This isn't a suggestion. It's instruction from teacher to student. We don’t see Moses defending himself or explaining that God told him to do it this way. Nope, he just listens and implements exactly what Jethro says. The man who spoke with God face to face takes administrative instruction from his father-in-law without hesitation. That's not the dynamic of a convert learning from a missionary, that's a student respecting his mentor's wisdom.

I would like to pause here to say: This isn't some conspiracy theory you found on a sketchy website. The Kenite Hypothesis has been discussed in Biblical scholarship since the 19th century. Scholars like Bernhard Stade, Karl Budde, and more recently Thomas Römer have argued that Yahwism originated among the Kenites/Midianites and was adopted by the Israelites through Moses's contact with them.

The Kenite Hypothesis points to:

• Jethro's priestly role and his sacrifice
• The geographical associations of Yahweh with Sinai/Seir/Paran in early texts
• The Kenites' metalworking skills and association with sacred sites
• The peaceful integration (not assimilation) of Kenites into Israel later

Back to the text:

Numbers 10:29-32 "Do not leave us. You know where we should camp in the wilderness, and you can be our eyes."

Read that again. Moses needs Hobab, Jethro’s son, to be their "eyes" in the wilderness. Moses, who lived there for forty years, who met God at the mountain. Moses needs a Kenite to show him where to camp and how to navigate. That's not the plea of a man who mastered the desert and taught the locals about God. That's a man acknowledging that the Kenites know this land and its God better than he does, even after forty years of apprenticeship. Moses learned enough to survive and to encounter God, but he still defers to Kenite expertise when it comes to actually navigating Yahweh's territory.

Judges 1:16: "The descendants of Moses' father-in-law, the Kenite, went up from the City of Palms with the people of Judah to live among the inhabitants of the Desert of Judah in the Negev near Arad."

These aren't converts being assimilated. They're identified as a distinct group, Kenites , but they're going up with Judah, living among them, integrated into the tribal structure. They're not foreigners being brought in; they're family coming home.

Judges 4:11 mentions Heber the Kenite, "a descendant of Hobab, Moses' brother-in-law" who had separated from the other Kenites. But the point is they're still around, still identified as Kenites, still living among Israel generations after the conquest. They weren't absorbed through conversion, they were incorporated as kinfolk who already shared the faith. The text treats them like cousins who took a different route but ended up at the same family reunion, not like pagans who got saved and tagged along.

All this goes to show that, one should read the Bible for themselves. These observations are not mine alone, they have been debated for years. The problem is, most preachers or priests continue to preach what the text does not clearly state. Seminaries teach, preachers preach. It just seems that they are all parrots who accept what they hear instead of reading it for themselves. God says we need ears to HEAR and eyes to SEE, I believe this is a very large part of His point with that statement.