Jethro and Aaron Celebrate at the First Feast of Freedom

The people were free. They had crossed the sea, watched the water close behind them, and stood on the far shore with nothing between them and the wilderness except the open sky and the sound of Miriam's tambourine. Before the laws, before the tabernacle, before any of the apparatus of organized religion, there was a feast.

The tradition preserved in Legends of the Jews, drawn from the rabbinic literature that grew up around the Exodus narrative, describes this meal with a specificity the Torah does not. The Torah records Jethro's arrival and the sacrifices he brings (Exodus 18:12), but Ginzberg's sources fill in the atmosphere: the smell of roasting meat, the sound of voices rising in song, a celebration by people who had been told for generations that they were property and who were now, demonstrably, free.

The honored guests were Aaron, Moses's brother and the designated priest of Israel, and Jethro, Moses's father-in-law and a priest of Midian. These two men, one an Israelite and one a Midianite, sat together at this first great feast of liberation. They ate. They sang. They raised their voices in hymns of thanksgiving to God, praised as the Creator of all things, the source of freedom.

But the praise was not only for God. Ginzberg's sources record that the assembled people also gave due appreciation to Moses, and that Jethro in particular delivered what the tradition calls glorious eulogies of Moses's leadership, honoring the man who had shown such courage and brought his people through so much danger.

The detail about Jethro deserves attention. He was not an Israelite. He had no ancestral stake in the Exodus. He was a Midianite priest, a man who had welcomed Moses when Moses was a fugitive, who had given Moses his daughter Zipporah and his years in the quiet of the Midianite wilderness. He had watched Moses leave to confront Pharaoh. And now he watched the result, the army swallowed by the sea, a nation emerging from slavery, and he sang praises to the God of Israel because he had seen what that God could do.

There is a long tradition in rabbinic literature of watching how righteous outsiders respond to the God of Israel, and reading their responses as a form of testimony. The Talmud records (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 11a) that Jethro, unlike the wicked advisors of Pharaoh's court, fled rather than participate in oppression. The feast at the edge of Sinai is the payoff for that choice. Jethro was at the table because he had chosen correctly across a lifetime of smaller decisions.

Aaron's presence at the feast carries its own weight. He had stayed in Egypt while Moses was in Midian. He had been among the enslaved. He had watched the plagues unfold, led the people through moments of panic and doubt, stood beside his brother before Pharaoh more than once. And now he sat with his brother's father-in-law, this Midianite stranger, and they ate together and praised the same God. The feast was not just a celebration of freedom. It was a demonstration of what freedom looked like: an Israelite priest and a foreign priest, sharing a table, in agreement about who deserved the credit.

The Ginzberg tradition draws from a strand of rabbinic thought particularly interested in what happens when the nations of the world encounter the God of Israel. Jethro sitting at that feast is the tradition's way of saying that even those who stand outside the covenant can recognize what the covenant is for.

Moses himself, the tradition notes, had to absorb the praises directed at him: the man who had spent the entire Exodus arguing that he was the wrong choice, that God should have sent someone else, that his tongue was too slow and his credentials too thin. At the feast of liberation, his father-in-law stood up and praised him in front of everyone. The reluctant prophet, it turned out, had done exactly what was needed. Even he had to accept that.