Jethro Was Banished for Being Right and Came Back Anyway

Before Jethro was the wise father-in-law, before he was the priest of Midian who reorganized Moses's judicial system, he was the man who sat in Pharaoh's court and said the wrong thing at exactly the right moment.

Three advisors were called when Pharaoh needed counsel on how to handle the growing Hebrew population. Jethro spoke up for the Hebrews and was banished. That is the whole of it in one sentence, and the Legends of the Jews, compiled by Louis Ginzberg from ancient rabbinic sources in the early twentieth century, preserves the detail without embellishment. Pharaoh was exceedingly angry with him. Jethro was dismissed in disgrace and fled to Midian. The other two advisors stayed. Balaam urged the killing of the males. Job stayed quiet. Jethro left.

The rabbinic tradition reads consequence into every choice. Balaam was eventually killed by Israel's sword during the Midianite war. Job's silence bought him a life of uncomprehending suffering. And Jethro, who lost his position by defending people he had every political reason to abandon, ended up as the grandfather of the generation that would receive the Torah.

He did not know any of this when he fled. He knew only that he had lost something, status, influence, proximity to power, for a principle that had not saved anyone. The Hebrews were still enslaved. His protest had changed nothing visible. He went to Midian and became a priest and raised daughters and tended his flock and waited, the way people wait when they have done the right thing and watched it fail.

Then his daughters came home from the well early. They told him about the Egyptian who had defended them from the shepherds. Jethro's first thought, recorded in Ginzberg's retelling, was that this stranger might be a descendant of Abraham, from whom blessing flows to the whole world. He rebuked his daughters for not bringing the man home. He wanted to meet him.

Moses came and stayed. When Jethro gave his daughter Zipporah in marriage, the Legends of the Jews records that he made Moses swear an oath: do not leave without my consent. He remembered what Jacob had done to Laban, departing with his daughters without warning. He had been burned before. Moses swore. And so he became a shepherd of Jethro's flocks, the future liberator of a nation learning patience in the desert, tending animals in the same wilderness where his people were still under brick and mortar.

God, the tradition notes, tests men with small things before giving them large ones. It was precisely during this shepherding that God appeared to Moses from the burning bush. The man who had sworn not to leave without his father-in-law's permission had to go back and ask. Jethro let him go. "Go in peace," the text says. The oath was kept. The departure was clean.

What is strange and worth pausing over is that Jethro then disappears from the main narrative during the plagues, the crossing of the sea, and the march to Sinai. He is absent from the great events he made possible by sheltering Moses and releasing him. He hears about them afterward, and walks across the desert to find the camp, and when he arrives at the Legends of the Jews's telling of this reunion, the first thing he does is rejoice at the liberation. "Blessed be the Lord," he says, "who has delivered you." Then he offers sacrifices. Aaron and all the elders eat with him.

And then, the next day, he watches Moses judge the people from morning until evening, alone, a single man hearing every quarrel and question a nation of former slaves had accumulated. He sees how exhausted Moses is. He says: what you are doing is not good. You will wear yourself out. You and the people with you. Listen to me.

Moses listened. He appointed judges over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens, and brought only the hard cases himself. Midrash Rabbah records the rabbis' astonishment at this: the greatest prophet Israel ever had, the man who spoke with God face to face, reorganized his entire system of governance based on advice from his foreign father-in-law. No defensiveness. No pride. Just: this is a better way, and I will do it.

Jethro eventually left. The text in Numbers records Moses's plea for him to stay, "you will be eyes for us in the wilderness", and Jethro's gentle refusal. He went back to his own land and his own people. The man who had been banished from one court, who had sheltered the man who dismantled an empire, who had given counsel that reshaped a nation's jurisprudence, returned to Midian having asked for nothing.

The rabbinic tradition counts what each of the three advisors received for their counsel in Pharaoh's court. Balaam received death. Job received suffering. Jethro received descendants who sat in the chamber of hewn stone in the Temple itself, the highest court in Israel, until the Temple fell. He was paid, the rabbis said, with his children's children's honor, which is the best kind of payment: the kind you don't live to see.