Jethro Waited at Sinai Nearly a Year for Moses to Come Down

The Old Priest Who Pitched His Tent and Waited

When Jethro heard what had happened at the Red Sea, he left Midian. He had been a priest of every idol the ancient Near East had a name for, and now he packed his household and went to find the son-in-law he had given his daughter to, the man who had walked into his camp years ago with a goat-staff and a speech impediment and ended up parting an ocean.

He arrived at the camp of Israel. And Moses was gone.

Moses had gone up the mountain of Sinai to receive the Torah, and he would not come back down, not for good, until the tenth of Tishri, most of a year later. Jethro pitched his tent at the edge of the camp and waited. He watched the cloud on the mountain. He watched the pillar of fire at night. He watched the Israelites receive manna in the mornings and quarrel among themselves in the afternoons, and he waited.

The Court No One Could Win

On the eleventh of Tishri, the day after Moses finally descended, Jethro watched his son-in-law hold court from dawn to dusk.

Every dispute in the camp came before Moses alone. Every question about law, every argument between neighbors, every complaint about water rights and borrowed tools and who said what to whom at the edge of the camp. Moses sat on a chair and heard them all, and the people stood in line from morning until the sun went down, and Moses was still there when they left.

Jethro watched this for one day. Then he pulled Moses aside and told him he was going to destroy himself, and he was going to destroy the people in the process. "This is not good," he said. "You cannot do this alone. The thing you are doing is too heavy for you."

The Convert Who Asked to Be Received

The Targum Jonathan, the Aramaic translation of the Torah compiled in the Land of Israel over several centuries, does not let Jethro arrive as a simple advisor. It makes him a supplicant. It records his words to Moses: "I, your father-in-law Jethro, have come to be a proselyte; and if you will not receive me on my own account, receive me for the sake of your wife and of her two sons who are with her."

This was not the speech of a man who had come to offer management consulting. This was a man who had spent years considering something enormous and had finally arrived at a decision. He was asking to be let in, and he was not entirely sure he would be.

Moses came out from under the cloud of glory to greet him. The Targum specifies this: Moses had been dwelling inside the divine cloud and had to leave it to meet a man who was not yet one of the covenanted people. He bowed before his father-in-law and kissed him and brought him into the camp.

The Oath That Bound Moses Before Egypt

The Talmudic tradition preserved by Ginzberg also works backward, to the day before Moses went to Egypt, the day he went to ask Jethro's permission to leave. He had sworn when he first came to Midian that he would not return to Egypt without Jethro's knowledge. When the burning bush sent him, Moses's first act was not to pack his staff. It was to find his father-in-law and ask for release from a promise.

Jethro gave it. He said: "go in peace." Jethro's consent was the thing that made the Exodus legally possible in Moses's private reckoning, the clearance from the only human authority Moses had voluntarily placed himself under.

By the time Jethro arrived at Sinai with his daughter and her children and his own soul in his hands, asking to be received, Moses owed him a debt older than the parted sea.