Moses Ruled Kush for Forty Years Before God Called Him

The Torah introduces Moses at eighty years old, standing before a burning bush in the desert of Sinai. The rabbis and the authors of the Sefer HaYashar -- the Book of the Upright, a midrashic chronicle drawing on ancient traditions and later redacted in the medieval period -- were troubled by the gap. Where had Moses been? What had he been doing for the six decades between his flight from Egypt and that moment in the wilderness? The answer, preserved in the tradition of Sefer HaYashar, is stranger and more specific than anyone who reads only the Torah's text would expect.

He had been a king. For forty years, Moses ruled Kush.

The story begins with a war and a coup. Konkos, king of Kush, had marched out against Aram and the children of Kedem, leaving the city in the care of Bilam the sorcerer -- identified in the tradition with Laban the Aramean, the adversary of Jacob -- along with Bilam's two sons. While the king was away, Bilam turned the people against him. By the time Konkos returned with his army, the walls had been raised higher, the riverbank had been flooded with diverted channels, and the fourth side of the city was guarded by enchanted serpents. The army attacked on three fronts across three days and lost more than five hundred men. They were unable to enter their own city.

Moses arrived in the camp during the siege. He was eighteen years old and had just fled Egypt. The text describes him in terms that the rabbis of the midrash use for great men: tall as a cedar, his face shining like the sun, with the strength and courage of a lion. The king took notice. The soldiers took notice. Moses spent nine years in the camp as a trusted advisor, and when Konkos died of illness on the seventh day of his sickness, the army found itself without leadership, without a plan, and without a way to take back the city they had been camped outside of for nineteen years.

They lifted Moses onto a pile of their cloaks. They blew the shofar. They crowned him king. They gave him the Kushite queen, the widow of Konkos, as his wife. Moses was twenty-seven years old.

On his second day as king, the people came to him with the obvious question: we have been away from our wives and children for nine years. What do we do? Moses told them: go into the forest and bring me stork chicks. Every soldier brought back a chick. Moses had them raised and starved for two days. On the third day, he sent the army into battle -- each soldier holding a starving stork, riding toward the side of the city guarded by the enchanted serpents. When the storks reached the serpents, they devoured them. The fourth wall fell. The city opened. Bilam saw what was happening, mounted his horse with his two sons, and fled to Egypt, where he joined Pharaoh's court as an advisor and began plotting against the children of Israel.

Moses entered the city in triumph. He reigned for forty years. He won wars against Edom, against the children of Kedem, against Aram. The text of this account from the Sefer HaYashar tradition insists at every point that his success came because the God of his fathers was with him -- the same God he would not encounter directly until the burning bush, but who was present in every campaign, shaping every outcome.

And through all of it, Moses never touched the Kushite queen. He remembered the oath Abraham had made Eliezer swear -- not to take a wife from the daughters of Canaan. He remembered what Isaac had commanded Jacob about the daughters of Ham. He feared God and walked before Him with truth and with all his heart, and did not depart from the path that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had walked. The queen sat at his right hand on the throne for forty years, and at the end of those forty years she told the ministers and the people: this man has been king for forty years and has never come near me. He does not worship our gods. Let him go. Let my son Munjam reign instead.

The people were afraid to depose Moses by force -- they remembered what they had sworn. So they gave him great gifts and sent him away with full honors. Moses was sixty-seven years old when he left Kush. Three years later, at seventy, he would be standing in the desert of Sinai watching a bush burn without being consumed.

The midrashic tradition around this story is not interested in filling a biographical gap for its own sake. It is making a claim about preparation. The man who would stand before Pharaoh, who would lead two million people through the wilderness, who would negotiate at Sinai between a frightened nation and an overwhelming God -- that man had already governed a foreign nation for four decades. He had already solved the problem of an impossible siege through unconventional means. He had already demonstrated, in the most concrete possible way, that he would not compromise the covenant of his ancestors for the privileges of power. The burning bush did not create Moses. It found him already made. That is the lesson the apocryphal tradition was preserving: God prepares His instruments long before He calls them by name.