Moses Ruled Kush for Forty Years Before God Spoke From the Bush

The Torah says Moses was eighty years old when he stood before the burning bush in the wilderness of Sinai. He had fled Egypt at forty. The gap of forty years between his flight and his call sits in the Torah like an unmarked room. The rabbis who wrote Sefer HaYashar, the Book of the Upright, walked into it and found a kingdom.

The Siege That Sorcery Could Not Break

Konkos, king of Kush, had marched out against Aram and the children of Kedem, leaving his city in the care of Bilam the sorcerer. Bilam turned the people against Konkos while the king was away. By the time Konkos returned, the walls had been raised higher, the riverbank had been diverted into defensive channels, and the fourth side of the city was guarded by enchanted serpents. The army attacked for three days on three fronts and lost more than five hundred men. They could not enter their own city.

Moses arrived in the Kushite camp during that siege. He was eighteen years old and had just run from Egypt. The army recognized in him what the midrashic tradition reads as an obvious quality: he had the face and bearing of someone who had been raised in a royal house, who carried authority as a natural condition of his presence. They made him their general.

The Storks That Won the War

Moses assessed the defenses. The serpents guarding the fourth wall could not be fought. He did not try to fight them. He found young storks, birds that eat serpents, and trained them until they could be used as weapons. When the army advanced on the fourth wall with the storks ahead of them, the enchanted serpents were devoured and the wall fell. The city was taken. Bilam and his sons fled. Konkos died in the siege. The Kushite soldiers, standing in their recaptured city with their general who had given them back what they lost, offered Moses the crown.

He became king of Kush at the age of eighteen.

The Queen Who Waited Forty Years

The Kushite queen was named Adonit. She pressed Moses to marry her and take her as wife. He refused, but not in a way that disrupted the kingdom. He refused quietly, with the patience of a man who knew his own situation precisely. He was a Hebrew. He was not supposed to be here. He had been shaped for something else. He ruled justly, the tradition says, for forty years, holding the kingdom together, administering it well, and never touching Adonit in a way that would have bound him to Kush rather than to Israel.

When Adonit finally understood that Moses would never marry her, she went to the people and made her case: this man has not worshipped our gods, has not joined himself to us, has not been a real king. Make him leave. The people heard her. They respected Moses enough to dismiss him honorably, with gifts of gold and silver and precious stones, rather than in humiliation. He left Kush at fifty-seven years old, walking back toward the world that had been waiting for him since before he was born.

What Kush Made of Moses

The forty years in Kush are not years spent waiting. They are years of formation of a different kind than any schooling. Moses learned to take a city that sorcery had sealed. He learned to govern a people that were not his own with enough justice that even those who wanted him gone honored him as they let him go. He learned the particular loneliness of a man who is king somewhere he does not belong, who holds power correctly even though the power is not his destiny.

When God spoke from the burning bush and called him to lead Israel, Moses was eighty years old, had ruled a kingdom for forty years, had been dismissed from that kingdom with dignity, and had spent the intervening time tending sheep in the wilderness of Sinai. He had been made, again and again, through circumstances that looked nothing like preparation but were exactly preparation. The burning bush found a man who already knew how to hold a siege, lead people who were not his own, refuse what would bind him to the wrong place, and wait.