Moses Climbed Out of a Pit and Walked Toward the Burning Bush

The tribe of Ephraim did not wait for Moses. They left Egypt early, thirty years before the Exodus, and every one of them died in the desert of Philistia. Their bones lay scattered for decades on the road they had chosen. When Israel finally walked out behind Moses, they took a longer route specifically to avoid seeing the bones of Ephraim's generation, because the sight would have broken their nerve before the journey had begun.

This is not a well-known story. Legends of the Jews, Ginzberg's compilation drawing from sources including the Yalkut Shimoni and the Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, records it as the first failed Exodus. Joseph had made his brothers swear on his deathbed to carry his bones out of Egypt when God came to redeem them. The sons of Ephraim misread the timing. They had calculated a number wrong, gone two hundred and ten years when they thought they should have counted two hundred and thirty. They left early, without divine sanction, without Moses, without the plagues that would have shattered Egypt behind them. The Philistines met them at the border and killed them all.

Moses did not make that mistake. But he did spend years in a pit before he ever reached the burning bush. The Ginzberg tradition preserves a tradition from Legends of the Jews that when Moses helped the daughters of Jethro at the well in Midian, Jethro suspected the stranger might be dangerous, the kind of man who might have been sent as a spy or a fugitive. He had Moses thrown into a pit. For ten years, according to some versions of this tradition, Moses sat in a pit in Midian, kept alive by the food and water that Jethro's daughter Zipporah secretly brought him each day. He survived on that secret sustenance for years while Jethro forgot he was there.

The pit recurs in Moses's story in another form. When the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, the Book of Jubilees 48 describes the plagues as a systematic dismantling of Egyptian power, judgment by judgment, each one targeted and deliberate. Moses stands in this account not as a passive instrument but as a man who has already climbed out of his own pit and understands something about what it takes to survive systematic degradation. He had lived in Midian long enough to know what it meant to wait.

What the Ginzberg tradition records about the aftermath of the Golden Calf is another version of the same theme. After the disaster, Moses took burning wool and placed it on divine fire, and the fire went out. He demonstrated, through this act, that righteousness could extinguish divine wrath. But even after the demonstration, the people went back to their old patterns. Moses climbed out of that pit too, and the second set of tablets came down from Sinai.

The Sifrei Bamidbar, the tannaitic midrash on Numbers compiled around the second century CE, preserves the moment when Moses doubted. Six hundred thousand people were complaining about food. Moses turned to God and said, essentially: this is impossible. You cannot feed this many people for a month. He was not being faithless so much as being honest about what he could see. God's answer, in the tradition, was not a rebuke but a lesson in the distinction between what human calculation can encompass and what divine action can accomplish.

Moses had climbed out of every pit. The physical one in Midian. The pit of powerlessness as a young man in Egypt. The pit of despair after the Golden Calf. The pit of doubt in the desert. He climbed out of each one not by his own strength but by waiting, by carrying his obligations forward, by not leaving before the right moment arrived. Ephraim left early and died. Moses waited and walked through the sea.

The midrashic tradition is fascinated by the contrast between Moses and the tribe of Ephraim because it makes the abstract principle concrete. Faith is not mere belief. It is the discipline to stay inside the right timing. Joseph's promise, which the Ephraimites invoked when they left early, was meant to be the fuel of the actual Exodus, not a license to leave whenever the waiting became unbearable. Moses understood this in a way his predecessors had not. He had already learned what pits were for. They were not punishments. They were waiting rooms. He had sat in one in Midian for years, sustained by Zipporah's secret gifts, and he had come out of it ready. Legends of the Jews, drawing from Midrash sources reaching back to the second century CE, records that God was already present in Egypt before Moses arrived. Moses walked into a situation that had already been prepared. His job was to show up at the right time. That was the lesson of every pit he had survived.