Jethro Returned the Idols and Was Cast Out of Midian

The Priest Who Could Not Continue

Jethro had spent his life in the service of the Midianite gods. He was the chief priest of the city, the man who stood before the idols and performed the sacred rites, the one the community turned to for intercession, blessing, and the maintenance of the divine order as they understood it. He knew the rituals precisely and had performed them for years without doubt.

Then he looked at what he was doing and could not do it anymore.

He did not make a dramatic announcement. He went before the townspeople and told them he had grown too old for the duties of the priesthood. He gathered up all the paraphernalia of idol worship, the implements and vessels and sacred objects, and returned them to the community. He told them to appoint whoever they thought best to take his position. He said nothing about why he was leaving. He offered no theological argument and no public declaration. He had arrived at his conviction quietly and he left his post quietly, and the silence around his reasons only made the people more suspicious.

Life Under the Ban

They placed him under the ban. In the ancient Near East this was a severe social execution: no one was permitted to perform Jethro the slightest service. The shepherds of Midian would not pasture his flocks. No neighbor would speak to him on the road. His seven daughters had to manage everything themselves, including the work of watering the animals, which meant going daily to the well and filling the troughs. Even there they were not safe. The male shepherds drove them away from the troughs they had filled and watered their own flocks with the water the women had drawn.

This had been going on long enough that it had become routine. The daughters knew to expect it. They did not expect Moses.

The Egyptian at the Well

The day Moses arrived at the well in Midian, the shepherds went further than usual. They drove the women away from the troughs and threw them into the water with intent to drown them. Moses pulled them out, drove the shepherds off, and helped the women water their flocks himself. The daughters came home early, and their father asked why they were back before their usual time. They told him an Egyptian man had rescued them and drawn water for them. Jethro asked: where is he? Why did you leave him there? Go bring him and give him bread.

Moses came to the house and stayed. He stayed for years. He married Zipporah, Jethro's eldest daughter, and tended Jethro's flocks, and Jethro was restored to something like a functioning household through the presence of the man who would later lead an entire people out of slavery. The ban was a kind of preparation: it created the isolation and need that made Jethro's household the right place for Moses to land.

The Priest Who Had Heard Everything

There is another element to Jethro's history that explains why his conversion from idolatry to the knowledge of God was more than incidental. He had been a counselor of Pharaoh, one of the three advisors in the royal court alongside Balaam and Job. When Pharaoh first consulted about what to do with the multiplying Hebrews, Jethro was in the room. Balaam said to oppress them. Job kept silent. Jethro spoke up for the Hebrews, argued against the oppression, and was banished from Egypt for it.

He had earned his exile from Midian by rejecting idols and his earlier exile from Egypt by protecting the enslaved. Both rejections preceded Moses. Jethro arrived at the position of the man worthy to receive Israel's lawgiver as a son-in-law through a series of costly separations, each one isolating him further from the systems of power around him and placing him in the desert margin where Moses, when he ran, would finally find him.