Moses Ruled a Kingdom in Cush Before He Ever Reached the Burning Bush

The Fugitive Who Became a King

Moses killed the Egyptian taskmaster and fled. That much the Torah says. What comes next in the Torah is the well in Midian, the daughters of Jethro, the sheep that needed watering. The Torah's Moses moves directly from fugitive to shepherd to prophet.

The Chronicles of Jerahmeel knew a different itinerary.

After the killing, Moses traveled south, far south, to the kingdom of Cush. The Cushite king had been at war for years, besieged by enemies who had been grinding at his borders long enough that his own people had nearly given up on the possibility of relief. Moses arrived at exactly the right moment, inserted himself into the war councils, made himself useful in the ways that a man of his particular combination of intelligence and military instinct could make himself useful, and over the years of demonstrated competence the Cushites made him their king. He ruled Cush for forty years. He had an entire life there before he was done with it.

This is the man who eventually walked away from the throne, traveled north through the wilderness, and encountered God at the burning bush. Not a young fugitive overwhelmed by divine attention. A man who had governed a kingdom, led armies, buried a king, and been chosen by the people he had served to succeed him. When God told Moses to go to Pharaoh and demand the release of Israel, Moses's protests were the protests of a man who understood what he was being asked. Not the protests of inexperience. The protests of a person who had seen enough of power to know exactly what kind of resistance he would face.

The Ascent Through the Firmament

Moses went up the mountain to receive the Torah. The tradition elaborated what that meant in terms that go well beyond receiving a text.

He walked through the firmament. He passed through the celestial realms. He entered the territory of the angels, who were furious. The Torah was theirs. It had been written before the world was made. The angels had lived with it in heaven and had, in their way, organized their celestial existence around it. And now this human being, this creature made of dust, was walking through their domain to take it away and bring it down to a people made of flesh who would inevitably misuse it, forget it, sin against it, and need to be forgiven for it, over and over, for the rest of history.

The angels attacked. Moses fought them off with what he had: the authority God had granted him for exactly this purpose, and the arguments he was apparently capable of making under circumstances that would have incapacitated most human beings entirely. He argued with the angels about why human beings deserved the Torah more than angels did. He won. He came down the mountain with the tablets, and the people who had been waiting below were waiting for a man who had just fought heaven for what he carried.

The Man Who Argued His People Back From Destruction

Between the kingdom in Cush and the burial in Moab, there was a third life that deserves its own reckoning. The forty years in the wilderness with Israel were not a straightforward story of leadership. They were a sustained argument. The people complained constantly. They made a golden calf forty days into the relationship with the God who had just freed them from Egypt. They sent spies into Canaan and accepted the fearful report. They followed Korach in rebellion. They wept for the fleshpots of Egypt so many times that the text loses count.

At each crisis, God offered Moses the same option: step aside, I will destroy this people and start again with a nation descended from you. Moses refused every time. Not because the offer was not real. The covenant God had made with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob outweighed it, and Moses was not willing to be the person who let the covenant die with one generation's faithlessness. He stood between Israel and destruction so many times that the tradition eventually named this as his defining quality: not the plagues, not the parted sea, not the tablets, but the forty years of intercession for a people who gave him very few reasons to keep interceding.

The Burial That God Conducted Alone

At the end, Moses could not enter Canaan. He stood on the heights of Pisgah and saw the land across the Jordan, and God showed him everything: the whole of the territory from Dan to the Negev, from the sea to the Euphrates. He saw it all. He did not enter it.

Then he died. And God buried him personally.

The tradition asked why. Why did the Holy One attend to the burial of Moses directly, without delegation, without ceremony, in a location that no human being has ever found? The answer the tradition gave was about the symmetry of the thing. Moses had given his entire life to a people who were sometimes grateful and often not. He had argued for them when God wanted to destroy them. He had carried them through the wilderness for forty years. He had gone up to heaven to fight for the Torah they would receive. He deserved, at the end, to have God perform for him the one act that in ordinary life falls to family and community: the preparing of the body and the sealing of the grave. Moses had no family present who could have done it properly. God did it instead.