When Pharaoh sought counsel on what to do about the growing Israelite population, he summoned three men: Reuel the Midianite, Job, and Balaam of Petor. Their answers determined the fate of nations.
Reuel pleaded for mercy. He recounted how God punished every king who harmed Abraham's family—Pharaoh struck with plagues for taking Sarah, Abimelech's household struck with barrenness for the same. "Whoever stretches forth his hand against them, their God takes vengeance." For this good counsel, Reuel was rewarded: his descendant Zipporah would marry Moses. Balaam gave the opposite advice—destroy them. He was later killed by the sword. Job stayed silent, neither defending nor condemning Israel. For his silence, he was sentenced to suffer.
After Moses left Cush, he came to Midian, where Reuel—now called Jethro—promptly threw him in a pit for ten years. Only Zipporah had mercy, secretly feeding Moses bread and water. When she finally convinced her father to check on the prisoner, they found him alive, standing upright, praying. In Jethro's garden stood a sapphire staff planted in the ground. Every mighty warrior who had tried to marry Zipporah had attempted to uproot it and failed. Moses pulled it out effortlessly, like lifting a branch from a thicket. Engraved on it was the Ineffable Name of God.
This was no ordinary staff. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, it had passed from Adam to Noah to Shem to Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph, and finally to Reuel. It was the staff Moses wielded when he returned to Egypt, tamed the lions guarding Pharaoh's gate, turned the Nile to blood, and split the Red Sea into twelve paths—one for each tribe. Even Pharaoh survived the drowning, pulled from the sea by Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel, and deposited in Nineveh, where he lived another five hundred years.