Biblion Bible Commentary
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Forty Years in Midian
Exodus 2:11-25
11 In those days, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his brothers and saw their burdens. He saw an Egyptian striking a Hebrew, one of his brothers. · WEB
A deliverer appointed by himself fails in a day; the forty years that follow are not a detour but the training.
In those days, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his brothers and saw their burdens Exodus 2:11.
He goes out knowing who he is. A prince of Egypt with a Hebrew nurse for a mother had every reason to forget his origins and did not, so the choice is made before the first blow is struck. What has not been settled is how a man in his position acts on it.
He looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no one, he killed the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand Exodus 2:12.
The two glances are the verdict. A man who checks for witnesses knows he is doing something he cannot defend, and the burial confirms it. The cause was just — a Hebrew was being beaten — and the method belonged entirely to the system he meant to oppose, which settled its questions by killing people in private. Injustice cannot be undone with its own tools, and the narrative demonstrates this before it states it.
The collapse takes one more day. Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Exodus 2:14. The question is contemptuous and also correct: nobody had. Forty years later the same man returns with an answer to it, and the answer is not his own indignation.
Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and lived in the land of Midian, and he sat down by a well Exodus 2:15.
At a well in MIDIAN he does exactly what he did in Egypt — sees strong men abusing weak ones and intervenes — and this time no one dies, the intervention succeeds, and it earns him a home. The scenes are placed side by side on purpose. The instinct was never the problem.
What follows is the part of a life nobody would choose to record. He marries, keeps another man's sheep, and names his first son for his own displacement: Gershom, for he said, "I have lived as a foreigner in a foreign land" Exodus 2:22. Four decades pass in a sentence. A man trained in the finest court in the world spends them learning the wilderness he will later cross with a nation, and learning it as a shepherd, which is the trade he will practice for the rest of his life on a larger flock. Nothing is wasted, and nothing is explained either; Moses had no way of knowing any of this at the time.
In the course of those many days, the king of Egypt died, and the children of Israel sighed because of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up to God because of the bondage Exodus 2:23.
The chapter ends with four verbs whose subject is God, and they are the pivot of the book. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the children of Israel, and God understood Exodus 2:24–25. Remembering here does not mean recalling something forgotten; it means acting on what was promised. For four hundred years nothing appeared to be happening. The answer given is that the delay was never indifference, and that the covenant, not the crisis, is what starts the machinery moving.
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