Parashat Yitro, Exodus 17-20
Making Room for Moses and Aaron
This year, the day after the Sabbath on which we read Yitro (“Jethro”) is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday — and I have another Torah puzzler for you. What's the connection between Abraham Lincoln and Moses?
The simplest answer to that question, of course, is that they both freed slaves. But there’s actually also a connection in this week’s reading, and here it is:
When Lincoln became president, the White House was not merely a public building; it was still open to the public, and I mean all you had to do was walk in the front door. Hundreds of people went there and just walked right into President Lincoln's office and asked him for a job. They wanted to be the postmaster of New Salem, Illinois (or wherever).
Lincoln spent most of his first few weeks dealing with these people, until some of his advisers reminded him, Uh … seven states have already seceded, and you need to spend more time dealing with the big picture and not just get to it at eleven o'clock at night. So they figured out a way to get rid of the office seekers and let Lincoln do the president's big picture job.
That is exactly what Jethro does for Moses in Exodus 18 in this week's reading, the chapter that in fact is all about Jethro, Moses's father-in-law. He shows up in v. 1 because he has heard what God did for Moses and for Israel. We might imagine that he was a little bit less concerned about Israel and a little bit more concerned about his son-in-law and the family he apparently abandoned, since vv. 2-3 tells us that Jethro brought Zipporah and “her” two sons along with him. V. 2 presents us with one of the unsolved puzzles of biblical studies, when Jethro brings his daughter אַחַ֖ר שִׁלּוּחֶֽיהָ aḥar shilluḥeha, “after she had been sent home” according to the new JPS translation, but we don't really know exactly what that phrase means.
We’ll come back to it later in this week’s column, but for now let’s fast-forward to v. 7, when Moses brings his father-in-law into his tent and tells him the whole story of the exodus, and again to v. 12, when Jethro brings a burnt offering and other sacrifices for God, and Aaron comes with all the elders of Israel to eat a ritual meal “before God” with Moses’s father-in-law.
Jethro, you have to remember, was the priest of Midian (Exod 3:1). Midian is not the name of a god; Jethro is not the priest of Apollo or the priest of Chemosh or I don't know who. Midian is a geographical region, more or less northwestern Saudi Arabia of today. So when he's called “the priest of Midian” we know where he is a priest, but we don't know what god he is serving.
Our chapter strongly suggests that he is serving the same God that Moses is serving, the God whom we call “the Lord” rather than pronouncing the Tetragrammaton, that four-letter name, YHWH in English transliteration — the same God who promised the land of Canaan to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jethro seems to be worshipping that God, and it would therefore seem reasonable to understand that he is a priest of the God the Israelites worship, YHWH.
What else happens in our chapter? That Lincoln parallel. Jethro wakes up the next morning, gets his cup of coffee, and goes out, only to discover that Moses is dealing with the quarrelsome Israelites from break of day late on into the night.
Jethro explains to him: This is no way to run a railroad. You need to delegate a hierarchy of subordinates to take care of the problems the Israelites bring. If there's a problem that's too difficult for them to solve, they can kick it further up the hierarchy, and if it has to it will come all the way up to you. But you need to be managing the overall situation, not dealing with quarrels between neighbors.
Moses does set up the system that Jethro suggests. Essentially, then, Jethro is the power behind the throne. He is the civil authority — at least, he's telling Moses, the ostensible civil authority, what to do. Don’t forget, Moses is somewhat raw. He’s new at this job. As we saw in verse 12, Jethro is also — definitely, and not behind the throne — serving as the chief priest, a job that Moses's brother Aaron is eventually going to get.
By the end of this chapter, the civil government at least is organized, and NJPS tells us, in v. 27, “Moses bade his father-in-law farewell, and he went his way to his own land.” This is another ancient, unsolved mystery of the Bible, since in Num 10:29–32 Moses's father-in-law seems to still be around. He’s not called Jethro but Hobab son of Reuel the Midianite. (Jud 4:11 is another reference to this Hobab, father-in-law of Moses; Exod 18:12 is the last verse in the Bible where the name Jethro appears.)
What happens in Numbers 10 is that Moses tells his father-in-law, We're setting out for the land of Canaan, which the Lord is going to give us; come on with us and be our guide. Show us where to camp and how to get through the wilderness. Hobab doesn't want to do it, but it's not clear in that story whether he accedes to Moses's request or not. What’s strange — besides the fact that he's got a different name than Jethro — is that we have no record of Moses’s father-in-law rejoining the Israelites. Let me say that again: in Exod 18:27 Moses's father-in-law goes home; in Numbers 10, he is somehow still on the scene, albeit with a new name.
I’m going to leave that problem for a future year. What I want to talk about this year is Moses bidding his father-in-law farewell. What he is doing according to the Hebrew text is וַיְשַׁלַּ֥ח — not a Qal verb, וַיִּשְׁלַח “he sent him,” but a Piel verb from that same root. (For a more intensive discussion of how roots change their meaning in different verb binyanim, see Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course.)
Students for some reason powerfully resist noticing the distinction between שׁלח as “send” in the basic verb pattern and as something less easy to translate automatically when it’s used with the Piel pattern. That form of the verb is quite an interesting one. It can mean, as it does in the story of Abraham and the three men in Genesis 18, that you “see someone off”: you accompany them to the door or even a little way on their journey to get them started. In that usage, it’s a very friendly gesture. The OED Word of the Day recently offered a charming Nigerian expression for this; they call it “giving someone a send-forth.”
But the same verb can mean that you let someone go or release a slave. See Exod 21:26–27, which we will be reading next week, where a master who hits his slave and causes him to lose an eye or a tooth must set the slave free using שׁלח in the Piel. This, of course, is also the Hebrew verb used when Moses tells the Pharaoh, “Let my people go.”
The same verb can be used to discuss divorcing a woman; see Deut 24:1–4 — and, perhaps not coincidentally, v. 2 of our own chapter, where it is the Hebrew verb behind “after she had been sent home.” It is even used in Gen 3:23 to banish someone, as Adam and Eve are banished from the garden.
What I would like to suggest, then, is that what Moses is doing in v. 27 is not bidding his father-in-law farewell and saying, “We'll see you again at Thanksgiving.” He is getting rid of his father-in-law, perhaps in a polite way, but getting rid of him all the same. He is making sure that Jethro does not stay with the Israelites. If he did, it's hard to see how Aaron could have become the chief priest with a much more experienced chief priest already at hand.
It’s even hard to see how Moses could have kept ruling the Israelites. Jethro in our chapter does not take over for Moses, but he is telling Moses what to do. Despite the best of intentions, it would be obvious to everyone that Jethro, not Moses, was the ultimate decider. In Exod 18:27, therefore, Moses is not simply bidding his father-in-law farewell, and certainly not a fond farewell.
He is getting rid of Jethro so that he and his brother Aaron can fulfill their destinies as the civil and the religious leaders of the Israelites, and so that the Israelites themselves can fulfill their destiny. That destiny is going to be announced to them in the next chapter, Exod 19:6. They are to be an entire kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. Jethro would merely be in the way.