1. Jethro. As Umberto Cassuto and others have noticed, this episode stands in neat thematic antithesis to the preceding one. After a fierce armed struggle with a hostile nation that Israel is enjoined to destroy, we have an encounter with a representative of another people, Midian, that is marked by harmonious understanding, mutual respect, and the giving of sage counsel. Cassuto points out that this antithesis is underscored through thematic key words: the Amalek episode begins and ends with a repetition of “battle” (or “war”). The Jethro episode begins with inquiries of “well-being” or “peace” (shalom) and near the end, “this people will come to its place in peace.” Moses “chooses” men for war in the first episode and men for justice in the second. He sits on a stone at the battle and then sits in judgment. His hands are “heavy” in the battle scene and the judicial burden is “heavy” in the judgment scene. As for Midian, the later biblical record shows them acting as marauders crossing the Jordan to attack Israelite farms, but Jethro belongs to the Kenite clan of Midianites that had a particular relationship of loyal alliance with Israel.

2. after her being sent away. What this phrase refers to is uncertain. As we saw repeatedly in the Exodus narrative, “send” (the verbal stem sh-l-ḥ) has multiple meanings. The verbal noun used here, shiluḥim, sometimes means “divorce,” but that is an unlikely scenario for Moses and Zipporah. The rare use of the term as “marriage gift” makes even less sense in this context. The most reasonable inference is that Moses, though he had started out for Egypt with his wife and sons, at some point thought better of it and sent her and the boys home to stay in safety with her father. The Midrash HaGadol (seventh century) vividly dramatizes such a reading: When Aaron first comes out to the wilderness to meet Moses, he sees his brother’s wife and sons and says: “‘Where are you taking them?’ He said to him, ‘To Egypt.’ He said to him, ‘For the previous ones we are sorrow-stricken and now you are bringing us still others?’ Immediately Moses said to her, ‘Return to your father’s house.’”

3. Gershom. In this poetic etymology, ger, “sojourner,” is broken out from the rest of the name, which in fact appears to derive from the root g-r-sh, “to banish.”

4. was my aid and rescued me from Pharaoh’s sword. The name Eliezer means “my God is aid.” The rescue from Pharaoh’s sword probably refers, as Nahmanides proposes, to Moses’s flight from Pharaoh’s executioners after his killing of the Egyptian taskmaster. It could not refer to the victory at the Sea of Reeds because Eliezer had been born earlier, and it does not comfortably refer to the rescue of the infant Moses because swords were not involved in the decree of infanticide by drowning.

5. the mountain of God. There is a patent disruption of chronology here, as Abraham ibn Ezra and many others have noted, because in the immediately preceding episode the Israelites were at Rephidim, and it is only in the next chapter that they are reported to have arrived at Mount Sinai. This entire passage is thus a perfect illustration of the rabbinic dictum that “there is neither early nor late in the Torah,” that is, that chronology may be violated in order to bring out certain thematic emphases (here, the antithesis between war/Amalek and peace/Jethro).

6. And he said to Moses. It is in the next verse that the two men meet, embrace, and inquire of each other’s well-being. This has led Nahmanides and many others after him to infer that “said” here actually means something like “sent word.”

7. and they went into the tent. After Moses’s respectful and affectionate public greeting of his father-in-law, the two men withdraw to the privacy of Moses’s tent, where the leader of the Hebrews will give Jethro a full account of the extraordinary events that occurred in Egypt and afterward.

11. Now I know that the LORD is greater than all the gods. Jethro’s response to Moses’s narrative is a perfect confirmation of the reiterated theme in the Exodus story that the LORD’s great acts against Egypt will demonstrate His supremacy over all other imagined gods. Jethro, as a Midianite priest, appears to speak here as a henotheist rather than a monotheist, conceding the reality of other gods but affirming YHWH’s unrivaled greatness.

for in this thing that they schemed against them. These words are quite obscure, and may well reflect a textual corruption. The chief problem is that the syntax breaks off, and an expected clause to complete it appears to be missing. The Targum Onkelos, in its explanatory Aramaic paraphrase, ingeniously proposes that “in this thing” refers to water—the Egyptians plotted to destroy the Hebrews by drowning and they themselves were then drowned.

12. to eat bread. Here “bread” is clearly a synecdoche for food (as in the English expression, “to eat the king’s bread”), since the ceremonial meal after a sacrifice would have included meat saved from the zevaḥim, “sacrifices” (the burnt offering, by contrast, would have been entirely consumed by fire on the altar).

15. to inquire of God. Frequently, this is the phrase used for inquiry of an oracle, though here it obviously refers to obtaining a different sort of revelation of recalcitrant truth—a judge’s determination of what is right according to the law.

18. You will surely wear yourself out. The literal meaning of the Hebrew verb is “to wither”—an appropriate idiom in an agricultural society for exhaustion from work as “burnout” is in a modern technological society.

19. Be you for the people over against God, and it shall be you who will bring the matters to God. Jethro, a priest by profession, assumes that the ultimate source of judicial insight for the chief justice is from God, and so Moses is to serve as a kind of intercessor between the people and God.

21. search out. The Hebrew is literally “envision.”

able, God-fearing men, truthful men, haters of bribes. Quite similar language for the recruitment of judges occurs in both Hittite and Egyptian documents dating from the late second millennium B.C.E.

put over them. That is, over the people as a whole.

chiefs of thousands. The Hebrew for “chief,” sar, is usually a military term (“commander”), and this neat, numerically divided judicial organization has the look of a military command structure. Scholars have noted that it is far better suited to the royal bureaucracy of the First Commonwealth period than to the rough-and-ready conditions of nomadic life in the wilderness.

22. every great matter. Throughout, “matter” is the polyvalent Hebrew davar, which means “word,” “thing,” “matter,” “affair,” “mission,” and more. Cassuto observes that davar in the singular occurs exactly ten times in this episode and that it might be a kind of coded prelude to the immediately following episode of the Ten Commandments, which in the Hebrew are called the Ten Words, ʿAseret haDibrot.

it will lighten . . . they will bear it. Both “it”s are supplied for purposes of clarity in the translation. The language of course reflects the image of judicial responsibility as a heavy burden.

23. will come to its place in peace. Evidently: will go home at the end of the day in a state of well-being or mental contentment. But some have proposed that the clause could refer to coming into the promised land.

26. The hard matters. The replacement of “great” by “hard” is a kind of explanatory gloss. Lest we think that “great” meant “important”—let us say, involving large issues of wealth—this substitution informs us that it is the legal cases that are difficult to resolve which would be given to Moses.

27. And Moses sent off his father-in-law. The “sending off” is obviously a ceremonious and amicable leave-taking, though it is precisely the verb used repeatedly in the Exodus narrative for what Pharaoh is implored to do for Israel. The verb also neatly closes the episode in a ring structure, picking up the “being sent away” of verse 2.

he went away. The Hebrew uses an ethical dative, literally “he went him” (as in “Go forth [go you] from your land,” Genesis 12:1). Its effect seems to be something like “away” or “on his way.”