Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT exchange.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Christopher wrote:-

>Years ago, we were told a hypothesis about Jethro, Moses' father-in-law,
>in Exodus.  The idea was that Moses' contact with Jethro, the priest of
>Midian, may have formed his religious ideas. For example, Moses' first
>encounter with the deity occurs while sojourning with Jethro in Exodus 3.
>This hypothesis implies Judaism an outgrowth of the Midianite religion,
>which is certainly curious.
>
>Since I wasn't much of a student, perhaps this is a misunderstanding on my
>part.  Has anyone heard of this before?

Yes, I have. There are problems with it, depending on your biases.  If
you're a maximalist the problems are that the whole of Genesis is
before Moses and YHWH has lots to do with people then. If you're a
minimalist then there was no Moses  to go visit with Jethro. Moses is
supposed to be a late creation to put a stop to the work of the
prophets.  Another widely held bias in scholarly circles is that the
Israelites were incapable of having an original thought, so scholars
are always trying to find where they borrowed their ideas from.

A good rule of thumb is the number of hypotheses which fit the data is
inversely proportional to the amount of data you have. But in the
Biblical arena it seems quite acceptable to discard data which doesn't
fit your hypothesis. We have some truly excellent exponents of that
technique on this list, I'm sure you'll encounter them.  So if you
discard everything which you don't like and only accept Moses'
encounter with Jethro then it becomes the only theory which fits 
your facts.

The only evidence we have for Moses meeting Jethro is in the Hebrew 
Scriptures. Grab a concordance and in a few minutes you can find 
and read all the evidence we have available to us. 

I'm sure you'll detect that I'm really cynical about all this. My
point is that you can have any answer you want and that answer tells
you more about your biases than anything else. I've even read that
Moses and Akenaten were the same person! A different answer, but one
born of the same bias that the Israelite people couldn't have had
an original thought.

Bill Rea, Information Technology Dept., Canterbury  University  \_ 
E-Mail bill dot rea at canterbury dot ac dot nz                 </   New 
Phone   64-3-364-2331, Fax     64-3-364-2332                   /)  Zealand 
Unix Systems Administrator                                    (/'