Are Ishmaelites and Midianites the Same? Kin, but Not One People

No: by descent they were two peoples, though both came from Abraham. The Ishmaelites were the children of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar, and the Midianites the children of Midian, his son by Keturah. The question arises because Genesis 37 calls the traders who carried Joseph to Egypt by both names, and Judges 8 calls the Midianites Ishmaelites.

So the puzzle sits in one of the saddest scenes in the Bible. Joseph’s brothers have stripped him of his coat of many colours and thrown him into a dry pit. They sit down to eat. Then they look up and see a caravan “with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt” (Genesis 37:25). Whoever those traders were, they carried a boy of seventeen to whom, years later, “all countries came into Egypt” to buy grain in a famine (Genesis 41:57).

Not in the family records of Genesis, which keep them apart:

	Ishmaelites	Midianites
Ancestor	Ishmael, son of Abraham	Midian, son of Abraham
Mother	Hagar the Egyptian (Genesis 25:12)	Keturah, whom Abraham married later (Genesis 25:1–2)
Where they lived	“From Havilah unto Shur, that is before Egypt” (Genesis 25:18)	Probably east of the Gulf of Aqaba, in northwest Arabia
Known in Scripture for	The spice caravan in Joseph’s story	Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, and the raids Gideon ended

Ishmael had twelve sons, “twelve princes according to their nations” (Genesis 25:16). Midian was one of six sons Keturah bore to Abraham, and before he died Abraham gave those sons gifts “and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country” (Genesis 25:6). So their ancestors were half-brothers, sons of one father by two mothers. Psalm 83 lists “the Ishmaelites” among the nations leagued against Israel (verse 6), while Midian appears only as an old enemy already beaten: “Do unto them as unto the Midianites” (verse 9).

Yet the two names overlap in two places. In Genesis 37 the traders are called Ishmaelites in verses 25, 27 and 28 and Midianites in verses 28 and 36. In Judges, after Gideon’s victory over Midian, the writer explains why the enemy wore gold: “For they had golden earrings, because they were Ishmaelites” (Judges 8:24). Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that these two verses are part of the reason the Midianites have traditionally been identified as Ishmaelites.

The whole question turns on one verse, where the King James spells the name “Ishmeelites”: “Then there passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmeelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt” (Genesis 37:28). Who is “they”? A few verses on, “the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar” (37:36), but in chapter 39 Potiphar “bought him of the hands of the Ishmeelites” (39:1). Over many centuries, Jewish and Christian readers have answered the puzzle in four main ways.

One caravan with two names

The simplest answer is that the Midianites and the Ishmaelites are the same traders. The Jewish commentator Abraham ibn Ezra wrote that “Scripture refers to the Ishmaelites as Midianites because the Midianites are called Ishmaelites,” and pointed to Judges 8:24. Carl Keil and Franz Delitzsch argued the same in their nineteenth-century commentary: the tribes “were often confounded,” because they shared descent from Abraham and the same wandering life, so “that strangers could hardly distinguish them, especially when they appeared not as tribes but as Arabian merchants.” On this reading the two names describe one company of desert merchants, and the brothers sold Joseph to it exactly as Judah proposed.

Several sales, one after another

Rashi, the great eleventh-century commentator, took the Midianites as “another caravan” and wrote that “Scripture indicates that he was sold several times.” The brothers drew Joseph out of the pit and “sold him to the Ishmaelites, and the Ishmaelites to the Midianites and the Midianites into Egypt.” Rashi drew this from an older midrash, Midrash Tanchuma, which finds four misfortunes in the letters of the Hebrew word for Joseph’s coat: “his sale to Potiphar,” his sale to the merchants, “his sale to the Ishmaelites,” and “his sale to the Midianites.” That reading keeps each verse as it stands, at the cost of sales the text does not describe.

The Midianites took him while the brothers ate

Rashi’s grandson Rashbam read the verse more plainly. While the brothers were eating and waiting for the Ishmaelites, the Midianites passed the pit from another direction, pulled Joseph up and sold him to the Ishmaelites themselves. “One may assume that the brothers had no knowledge of this,” he wrote, though he allowed that the brothers might have told the Midianites to pull Joseph up and then sold him themselves. His first reading fits two details in the story. Reuben comes back to the pit, meaning to rescue Joseph, and finds it empty: “The child is not; and I, whither shall I go?” (37:30). And Joseph later tells Pharaoh’s butler, “For indeed I was stolen away out of the land of the Hebrews” (40:15).

Two tellings woven into one

Many modern critical scholars hold that Genesis 37 joins two older accounts. Writing for TheTorah.com, Marty Lockshin summarises the view: “One story has Reuben suggesting that they throw Joseph in a pit,” and before Reuben can rescue him, Midianite traders find Joseph and carry him off. “In the other story, Judah suggests that Joseph be sold to the Ishmaelites, and this is what the brothers do.” On this view the editor kept the words of both. Readers who take Genesis 37 as one continuous account choose among the first three answers.

Scripture does not say whose hands pulled Joseph out of the pit, and it does not say whether the two names belong to one caravan or two. Every answer above is a careful reading, and none is spelled out in the text. Even the name shifts in Genesis 37:36, where the Hebrew reads Medanim, Medanites, which the King James Version renders “Midianites.” Medan was yet another son of Keturah (Genesis 25:2).

What Genesis does settle is the part that matters most. The brothers meant to sell him. “Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmeelites,” Judah said, “and his brethren were content” (37:27). Years later Joseph says it to their faces: “I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt.” In the next breath he tells them who was at work behind the caravan: “Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life” (45:4–5).

They appear as both friends and enemies of Israel. When Moses fled Egypt, he “dwelt in the land of Midian,” married Zipporah, a daughter of “the priest of Midian,” and kept the flocks of Jethro his father-in-law until he came to Horeb (Exodus 2:15–21; 3:1). Jethro later heard all God had done and said, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods” (Exodus 18:11). The story of Moses’ wife Zipporah is in how many wives did Moses have.

Later the elders of Midian joined Moab against Israel in the plains (Numbers 22:4), and Midian was part of the sin at Peor (Numbers 25:6; 31:16). In the days of the judges, Midian came up every harvest with camels “without number” and stripped the land, until “Israel was greatly impoverished because of the Midianites” (Judges 6:5–6). God broke their power through Gideon and his three hundred men, and after that the Midianites largely disappear from the story.

Are the Moabites and Midianites the same?

No. Moab came from Lot’s elder daughter, “the father of the Moabites unto this day” (Genesis 19:37), so Moabites were not descendants of Abraham at all. They were his kin all the same, because Lot was “his brother’s son” (Genesis 12:5), Abraham’s nephew, which is why readers often link the two peoples. Midian came from Abraham and Keturah. The two peoples were neighbours and allies, which is why their elders appear together in Numbers 22.

No people today goes by either name. The Ishmaelites live on in tradition. Muslim tradition traces the Prophet Muhammad’s own line to Ishmael: in a hadith collected in Sahih Muslim, Muhammad says, “Verily Allah granted eminence to Kinana from amongst the descendants of Isma’il,” and goes on through the Quraish to his own clan. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote of Ishmael’s twelve sons, “These inhabited all the country from Euphrates to the Red Sea, and called it Nabatene. They are an Arabian nation.” These are traditions of descent, Muslim and Jewish. Genesis itself names Ishmael’s sons and the land they lived in, and goes no further.

Britannica places them most likely east of the Gulf of Aqaba and says they largely disappear from the Bible after Gideon. Yet the prophets did not forget them. Isaiah, looking toward the day when the nations come to God’s light, sees the same kind of caravan that once carried Joseph down to Egypt: “The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord” (Isaiah 60:6). Ishmael’s own life, and the question of his salvation, are taken up in did Ishmael go to heaven.

We will never know for certain whose hands lifted Joseph from the pit, or how many times silver changed hands on the road to Egypt. Joseph himself did not dwell on it. Standing before the brothers who had sold him, he gave the answer that still holds for every one of us carried somewhere we did not choose to go: “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Genesis 50:20).

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