BIble Study: Who was Moses’ wife? Did Moses have more than one wife?

Christian Pure Team

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Summary

  • Moses’s life showcases both his divine mission and his human struggles, revealing his role as a husband and father before becoming a leader.
  • Zipporah, Moses’s wife, played a crucial part in his life, providing love, hospitality, and displaying immense courage during critical moments.
  • The story highlights themes of commitment, prejudice, and God’s grace towards outsiders, illustrated through the tensions between Moses, Zipporah, and his siblings.
  • The Catholic Church emphasizes the sanctity of marriage as a monogamous union, referencing biblical figures while noting the pitfalls of polygamy in scripture.

We often picture Moses as a figure of immense strength and solitude. We see him on the mountaintop, face-to-face with God, receiving the Law etched in stone. We see him as the powerful leader of a nation, the intermediary between the divine and the human. But the Holy Scriptures, in their tender and powerful wisdom, also invite us to see Moses the man. Before he was a lawgiver, he was a fugitive. Before he led a people, he was a husband and a father.

To ask about the wife of Moses is to do more than satisfy historical curiosity. It is an invitation to look deeper into his life, to see his humanity, and to witness how God’s grace weaves its way through the beautiful and sometimes complicated threads of family and relationships. This journey into the life of Moses’s family is a path into the heart of a great servant of God, and a glimpse into the merciful heart of God Himself.

Who was Zipporah, the woman who gave Moses a home?

The story of Moses and Zipporah begins, as many great biblical love stories do, at a well. It is a story born from desperation and grace. After slaying an Egyptian taskmaster, Moses flees the palace and the life he knew, becoming a man on the run, an outcast with a violent past.¹ He arrives in the foreign land of Midian, a stranger with nothing to his name. There, by a well, he sees the seven daughters of the local priest being harassed by shepherds. Moses, whose heart for justice has already been established, rises to defend them, driving off the aggressors and watering their flock for them.³

One of these daughters was Zipporah.⁵ When she and her sisters returned home and told their father, Jethro (also called Reuel), of the kind stranger’s help, he immediately extended a hand of fellowship: “call him, that he may eat bread”.⁶ Moses, the fugitive, was welcomed into their home. The Bible tells us he “was content to dwell with the man,” and in time, Jethro gave him his daughter Zipporah in marriage.⁷

Her very name, Zipporah (צִפּוֹרָה), which means “bird,” hints at her beautiful character.⁸ Jewish tradition offers two heartwarming ways to understand this name. Just as a bird is admired for its loveliness, Zipporah was admired for her own beauty and grace. In a deeper spiritual sense, just as the blood of a bird was used in rituals to purify a home from leprosy, Zipporah is said to have cleansed her father’s house from the taint of idolatry, pointing to a woman of powerful spiritual strength.⁸

In Midian, Zipporah gave Moses a life he had lost. She gave him a family, bearing him two sons: Gershom, whose name means “a foreigner there,” a constant reminder of Moses’s exile; and Eliezer, meaning “my God is my help,” a testament to the divine protection that had brought him to this safe harbor.¹ To enrich this picture, Jewish Midrashic tradition tells a dramatic tale of Zipporah’s deep compassion. In this story, her father, fearing Moses was a threat, cast him into a pit to die. For ten long years, it was Zipporah who secretly brought him food and water, keeping him alive until it was safe for him to emerge. This beautiful, though non-biblical, story paints a portrait of a woman whose kindness and courage were instrumental in saving Moses long before she became his wife.⁸

The story of Zipporah is a powerful illustration of the Christian call to welcome the stranger. Moses arrives as a broken man, a refugee fleeing a capital crime. He is vulnerable, alone, and an outsider. Yet, in Zipporah and her family, he is met not with suspicion but with hospitality, acceptance, and eventually, love. This welcome does more than just give him shelter; it begins to heal the brokenness in his life. The home Zipporah provides becomes the crucible where Moses, the shepherd, is quietly prepared by God for his ultimate mission as the shepherd of Israel. Her actions are a powerful theological statement, embodying the grace that finds us in our own exile and gives us a place to belong, much like the Church is called to be a home for all who are lost and weary.

What does the strange story of the “bridegroom of blood” teach us about commitment?

The journey of faith is not always smooth, and the story of Moses and Zipporah contains one of the most mysterious and unsettling episodes in the entire Old Testament. In Exodus chapter 4, after God has commissioned Moses at the burning bush, Moses sets out for Egypt with his family to begin his great mission. On the way, the Scripture tells us something shocking: “At a lodging place on the way the LORD met him and sought to put him to death”.⁹

The narrative is stark and terrifying. Why would God choose a leader only to try to kill him before his work could even begin? Zipporah’s immediate and decisive action provides the answer. The text implies that Moses was struck with a sudden, deathly illness, rendering him helpless. But Zipporah understood the spiritual crisis at hand. The reason for God’s anger was Moses’s failure to circumcise their son, a neglect of the fundamental sign of God’s covenant with Abraham.⁴

With stunning clarity, Zipporah acts. She takes a sharp flint knife, performs the circumcision on her son herself, and then takes the bloody foreskin and touches Moses’s feet with it (the term “feet” is widely understood as a respectful euphemism in Hebrew for the genitals).¹² Her action is an act of covenant faithfulness that saves her husband’s life. Instantly, God relents, and the threat passes.³

In the aftermath of this traumatic event, Zipporah cries out, “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!”.⁴ This is not a cry of joy a raw and emotional lament. It is the voice of a wife and mother pushed to the brink, a cry of frustration that her covenant bond to her husband has forced her to perform this painful, bloody act on her own child to save his life.¹² Her words reveal the real and sometimes agonizing cost of true commitment to God and to family.

This strange event carries a lesson of immense weight. It underscores the absolute seriousness with which God views His covenant. The man chosen to lead Israel out of bondage and deliver God’s law could not do so while neglecting that same covenant in his own home.¹¹ It is a timeless reminder that spiritual leadership begins with personal faithfulness and integrity in one’s own family.

It is profoundly major that at this critical moment, it is not the great patriarch Moses who saves the day. He, the chosen one, fails. It is his wife, Zipporah—a Midianite, a woman not born into the covenant of Abraham—who understands the spiritual reality of the moment and acts with the faith and courage necessary to preserve God’s plan.⁴ The “outsider” becomes the agent of salvation. The non-Israelite becomes the teacher of covenant faithfulness. This powerfully demonstrates that God’s work is never limited by our human boundaries of lineage or status. He often uses those we might consider to be on the margins to instruct, correct, and even save those at the very center of His plan.

Did Moses have a second wife?

Years later, after the Exodus from Egypt and deep in the wilderness journey, another controversy arises concerning Moses’s wife. This one, found in the Book of Numbers, has led to centuries of debate among scholars and believers. The verse at the heart of the matter states, “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman”.¹⁵

This single verse raises an immediate and challenging question: Who is this “Cushite woman”? Is this another name for Zipporah, his Midianite wife, or had Moses taken a second wife?.³ The Bible does not give a simple answer, and faithful interpreters have arrived at different conclusions. The two main schools of thought can be summarized as follows.

View 1: The Cushite Woman was Zipporah View 2: The Cushite Woman was a Second Wife
Supporting Arguments: Supporting Arguments:
The term “Cushite” may have been used as a descriptive term for Zipporah, perhaps referring to her dark complexion or as a compliment to her exceptional beauty and character, setting her apart from other women. The complaint from Miriam and Aaron seems to be about a recent event. It is unlikely they would protest a marriage that was already over 40 years old.
The Bible itself provides a geographical link. The prophet Habakkuk uses the term “Cushan” in parallel with “Midian,” suggesting a historical or tribal connection between the two peoples. Midian, located in the Arabian peninsula, and Cush, traditionally identified with Ethiopia or Nubia in Africa, are geographically distinct regions.
This view presents Moses as monogamous, which aligns more closely with the ideal of God’s singular covenant relationship with Israel that the prophets would later emphasize. It is possible that Zipporah had died by this time (though her death is not recorded) and Moses had remarried. The Bible is silent on the deaths of many figures.
Many Jewish and Christian commentators, including the official commentary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, favor this interpretation. The first-century historian Josephus records a non-biblical tradition that Moses, as a general for Egypt, married an Ethiopian princess named Tharbis after a military victory.

Why were Miriam and Aaron so upset with Moses?

Although the identity of the Cushite woman remains a mystery, the motivation for the complaint against her is painfully clear. The Bible tells us that Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of his wife their very next words reveal the true issue burning in their hearts. They ask, “Has the LORD spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?”.¹⁵

Here, the veil is lifted. The marriage was merely a pretext, a convenient excuse to voice a deeper grievance.²⁷ The root of this family conflict was not concern over a sister-in-law; it was jealousy over Moses’s unique authority and his unparalleled relationship with God.³³ Miriam was a prophetess in her own right, and Aaron was the high priest. They were leaders, too. Yet, in their eyes, their own status and importance were being overshadowed by their younger brother. It is a deeply human and tragically relatable story of envy.

This brief episode in the wilderness holds up a mirror to our own hearts. How often in our own lives, in our families, workplaces, and communities, do we seize upon a surface-level issue to mask deeper feelings of insecurity, envy, or a wounded sense of importance? The story of Miriam and Aaron is a gentle but firm caution against allowing jealousy to poison our relationships and our perception of God’s work in the lives of others.

What does God’s response to Miriam teach us about prejudice?

God’s reaction to this challenge is immediate, personal, and severe. He summons all three siblings to the Tent of Meeting, the very center of Israel’s life with God. There, He delivers an impassioned defense of His servant Moses, declaring a relationship with him that is unlike any other. To other prophets, God speaks in visions and dreams of Moses, He says, “With him I speak face to face, clearly, and not in riddles”.²⁷ He makes it clear that to speak against Moses is to speak against God’s chosen vessel.

The nature of the complaint and the nature of the punishment that follows are profoundly connected. The term “Cushite” is most often associated in the Bible with the land of Cush, a powerful kingdom south of Egypt, known today as Nubia or Ethiopia.²² The people of Cush were Black Africans, a fact the Bible itself notes when the prophet Jeremiah asks rhetorically, “Can the Cushite change his skin?”.³⁴ Therefore, it is very likely that the complaint against Moses’s wife was, at its core, a form of racial or ethnic prejudice. She was a foreigner, an outsider, and her dark skin may have been the focus of their slander.

God’s anger is kindled against them, and when the cloud of His glorious presence departs, a terrible judgment has fallen. Miriam is suddenly afflicted with leprosy, her skin turning “as white as snow”.²⁷ The divine poetry of this moment is staggering. The punishment is not merely a penalty; it is a powerful and pointed lesson.

In this divine act, the very foundation of Miriam’s prejudice is dismantled. She who spoke against a woman, possibly for the color of her skin, is now afflicted with a condition that makes her own skin a ghastly, unnatural white. This disease, leprosy, renders her ritually unclean and forces her to be cast outside the community. A stunning reversal takes place. The Cushite woman, the target of the slander, remains inside the camp, protected and vindicated by God. Miriam, the privileged sister of the leader, now finds herself an outcast. God’s judgment serves as a powerful, symbolic sermon: holiness has nothing to do with skin color or ethnic origin. True purity is found in a humble heart, and true defilement springs from a heart filled with pride and prejudice. God turns Miriam’s own standard of judgment back upon her, championing the marginalized and rebuking the powerful.

How does this story reveal God’s love for outsiders?

For the early Church Fathers, this story held an even deeper layer of meaning. Thinkers like Saint Irenaeus of Lyons saw this historical event as a type, a beautiful foreshadowing of the great mystery of Christ and His Church.³¹

In this spiritual reading, Moses is a figure of Christ. His marriage to the Cushite woman—the “Ethiopian” bride, as she was called in the early Greek translations—becomes a living parable of Christ’s love for the Church. This bride is a foreigner, an outsider to the covenant people of Israel. She represents the Gentile nations, the “wild olive tree” that the Apostle Paul speaks of, who through no merit of their own are grafted into the “cultivated olive,” the people of God.³¹

This interpretation reveals a powerful truth about the nature of God’s grace. The the bride of Christ, does not bring her own righteousness to the marriage. Like the Cushite woman, she is chosen from the outside, loved, and brought into a holy and unbreakable union with her savior. It is Christ who makes His bride holy. And those who, like Miriam and Aaron, would “detract from, accuse, and deride” this scandalous union of the holy one with the outsider find themselves, in the end, outside the camp of the righteous, impure in their judgment.³¹ This ancient story becomes a timeless portrait of God’s saving plan, a love that reaches across every human division to create one new family in Christ.

What is the Catholic Church’s stance on Moses’s wives and polygamy?

For Catholics seeking to understand these passages, the Church provides clear and steady guidance. Regarding the specific question of the Cushite woman in Numbers 12, the commentary provided in the official Bible of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) aligns with the view that the woman was “apparently Zipporah.” It further clarifies that the complaint about her was a “pretext” for the real issue, which was Miriam and Aaron’s jealousy of Moses’s authority.²⁷

On the broader and more pressing question of polygamy, the teaching of the Catholic Church is unequivocal. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that polygamy is not in accord with the moral law. It “radically contradicts” the total, undivided, and exclusive love that God intended for marriage from the very beginning.³⁵ It “directly negates the plan of God” and is contrary to the “equal personal dignity of men and women”.³⁵

The Church acknowledges that in the Old Testament, the practice of polygamy by revered figures like the patriarchs and kings was “not yet explicitly rejected”.³⁸ The Law of Moses regulated the practice to protect wives from the arbitrary domination of their husbands this was a concession to the “hardness of heart” of the people, a temporary toleration rather than a divine endorsement.³⁸ , a careful reading of the Old Testament stories themselves reveals the disastrous consequences that consistently followed polygamous unions: jealousy, bitter rivalry strife, and heartbreak.²⁵

This period of divine pedagogy, or teaching, reached its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. He definitively restored marriage to God’s original intention: a sacred, indissoluble, and monogamous union between one man and one woman, who become “one flesh”.²⁵ For Christians, there is no ambiguity; the teaching of Jesus and His Church is that marriage is a covenant between two, and only two, people.

What is the ultimate lesson from the story of Moses’s family?

The story of Moses’s family is not an idealized portrait of perfection. It is messy, complicated, and deeply, recognizably human. It features a great leader who falters, a courageous foreign wife who rises to the occasion, and loving siblings who are overcome by jealousy. It is a story of faith and failure, of love and conflict, of prejudice and powerful mercy.

And yet, this is precisely where we can find the greatest hope. For the story shows us that God does not require perfection to accomplish His will. He works in and through our human imperfection. He weaves a beautiful story of grace using the tangled threads of our lives. He works through Moses’s failure at the inn, through Zipporah’s fierce and costly love, and even through Miriam’s sin and her subsequent repentance. God uses these flawed people and their complex relationships to advance His unstoppable plan of salvation.

The ultimate lesson from the life of Moses’s family is one of boundless hope. It teaches us that God’s love transcends all our human categories and boundaries—of ethnicity, of origin, of sin and of status. It reveals a God who defends the marginalized, who rebukes prejudice with stunning creativity, and who can bring forth immense and lasting good from our most broken human stories. The family of Moses, in all its challenging complexity, stands as an eternal testament to the patient, mysterious, and merciful love of God.

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Bibliography (Click to show)

Bibliography:

  1. Zipporah in the Bible: 10 Facts About Moses' Wife, accessed June 29, 2025, https://thebiblecolleges.com/zipporah-in-the-bible/
  2. Who was Moses in the Bible? | GotQuestions.org, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.gotquestions.org/life-Moses.html
  3. Who was Moses' wife? Did Moses have more than one wife? | GotQuestions.org, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.gotquestions.org/Moses-wife.html
  4. Who was Zipporah in the Bible? | GotQuestions.org, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.gotquestions.org/Zipporah-in-the-Bible.html
  5. en.wikipedia.org, accessed June 29, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipporah#:~:text=Zipporah%20is%20mentioned%20in%20the,priest%20and%20prince%20of%20Midian.&text=She%20is%20the%20mother%20of,and%20Rehabiah%2C%20son%20of%20Eliezer.
  6. Zipporah – Wikipedia, accessed June 29, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipporah
  7. What does Exodus 2:21 mean? – BibleRef.com, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.bibleref.com/Exodus/2/Exodus-2-21.html
  8. The Untold Story of Zipporah, Wife of Moses – What Do You Think …, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/4240317/jewish/The-Untold-Story-of-Zipporah-Wife-of-Moses.htm
  9. www.bibleref.com, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.bibleref.com/Exodus/4/Exodus-4-26.html#:~:text=NIV%20So%20the%20Lord%20let,'%E2%80%94%20because%20of%20the%20circumcision.
  10. "Bridegroom of Blood" – The Odd Text of Exodus 4:24-26 – West Oaks church of Christ, accessed June 29, 2025, https://westoakschurchofchrist.com/articles/2020/01/23/bridegroom-of-blood-the-odd-text-of-exodus-424-26
  11. Why did God want to kill Moses in Exodus 4: 24? – Catholic Cafe, accessed June 29, 2025, http://catholic.cafe/2020/12/11/why-did-god-want-to-kill-moses-in-exodus-4-24/
  12. What is a bridegroom of blood in Exodus 4:25? | GotQuestions.org, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.gotquestions.org/bridegroom-of-blood.html
  13. A Bridegroom of Blood – Into the Word, accessed June 29, 2025, https://intotheword.ca/view/a-bridegroom-of-blood
  14. The Strangest Circumcision Story Ever – The Gospel Coalition, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/moses-zipporah-strangest-circumcision-story-exodus/
  15. Numbers 12:1-3 Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman. And they said, “Has the LORD indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spo | English Standard Version Revision 2016 (ESV) | Download The Bible App Now, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.bible.com/bible/59/NUM.12.1-3.ESV
  16. Numbers 12:1 Then Miriam and Aaron criticized Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married, for he had taken a Cushite wife. – Bible Hub, accessed June 29, 2025, https://biblehub.com/numbers/12-1.htm
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  20. The “Cushite” wife of Moses | theoutwardquest – WordPress.com, accessed June 29, 2025, https://theoutwardquest.wordpress.com/2019/06/24/the-cushite-wife-of-moses/
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