How Many Wives Did Moses Have? 1 or 2: Zipporah and the Cushite

Moses had one wife by name, and perhaps a second. The named wife is Zipporah, daughter of the priest of Midian (Exodus 2:21). The other is “the Ethiopian woman whom he had married” (Numbers 12:1), in Hebrew “the Cushite woman.” Was she a second wife, or Zipporah herself? The text does not settle it.

Whether she was one woman or two, Moses married outside Israel. He was himself a refugee when he met Zipporah. He named his first son Gershom, “for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land” (Exodus 2:22). The man who led Israel out of Egypt married into a foreign house, and when his brother and sister spoke against him over his wife, God answered them and defended Moses.

Moses fled Egypt after he killed an Egyptian he saw beating a Hebrew (Exodus 2:11–12), and “dwelt in the land of Midian: and he sat down by a well” (Exodus 2:15). The seven daughters of the priest of Midian came to water their father’s flock, shepherds drove them off, “but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock” (Exodus 2:17). Their father heard the story and said, “call him, that he may eat bread” (Exodus 2:20). Then “Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter” (Exodus 2:21).

Her name is the Hebrew Tsipporah, the feminine of the word for “bird.” She bore Moses two sons. Gershom came first; the second, Eliezer, was named for the God who “was mine help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh” (Exodus 18:4). Stephen, telling the story in Acts, says Moses “was a stranger in the land of Madian, where he begat two sons,” and that forty years passed before the burning bush (Acts 7:29–30). By the time Moses stood before Pharaoh he was “fourscore years old” (Exodus 7:7). Their marriage was already a long one.

On the road back to Egypt comes one of the strangest scenes in Scripture. “And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me” (Exodus 4:24–25). “So he let him go” (4:26).

The passage never says why, and the Jewish Publication Society’s translation notes simply, “Meaning of verses uncertain.” Rashi, the rabbi of Troyes in France (1040–1105) whose commentary is printed on the page of almost every edition of the Hebrew Bible, gives the plain answer. Where Exodus says “the Lord met him,” Rashi speaks of the angel, and says the angel came “because he had not circumcised his son Eliezer.” He also records a gentler view, that Moses had delayed only to keep the child safe on the road. Either way, the man sent to bring Israel out under God’s covenant had not yet given his own son its sign. It was Zipporah who understood the danger and acted. A Midianite woman kept the covenant of Abraham for her Hebrew husband, and the words “bridegroom of blood,” as the JPS renders them, are hers.

For a time, yes. When Jethro came to meet Moses in the wilderness, he “took Zipporah, Moses’ wife, after he had sent her back, And her two sons” (Exodus 18:2–3). Exodus never says when or why Moses sent her home. Rashi repeats an older tradition from the Mekhilta, a commentary on Exodus compiled in the land of Israel around the third century: Aaron met them on the road and asked where Moses was taking his family, and Moses “therefore said to her, ‘Return to your father’s house’” while Israel suffered in Egypt.

So the separation was not a divorce in Exodus. Jethro brought “thy wife, and her two sons with her” (18:6), Moses went out to meet him, “and they came into the tent” (18:7). That is the last scene in which Zipporah appears by name. The Bible does not record her death.

In the second year of the journey (Numbers 10:11), Miriam and Aaron turned on their brother. “And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman” (Numbers 12:1). The Hebrew says ha-ishah ha-kushit, the Cushite woman, which the King James translators rendered “Ethiopian.”

Cush, in the Bible, is the land beyond Egypt’s southern border. Ezekiel draws the line “from the tower of Syene even unto the border of Ethiopia” (Ezekiel 29:10), and Genesis lists Cush beside Mizraim, Egypt, among the sons of Ham (Genesis 10:6). Jeremiah takes it for granted that a Cushite’s skin is dark: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23). Read at its plainest, then, Numbers 12:1 says Moses had married an African woman from the upper Nile.

Here faithful readers part ways. Both sides read the same few verses carefully.

The case that she was Zipporah

The ancient rabbis read the Cushite as Zipporah. The Sifrei, an early rabbinic commentary on Numbers, asks how a Midianite could be called a Cushite and answers that as a Cushite stands out by his skin, so Zipporah stood out by her beauty. Rashi follows it: the word “tells us that all agreed as to her beauty just as all agree as to the blackness of an Aethopian.” Targum Onkelos, the ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah once read aloud verse by verse in the synagogue, simply puts the word for “fair” where the Hebrew has Cushite. In this reading the complaint was not about a new marriage at all. Rashi takes the complaint to be “because of her having been divorced by Moses,” and the Sifrei explains that Moses had stopped living with her as a husband so that he would always be ready when God spoke.

Scripture itself gives one hint that the names could meet. Habakkuk sets them side by side: “I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction: and the curtains of the land of Midian did tremble” (Habakkuk 3:7). The Catholic New American Bible, in the bishops’ note on Numbers 12:1, takes this side too: “apparently Zipporah, the Midianite, is meant; cf. Ex 2:21.”

The case that she was another woman

Others read Numbers 12:1 as a second marriage. Elsewhere in the Bible Cush is the land south of Egypt, and Exodus never calls Zipporah’s people Cushites. The verse also repeats itself, “for he had married an Ethiopian woman,” as though the marriage were news. The old commentary of Keil and Delitzsch argues just this: “This wife cannot have been Zipporah the Midianite,” because Miriam would hardly have raised a marriage made so many years before. They suggest Moses married again “probably after the death of Zipporah.” The Bible itself says nothing about whether Zipporah was still alive, and nothing about a quarrel between two wives. It names no concubines of Moses at all.

Neither reading makes Moses a man with a household of wives. At most Scripture gives him two, and it is silent on whether he had both at once. What the Church teaches now about more than one wife is in is polygamy a sin?

Their next words show what was really in their hearts. “Hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he not spoken also by us?” (Numbers 12:2). The bishops’ note gives “the apparent reason” for the quarrel: it “was jealousy of his authority; his Cushite wife served only as an occasion for the dispute.”

Moses himself says nothing. “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth” (12:3). God speaks for him. He calls the three to the tabernacle and comes down in the pillar of cloud: “With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches … wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” (12:8). The old word “apparently” means openly; the bishops’ translation has “plainly and not in riddles.” When the cloud lifted, “Miriam became leprous, white as snow” (12:10).

Look at the shape of that judgment. A woman spoken against, perhaps for her dark skin, stays in the camp; the sister who spoke against her is shut outside it for seven days. The text does not explain its own choice, and we should not press it too far. But it is hard to miss that God took the side of the foreign wife. The prophet Amos would later hear the Lord ask, “Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?” (Amos 9:7).

The early Christian bishop Irenaeus of Lyons saw the church in that marriage. Moses, he wrote, took “an Ethiopian woman, whom he thus made an Israelitish one, showing by anticipation that the wild olive tree is grafted into the cultivated olive.” The bride from beyond the border became a picture of all of us who were once strangers to the promise.

Some ask about three or four wives of Moses. The extra wives come from stories told long after the Bible was written. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the reign of the emperor Domitian, tells of an Egyptian war in which Moses led Pharaoh’s army against the Ethiopians. Tharbis, “the daughter of the king of the Ethiopians,” saw him from the walls and fell in love, and after the city surrendered Moses “gave thanks to God, and consummated his marriage.” Josephus never links her to Miriam’s complaint; his retelling of the wilderness years leaves Numbers 12 out.

Sefer ha-Yashar, a medieval Hebrew retelling first printed in Venice in 1625, goes further. It makes Moses king of Cush for forty years, married to the widowed queen Adoniah, and says he “never came near unto her.” Add Tharbis and Adoniah to Zipporah and the Cushite and you reach four names. Only Zipporah is named in Scripture, and only the Cushite woman is mentioned there besides her.

Zipporah’s father is Reuel in Exodus 2:18, Jethro in Exodus 3:1 and 18:1, and Hobab is named in two places. Numbers 10:29 speaks of “Hobab, the son of Raguel the Midianite, Moses’ father in law,” and Judges 4:11 calls Hobab “the father in law of Moses.” Raguel is only another English spelling: the Hebrew name is Reuel in both verses. Rashi lists seven names for Jethro, Hobab among them, and admits the puzzle: some say Reuel was Jethro’s father, “for children call their grandfather: father.” Whichever it was, the family that sheltered Moses stayed close to Israel; Moses begged Hobab, “Leave us not, I pray thee … thou mayest be to us instead of eyes” (Numbers 10:31).

Chronicles counts Moses’ sons “of the tribe of Levi” (1 Chronicles 23:14), not among the priests, and names them: “The sons of Moses were, Gershom, and Eliezer,” and of Eliezer’s son Rehabiah it says, “the sons of Rehabiah were very many” (1 Chronicles 23:15, 17). The line of the stranger’s son lived on among the people his father led.

Moses speaks only once in Numbers 12. His sister had spoken against his wife and against him, and he did not ask God to defend him. He prayed for her: “Heal her now, O God, I beseech thee” (Numbers 12:13).

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