Exodus 2:20
The Text
Seven daughters come home early, buckets emptied, flock watered, and they tell their father what happened at the well: an Egyptian stood up for them against the shepherds who shoved them aside every day. Reuel, priest of Midian, does not congratulate them. He is annoyed. "Where is he? Why is it that you have left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread." The stranger is still sitting out there by the water, dust on his robe, nowhere to sleep, and his daughters walked away from him. In the old man's mouth that is not politeness neglected; it is a disgrace. Go back. Fetch him. He eats with us tonight.
The Core
Hear it the way a desert household would. Water is contested, bread is counted, and a stranger at the well is either a threat or a guest, never nothing. To leave a man standing after he has served you is to treat him as a tool, and Reuel's sharp question exposes exactly that. What the text quietly shows is how God moves his story forward: not by thunder, not yet by a burning bush, but by an old man insisting that a fugitive be fed. Moses has killed a man, lost his name, lost his people, lost his palace. He is given a meal. Before God ever calls him, grace reaches him in the shape of someone else's table, offered by a stranger who owes him nothing but a debt of courtesy.
The Common Thread
Midian sits on the edge of Israel's map and the edge of its memory: descendants of Abraham through Keturah, cousins of the covenant family, outside the promise but not outside God's reach. And here the man who will stand before Pharaoh is kept alive by a cousin's hospitality. The pattern repeats across Scripture until it becomes a shape you can recognise: the deliverer arrives as a stranger, unrecognised, with nothing in his hands, and everything depends on whether someone opens a door. Centuries later a man born in Bethlehem would have no place to lay his head, would eat at other people's tables, and would be turned away from a good many. Reuel's question, where is he, is the question the whole story keeps asking.
The Mirror
Think of the last person who did something for you that cost them real effort. The neighbour who sat with your kid when the hospital called. The colleague who quietly fixed what you broke before anyone noticed. You said thanks. Then you went inside and closed the door, and that was the end of it. Reuel's daughters did nothing wrong; they thanked the man, they told the story at home. The failure is subtler than rudeness: it is letting usefulness be the whole relationship. We are efficient with people. We extract the help and move on, and we call it not wanting to impose. Today, send a message to one person who helped you in the last month and invite them to eat with you, with an actual date in it.
The Main Character
Reuel is an old man with seven daughters and no sons, which in that world means a household with no muscle. Shepherds drive his girls off the water every day and he can do nothing about it; the humiliation is routine by now. He is a priest, which means he knows what is owed to God and what is owed to a guest, and he has probably watched his own honour thin out year by year. Then his daughters come home early, and the first thing out of his mouth is not relief but indignation on behalf of a man he has never met. That is the measure of him. A man who has been pushed away from wells himself does not leave a stranger sitting by one.
The Intertext
Genesis has already shown us this scene from the other side. Abraham, sitting in his tent door in the heat, runs toward three strangers and presses food on them before he knows who they are, and the blessing of Isaac arrives inside that meal. Hospitality in these stories is never decoration; it is the doorway revelation walks through. The dark mirror is Judges 19, where a Levite and his concubine sit in the town square of Gibeah and nobody takes them in, and the night that follows tears Israel apart. The question of whether a stranger gets fed turns out to be the question of whether a society still knows God. Reuel passes. Gibeah fails.
The Question
If God is already working through this meal, why does nothing happen for forty years? Three verses later Moses names his son Gershom because he is a foreigner in a foreign land, and the verse after that tells us Israel is still groaning, still in the brick pits, still dying. God hears, God remembers, God sees, God is concerned, and still the slaves wait. The text gives no reason for the delay. It would be cheap to say Moses needed the desert to be shaped, true as that may partly be, because the children who died in those decades did not need anything. Scripture lets the gap stand. What it refuses to say is that God was absent from it. He was at a Midianite table, setting bread in front of a murderer, doing something slow.
Reflection
Who has helped you in a way you absorbed and never answered, and what would it cost you to call that person back?
Where in your life are you currently living the forty silent years, and what would it mean to believe God is at work in the ordinariness of it rather than despite it?
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JL GroupWhat the community shares on Exodus 2
Insights, prayers and thanksgivings from readers and the editorial team on this passage.
Father, when I run from what I can't fix, meet me where I land. Sit with me by the well in this strange place, far from what I knew. Teach me that waiting is not wasted, and that you are already at work in the years no one sees.
Thank You for that well in Midian, and for seven daughters who came and drew water, filling the troughs for their father's flock. Thank You for ordinary chores at ordinary hours, and for the way You meet us in the middle of them.
Father, you work in small moments: a sister speaking up, a single word of permission, a mother handed back her own child. When my situation looks hopeless, help me trust that you are already arranging what I cannot see, and give me courage to speak when it matters.
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