Moses’s flight to Midian

The flight is recounted in five compact verses, Exodus 2:11–15. Moses, raised in Pharaoh’s household but Hebrew by birth, kills an Egyptian overseer brutalising a slave and the next day finds the deed already common knowledge. Pharaoh orders him executed and he runs. The text simply says he “dwelt in the land of Midian” (Exo.2.15). Midian in the Late Bronze Age was a cluster of tribal territories along the eastern shore of the Gulf of Aqaba and inland to the north-western Arabian desert — roughly modern north-western Saudi Arabia. To reach it from the eastern Nile delta, Moses would have crossed the northern Sinai by one of the caravan tracks (the Way of Shur or the Way of the Wilderness), skirted the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, and turned south down the Arabian coast. At a desert well he intervened for the seven daughters of Reuel/Jethro, a Midianite priest, married Zipporah, and herded his father-in-law’s flocks for forty years until the encounter at Horeb (Exo.3.1).