The Pattern for God’s People
Exodus 2:15–19 (NASB95)
15When Pharaoh heard of this matter, he tried to kill Moses. But Moses fled from the presence of Pharaoh and settled in the land of Midian, and he sat down by a well. 16Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters; and they came to draw water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. 17Then the shepherds came and drove them away, but Moses stood up and helped them and watered their flock. 18When they came to Reuel their father, he said, “Why have you come back so soon today?” 19So they said, “An Egyptian delivered us from the hand of the shepherds, and what is more, he even drew the water for us and watered the flock.”
Commentary – The Pattern for God’s People
By the time we reach Exodus 2:15, Moses finds himself in a desperate situation. Pharaoh has learned that Moses killed an Egyptian taskmaster, and now the most powerful ruler in the world is seeking his life. Moses has no choice but to flee. He leaves Egypt behind and makes his way to Midian, a region that would have offered him a reasonable measure of safety. The Midianites were descendants of Abraham through his wife Keturah, and they occupied stretches of the Sinai peninsula as well as northwestern Arabia. For a man running from Egypt, Midian represented a place where Egyptian authority held little sway, where the language and customs were not entirely foreign, and where a lone fugitive might find shelter among people who had their own complicated history with Egypt. Moses arrived not as a conqueror or a nobleman but as a man with nothing, sitting alone by a well.
Wells in the ancient world were far more than sources of water. They were gathering places, social centers, and sites of great significance. It is no accident that several pivotal moments in the Old Testament happen at wells. This particular well in Midian becomes the setting for the third great act of courage in Moses' young life.
The daughters of Reuel, who is also known as Jethro (he will become important in later chapters) and who serves as a priest of Midian, came to the well to draw water for their father's flocks. Before they could finish, a group of shepherds arrived and drove them away. In the ancient Near East, women drawing water alone were vulnerable to exactly this kind of harassment and intimidation. What those shepherds did was an act of injustice, plain and simple. They used their strength to take what was not theirs and to push aside those who had every right to be there. Moses saw what was happening, and he did not look away. He stood up, drove the shepherds off, and then went further still, drawing water and filling the troughs for the women's flocks himself.
This brings us to verse 17, and it is worth pausing here to recognize something important. This is the third time in the opening chapters of Exodus that Moses intervenes to confront injustice. The first time, he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and he stepped in. The second time, he saw two Hebrew men fighting each other and tried to make peace between them. Now, for the third time, he sees women he has never met being mistreated by strangers, and once again he acts. Each of these three moments involves different people. The first was a matter of ethnicity, a Hebrew being abused by an Egyptian. The second was a conflict within his own community. The third crosses every conceivable boundary. These women are Midianites, not Hebrews. They are women in a world that afforded them very little protection. Moses had no obligation to them. He had no history with them, no shared identity, no personal stake in the outcome. He stood up for them anyway. Moses does not pick and choose whose dignity is worth defending. He stands against injustice for Hebrews and non-Hebrews alike, for men and for women, for his own people and for complete strangers. This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern the text deliberately shows us.
Look carefully at the first two chapters of Exodus and notice who the key figures are and how each one behaves. Jochebed, the mother of Moses, defies Pharaoh's death decree and finds a way to keep her son alive. Miriam, still a young girl, watches over her brother with extraordinary nerve and then approaches Pharaoh's daughter with a bold and clever plan. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah are ordered by the most powerful man in the world to kill Hebrew baby boys, and they refuse. Pharaoh's daughter sees a Hebrew child hidden in the reeds, understands exactly what she is looking at, and chooses compassion over compliance with her own father's law. And Moses, across three separate moments, refuses to walk past suffering without doing something about it. Every single person God introduces to us in these first two chapters is a person of action. Not one of them sits still and waits for someone else to fix things. Not one of them shrugs and decides the problem is too large or the cost is too high. They see what is wrong, and they act. This is what the people of God look like.
The first two chapters also help us understand discipleship as encountered in the New Testament. Christ calls His followers to be willing to walk away from everything that identifies them in this world. In Matthew 16, Jesus says that whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for His sake will find it. Moses lost everything because he chose to act and to be faithful to God. True discipleship is costly.
Moses also points us to Jesus Christ. Moses left behind privilege and power in Pharaoh’s palace to defend and deliver those in need. In the same way, Christ left the glory of Heaven and took on human form, as Paul writes in Philippians 2. Jesus gave up everything to fight for us and to bring us salvation. Both Moses and Christ show us what sacrificial love looks like. They stepped out of comfort and into the pain and struggle of others. Their stories teach us that true leadership and true love are measured by what we are willing to give up for the sake of others.
These verses call us to be people of action, not just people of words. God’s people do not stand by while others suffer. We are called to intervene, to defend the vulnerable, and to trust God even when faithfulness costs us dearly. The world may not understand or reward such sacrifice, but God sees and honors those who stand for what is right. Consider this a call to action; action that our world desperately needs.
In His Service,
Ryan Goodnight