What Does Exodus 2:20 Mean?

He said to his daughters, "Then where is he? Why have you left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread." Reuel's immediate instruction to invite the Egyptian stranger to eat is the ancient Near Eastern practice of hospitality at its most reflexive: the man who helped you does not sit at the well; he comes to your table. The question "where is he?" is almost bemused: you described a man who defended and served you, and you simply walked away and left him there? The failure of the daughters to extend hospitality to their benefactor is gently corrected by the father's immediate and instinctive response.

The invitation to eat bread is the first step in Moses' integration into the Midianite household. Sharing a meal in the ancient Near East was not a casual social grace; it was a statement of mutual welcome and the beginning of relationship. Reuel's hospitality here will develop over the next verses into Moses' full adoption into the household: he stays with the man, he marries Zipporah, and he spends forty years as a shepherd in Reuel's pastures. The bread Moses is invited to eat opens a chapter of his life that will last four decades.

The detail that Moses needs to eat bread is itself worth sitting with. The man educated in Pharaoh's palace, who had access to the resources of the wealthiest court in the ancient world, is now sitting at a well in Midian, hungry.

The descent from privilege is total: exile, hunger, dependence on the hospitality of strangers. This stripping of external resources is the prerequisite for the formation that forty years in Midian will provide. What Moses learns in the palace about Egypt's administration is useful; what he learns in Midian about the wilderness, about flocks, about terrain, about dependence on God in unprovided places, is equally essential for leading a nation through the desert.