The story of Moses is in many ways closely parallel to that of Sinuhit.  Among the Midianite tribes living to the south and southeast of Palestine he found refuge and generous hospitality.  The priest of the sub-tribe of the Kenites received him into his home and gave him his daughter in marriage.  Note the characteristic Oriental idea of marriage.  Here Moses learned the lessons that were essential for his training as the leader and deliverer of his people.

The Kenites figure in later Hebrew history as worshippers of Jehovah and are frequently associated with the Israelites.  After the capture of Jericho certain of them went up with the southern tribes to conquer southern Palestine. (Judg. 1:16.) It was Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite (Judg. 5:24), who rendered the Hebrews a signal service by slaying Sisera, the fleeing king of the Canaanites, after the memorable battle beside the River Kishon.  Many modern scholars draw the conclusion from the Biblical narrative that it was from the Kenites that Moses first learned of Yahweh (or, as the distinctive name of Israel’s God was translated by later Jewish scribes, Jehovah).  Furthermore it is suggested that gratitude to the new God, who delivered the Israelites from their bondage, was the reason why they proved on the whole so loyal to Jehovah.  This conclusion is possible and in many ways attractive, but it is beset with serious difficulties.  We know, in ancient history, of no other example of a people suddenly changing their religion.  When there have been such sudden and wholesale conversions in later times they have been either under the compulsion of the sword, as in the history of Islam, or under the influence of a far higher religion, as when Christianity has been carried to heathen peoples on a low stage of civilization.  Do the earliest Hebrew traditions imply that the ancestors of the Israelites were worshippers of Jehovah?  Is it not probable that Moses fled to the nomadic Midianites not only because they were kinsmen but because they were also worshippers of Jehovah?

In any case Moses’ life in Midian tended to intensify his faith in Jehovah.  The title of his father-in-law implies that this priest ministered at some wilderness sanctuary.  In the light of the subsequent Biblical narrative was this possibly at the sacred spring of Kadesh or on the top of the holy mountain Horeb (elsewhere called Sinai) where Kenites and Hebrews believed that Jehovah dwelt, or at least manifested himself?  Moses, in the home of the Midian priest, was brought into direct and constant contact with the Jehovah worship.  The cruel fate of his people and the painful experience in Egypt that had driven him into the wilderness prepared his mind to receive this training.  His quest was for a just and strong God, able to deliver the oppressed.  The wilderness with its lurking foes and the ever-present dread of hunger and thirst, deepened his sense of need and of dependence upon a power able to guide