When the young women returned to their father's house they told him of the kindness which had been shown them by one whom they took to be an E'gyp-tian. The priest, whose name was Je'thro, reproached his daughters for not inviting the man to come to their home as a guest. The daughters then returned to the well and asked Mo'ses to come to their father's house. He was glad to accept the invitation, and before long decided to enter the priest's household as a shepherd. The next forty years of Mo'ses' life were spent in the land of Mid'i-an. The Mid'i-an-ites were descendants of one of A'bra-ham's sons by his wife Ke-tu'rah, and were of She'met-ic blood, but were not members of the race blessed in the Covenant which God made with A'bra-ham.
Soon after entering the employ of Je'thro, Mo'ses fell in love with Zip'po-rah, who was a daughter of the Mid'i-an-ite priest. She was given to him in marriage by Je'thro, and a son was born to them. Mo'ses continued to look after the sheep for his father-in-law, and remained in the household for forty years. During that time he spent many hours every day out on the plains and hills with the sheep, communing in his heart with God, and never forgetting his hope some day to deliver the He'brews from bondage in E'gypt.
Strange were the ways in which God prepared Mo'ses to deliver his people. First, his life had been saved by an E'gyp-tian princess, and his early years had been spent under the care and instruction of his own mother, who had providentially been permitted to attend to him as a nurse. Then came the period when he enjoyed all the advantages open to a member of the E'gyp-tian royalty. Next came the forty years of exile from E'gypt, during which time he married a daughter of the Mid'i-an-ite priest, and communed with God while caring for the sheep in the desert regions of A-ra'bi-a. Then came the call of God to begin the work for which he had been trained for eighty years, and this will be the subject of our next story.
