Women in white raiment

by John Lemley

It has also been thought that Jethro and his house, before his acquaintance with Moses, was not a worshipper of the true God. Traces of this appear in the delay which Moses had suffered to take place in respect to the circumcision of his sons. But the fact that Zipporah started from her home in Midian to accompany her husband upon his mission in Egypt, and of her joining him when he had reached the wilderness, upon his return, shows that she was in sympathy with his work, and, doubtless, if up to the time the Lord suddenly withstood Moses at the wayside inn, she was not fully in accord with him in her faith, that this incident fully established her in the true faith. There is a legend which, if not true, is characteristic of the priest of Midian. This Midrash tale relates that Jethro was a counselor of Pharaoh, who tried to dissuade him from slaughtering the Israelitish children, and consequently, on account of his clemency, was forced to flee into Midian, but was rewarded by becoming the father-in-law of Moses.

The wife of so excellent and remarkable a man as Moses, and one who possessed so many womanly qualities as did this shepherdess whom Moses found by the well in Arabia, in the faithful discharge of her duties, deserves a place in the galaxy of Women in White Raiment.

The hospitality, freehearted and unsought which Jethro at once extended to the unknown, homeless wanderer, on the relation of his daughters that he had watered their flock, is a picture of Eastern manners no less true than lovely, and gives us a fine view of the quaint habits and honest simplicity of the Oriental people.

We now pass to the daughter of Jochebed, namely, Miriam. She first came to our notice when the little ark of Moses was placed among the flags of the Nile. Her mother set her to watch the little craft as it floated on the bosom of the great river. When the princess Thonoris, Pharaoh’s daughter, discovered the child and sent her maid to rescue him from his perilous surroundings, Miriam, then probably a young girl, appeared before the Egyptian princess, and asked if she should call a nurse for the child. In reply to this question, Thonoris said to her she might find for her a nurse. And Miriam hastened to the home of her parents, “and called the child’s mother.”

This act shows that Miriam was not only quick-witted, but had the courage to carry her convictions into effect. Though very human, as fully demonstrated in after years, she was faithful to her mother when she watched the boat woven of river plants and made water-tight with asphaltum, carrying its one passenger. And was she not very courageous and did she not put all the ages of time and of a coming eternity under obligation when she defended her helpless brother from the perils of the Nile? She it was that brought that wonderful babe and its mother together, so that he was reared to be the deliverer of his nation. What a garland for faithful sisterhood!

What part Miriam took in the care of her illustrious brother while in the arms of his mother-nurse, we are not told, but we may well believe her sisterly love was strong and unwavering during the years while the precious charge was in the care of the mother.

But there was a long period of eighty years between the infancy of Moses and his return from the desert of Midian, so that the clear-eyed and sprightly girl had grown away from the buoyancy of youth during the years of his exile, and must have been nearly, if not quite, a hundred years old, when God’s chosen people were led out of the iron furnace of bondage, a fact we must not lose sight of in the brief narrative of this noble woman in White Raiment. Her age may, in part at least, account for the high position given her. “The sister of Aaron,” is her biblical distinction which she never lost. In Numbers xii, 1, she is placed before Aaron, and in Micah vi, 4, reckoned as one of the three deliverers of God’s chosen people, “I sent before thee Moses and Aaron and Miriam.” Hence it is quite evident that she had no small part in the redemption of the house of Israel from the land of oppression. Whether or not the prejudices of that day gave her full honor, the Lord admitted her to the triumvirate of deliverance, the three children of the brave, faithful Jochebed.

She was also the first person in her father’s house, and the first woman in the history of God’s people to whom the prophetic gifts are directly ascribed. “Miriam the prophetess,” is her acknowledged title in Exodus xv, 20. She stood, as the leader of Hebrew women, appropriately by the side of the future conductor of the religious service.

MIRIAM’S SONG OF TRIUMPH.