Did you know Moses was a father?
Yeah, it’s easy to forget that Moses and his Midianite wife had two sons.
Can you name them? Probably not.
And even if you could, you couldn’t say much about them. The Bible tells us very little about them. We don’t know their deeds, their values, and their destinies.
We could be forgiven for assuming they didn’t follow in their father’s steps very far.
How do the children of so central a biblical figure simply slide through the Torah with nary a mention? The rabbis of the midrash were troubled by this question, and from various thoughts that they recorded, we can piece together an answer that has important and potentially alarming implications for all of us who are parents. And we will also begin to suspect that the rabbis who addressed the question of Moses’ sons had more than just an academic interest in the issue. They may very well have had a personal stake in understanding why what happened to Moses’ sons happened to them.
When it was time for someone to take over from Moses as leader of the children of Israel, God didn’t choose Gershom or Eliezer.
Reminds me of Samuel and his boys. 🙁
I wonder if it reminds anybody of James Roth and his son. 😯
I am the God of thy father (Exodus 3:6)
Well, dads, here’s another piece from the article above:
“It’s not even enough to be a model of correct and righteous behavior.”
Wow!
Here’s the concluding portion of that paragraph:
The only way to convey to our children that living the Torah is important, is to actually take the time to personally sit down and study Torah with them. It was, of course, Moses who spoke the familiar command, “Thou shalt teach them to thy children.” Tragically, Moses learned this the hard way.
Therein lies one of my own shortcomings. I didn’t take much time to sit down and study the Bible with my children while they were small.
Please read this also: Fathers and Children. I wrote it back in 2009.
Oh, and just for some additional perspective on the Exodus from Egypt…Eliezer may have been less than two years old then!
“And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (Deuteronomy 6:7).
May God prosper each father’s fathering who reads this.