Commentaria in Exodum
St. Ambrose notes symbolically, book On Cain and Abel, that Moses was a fit slayer of the Egyptian, because in himself he had first slain the ambition of honour and kingdom. “He,” he says, “lays hands as it were on himself, who kills the pleasures of his own body. Moses therefore killed the Egyptian man; but he would not have killed him unless he had first slain in himself the Egyptian of spiritual wickedness, the honour of royal pleasures.”
Allegorically, Moses, having struck the Egyptian, freed the Hebrew, that is, Christ, having broken the power of the devil, freed the human race. The Egyptian was hidden in the sand, because the devil and his temptations are hidden in temporal goods, which like sand are vile, weak and unstable. So Pererius.
13. HE SAID,—within himself, that is, he thought; for as there is a word of the tongue so is there a word of the mind.
HOW IS THIS THING BECOME KNOWN?—The Hebrew is, truly the word has become known; our Interpreter understood more deeply the passion of Moses, and expressed it by a note of wonder, as if he said: Is it so, or is it truly, that this word has become known? but it comes to the same. Note: The Hebrews use “word” by metonymy for a deed or thing of which the word is the index and sign; so it is said “No word shall be impossible with God,” that is, no thing; and the shepherds say, Luke chap. 2: “Let us see this word that is come to pass,” of the now-born Christ.
See here how inconstant are the honours of courts, how unstable and varied the world’s felicity. Behold, Moses, adopted as the king’s son, is driven into exile. Truly said Philo, in the book That God is Immutable: “As the flow of the sea is followed a little after by the ebb, so the flow of perishable things is soon followed by their ebbing.” Hear Seneca also: “The best known saying,” he says, “is that of the man who had grown old in the service of kings, when someone asked him how he had attained the rarest thing in a court, old age: By receiving injuries, and often giving thanks.”
15. WHO FLEEING.—To return at the opportune time, when it should seem good to God, and to take counsel for his own. Hence the Apostle to the Hebrews chap. 11, verse 27, says of Moses: “By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the fierceness of the king,” as if to say: Though Moses fled, yet he did not lose heart, nor cast away the hope of freeing Israel; but was firmly persuaded that in his time he would return and deliver Israel; although there is another, more genuine sense of that place, as I said on Hebr. 11.
So St. Athanasius, when by order of Julian the Apostate he was driven from Alexandria into exile, and saw the Christians around him weeping, said: “Be of good heart; for it is a little cloud, which will soon vanish.” So Sozomen, book 5, chap. 14. So it came to pass; for a little after the monk Julian, foreseeing in spirit the death of Julian, said to his people: “The wild boar, the enemy of the Lord’s vineyard, has paid the penalty due for his crimes against Christ, and lies dead, that he may no more lay snares for Christians.” It was soon found that this had happened at the very moment when the monk was speaking, as Theodoret attests, book 3, chap. 9.
Where note: A faithful and holy man cannot be driven into exile; for everywhere he is received by God, who is to him father, and country, and every good. So St. Cyprian, Epist. 66 to the Thibaritans: “He is not alone,” he says, “to whom Christ is a companion in flight; he is not alone who, keeping the temple of God, is not without God wherever he may be.”
So St. Augustine, serm. On St. Cyprian: Do you suppose, tyrant, he says, that you thrust the man of God out of his native land into a foreign one? You are deceived; he is nowhere an exile in Christ, in the flesh he is everywhere a stranger. So St. Nazianzen: “To me,” he says, Oration 28, “every land and no land is a fatherland”: because, namely, heaven is my country, and because I reckon the whole earth my country, and am a cosmopolite, that is a citizen of the world.
So St. Basil: “Exile,” he says, “I do not know, who am confined to no place; nor do I hold this land which I now inhabit as my own, and I reckon every land into which I may be cast as mine: nay, to speak more rightly, I know that the whole earth is God’s, whose guest and pilgrim I am”; Nazianzen is witness, Orat. 20, which is on the praises of St. Basil.
Hugh of St. Victor, book 3 Didasc., last chapter: “He is still tender,” he says, “to whom his country is sweet; strong already, to whom every soil is a country; perfect, to whom the whole world is an exile. The first fixed love in the world, the second scattered it, the third extinguished it.”
MADIAN.—Madian was a city founded by Madian, son of Abraham by Cetura, whence the whole region also was called Madian. How true is that of Ecclus. 2: “Son, when thou comest to the service of God, prepare thy soul for temptation!” Behold how many trials here assail Moses in a mass, following the call of God and having left the court: poverty, ignominy, contempt, not from the Egyptians only but also from the ungrateful Israelites, for whose sake he underwent all this, the king’s snares, dangers of death, flight, exile; but by no evils, not even of the ungrateful, is the resolved piety of Moses overcome, which, looking not at men but at God, endured as seeing him that is invisible, Hebr. 11:27. See here how true is that of St. Mark the Hermit: “God, conscious of our weakness, is not wont to confer anything great on anyone, except after calamity first.”
Allegorically Rupert notes that St. Stephen asserts, Acts 7, that the fathers of the Jews denied Moses, Samuel, David, as an example and type of the Jews denying Christ: who therefore, fleeing, took a foreign wife, namely the Church of the Gentiles.
Note: While Moses was dwelling in Madian (in the 67th year of Moses, says Tornielus, which was the 31st of Cecrops, first king of the Athenians) there happened that famous flood of Deucalion among the Gentiles in Thessaly. It is called “of Deucalion” because Deucalion then reigned there, and he himself with a few others escaped this flood in a small raft, landing at Mount Parnassus; whence he is said to have restored the human race. So St. Augustine, book 18 On the City, chap. 10.
Then too happened the conflagration of Phaeton, just as if fire and water had then conspired for the ruin of men: so great was the heat of the sun, that it seemed to have scorched the whole world: whence arose the fable of Phaeton, that Phaeton, son of the Sun, ill driving the sun’s chariot, burned up the earth. So Eusebius, Cyril, Orosius, book 1, chap. 10, and from these Tornielus.
16. TO THE PRIEST OF MADIAN,—Chaldee, prince of Madian; nay Artapanus in Eusebius, book 9 On the Preparation for the Gospel, last chap., calls this Raguel king of Arabia: of which Madian is a part; the Hebrew cohen properly signifies priest; but because the priesthood, as a most noble and divine function, then belonged generally to princes or heads of families, as to Melchisedech, Noe, Abraham; and because a prince and magistrate ought above all to promote the worship of God and what makes for his glory: hence cohen also signifies prince, as is plain 2 Kings 8:18, where the sons of David are said to have been priests, that is, as the Septuagint render, princes of the court. Raguel could therefore be both priest and prince: priest, I say, of idols at that time, because the Madianites were idolaters; but afterwards, seeing the wonders which God did by Moses, he acknowledged and worshipped the true God, as is plain Exodus 18, although St. Cyril, book 3 On Worship in Spirit, fol. 54, and Abulensis think that from then he worshipped the one most high God, but with him many other gods also of his nation.
Demetrius the historian, says Eusebius above, relates that Abraham begot of Cetura Jecsan, of whom was born Adam (or rather Dadan, as is plain Gen. chap. 25, verse 3), from whom came Raguel, father of Jethro, whose daughter Moses took to wife; and he adds that Moses was tall in stature and fair, with rather long hair and beard, and in stature and face altogether of great dignity.
THEY DESIRED TO WATER THEIR FATHER’S FLOCKS.—The shepherd’s art was then noble, whatever Calvin may cry out against it, which even noble maidens then practised, with the wonderful chastity of those times, as we saw in Genesis that Rachel and Lia did.
17. THEY DROVE THEM AWAY,—from the drawing and the prepared drink, driving their own cattle to it; to enjoy idly the labours of others, says Philo.