Jethro, a priest of Midian, whose flocks he tends, and whose daughter
he marries.

The land of Midian, to which he fled, is not fertile like Egypt, nor
rich in unnumbered monuments of pride and splendor, with pyramids for
mausoleums, and colossal statues to perpetuate kingly memories. It is
not scented with flowers and variegated with landscapes of beauty and
fertility, but is for the most part, with here and there a patch of
verdure, a land of utter barrenness and dreariness, and, as Hamilton
paints it, "a great and terrible wilderness, where no soft features
mitigated the unbroken horror, but dark and brown ridges, red peaks like
pyramids of fire; no rounded hillocks or soft mountain curves, but
monstrous and misshapen cliffs, rising tier above tier, and serrated for
miles into rugged grandeur, and grooved by the winter torrents cutting
into the veins of the fiery rock: a land dreary and desolate, yet
sublime in its boldness and ruggedness,--a labyrinth of wild and blasted
mountains, a terrific and howling desolation."

It is here that Moses seeks safety, and finds it in the home of a
priest, where his affections may be cultivated, and where he may indulge
in lofty speculations and commune with the Elohim whom he adores;
isolated yet social, active in body but more active in mind, still fresh
in all the learning of the schools of Egypt, and wise in all the
experiences of forty years. And the result of his studies and
inspirations was, it is supposed, the book of Genesis, in which he
narrates more important events, and reveals more lofty truths than all
the historians of Greece unfolded in their collective volumes,--a marvel
of historic art, a model of composition, an immortal work of genius, the
oldest and the greatest written history of which we have record.