Genesis 15:13

Hebrew Bible

11 When birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. 12 When the sun went down, Abram fell sound asleep, and great terror overwhelmed him. 13 Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a foreign country. They will be enslaved and oppressed for 400 years. 14 But I will execute judgment on the nation that they will serve. Afterward they will come out with many possessions. 15 But as for you, you will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age.

Exodus 2:22

Hebrew Bible

20 He said to his daughters, “So where is he? Why in the world did you leave the man? Call him, so that he may eat a meal with us.” 21 Moses agreed to stay with the man, and he gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. 22 When she bore a son, Moses named him Gershom, for he said, “I have become a resident foreigner in a foreign land. 23 During that long period of time the king of Egypt died, and the Israelites groaned because of the slave labor. They cried out, and their desperate cry because of their slave labor went up to God. 24 God heard their groaning; God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.

 Notes and References

"... The very fact that there are two sets of parents in the myth of the birth of the hero already intimates the difficulties involved in fashioning an identity. The myth addresses primary questions: Who am I? Who are my parents? Where do I come from? But the questions of origin become all the more complex when the two sets of parents pertain to two different nations. Moses’ split national identity at birth will follow him for the rest of his life. When his first son is born in Midian he chooses to name him Gershom, saying, “I have been a stranger in a strange land” (Exodus 2:22). His naming speech relies on a pun that links the name “Gershom” with the word stranger (ger). But in what sense is Moses a stranger at this point—in relation to Midian (Jethro’s daughters regard him as an Egyptian), or Egypt (his words echo the oracular announcement of Israel’s troubling future as “a stranger [ger] in a land that is not theirs” in Genesis 15:13)? Moses will devote most of his life to constructing the concept of Canaan as homeland and will lead his people persistently toward the land of “milk and honey,” but ultimately he will die in the wilderness, between Egypt and the Promised Land ..."

Pardes, Ilana The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (pp. 31-32) University of California Press, 2000

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