Lives of Scripture

Gershom was the firstborn son of Moses and Zipporah, born during the years Moses spent in Midian after fleeing Egypt for killing an Egyptian overseer (Exodus 2:11-15, 21-22). Scripture records that Moses himself chose the name and explained why: "he named him Gershom, for he said, I have been a sojourner in a foreign land" (2:22) -- a Hebrew wordplay (ger, "sojourner" or "foreigner") that turned his son's name into a permanent marker of Moses's exile, displacement, and dependence on God's protection among strangers. The naming is repeated almost verbatim in Exodus 18:3, when Moses's father-in-law Jethro brings Zipporah and her two sons -- Gershom and his younger brother Eliezer -- out to Moses in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt, restating the same explanation for Gershom's name. Scripture records no independent words or deeds of Gershom himself; he appears only within the account of his birth and his father's household. Yet his name preserves something deeply personal about Moses's own story -- a reminder, carried in his son's identity, that the man God would use to lead Israel out of slavery had himself once been a homeless fugitive, entirely dependent on God's hidden care during the very years that shaped him for the calling still to come.