kbs2244 wrote:In spite of myself, I am getting drawn into this.
Well, don't worry about it KB! Just relax and enjoy the ride!
The only trouble with your post is that you're talking about Jethro and Moses as if they were real historical people, who actually existed. Based on that premise, your post makes a lot of sense.
But I think (and please correct me if I'm wrong all) we're well on the road now to establishing that the story of Moses, at least, is allegorical - if not an astrotheitical allegory - and so given this case, every character in the story (including Joshua, Jethro, Miriam and Aaron) are fictional characters, made up solely to tell a certain story.
If you have doubts, let's go over some of the facts:
In addition to the fact that the Moses-in-the-bulrushes story is a copy of Sargon of Akkad's, and significant aspects of the story of the crossing of the Red Sea have been taken from a similar story about the god El in Canaanite mythology,
http://www.worldagesarchive.com/Referen ... rpers).htm
A growing volume of evidence concerning Egyptian border defenses, desert sites where the fleeing Israelites supposedly camped, etc., indicates that the flight from Egypt ....never occurred at all...
...Beginning in the 1950s, doubts concerning the Book of Exodus multiplied just as they had about Genesis. The most obvious concerned the complete silence in contemporary Egyptian records concerning the mass escape of what the Bible says were no fewer than 603,550 Hebrew slaves. Such numbers no doubt were exaggerated. Yet considering how closely Egypt's eastern borders were patrolled at that time, how could the chroniclers of the day have failed to mention what was still likely a major security breach?
Not only was there a dearth of physical evidence concerning the escape itself, as archaeologists pointed out, but the slate was blank concerning the nearly five centuries that the Israelites had supposedly lived in Egypt prior to the Exodus as well as the forty years that they supposedly spent wandering in the Sinai.
Not so much as a skeleton, campsite, or cooking pot had turned up ...even though "modern archeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world." Indeed, although archaeologists have found remains in the Sinai from the third millennium B.C. and the late first, they have found none from the thirteenth century.
Even the reason that the Jews were in Egypt (the brothers of Joseph followed him there, escaping famine in Canaan) now seems doubtful.
If you look at the story of Joseph, the main milestones of it are remarkably similar to someone else beginning with J - Jesus ben Joseph:
Joseph was born of a miracle birth, Jesus was born of a miracle birth. Joseph was of 12 brothers, Jesus had 12 disciples. Joseph was sold for 20 pieces of silver, Jesus was sold for 30 pieces of silver. Brother "Judah" suggests the sale of Joseph, disciple "Judas" suggests the sale of Jesus. Joseph began his work at the age of 30, Jesus began his work at the age of 30. And so on and on.
In my opinion, the belief that the stories in the Bible are all about the history of Israel is what's held us up for so long in our understanding about what actually did happen in that part of the world in the late BCs/early ADs (see, even our dating convention are dictated by these stories!

).