Sensible Madness

Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, was serving as the priest of Midian, affectionately known as the "Ozarks of the Middle East", when he heard about all the great stuff God was doing for Moses and his people, what with the rescuing them from Egypt and not letting them starve to death and all. Wanting to get in on some of this manna and water-from-a-stone stuff, Jethro decided to take Moses' wife Zipporah (which means "happy firestarter") and his two sons to the wilderness where Moses was camped out. After an uneventful journey, Jethro and the others camped out at Mount God and had a nice little family reunion with Moses.

Moses recounted the entire story of what had happened with the Israelites and Pharaoh and basically the entire book of Exodus up to this point, and Jethro was convinced that God could totally beat up every other god, and it was time to start worshiping him pronto. In recognition of this, Jethro sacrificed a bunch of stuff to God, after which Aaron and all the other elders of Israel came by to eat dinner with him.

The next morning, Moses went to his day job, which was judging everyone Wapner-style. He sat in a chair all day basically mediating between any two people who had any kind of issue, using the thus far unpublished laws and ordinances of God. Jethro saw all this, and asked Moses why he was putting himself through so much when he could just, you know, delegate. Moses had evidently never heard of the concept of a management structure, so Jethro instructed him to split everyone into groups of thousands, then further into groups of hundreds, fifties, and tens. Over each of these, Jethro said, Moses should put a judge, or “ruler”, hand picked by Moses from among the non-screwups among the Israeli population. For those keeping score at home, that would mean for every thousand people, there would be 100 rulers of tens, 20 rulers of fifties, 10 rulers of hundreds, and one ruler of thousands, which according to my calculator comes out to 131 rulers for every thousand people, or roughly one ruler for every seven and a half people. This may seem excessive, but evidently the Israelites needed a lot of supervision.

Anyway, once all those judges were chosen, Moses could then just teach all the laws to them, and he could sort of serve as the Israeli Supreme Court. Moses, who was suffering from a galloping case of hemorrhoids from sitting in the same chair all day every day, loved the idea and implemented it immediately.

From then on, Israel had a bunch of judges who settled all of the piddling little disputes, and only left the big ones for Moses to deal with. Satisfied that Moses was now going to be able to get up and stretch his legs once in a while, Jethro wandered back off to where he came from.