Exodus 2:22

Gershom. Meaning “banishment,” from gar ash. “to drive” or “to thrust away.”

Moses explained the name by referring to the fact that he was “a stranger [ger] in a strange land.” Though he had saved his life, he was living in exile, and gave expression to his feeling of loneliness and humiliation in naming his first son.

Once again many years are passed over in silence. A former prince of the most powerful royal house of the time was passing his days as a shepherd. He had exchanged his palace for a tent, the luxuries of Egypt for the desert life of Sinai, his host of attendants and his army for a flock of sheep and goats. What a change! Yet 40 years spent in the wide spaces of the desert made of him the sort of man God could use in the deliverance of His people from Egypt. During these years Moses learned lessons essential to him as the leader of a rebellious nation. The qualities Moses developed during his long years of desert life, alone with God and nature, were priceless, and well worth the long solitude and humiliation required to gain them. His later history shows that those years had not been lost, but that he had been a diligent student under the tutorship of God and had graduated from his course with honors.