Why did Moses kill the Egyptian?

What Exodus says

Exodus jumps from the baby in the basket to a grown man. Moses has been raised as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, but he knows whose son he really is.

In those days, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his brothers and saw their burdens. He saw an Egyptian striking a Hebrew, one of his brothers. He looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no one, he killed the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.

That is all the text says. Two details carry the motive. The Hebrews are “his brothers,” twice in one verse. And the Hebrew uses the same verb, nakah, “strike,” for what the Egyptian does to the slave and for what Moses does to the Egyptian. Blow for blow.

Rescuer or killer?

“He looked this way and that way” has kept readers arguing for centuries. Was he checking for witnesses, like a man who knows he is doing wrong? Or looking for someone else to step in, and finding no one? The text doesn’t judge. The next day Moses tries to stop two Hebrews from fighting, and one of them throws it back in his face.

Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you plan to kill me, as you killed the Egyptian?

Moses is afraid: “Surely this thing is known.” His own people don’t see a rescuer. They see a prince from the palace with blood on his hands.

How later writers told it

Everyone who retold the scene had to decide what to make of it.

• Stephen, in Acts, makes it a rescue: Moses “defended him and avenged him who was oppressed,” supposing his brothers would see that God was saving them through him, “but they didn’t understand” (Acts 7:24–25). He adds an age: forty (7:23).
• The Letter to the Hebrews sees a choice: Moses “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter” (Hebrews 11:24). It even says he left Egypt “not fearing the wrath of the king” (11:27), though Exodus says he was afraid; many readers think that verse means the Exodus itself.
• Philo of Alexandria makes the dead man one of the cruelest of the overseers, and the killing a righteous act (Life of Moses 1.43–44).
• Josephus leaves the killing out. In his version Moses flees because jealous Egyptian courtiers turn Pharaoh against him (Antiquities 2.254–257).
• The Quran tells it as a blow struck in a fight: Moses kills the man with his fist, calls it the work of Satan and asks God’s forgiveness (Quran 28:15–16).

Where did Moses go?

Pharaoh hears and tries to have him killed, so Moses runs east, across the Sinai, to the land of Midian, which most scholars place beyond the Gulf of Aqaba, in today’s northwest Saudi Arabia. At a well he does the same thing again: shepherds drive off seven sisters, and he stands up for them. The girls tell their father, the priest Reuel, “An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds” (Exodus 2:19). That is how Moses looks to outsiders. Reuel, also called Jethro, takes him in and gives him his daughter Zipporah. Moses names their first son Gershom, for he said, “I have lived as a foreigner in a foreign land” (2:22). The prince is a shepherd now, and he will stay one for years, until a bush catches fire at Horeb.