The daughters answer their father: an Egyptian man rescued us from the shepherds, and he even drew water for us and watered the flock. The verb they use — rescued — is significant. The same root will appear repeatedly in the Exodus narrative when God delivers Israel from Egypt. Moses, the one who will rescue a nation, is here practicing rescue at the scale of a domestic dispute at a well. Genesis 12:3 promised that through Abraham's descendants all nations would be blessed; here a Hebrew man blesses a Midianite family before he even knows his own calling. The daughters do not yet know this Egyptian's name or history, but their description of him captures the essential Moses: he intervened when he did not have to, he completed a task that was not his, and he left things better than he found them. That is what deliverers do.

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