Zipporah bears a son, and Moses names him Gershom, saying: I have been a sojourner in a foreign land. The name is a wordplay on the Hebrew ger sham — a stranger there. Moses is narrating his own experience through his son's name, a practice common in Genesis, where children's names encode their parents' theology. He is a man without a homeland in any conventional sense: born Hebrew, raised Egyptian, living in Midian. But the self-description as sojourner is not despair; it is honesty. Hebrews 11:13–14 says the great figures of faith acknowledged they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, and that this acknowledgment was itself an act of faith — a declaration that their true country lay elsewhere. Moses' naming of his son is his first recorded theological statement. Before he knows the name of God, he knows his own condition: I am a stranger here. That is where wisdom begins.

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