Talk:Jethro (biblical figure)

Tomb of Jethro in Jordan? This must be Israel? The Druze consider this to be a holy place. It's near Arbel. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.170.206.88 (talk) 11:44, 18 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

The link is broken and I can't find any other reference to a sarcophagus being found. Sounds a little fishy. I'm gonna remove it. dann (talk) 13:36, 12 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

According to the opinion of the majority of the Arab scholars, Shuayb the Prophet of Islam is not Shuayb (Jethro) who is Moses' father in law. This view is supported by many reasons, one of them is that both Prophets (Shuayb and Moses) didn't speak the same language. Prophet Suayb was an Arab and Prophet Moses was a Hebrew. And Prophet Muhammad was reported to have said (to the effect that) Shuayb was an Arab Prophet as well as Hud and Saleh.--41.232.154.229 (talk) 14:02, 16 May 2012 (UTC)Reply

I just wanted to point out that this whole paragraph is horrendously bad: "In Numbers 10:29, the Hebrew for the name Raguel is the same as the Hebrew for Reuel. The reason for the difference is that the Hebrew character ע (ayin) in רעואל is sometimes used merely as a vowel and sometimes as "g", "ng", and "gn", because of the difficulty of its pronunciation by European speakers. Re-u-el, with the first syllable strong accented, is nearer to the true pronunciation. Some suppose he was father to Hobab, who was also called Jethro, a likely possibility.[10]" The actual reason for the difference is that Raguel comes from the Greek transliteration of the name in the Septuagint: <Ῥαγουὴλ>; while Reuel comes from a more recent (medieval) reliance upon the Hebrew Masoretic text (resulting in transliteration directly from Hebrew). The only reason the Greek uses a <G> is that during the 3rd century BCE, Biblical Hebrew still had two distinct consonants that were written with the letter ʿayin. The regular sound that <ע> represented was a voiced pharyngeal /ʕ/ that was pronounced very far back in the throat and not heard very well by Greek speakers, so it was consistently not represented by any letter during Greek transliteration (<עבר> -> Eber, <עשו> -> Esau). The other consonant was a uvular voiced consonant, much closer to a Greek /g/ sound, and therefore consistently represented by gamma (<עמרה> -> Gomorra, <רעמה> -> Regma). The KJV renders the second one as "Raamah", while it falls back onto the traditional Greek spelling for Gomorrah (which it tended to do for very well known biblical names); a more consistent Masoretic based name would have been "Amorah". The reason for this is that by the medieval ages, that two-way distinction in the letter ʿayin was long lost, and, furthermore, its pronunciation was merging with the letter 'aleph (glottal stop) making it essentially a "silent" letter. So all cases of ʿayin and 'aleph were ignored in transliteration from Hebrew (but as I've mentioned earlier, with the exception of well-known names that kept the old Greek transliteration). And finally, the whole bit about the "strong accented" first syllable is completely wrong. The "true" pronunciation (assuming the author meant in Biblical Hebrew) has the accent on the final syllable, like most Hebrew words/names. And that last sentence doesn't really add anything to the article either. I like the documentary hypothesis idea of different sources being the origin of the confusion. It's the Jahwist source that uses Reʿu'el as Moses's father-in-law, and the Elohist that uses Jethro, while the Deuteronomistic History says it's Hobab. But anyway, I don't know if somebody wants to do something about it, but I really wanted people to know how bad the information is for this section. If somebody wants to remove it or edit it, that would be a big improvement. I'm just a non-member who wanted to make a comment. 2601:681:4201:DE55:21A7:F9B:E4F7:1F1F (talk) 10:25, 17 June 2019 (UTC)Reply

Jethro, Reuel/Raguel and Hobab were three different persons which were conflated by different authors of the Bible. I have edited the article accordingly. Tgeorgescu (talk) 03:30, 17 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

It became, however, generally accepted that he had seven names.

Has it never been advanced that Moses may have had seven wives (some at different times, perhaps), and consequently seven fathers-in-law?

Nuttyskin (talk) 05:49, 17 January 2022 (UTC)Reply

@ElohimWillPrevail: White was not a scholar of religion, but possibly a mentally impaired cult leader. She had visual hallucinations, didn't she? Even to the extent that for many it was difficult to distinguish between Adventists and Spiritualists: both were based upon occult communications occurring during mediumnistic trance. And she showed off her works, including mistaken judgments of the original authors.

Replacing a reference to Stephen L. Harris with a reference to such a huckster as White violates WP:FRINGE. If Harris is controversial, then White is controversy on steroids. I am prepared to admit that due to his link to the Jesus Seminar, Harris is slightly controversial. But then you will have to admit that White is wildly controversial. tgeorgescu (talk) 04:03, 16 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for comment, but if you feel that Ellen G White was a member of cult, that is your opinion. I was just trying to correct the fact that Jethro and Hobab are not the same people. I was looking for a link to put in there to show that Hobab was indeed Moses' brother in law. ElohimWillPrevail (talk) 23:52, 16 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

@ElohimWillPrevail: You do not make our WP:RULES. The claim is WP:V in multiple WP:RS. That is enough for keeping it.

11 Now Heber the Kenite had severed himself from the Kenites, even from the children of Hobab the father-in-law of Moses, and had pitched his tent as far as Elon-bezaanannim, which is by Kedesh.

— Hebrew Bible

What you claim to be WP:THETRUTH is just one of many solutions (i.e. guessiology) to this dilemma. It is a solution of harmonization, and mainstream Bible scholars do not do harmonization.

If you don't trust the Bible to speak about the Bible, you don't trust mainstream Bible scholars to speak about the Bible, and you don't trust evangelical Bible scholars to speak about the Bible, then you cannot cooperate to our articles about the Bible. White wasn't a Bible scholar in the academical sense, and Wikipedia is very much biased for WP:SCHOLARSHIP. tgeorgescu (talk) 07:52, 17 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

In the introduction section it has an error it says Jethro is Hobab in Book of Numbers 10:29. But when you check the verse it says the FATHER of Hobab. Hence I have corrected the error. 149.50.160.90 (talk) 16:46, 7 February 2024 (UTC)Reply